Breakthroughs?

Today, after reading over the book I talked about in the earlier post, I think I may have had a breakthrough on my Buffy the Vampire Slayer chapter. I have a lot of stuff written already, but it is disjointed & somewhat pointless. Buffy is feminist, blah blah blah. So what? And how does it fit into my overall dissertation (which, for newbies here, is basically about witches in modern lit, tv, and movies, and how they fit into a feminist ideology).

On the way home from Starbuck's, having finished Lorna Jowett's excellent book, I was thinking about some of the writing I've already done. And some justification I had in there for reading Buffy from a witch standpoint, which I was basically addressing in a footnote and glossing over and going on to the "blah blah blah" stuff above. And then I thought-- Well why the hell don't I just talk about Buffy as a witch, as defined in the Malleus Mallifacarum, which I discuss in my introduction, and then also discussing the other witches in the show? And then how those witches bring about that resistance to patriarchy that the feminist message wants to have? DUH!

Big DUH!!!

I may have to abandon most of the previous writing I have, but now I think I have my point. It's such a simple, duh point, that I can't believe I didn't see it as my chapter before.

You can get so caught up in the forest that you miss the trees sometimes.

So now I think I've got a paper which I can write fairly quickly. There will be some writing tomorrow. I'll keep you updated on how it goes.