Sex, crime and the ‘liberated’ woman inThe Virgin BrideandBuffy the Vampire Slayer

Abstract

Strindberg's play The Virgin Bride and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, belong to different genres, the distinctive spheres of high and popular culture and the opposite ends of the 20th century. Nevertheless, they tell a remarkably similar story about women and crime. The analogous experiences of their female characters, Kersti and Faith, as they journey from sexual profligacy to crime to redemption, are testament to a persistent and pervasive association between female sexuality, liberation and crime in modern culture. This is an association that is also found within the criminal justice system—as the work of feminist criminologists has amply demonstrated. As such, The Virgin Bride and Buffy demonstrate the relationship between narratives and imagery in the general consciousness and the conduct of court cases. In doing this, they provide an opportunity to explore more fully the production, meanings and functions of these associations. The location of Kersti and Faith's crimes within overarching explorations of redemption and liberation suggests that the concern with female sexuality can be linked to a deeper fear of the crumbling values and the excessive freedom of modernity.

Crime, in these stories, is used to both represent and alleviate the dangerous consequences of this situation. By using crime as a symbol of disorder, and therefore endowing it with consistent and unequivocally negative characteristics, it actually reaffirms social values and fortifies reality and subjectivity. The comfort of certainty that crime offers is shown most clearly when Kersti and Faith exchange the oppression of their independence for peace and freedom in prison. Their embrace of social constraints, represented by the prison, not only allows them to be stripped of their disturbing sexuality and freedom, but also allows them to be reconstituted as images of the stability and confidence that modernity has lost.