When it comes to female teachers who have had it up to well past their ovaries with male disappointment, Daria‘s Janet Barch (voiced by Ashley Paige Albert)–Ms. Barch, if you’re nasty–was once unrivaled in her contempt for the likes of her abandoning ex-husband and dick-packing co-workers that included the always irascible Mr. DeMartino (Marc Thompson)–sort of the male counterpart to Ms. Barch’s own constant stream of rage. Now, however, she has new, or rather, reincarnated competition in the form of Ms. Mary Wardwell (Michelle Gomez)–as inhabited by the demon/witch/first woman on earth Lilith–on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, another series centered on a, shall we say, “offbeat” high school outcast.
The parallels between Barch and Wardwell range from the general to the oddly specific. For instance, in the episode called “Doctor Cerberus’ House of Horror,” Ms. Wardwell adopts the guise of a fortune teller named Mrs. McGarvey (Veronica Cartwright), blowing through town during a storm and conveniently not having any cash or card to pay for something that would make her worthy of sitting at a table. She does, however, conveniently have a deck of tarot cards on hand, offering to earn her keep while waiting out the rain by giving free readings. Never one for being averse to the occult, Hilda (Lucy Davis), agrees. Barch, too, once experienced her own foray into fortune telling (for the purpose of a school fundraiser disguised as a “medieval fair”), likewise using it for her own benefit in giving misandrist readings to men (charging $2 for girls and $20 for boys), but never sugar coating the truth to women either, seething/reciting the cruel fate that befell her to a female student, “You’ll marry a man while you’re still in your prime. Then, after putting him through school and spending twenty long-suffering years begging him to turn off those damn Broncos and get a real job, he’ll walk out of your life, leaving a trail of muddy footprints behind on the freshly cleaned carpet. But you’ll be better off without him. Much better off.”
Daria (Tracy Grandstaff), the Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) of the scenario, walks by to sarcastically remark, “And [Ms. Barch] is the living proof.” Similarly, Sabrina has her own array of judgments to cast upon Ms. Wardwell/Lilith for acting contemptuous toward Lucifer when she herself was the one who went along with his evil bidding for so many centuries.
As she tries to comprehend Ms. Wardwell’s dichotomous feelings of love and hate toward Satan (somewhat akin to the warring emotions Barch feels for Mr. O’Neill [also voiced by Marc Thompson], on the one hand falling in love with his “feminine side” and on the other hating him because he’s still a man), she informs her erstwhile teacher, “When I was playing Lilith in the passion play, I kept wondering, ‘Why does Lilith bend to the Dark Lord? Why does she do his bidding?” Lilith sighingly replies, “Promises were made. That if I served him faithfully, he’d lift me up. Make me Queen of Hell. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” Sabrina queries, “And you believed him?” Wardwell then further tries to explain, “You don’t understand. He was kind at first. Gentle. We’d spend our days near the place where he’d fallen and hit the earth. Where thousands and thousands of years later, ye old town of Greendale was founded.” As was the case with Lilith and Lucifer, Barch’s initial youthful guilelessness led her down what Lilith calls the “primrose path” of marriage that leads straight to “a woman’s destruction.”
Like Barch, Lilith comes upon this wisdom too late, wasting far too many years on someone who ultimately only served to take the best of them away from her. As to the point of Greendale being the location of Lucifer’s fall from heaven, Sabrina asks, “Is that why Greendale’s so messed up?” Wardwell confirms, “It’s a nexus. A cursed place.” Daria feels quite the same about Lawndale, not so coincidentally also ending in a -dale like Green.
The hardening of both female educators over time, one demonically possessed for real, the other by the lingering sting of male betrayal, turns them staunchly opposed to trusting anyone, least of all a person ascribing to the male gender. To intensify their caustic air, both prefer other pursuits to the one that finds them in the role of wife or mother. Case in point, Lilith as Wardwell declaring her reasons for wanting to help Sabrina topple Satan as, “I want the throne and the crown. I’ve worked for them, I’ve earned them–they’re mine. And if he won’t give them to me, then let’s gut the bastard and I’ll take them for myself.” It’s something very much in keeping with the Barch school of thought on the inutility of male power.
Also echoing the tone of one of Barch’s most famed lines, “Your assignment tonight is to locate Orion the Hunter in the sky. Then write an essay on why you think he needs to carry a weapon to feel like a man,” Lilith as Ms. Wardwell balks at Lucifer’s false projections to the world, noting “He’s not a god and he never has been. That’s one of the devil’s greatest lies. He’s just a fallen angel. A creature of the cosmos.” A nothing, like all men, as Ms. Barch might add (just a little something to mirror her eulogy for Kevin in the episode “Murder, She Snored,” during which she states, “I would just like to say that I’m glad Kevin is dead. I wish all men were dead”).
More than just their connection in personality and character, there is an uncanny physical resemblance between the two as well, with Wardwell updating Barch’s purple TJ Maxx-inspired skirt suit with something slightly more dominatrix-oriented. Fit for guiding the youth (astray) and literally raising hell. She chooses, however, to keep those “mousy” brown shoulder-length locks rather than bother with Brittany Taylor or Sabrina Spellman blonde.
Perhaps the two women’s (if they are, in fact, even two separate women) most primary differentiation in stance lies in the fact that Barch, somewhere beneath it all, still believes in giving love a second chance, saying such things to Mr. O’Neill in her fortune teller’s getup, “See, in another life, you were a woman. That’s why you have feelings.” Wardwell, on the contrary, has learned much too difficult a lesson to ever trifle with emotions again, knowing full well that to surrender any of one’s power to a male is to never get it back again. At least not without all hell breaking loose to do so.
She is true to Ms. Barch’s Gone With the Wind repurposed assertion in the season two episode, “The Daria Hunter,” that, “As god is my witness I will never carry a man’s weight again” (right after this, she picks up O’Neill and slings him over her shoulder). Though, incidentally, Wardwell does end up carrying Lucifer like some sort of drugged bride over the threshold back into the Gates of Hell. Once again, are these women not secretly one? Or, at the very least, a wondrous two-headed hydra of man-hating glory and justification?
