Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman

  Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose

  Edited by Tara Prescott and

  Aaron Drucker

  McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

  Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Feminism in the worlds of Neil Gaiman : essays on the comics, poetry and prose / edited by Tara Prescott and Aaron Drucker.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-7864-6636-8

  1. Gaiman, Neil—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Feminism in literature. I. Prescott, Tara 1976– II. Drucker, Aaron, 1975–

  PR6057.A319Z63 2012

  823'.914—dc23 2012035678

  BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

  © 2012 Tara Prescott and Aaron Drucker. All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Front cover image courtesy of Alvin Booth; background image © 2012 Shutterstock

  McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

  Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640

  www.mcfarlandpub.com

  For Gisele and William, still dreaming...

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Dr. Molly Ierulli, first and foremost. She shepherded my initial essay, which then formed the basis of this collection, while being supremely understanding of my horrific Latin and peculiar readings of classical mythology. Though it may seem to go without saying, Tara Prescott has been a fabulous, insightful, and ridiculously committed partner in this project, and I can’t think of anyone with whom I’d rather be working. I also want to thank Farah Mendlesohn, whose omniscience continues to baffle me. (Seriously, how can one person be so right about so much so often?) Conversations with Amanda Palmer and Roz Kaveney provided valuable insight into the project’s potential, and I can’t help but continue to admire these extraordinary women. I want to thank Ms. Pardee (my high school religion instructor) and Tori Amos, both of whom brought me to Neil Gaiman in their own ways. The latter brought my attention to the fact that one could, in fact, be hangin’ out with the Dream King, and the former taught the class I was cutting when I first discovered “Season of Mists” at the local 7–11, which looked like a reasonable equivalent of the religion curriculum and subsequently set the course of my career. I want to thank all of the contributors for their patience and the nonstop hurry-up-and-wait that inevitably occurs during this kind of project. To Robert G. Weiner, yes, I took your suggestion and here it is. Thanks for the encouragement. Alvin Booth, an extraordinarily talented artist and photographer, was very generous in allowing us to use the image on the cover. And lastly, Gisele and William, my wife and son, to whom this work is dedicated.

  AJD

  Los Angeles

  I would never have imagined that I’d meet Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer on Halloween night, on a wide stage in front of hundreds of fans, after a raucous introduction by Margaret Cho, dressed head to foot in Puritan costume. As Gaiman approached me, bathed in the reflected red glow of the LEDs embroidered to my chest, my first thought was This isn’t happening. My second thought was Well, of course I’m meeting Neil Gaiman while dressed as Hester Prynne. This makes total sense.

  Welcome to the world of Neil Gaiman.

  There are many people who helped make this project possible. I would like to thank Aaron Drucker, my partner in crime, for many long discussions about why Gaiman matters to us. I would also like to thank Seth Anderson, doctoral candidate in history at Claremont Graduate University, for offering excellent feedback at any hour of the night. Jennifer Osorio, librarian for English and American literature at UCLA, helped me to track down some of the more slippery Gaiman sources that are no longer available in print or online. I am also grateful to Sadie MacFarlane, who graciously provided PDFs of the Magian Line (anagram for “Neil Gaiman”) newsletter.

  Finally, I would like to thank Bob Borden, owner of Fantasy Books and Games in Livermore, California. I first stumbled into Bob’s comic book store when I was a teenager, unsure of what comics to read, but knowing that I wanted more than Betty and Veronica. Bob introduced me to it all: Sandman, Strangers in Paradise, Barry Ween, Watchmen, The Books of Magic, Preacher, Zero Girl, A Child’s Life and Other Stories, Blankets, Fun Home. In an era where bookselling is experiencing unparalleled challenges, I feel fortunate to be able to continue to support Fantasy Books and Games. Thanks for all the great reads, Bob.

  TP

  Los Angeles

  Finally, we all would like to thank Neil Gaiman, for all of the obvious reasons. We hope he receives our thoughts, reflections, and sporadic criticisms in the vein they are meant, with respect and proper deference ... and the hopes of eventually reading that once-mentioned historical fantasy set in restoration London. Truly, we do this out of dedication to and fascination with the material. Thank you for letting us in, if only for a moment. It was a lovely time, and now we’re talking about it in our own, peculiar way.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Introduction

  A Note on Citation

  Speaking the Cacophony of Angels

  The Power of the Perky

  Agency Through Fragmentation?

  It’s Pretty Graphic

  Empowering Voice and Refiguring Retribution

  Feminist Subjectivity in Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid

  When Superheroes Awaken

  Outfoxed

  “A boy and his box, off to see the universe”

  Unmasking M(other)hood

  The Fairest of All

  Inverting the Fairy Tale

  Feminist Fairy Tales in Who Killed Amanda Palmer

  Liminality and Empowerment

  “Anathema liked to read about herself”

  Doors, Vortices and the In-Between

  About the Contributors

  Index of Terms

  Preface

  There is, to our knowledge, no collection on this topic published before this one, which we still find startling. Neil Gaiman’s reputation as a writer of strong, independent female characters is common knowledge in our circles (admittedly of comic book and science fiction/fantasy aficionados). But little academic writing has been done on his work in this area, though there is the occasional essay available here or there. We suspect this is because his work is relatively new. His most famous body of work, DC Comics’ The Sandman comic book series, wrapped a mere 16 years ago, which is long enough for a generation of comic readers to rediscover it but (like geological time) mere moments in literary history. On the other hand, what Gaiman has brought to female readers of comic books has rarely been paralleled since the unlikely run of the Dream King and was unprecedented in its time.

  Previous readings of Gaiman’s work were almost entirely limited to his important comic series, but altogether remiss in his other graphic and literary work. This collection seeks to remedy that (or at least begin the process). In constructing the call for contributors, we intentionally cast an unusually wide net: any work the author completed to the date of composition. A still-living author, Mr. Gaiman is inconveniently adding to his corpus, but it’s so awfully good that we’ll forgive him this literary transgression. In any case, it turns out that as we researched the available topics, his work spread to all corners of the literary world. Simply to list his published wor
k would take a number of pages, and that’s without accounting for his extensive online presence and incidental contributions to public commentary (personal, social, and political). From these hundreds of sources, we chose 16 essays covering a variety of Gaiman’s work. Of course, we addressed aspects of The Sandman, in large part because we knew that this would be the topic most familiar to our interested audience, but we also included his other major comic work, the sorely overlooked Black Orchid (and even managed an essay on 1602). Even as roughly half of the essays chosen address Gaiman’s graphic work, we didn’t get the opportunity to address his occasional contributions to comics, like Swamp Thing Annual #5 or What Ever Happened to the Caped Crusader? We tried to address the range of his prose, some poetry, and brilliant oddities like Who Killed Amanda Palmer? And we overlooked some things, too. Most particularly, and much to our regret, his novels are not well represented in this collection. That’s for next time.

  We wanted to get a broad overview of Gaiman’s sensibility, his approach to feminism, the feminine, and (perhaps) the “feminist.” We’d like to think we managed to say some interesting things on the topic and offer some occasional insight into the complex negotiations in the discourse of gender studies. There are some obvious complications for the topic, to be sure. The fact that Gaiman is male proffers a clear would-be obstacle for obvious feminist credentials in his work. The list of “feminist” male authors is startlingly short, and there is some dispute about whether Gaiman is, in fact, a “feminist author” at all. While appropriately lauded for a variety of extraordinary female characters and powerful feminist depictions, several of Gaiman’s works are written from a decidedly male, occasionally chauvinistic perspective. Several depict sadistic misogynists and willing victims of patriarchy. Many of the works we cover are not kind to women in their representation. Even so, through most of Gaiman’s work there remains a surprisingly strong strain of will and agency in the women he creates. Some are categorically reflections of people in his experience (it’s hard not to see a bit of Tori Amos in the character and design of Delirium, who was once Delight). Some are Freudian nightmares of his own reflection. And many are inventions of his experience and imagination, blossoming in the occult light of fiction enhanced by a superlative imagination.

  In the end, we found a balance in evaluating the author and his work against the ever-shifting criteria of a “feminist” author. Gaiman’s goal is not to be proactively feminist. He is a teller of stories, and he remains in the service of the narratives he explores. His language is that of the traditions he inhabits, and this is something we tried to address throughout our analysis. But as he works his way through science fiction, fantasy, horror, comic books, and children’s literature, he consistently manages to upset the traditional expectations in ways that are consistently against genre type. Perhaps that is why his ability appears so fluid (how many authors can rightfully say they succeeded in such a range of genres?). More likely, it’s just a sensibility, reflected and refracted through the contrasting needs of a decent bloke trying to make a dime telling stories in this queer, troubled modern world. Yes, it seems there’s another book in that last sentence, too. We’ll see.

  Introduction

  AARON DRUCKER and TARA PRESCOTT

  This collection of essays opens a door into the worlds of Neil Gaiman, specifically into the ways that he illustrates, narrates, and complicates feminist concerns. The two editors have selected sixteen essays and grouped them roughly by genre. Because of the overwhelming preference of readers to his original (and originary) Sandman title for Vertigo Comics, we chose to begin there, followed by examinations of his other comics, screenplays, children’s stories, short stories, novels, and assorted difficult-to-categorize creations. Collectively, these essays offer a rich exploration of Gaiman’s worlds. But even so, there is so much more to examine. Gaiman’s explorations of feminism deserve an ongoing conversation and this collection represents only the beginning, an offering to the elder gods and goddesses of literature.

  In her talk for the 2012 Bradshaw women’s studies conference, writer Sandra Gilbert, co-author of Madwoman in the Attic, describes collaborative writing as a feminist act. “In collaboration, you form a single writer who is different from either writer,” Gilbert states. The “sacrificial merging” that Gilbert describes in collaborative writing is a trope that reappears in many of Gaiman’s interviews. For example, when Gaiman is asked how much of the co-authored novel Good Omens is his, and how much Terry Pratchett’s, he refuses to definitively answer. The collaborative nature of comics (and, in truth, fiction generally) is often overlooked in terms of its feminist possibilities, simply because the world of comics has been almost exclusively masculine. However, as more and more female artists, writers, publishers, and readers enter the genre, the face of comics is changing dramatically. And in many ways, Gaiman is at the forefront of this change.

  The sixteen essays in this collection take a look at Gaiman’s work through the broad lens of feminism. As there are many personal, political, and literary ways to define this term, we kept our parameters purposely open, selecting essays that emphasize female agency in Gaiman’s narratives. Rather than constrain the definition, we encouraged our contributing scholars to define what “feminism” means for them. The results are as varied and inspiring as one might expect, much to our great delight.

  The collection begins with an essay by Rachel R. Martin that discusses “feminist” language and the traps of communicating feminist ideas in Anglophone discourse, which was mainly created and mediated by men. In this “phallocentric” discourse, Gaiman’s work negotiates a particular sensibility. Martin argues that Gaiman tries to transgress the limitations of language, but with limited success. After establishing how Gaiman resists the limitations and boundaries of language, our contributors next turn to arguably his most important contribution to the genre, and certainly the creative masterpiece that cemented his reputation.

  The Sandman ran for seventy-five issues over seven years and had relatively modest origins. The Sandman was originally a character created and published by DC Comics, a noir crime fighter and crusader who fit the mold of several traditional comic book heroes of the early pulp days like The Shadow or The Phantom. He was not particularly popular or successful as a character, yet Gaiman chose him as the focal point of a broad reinvention of the DC Universe, an industry-polarizing and fan-energizing offshoot called Vertigo Comics. Perhaps unintentionally, he would reinvent DC (notably the most prominent adherent to the strict self-censoring rules of the Comics Code Authority). Taking the nebulous notion that DC’s characters were more like gods than men (Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, to name a few), Gaiman transformed the cartoonish Sandman into the elegant and enigmatic Lord of the Dreaming, also known as Morpheus or Dream. Rather than a constructed icon of nobility with near infinite ability and little or no dramatic plausibility or a mere anthropomorphized idea of some Jungian subject, Gaiman’s Lord of the Dreaming was a literalization of the idea of dreams in all of their flawed, troubled, complex, symbolic, frustrating humanity.

  In The Sandman, Gaiman re-envisioned a character whose sustainability was marginal in the comic book marketplace and created a new mythology that led to an industry revolution on the heels of such important and groundbreaking work as Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. He broadened and deepened the narrative and the DC Universe by creating Dream’s brothers and sisters, collectively known as The Endless: Death, Delirium (who was once Delight), Despair, Desire, Destiny, and Destruction. The rich narratives of these seven god-like characters continue to captivate new generations of readers and inspire and expand the imaginations of current writers and artists throughout the industry.

  In order to appreciate the extent of Gaiman’s craft, and to enjoy the essays in this collection, it is helpful to briefly cover the traditions and conventions within which Gaiman writes. A comic book universe frequently relies upon its own internal world-logic and is governed
by a set of basic, if intrinsic, rules. Writers who enter “the continuity” of a “house” (like DC) or a “title” (like Superman) are expected to create new narrative threads, but they are limited by the established storylines for their characters, participating in and perpetuating the overarching storyline. Gaiman wrote The Sandman within the DC Universe continuity, focusing largely on the “magic” and “supernatural” storylines that run continuously throughout the history of the publishing company.

  Most readers will be familiar with the pantheon of the DC Universe, comprised of several iconic (and many relatively unknown) superheroes who live on an Earth comparable to our own, with a few critical differences. In this universe, major fictional cities like Metropolis and Gotham exist alongside familiar surroundings such as Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, and the inhabitants of these cities are cultural icons of our own landscape: Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Batman, and many others. Still, the world is inhabited by everyday people like ourselves, but also supernatural heroes such as Doctor Fate or extraordinary gifted figures such as John Constantine. The Sandman series takes place in a world between the standard DC Universe and an alternate realm of Gaiman’s own invention, “The Dreaming,” a liminal space where consciousnesses drift when people are asleep, and where dreams literally occur.

  Gaiman creates elisions between The Dreaming and the waking world, between fantasy and sleep. In The Dreaming a dream is as real as a waking experience, though often without the physical consequences (thus falling off a cliff in The Dreaming elicits awakening rather than death). Hence, it is possible to inhabit The Dreaming physically (as it does exist), though it is much less common than the normal, temporary visit that we all make while asleep. Morpheus and the other mythological or magical entities in the stories can influence events in both worlds. The internal logic of The Dreaming can be initially difficult for readers, as indeed it is for some of Gaiman’s own characters. In The Dreaming, once a thing is conceived in the mind, it literally exists—from a library filled with unwritten books to the Biblical battle between Cain and Abel, two brothers locked in an endless, over-determined battle for impossible supremacy. Gaiman constructs his narratives from this world of the impossible and infinitely possible. We selected several essays that focused on this highly wrought and complex mythology, highlighting several of the issues we felt were both germane and important. Time and length are never on an editor’s side, and inevitably we had to limit our selection with full knowledge that there is much more that can be explored within this masterwork of the genre.