Carrol Cox wrote:
> But, it runs afoul of a literary principle I worked out decades ago
> while reading the *Lord of the Rings* and Milton's epics.. All conscious
> beings are either humans or pure abstractions (the latter represente by
> Milton's
> God or Tolkien's Balrog), whether they are called elves, goblins,
> angels,
> devils, etc.
>
> So in literary terms, the vampires in Buffy are humans, not supernatural
>
> creatures.
>
> And since *all* american fiction is multi-racial and includes a
> substantial
> representation of blacks (Toni Morrison is irrefutable on thisj), the
> vampires are African Americans.
Disability cultural studies would probably say that since these "humans" have deformities of the body, face, etc. that the analogy would be to disability. Indeed, monsters, monstrous bodies, are usually derived from physical anamolies - for instance dwarfs are both real and unreal and often made evil in horror literature. The Phantom of the Opera was a disfigured human, etc.
It used to be believed that disability was caused by the devil, if you were bad, paying some spiritual debt, or that a person with a disability was an omen, usually a bad one. Literature has used disability as a dramatic device, usually always a negative one. Anne Finger, a writer with a disabilitiy, who teaches at Wayne State University, has done such an interpretation of Moby Dick.
I haven't watched Buffy to see how I would interpret it specifically.
Marta Russell