Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  7. In “Tear In My Hand” Amos sings, “If you need me, me and Neil’ll be hanging out with the Dream King.”

  8. It is worth noting that the album that features Amos’s “wink” to Gaiman also features the devastating autobiographical song, “Me and a Gun,” which chronicles the night in 1985 when Amos was raped after a concert.

  9. Gaiman and Amos later collaborated on several projects. In terms of thinking about Gaiman and feminism, his contribution to Amos’s 2001 album Strange Little Girls is particularly interesting. Gaiman wrote short prose pieces to accompany Cindy Sherman-esque photographs of Amos. Excerpts from these pieces were published in the album’s liner notes and the full text was published in the Strange Days concert tour book and reprinted in Gaiman’s Fragile Things collection.

  WORKS CITED

  Bender, Hy. The Sandman Companion. New York: Vertigo, 1999. Print.

  Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Fawcett, 1975. Print.

  Erickson, Steve. “Introduction.” The Sandman: Dream Country. Vol. 3. New York: Vertigo / DC Comics, 1995. Print.

  Gaiman, Neil et al. The Sandman: Dream Country. Vol. 3. New York: Vertigo / DC Comics, 1995. Print.

  _____. “Original Script of Calliope.” The Sandman: Dream Country. Vol. 3. New York: Vertigo / DC Comics, 1995. Print.

  _____ (w), Sam Kieth (p), and Mike Dringenberg (i). “Sleep of the Just.” The Sandman #1 (January 1989), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Michael Zulli (p), and Steve Parkhouse (i). “Men of Good Fortune.” The Sandman #13 (February 1990), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Kelley Jones (p), and Malcolm Jones III (i). “Calliope.” The Sandman #17 (June 1990), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Mike Dringenberg (p), and Malcolm Jones III (i). “Season of Mists: Prologue.” The Sandman #21 (April 1989), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  Gieni, Justine. “Rape and Revenge in Graphic Detail: Neil Gaiman’s ‘Calliope,’ in The Sandman Comic Series.” Forum. 13. Web. 3 March 2012.

  Hibbs, Brian. “Interview with Tori Amos.” Magian Line. 1.3 (1993). Web. 1 March 2012.

  Kilbourne, Jean. “Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women.” Media Education Foundation, 2010. DVD.

  McCabe, Joseph. Hanging Out with the Dream King. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004. Print.

  McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Print.

  Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print.

  Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002. Print.

  Wordsworth, William. “The Tables Turned.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.

  Empowering Voice and Refiguring Retribution

  Neil Gaiman’s Anti-Feminism Feminist Parable in The Sandman

  BY AARON DRUCKER

  In medias res, Lyta Hall is expecting. For two years she has lived with her husband in the “Dream Dome,” seeming to assist him in saving the world’s children from nightmares and only dreamed of terrors. In this liminal place, she survives with her husband (who was fatally wounded in the real world but whose being is caught just before passing over, not yet dead) and her unborn child, awaiting a future that cannot come, for it is “in maternity that she must be transfigured and enslaved” (de Beauvoir 171). Brought into the (false, barren) Dreaming by her desire, her potency is static; she is unable to generate—thought, control, movement, life. She is surrounded by the world constructed by the dreams of lesser men, the trophy companion without purpose or function. Her acquiescence to the patriarchal renders her barren. She believes she follows her heart, her love, her femininity. In fact, she is submitting to the role of perpetual wife-not-yet-mother, the subservient place to the ghost of her husband, as frozen in time as the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, whose command solicits stultifying ambivalence. We are introduced to Lyta Hall in the midst of metaphor quickly turned to allegory during the story arc aptly named “The Doll’s House” in The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. From her first appearance to the climax of her narrative arc, Lyta serves as a figure for feminist tropes in Gaiman’s fantasy, constructed to ironically critique the second-wave feminist archetypes of empowerment in a male-constructed narrative of the feminine in the world of dreams.

  The story opens on a woman looking in a mirror, the panel shaded in a monochromatic pale blue. The reader sees her name as she looks into the mirror, seeing her as a reflection, brushing her hair, staring blankly through the doubled image and towards the reader (12:1). We see her through her female gaze,1 doubling the apparent androcentric production of the work. Gaiman is transparently aware of his gender perspective: a male author in a male dominated environment constructing a female character. From the beginning, he clearly understands the male-orientated perspective of the comic book medium. Since young men are the target demographic of most comics, it is unusual in that—according to his editor, Karen Berger—roughly half of The Sandman’s readers are female (Goodyear para. 27). Many are ardent fans (Bender 186). When the author then appropriates a female figure from the larger world of the comic oeuvre, he immediately opens with the trope of the gaze, openly doubled through the mirror image of the issue’s protagonist. The frame is followed by her staring blankly, outside her bedroom door, lost and resigned to her oblivion, appealing to the apparent male authority: “He’ll know. Hector knows everything” (12:1). Betty Friedan remarks in The Feminine Mystique:

  The apathetic, dependent, infantile, purposeless being, who seems so shockingly nonhuman ... is ... the familiar “feminine” personality. Aren’t the chief characteristics of femininity ... passivity; a weak ego or sense of self; a weak superego or human conscience; renunciation of active aims, ambitions, interests of one’s own to live through others; incapacity for abstract thought; retreat from activity directed outward to the world, in favor of activity directed inward or phantasy? [286].

  Her identity has been completely absorbed by her husband, so much so that she is (ineptly, inappropriately) referred to as “Mrs. Sandman” by him, the man for whom she has abandoned her godhood. Lyta Hall was The Fury, daughter of Diana of the Amazons and the human Steve Trevor, granddaughter of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.2 Gifted with superhuman strength, speed, endurance, and near invulnerability, and trained in multiple forms of combat, she falls in love with Hector Hall, a teammate from the superhero alliance Infinity, Inc., and marries him. Soon, she becomes pregnant with his child and voluntarily gives up her costume, opting instead to raise their child and perform the role of homemaker. When Hector is killed in battle, she becomes despondent and, when offered the chance to join him in a between-realm called the “Dream Dome,” she readily accepts, giving up not only her powers, but her place in the “real” world as well. She is the heir to Wonder Woman, but in her husband’s home, she is “babycakes” (Gaiman 12:4). Lyta begins her story as an intentional stereotype, a self-reflexive trope of the sexist vision of femininity. Her entrance to the Dreaming is through Hector’s dream, that of the “superhero” Sandman and his Dream Dome, supposedly protecting children (though in fact he’s contributing to an abused child’s psychosis). Lyta Hall is the fool’s dream of a man’s woman: barefoot and pregnant, constantly tending her hair, the literal representation of the iconic stereotype. But she is more than merely a characterization pulled from the masculine repertoire of feminine tropes. She is Echo, too, following Hector’s relentless Narcissus into self-inflicted nothingness, “in the extremity of her alienation from ordinary fleshly life, this ... angel-woman becomes not just a momento of otherness but actually a momento mori or ... an ‘Angel of Death’” (Gilbert and Gubar 24). Her life is the daily reminder of his death, and her subjugation to his vision of her place—static, unchanging, unknowing, disabled—is the necessary condition that predicates his survival. By accepting his offer, she engages in the patriarchal construct of the Universe, more literally so than in “real life,” sinc
e her world is a literalized dream. This raises the question, of course, whose dream? In the context of the story, the Dream Dome resides within a “fold” in the larger Dreaming, inside the mind of a young boy who has been found and co-opted by two nightmare creatures (the literal “Brute and Glob,” who are doubled again in his abusive uncle and aunt). However, to create this haven, the monsters of the Dreaming require a “bozo” to believe in the construct, to fill out its edges and solidify its reality (Gaiman 12:10). Hector is the second such entity, just desperate enough to desire his existence and just narcissistic enough to believe in his importance. He is the man, the savior, the hero. Hector Hall builds a world in his own image, a technological marvel inside a boy’s mind. The Dream Dome reflects all of Hector’s desires for himself: the everlasting, never failing hero with his wife and child-to-be. He is insulated from failure and responsibility. He is, as the title of the issue suggests, “Playing House,” and it is in his house that Lyta searches for her own being. But this is a man-made womb: a cave within a cave within a cave. The boy’s imagination folds a space upon itself, making a cavernous space of his own ego-construction, into which Hector has inserted his “Dream Dome,” which contains his representation of his life. Each shell harboring the frozen embryo of that which created it, finally culminating in Lyta’s stalled womb. “Darling,” she asks her husband, “how long have we been living in the Dream Dome?” He responds, “Must be a couple of years by now, Hon. Why?” “Well, it just seemed to me like, maybe I ought to have had a baby by now. I was about six months pregnant when we got here...” Lyta sadly muses (Gaiman 12:4). And then Hector dismisses her with an infantile response:

  You know, Precious, I’ll bet that the Stork doesn’t know how to get to the Dream Dome. He’s probably got our little bundle of joy in its white cotton diaper, right now. [...] I’ll tell Brute and Glob about it. They’ll know how to get a message to that ol’ Stork. You’ll see [12:4].

  She is an adult woman, in her third trimester, beyond the age where the story-time myth of birthing produces its comforting magic, but she is stripped of her womanhood, reduced to passivity. Lost in Hector’s deluded trope of her, she is rendered into nothingness: a receptacle, full but unable to ripen. Her body, the real object trapped inside the construct, doubled and then doubled again, is left in medias res, without end. In her present nothingness, her identity is beyond her reach.

  Her instinct is to explore her self, but in Hector’s world, she can only see her reflection in his mind. “Lyta lives in a pretty house, with her husband, their two servants, and a thousand thousand screens” (12:4); Hector’s world proliferates with her own reflection, and she can only see what is reflected from the patriarchal construct in which she resides. “Is this what she wants? Is this what she wanted?” (12:9 fr.1). She sees herself again reflected in the mirror: Hector’s pregnant wife. Then, her image shifts. She is a happy child, though she still desires her heteronormative life: “She always wanted to be with Hector. Even when they were children” (fr. 2). Her reflection brushes her hair, the trappings of adulthood (hairspray, makeup) are replaced by a teddy bear and some unread books. She smiles, as if the brush can solve any problem, and the listless days are far into the future. A child Lyta imagines herself with her knight, with her “hero brat” still out there to rescue her. The scene shifts, and now Hector stands behind her adolescent self, staring at her reflection, admiring her beauty. She sees herself through his eyes, and finds joy in her second place. Together, they live their lives, “but Hector’s dreams came first. They always did” (fr. 3). She is now The Fury, “a cheap copy of her vanished mother” (fr. 4). Absently stroking her hair, getting ready to fight alongside her man. In costumes, in alter-egos, she has taken on the identity of her mother’s form and function. She is Hector’s; she is her mother’s. And as the smile recedes into the blank stare of the conformed, the scene shifts again. Lyta’s reflection continues to sit and stare, lost in the “nightmare times when she thought Hector was dead” (fr. 5), but the real Lyta stands and turns to go. “And, after the wedding, she came to live in this house. And she was happy. They were all so very, very happy” (fr. 6), she poses to the tear-stained reflection left behind in the callous reality of the mirror. In the corrupted world of the Dream Dome, the mirror is reality. Gaiman inverts the traditional depiction of the imprisoned woman. As Gilbert and Gubar observe:

  Dramatizations of imprisonment and escape are so all-pervasive in ... literature by women that we believe they represent a uniquely female tradition.... Interestingly, though works in this tradition generally begin by using houses as primary symbols of female imprisonment, they also use much of the other paraphernalia of “woman’s place” to enact their central symbolic drama of enclosure and escape. Ladylike veils and costumes, mirrors, paintings, statues, locked cabinets, drawers, trunks, strong-boxes, and other domestic furnishing appear and reappear in female novels ... to signify the woman writer’s sense that, as Emily Dickinson put it, her “life” has been “shaven and fitted to a frame,” a confinement she can only tolerate by believing that “the soul has moments of escape / When bursting all the doors / She dances like a bomb abroad” [85].

  Lyta’s life is the protected, but deathly, static dream of a patriarch’s woman. When the bomb explodes, bursting all the doors (perhaps more literally than Dickinson had proposed), Lyta is not let into a world of ecstatic freedom (12:19). She neither dances nor escapes. Rather, she is paradoxically imprisoned by her release. In the construction of Hector’s projection, Lyta can walk away from the aberrant and assaulting reality of her lived experience. The loss, the fear, the terror, and ultimately the future are bound and separated by the static vision of the ordered patriarchy in the Dream Dome. But when Dream interferes, reabsorbing Hector Hall’s world into the natural order of things, he reveals Lyta’s world for what it is. Gaiman’s construction runs the risk of advocating the patriarchal at this point. At first reading, it appears that Lyta prefers the Dream Dome’s inverted reality, a place in which she appears happier and better off than in the real world, at least in the immediate aftermath of her exposure. She resists, and even openly defies, the reality imposed upon her by her restoration to reality. But Gaiman’s construction is careful to frame the imposition of Dream’s interference. Brute and Glob, resolutely male characters and attributes of the worst of masculine tendencies, are abusive, vile creatures whose purpose is to use and abuse others to their own satisfaction, even without an apparent purpose. “I am waiting for an explanation,” Morpheus asks of them. Glob responds weakly, “Well ... we thought ... we could maybe make our own Dream King. One we’d be running...” (12:20 fr. 2–3). Beyond nonspecific mischief and a diversion of limited scope, Brute and Glob abuse one man to the point of suicide (fr.4) and then turn to Hector Hall, who could not be lost through death (as he was already dead) but whose wife would become a static and hollow shell of herself. Remorseless, they abuse without purpose, for little reason other than to exercise some minimal sense of power. When faced with accountability, they fold immediately and acquiesce to the most restrained prodding of authority. Brute and Glob are the overt attributes of Hector Hall’s vision of patriarchal structure. While he covers his misogyny with awkward acts of kindness and contrition, his apparent sadism inserts itself into his marriage when he seeks and accepts the static tragedy of Lyta’s condition, denying her both her sex and her identity in his abusive fiction. Even as Lyta denies the reality of her situation, as she walks away from the tragic mirror-of-the-real, as she turns from the pronouncement of Dream’s observation of Hector’s “unseemly” state (12:21), Lyta’s preference for the trappings of her imprisonment betrays the complex relationship with reality that feminist independence demands. Through Lyta, Gaiman postulates that sometimes the static entrapment of being the “second sex” seems preferable to the uncompromising and bitter realities of independence, and yet he cannot—and he will not—allow the protected subject of the patriarchal construction continue unabated. Like feminis
ts before him, Dream issues the ultimatum of freedom. Released from Hector’s tower/prison, Lyta asks Morpheus, “So, what are you going to do to me?”

  “Nothing,” he replies.

  “Nothing? You killed Hector. You destroyed our home. You’ve ruined my life. You call that nothing?”

  “Exactly. Nothing,” he continues. “You are free to go. Build yourself a new life...” [12:23].

  In that moment, Gaiman leaves Lyta with the choice after Feminism: does the empowered woman return to her old life, her old ways, the old patriarchy, or does she build something new? Dream does not help her shape the new possibilities (the story does take place in the modern world, after all, and Lyta was once a hero with the powers of a goddess). Whether or not this is a sinister act, a final act of cruelty, or just the bitter reality the newly freed woman faces is ambiguous in Gaiman’s presentation. Dream acts with certainty and fairness, setting aright what has been abused and degraded. However, he is also pictured as dark and shadowed, with an imposing glint in his eye that betrays a threatening aspect to his masculine intrusion. His act is not of compassion or of kindness but of necessity. If, through Dream, Gaiman speaks for the freedom imposed by Feminism, of the complex and often bitter realities faced by the newly independent woman, it is a terrifying freedom, potentially overwhelming, positioned upon her and leaving her in the spotlight (figured literally in the final frame of the issue), left only to react to the last tropes of patriarchy.

  In an image uncannily reminiscent of the Virgin Mary, Lyta turns from Dream, waking into the nightmare of the real world (12:21 fr.4). The child she now carries is a child of the Dreaming, and the Lord of the Realm will return to claim him. Dream, in an overtly creepy and threatening rendition of the Annunciation, predicts, “The child—the child you have carried so long in dreams. That child is mine. Take good care of it. One day I will come for it” (12:23 fr. 5). Splayed in the spotlight, head down, eyes shadowed, Lyta swears, “You take my child over my dead body, you spooky bastard.... Over my dead body” (fr. 7). Unlike Gabriel’s pronouncement to Mary, Morpheus’s prediction is not taken as tidings of wonder and joy, though it remains a distinctly male action. The woman’s labor is taken for the man’s use. Like Jesus’s mother, Lyta will carry, bear, and raise a child that is not truly hers. She will be responsible for the safety of the male God’s progeny, under implicit threat should the child come to harm. The Bible fails to explore what might happen to Mary should Jesus have taken an unfortunate fall in his early years, but Dream is explicit by his bearing, if not by his words. His admonition carries with it a threat of harm, should something go amiss with Lyta’s son. Daniel’s safety is Lyta’s responsibility, but this is to satisfy Morpheus’s command rather than the natural inclinations of motherhood, should something go amiss with Lyta’s son. The reader encounters Daniel for the first time some 10 issues later, in The Sandman #22. “Have you got a name for him yet?” Lyta’s friend asks (22:12). “Not one I like,” she responds. “He doesn’t look like a Steve. Or a Hector, does he?” She plays with the nameless child and discusses her future: