Shadow Though it Be: An Excursus
Endnotes for Chapters 22 – 30
“Ah, I see. So it’s every man for himself.”...Originally I had a little flourish in here about Elisabeth coming from Slytherin and Giles being a closet Harry Potter reader, but it turned into a bit of a red herring, so when it came time to write the scene I left it out.
odd impressionistic glimpses of texture through the shadows....An echo of Thursday’s moment of hysteria in the wood, in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday; though “wandering womb” is not exactly a description of Elisabeth’s current state.
“Goodnight, Tara, goodnight Willow, goodnight John-boy,” Elisabeth said...I don’t suppose I really need to mention that this is a reference to The Waltons, a show which my mother watched during my childhood, much to my annoyance.
“You’re thinking: ‘What do they teach them in these schools?’”...A reference to the Pevensie children’s Uncle Diggory, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I expect Giles understands this reference, and finds it both appealing and irritating, much like C.S. Lewis in general, whom Dorothy Sayers once called “God’s Terrier.”
it’s possible to find the erotic in everything...Elisabeth is doing a disservice to my real-life English professor and mentor Dr. Engle, who scandalized my freshman soul by explaining in our Honors Greek Drama seminar that an erotic sensibility in academic reading was not only an eventual, but a desirable, acquisition. Elisabeth is feigning academic atavism in an attempt to draw Giles’s notice away from her ever-more-apparent sexual awakening, but obviously it is backfiring.
“Oh, do not say, ‘Bad kitty!’ Let us go and prowl the city”...Elisabeth is quoting Henry Beard’s Poetry for Cats, in which the Prufrock parody is arguably the best.
it’s like trying to get an actor’s union card...Giles doesn’t know that Elisabeth is using for her analogy Tony Head’s predicament at the beginning of his career.
There was time, oh there was time...a deliberate echo of Eliot, which since it appears in the narrative doesn’t count against Rupert’s requested moratorium on Eliot quotage.
For shame, thou everlasting wooer...From John Cleveland (or Cleaveland), “The Antiplatonick,” which is quite delightful all through.
Donne...Interpolations are from “To His Mistress Going to Bed” (altered), and “The Dream,” which I found extremely apropos to the storyline in general.
“Not Getting the Memo”...I wrote the sonnet before beginning “Shadow”; it was said, I forget by whom, that the theme of it was very Gilesian, and so when I began the story the sonnet figured in it early on. Originally, Elisabeth was to have departed the Sunnydale dimension, and as a coda Giles found a way to send the book of Victorian fairytales from Chapter 1 after her, with a note inside thanking her for the sonnet; Elisabeth finds the book in a bookstore and purchases it. It was the only tenuous connection I could draw between Elisabeth and Giles in such an ending scenario, and its obvious inadequacy was one of the reasons I began envisioning a storyline in which Elisabeth remained in the Buffyverse.
something about John of the Cross...It seemed right to have the vicar reading John of the Cross given Elisabeth’s fear of Nothing and her own dark night.
a bakery franchise...Obviously
a Panera Bread, which should have remained St. Louis Bread, but the franchise
owners got all fancy-schmancy and foolish with both
the name and the menu. “Breadly” Bread? I ask you.
Incidentally, this begs the question why Giles didn’t take her to Panera instead of the
“They put whipped cream on everything in this country,” Giles complained...Giles does not know that he is echoing Wesley’s opinion of California-style coffee.
“Rupert. Listen to me. It’s started.”...If Elisabeth were paying attention, she would have realized that she is echoing Robson’s words to Giles in Season 7.
All you have to do is let go—...A reference to the allegorical Christian death of John in C.S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress. The phrase makes its appearance again in “Dust and Ashes” as Elisabeth’s mantra for, ironically, surviving the onslaught of the First Evil.
The third pair of glasses she’d lost in a fortnight, she thought manically...I couldn’t let this story go without making some kind of reference to Peter Rabbit!
Buffy wrinkled her nose. “You know, I think it’s all the same thing to him.”...Buffy has not as yet lost her grip on Spike’s character; subsequent events, of course, serve to drive her from one extreme to the other.
the Brave Little Toaster...Giles’s Citroen, may it rest in peace; also known as the Gilesmobile. Apparently, Giles’s new car, the BMW, is informally called by the Scoobies “Giles’s tramp,” after Buffy’s ironical commiseration with Giles’s lament that the car “seduced” him: “Little two-door tramp.”
I wouldn’t think Screwtape very...congenial reading at a time like this....Perhaps not, but no less appropriate than Burnett for Wesley and Fred.
He felt the faintest whisp of desire, to know what it was she had seen...Which, now that Elisabeth is here to stay, will become a continuing problem for him as the pressure increases.
“Kind pity chokes my spleen,” she murmured...The opening line to Donne’s Satire 3.
He watched, to make sure she was breathing...Poor Giles; since Jenny he hasn’t been able to be easy about women in his bed.
“You can make up a birthday,” Xander suggested...Anya may or may not have already forged a birth certificate, but she has had no reason yet, as far as I can tell, to have created a birthday for herself, for the purposes of celebration. She is in the period of realizing that she is now mortal and subject to the passage of years; I can’t help thinking that that fuels her interest in connecting to her adopted country and cementing her relationship with Xander. The birthday she chooses, of course, turns out to be the Fourth of July.
I don’t understand it. Why I’m alive again. What I’m doing here...Elisabeth echoes here the words of Buffy in “Grave,” questioning the events that led to her resurrection.
“‘There seems no plan because it is all plan. Blessed be He!’” she murmured....A quote which the First Evil turns against Elisabeth later.
one from Byron about buffooning when one’s depressed...I still can’t find this one. I think I read it in a Chesterton essay about Byron, but can’t be sure.
He watched her eyes, still bleary behind crooked glasses, sweep over the landscape of his flat...A reference, among other things, back to her entrance of the flat at the beginning of the story.
The End! Unless I think of something else.