Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  With the turn of the page, the reader suddenly encounters a single, full-page, shocking and terrible image: a naked and skeletal woman, kneeling, with arms and hands braced at unnatural angles in a desperate attempt to simultaneously shield her eyes from the light and her body from view. Because the reader now shares Madoc’s and Fry’s point of view, Calliope also cowers from the reader’s gaze. The image is stark and terrifying—thrown in relief against a black background, Calliope’s yellow mane and hints of pale flesh are the only color on the page. She is figured in profile, mostly in shadow, with countable ribs, the underside of one (disproportionately full) breast swelling under her arm, long fingernails, and a mane of lush, lively hair that emphasizes how dead the rest of her body appears.

  Remarkably, this is a toned-down version of the art. According to Gaiman, “Kelley [Jones] drew Calliope as really, really skinny, with horribly protruding ribs. [Editor Karen Berger] felt that this was too extreme, and when Malcolm [Jones III] inked it he made her a little less skinny” (Dream Country, “Episode 17,” 10). “Calliope” was penciller Kelley Jones’s Sandman debut, and his background in horror (Action Comics’ “Deadman,” Deadman: Love After Death, and later Batman and The Last Train to Deadsville) clearly informs his terrible depictions of the captured muse. In interpreting Gaiman’s script, it is easy to see why Jones’s depiction of Calliope is so horrifying:

  A thin, fifteen-year or possible just sixteen-[year] old girl. She has a beautiful face, with deep cheekbones—she’s a goddess after all—and a thin body: she looks as if she’s been starved for a couple of weeks. [...] She looks very vulnerable—this is the vulnerability of nakedness; if you’ve ever seen photos of famine victims, or concentration camp victims, there’s a point at which nakedness totally ceases to titillate, instead just arouses feelings of pity [...] The key here is vulnerability—This shouldn’t look titillating, it’s not a hubba hubba kind of naked woman shot; it’s one that it almost hurts to look at. Tear their hearts out, Kelley [“Original Script of Calliope” 10].

  Jones’s artwork does indeed tear out the reader’s heart, as this is an incredibly difficult page to look at. Although the final printed version of Calliope looks mercifully older than sixteen, and her ribcage goes against Gaiman’s suggestion that we can “not quite count her ribs,” nearly every other direction from the script is evident. Calliope’s extreme vulnerability arouses the “feelings of pity” which the script called for. The script shows Gaiman’s awareness that a naked, beautiful woman would be titillating, and that he consciously strove to avoid exploiting this moment, of at all sexualizing or romanticizing Calliope’s rape. In his handwritten marginalia, Jones reiterates, “Shocking—not sexual” (19). The degree to which this intent is successful or not, of course, depends on the individual reader. Part of what makes reading “Calliope” so unnerving are the moments when the artwork seems to veer towards titillating, especially in the depictions of Calliope’s full breasts and nipples. She is an odd mixture of terrible and beautiful.

  After the splash page, the story resumes. Resigned to the rape to come, Calliope notices the unfamiliar figure of Madoc and bitterly asks, “Is this man to be our audience?” (17:7). By having Calliope raise the issue of audience, Gaiman forces the readers to realize their own role in the comic, a role that becomes increasingly more difficult to neutrally maintain as the level of graphic violence increases. Calliope is horrifying to look at; her bare ribs and penetrating eyes are at odds with the way she is sexualized in the art. It feels almost shameful to look at her on the page, to derive pleasure from reading her story. Jones’s art frequently highlights her pert, erect nipples and rich Barbie doll mane. It is uncomfortable for the reader to see the mixture of sexuality and violence, to gaze upon a woman who is depicted as both beautiful and violated.

  Fry soon announces that he isn’t the first writer to pimp out Calliope; he is the most recent successor in a long line dating back to Homer. “Calliope, I’m giving you to Richard. You’re his now,” he announces, with the lettering emphasizing the possessive pronoun (17:7). Calliope is a prized possession, and in emphasizing ownership, Fry begins Madoc’s thought process of de-deifying, de-humanizing, and finally objectifying Calliope, which allows him to justify his horrific treatment of her.

  Fry’s language continues the thread of sexuality and misogyny established early in the story; he cautions Calliope not to get “all worked up,” he introduces Madoc to her as someone “unable” to write, and he calls the skeletal woman a “little cow” (17:7). There is no doubt in the reader’s mind that Fry is lascivious and evil, but Madoc’s position is still undetermined. When Madoc first appears in the comic, he is young, handsome, naive, and sympathetic to a degree, especially when he wraps a coat around Calliope before ushering her from Fry’s home. The gesture could be chivalrous or self-serving, and juxtaposed against Fry’s horrible parting words, “Take the little cow away,” the panel offers some small hope that Madoc might in fact do the right thing in rescuing her from Fry’s grasp.

  Once the reader turns the page, however, Madoc’s intentions become all too horrifyingly clear. At the top of a page 8, a lovingly rendered horizontal panel shows Calliope lying on her side, facing away from the viewer, an odalisque with full round buttocks and loose, tousled locks. Once again, it is her rib cage and the dark, crosshatched shadows that indicate there’s something horrifically wrong with this image. A closer look reveals a barred window framed by decadent, sashed curtains: a domestic prison fit for Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

  The next panel, however, is the most jarring image in the story, and the one that many readers recall after reading “Calliope.” The text box starkly and coldly announces, “His first action was to rape her, nervously, on the musty old camp bed” (17:8). The narrator focuses on Madoc rather than Calliope, offering an adverb that emphasizes his emotional state during his action, and adjectives that focus on the mundane aspects of the scene of the crime. The details are extrinsic to Calliope herself. Yet the text, like the image of Calliope’s body that it accompanies, is blunt, naked, stark, and horrifying. It feels invasive to view this panel, to gaze at Calliope in this moment of violence. The image presents a faceless Madoc with muscular forearms, his hand enclosed like a manacle around Calliope’s wrist. She is depicted as a smooth, pale, prostrate body, again with that odd erect nipple thrown in relief against black, head fully extended at a painful, inhuman angle, eyes open and empty, her face a skull-like mask. Calliope is resigned rather than fighting, a living corpse. In this image, Gaiman references a sensation that many survivors of trauma describe: a complete sense of numbness, the sense of being disembodied or dead.

  In his pivotal work, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud writes:

  Closure in comics is far from continuous and anything but involuntary. Every act committed to paper by the comics artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplice. An equal partner in crime known as the reader. I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but I’m not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you committing it in your own style [68].

  McCloud’s point that reading comics necessitates a specific kind of reader participation is poignant when examining why the experience of reading “Calliope” is so particularly disturbing. Just as the reader must supply the plot for what happens between panels, to fill in the gap in the gutter, the reader of “Calliope” is “an equal partner in crime,” and it is we who decide how long Calliope is raped, what sounds Madoc makes as he forces himself upon her, and how much she resists him. The medium forces us to use our imaginations to “commit” Madoc’s crime. Just as we earlier became Fry, mimicking the action of opening the door and exposing Calliope by turning a page, we also become Madoc, and we also feel Calliope’s pain. “Calliope” is a story in which the reader does not want to identify with any of the main characters, and yet, by nature of the medium, must.

  In addition, Madoc�
�s resolve briefly wavers, making the reader consider the thought process that people must, at some level, come to believe in order to commit atrocities such as rape or murder. The text box reads:

  She’s not even human, he told himself. She’s thousands of years old. But her flesh was warm, and her breath was sweet, and she choked back tears like a child whenever he hurt her [17:8].

  There is abundant evidence that Calliope is a being capable of feelings, but Madoc wills himself into believing otherwise. For a Sandman reader anticipating a new installment about dreams, this panel is particularly unsettling because it forces the reader to become a witness of rape and slavery. The act could have been described purely in text, or inferred through art; but instead, “Calliope” depicts rape staged against rich folds of cloth. The text tells us the scene includes a “musty camp bed,” but the art offers Calliope prostrate as if she were a still life. The scene draws upon familiar romanticized tropes of women—the damsel in distress, the imprisoned princess, the passive odalisque, the tease who “secretly wants it”—and presents them as horror. By doing so, Gaiman forces us to question the typical representations of women in art, folk tales, love stories, and even in romanticized rape narratives. In Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller notes, “Permissible rape as an act of manhood infused the theories of courtly love propounded by the social arbiters of the Middle Ages” (290). If a knight were to win a damsel in combat with another knight, then he had the right to “have” her (Brownmiller 291). In Madoc’s mind, and according to the rules of romantic fairy tales, because Madoc has “rescued” Calliope from Fry, then she is his. In this scene, Gaiman draws upon the tropes of romanticized violence in order to subvert them. When viewing the right half of the middle image on page 8, it could be mistaken for a romantic love scene. When viewing the left half of the image, however, the scene is sickeningly violent. The reader cannot look away in order to continue reading, and this forces the reader to participate in a terrible voyeurism, to confront the hideous reality behind the rape fantasy.

  After this gut-wrenching panel, Madoc’s postcoital retirement to his study is a visual relief. Once again, his niggling conscience rises, and in considering his actions, Madoc mirrors a system of denial and justification that is unfortunately recognizable. He questions for a moment whether or not Calliope is a “real girl” and whether “he, Rick Madoc, might possibly have done something wrong, even criminal” (17:8). Madoc acknowledges that rape can be “wrong” or “criminal” in certain circumstances, but since he has convinced himself that Calliope is not a real person, he does not believe his act is technically rape. And once this justification occurs, there is no turning back.

  In Jones’s art, Calliope is alternatively fragile, beautiful, terrifying, and pitiable. The reader’s response to Calliope’s gaunt body connects it to the body of images we have that are similar, the most terrible of which being the bodies from the Holocaust.2 Calliope’s skeletal frame should completely repulse, but instead the reader’s reaction is complicated by the detailed beauty in her long lashes, delicate limbs, and long, lush hair. In some ways, Calliope’s gaunt, tortured, sexualized figure is all-too-familiar to contemporary readers inured to anorexic models and photoshopped bodies in advertising. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf notes that one of the terrible consequences of living in “the Surgical Age” is that “the average fashion model now is even thinner than were the Amazons of the eighties and nineties” (7). In the most recent iteration of her famous Killing Us Softly series, Jean Kilbourne connects the objectification of models in advertising and the growing trend of violence against women:

  We all grow up in a culture in which women’s bodies are constantly turned into things, into objects. [...] Of course this affects female self-esteem. It also does something even more insidious. It creates a climate in which there is wide-spread violence against women. [...] Turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person [Kilbourne].

  It isn’t just Madoc’s process of turning Calliope “into a thing” that horrifies the reader. It is Calliope’s representation as beautiful-and-emaciated that adds another layer to the reader’s repulsion and horror. The reader experiences the uncanny, a combination of recognition and revulsion—recognizing that Calliope is beautiful, even the parts of her that are meant to be repulsive, because of the cult of beauty that we currently live in. We have been trained to find emaciated women alluring without questioning the methods that lead to their emaciation or the cultural expectations that keep them that way.

  In Madoc’s decision to secure inspiration, the reader also recognizes the appeal of the easy fix—if only writing were that easy! Rather than laboring over drafts and revisions for weeks on end, it is so much more romantic to think of artistic inspiration as a gift from the divine. But just as quickly as this thought occurs, its opposite arrives in full force: a series of seemingly harmless concessions, small allowances, and minor justifications can nonetheless become a slippery slope to a terrible crime. A cascading series of decisions leads Madoc to trade in his humanity in exchange for the power of writing. The result is a special kind of abject horror for the reader, because as remote as the situation is, the reader can empathize with and imagine being Madoc. As Vladimir Nabokov no doubt knew, anyone can make a saint look sympathetic, but it takes great skill to make readers side with a rapist. The character Madoc takes a shortcut to become the type of writer that his creator, Gaiman, had to become the hard way. As Humbert Humbert famously remarks in Lolita, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (Nabokov 9).

  Madoc’s “fancy prose style” clearly improves once he has Calliope in his power. But what of his victim? Up until this part of the story, Calliope has barely spoken. When she does finally speak, the power of her entreaty is striking. Not surprisingly, the muse of epic poetry has great rhetorical power. The “beautiful voice” prays for help with eloquent, effective speech (17:9). She turns to the three Fates to intercede, and although they cannot or will not help her, they do hint at someone who can: Oneiros (from Homer’s Iliad), also known as the Sandman, Morpheus, or Dream. In this scene, Gaiman also reveals that Calliope is Dream’s former lover and mother to his son Orpheus. However, Dream’s record with his past loves is problematic at best.3 As Hy Bender notes, “It’s not a stretch to guess that the way Rick Madoc perpetually uses Calliope and then returns to his obsession with his career is an exaggerated echo of the way the Sandman himself used to treat Calliope when they were lovers” (66).

  Because Dream has recently escaped 70 years of naked, solitary confinement, the famously dour paramour with little capacity for forgiveness is now in a unique position to sympathize with Calliope. Interestingly, several aspects of “Calliope” are in fact prefigured by Sandman’s first issue, “Sleep of the Just,” which in some ways reads as Dream’s captivity narrative. When Alex Burgess pleads for Dream’s forgiveness for his capture and imprisonment, Dream simply states, “There are offenses that are unpardonable. Can you have any idea what it was like? Can you have any idea?” (1:36). The emphasis on “unpardonable” offenses sets the stage for the rapes in “Calliope,” and the phrasing of “have any idea” echoes in Madoc’s “I have no idea.” Indeed, Dream’s response to Burgess (damning him with “eternal waking”) prefigures his response to Madoc (damning him with neverending ideas).

  But before Dream comes to Calliope’s rescue, the story flashes back to her capture at the hands of Fry. This allows Calliope to “narrat[e] the dark side of being treated as a beautiful object” (Wolf 285). “It had been her own fault,” Calliope recalls, echoing the common rhetoric of blaming the rape victim and the victim in turn internalizing that blame. She describes the events in the third person, as if they were happening to someone else (17:11). This has the effect of reminding the reader of the ways in which rape is typically described in news accounts and popular media, as if the type of clothing a woman wore (in Calliope’s case, a Grecian toga) or the typ
e of behavior she exhibited (in Calliope’s case, bathing in a stream and accepting a flower) in some way made her consent to sexual violence. The reader clearly sees that Calliope had done no wrong and certainly never asked to be enslaved. There is no ambiguity.

  The young Fry, like a suitor, woos the goddess with flowers—more specifically, moly flowers which “had power over her kind” (17:11). In doing so, Fry performs a sick mockery of the courtship ritual, paying a call on a young woman and bringing her flowers. Next, Fry picks up Calliope’s Grecian scroll and burns it, commanding her to call him “master.”4 The connection between Calliope’s freedom and a piece of paper, combined with the “master” term, draws a direct comparison between this moment and the history of American slavery. And the enslavement of another human being is never permissible, as Dream earlier in the series tells his friend Hob Gadling (13:20). In Calliope’s brief recollection, Gaiman is able to create a situation where the reader sees parallels between romantic idealization and courtship practices, the harmful rhetoric of rape, and the false justification of slavery.