Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  “Had any other ideas about what you’re going to be doing?”

  “You mean like bringing up ‘Hey You’ Hall isn’t going to keep my busy enough?”

  “No. No ideas yet. But I will do something when he’s a bit bigger. Maybe go back to school. I don’t think the costume stuff, now ... not with Hector gone. It wouldn’t be the same...” [fr. 4–5].

  Perhaps a year after her first encounter with Dream, Lyta Hall has adopted the role of “mother.” While she plays the role of guardian and protector, she has not built a new life for her son or herself. True, she is not encumbered by the necessities of practical living (“Money’s not a problem,” she explains [fr. 7]), but her life is a facile continuation of the proscribed roles of the feminine she refuses to release.

  When Morpheus visits Lyta Hall’s son in the “Season of Mists” story arc, Lyta fears he has come to take her child and she reacts violently: “You—you get away from my child—you—don’t touch him—I’m warning you” (22:13). Her impassioned expression, emphasized by striking force lines3 in the static frame, underscores that she is the Mother/Goddess fiercely protecting her young. While she may not be ready to go back to the “costume thing,” she is nonetheless in possession of a formidable arsenal for defending herself and her young son. Dream responds, telling her that this is just a visit and that avoiding a violent conflict that Lyta would surely lose, but her ire is misdirected. The threats continue, even as Morpheus reminds Lyta that her child is special—not because he is the biological product of two supernaturally endowed parents, but because “it is unusual for a child to gestate in dreams.... A child formed in my realm...” (22:13), and he tapers off without a hint of how the story ends. Simone de Beauvoir expresses Lyta Hall’s situation eloquently: “Every mother entertains the idea that her child will be a hero, thus showing her wonderment at the thought of engendering a being with consciousness and freedom; but she is also in dread of giving birth to a defective or a monster, because she is aware to what a frightening extent the welfare of the flesh is contingent upon circumstances” (de Beauvoir 497). Lyta has re-proscribed her identity through the birth of her child: she is “mother.” But she only wears the costume of a mother. She cannot act; she cannot exist independently from patriarchal control. While she may, in her role, defend and protect her progeny, as a mother is supposed to do, she cannot engage the responsibility for his being. He is the object of her production but not a person to her until she is repatriated by the patriarchy. It is Dream who announces the baby’s name: Daniel (22:14).4 Her initial reaction to Morpheus’s pronouncement is anger, but it quickly turns to consideration and acceptance. She continues to be, as she was with Hector, bound by the social ideologies of the patriarchal order: what the man says, is so. Morpheus is now figured as the “father”: the absent, distant, and abusive male who makes the decisions and defines the reality of Lyta’s existence. Once the reality is stated, she can embrace it, literally holding and smiling comfortingly at her son for the first time in the series. In positioning Dream as the male figurehead, she can now complete her subjective position. For her, motherhood is a role, like the “costume thing” or life with Hector. It is dictated by a director whose control she outwardly resists but receptively capitulates in order to constitute her identity. She can now be “Daniel’s mother,” greater than the woman who is merely keeping busy “bringing up ‘Hey You’ Hall.” She is secured by the reinforcement of her deferred role in the act of identifying and is defined by the object of her production. “But this is only an illusion. For she does not really make the baby, it makes itself within her” (de Beauvoir 496).

  In an interlude some eighteen issues later, Daniel takes a nap. Lyta is again talking to a friend,5 this time on the phone, and she has put her son to sleep. He lays in his crib and silently, happily goes to sleep. His willingness to nod off would seem a boon to any single mother, but his desire to dream takes literal form quickly enough, as Lyta inadvertently admits: “Daniel just gets everywhere.... It won’t be long before he figures out how to get out of his crib” (40:2). And in Daniel’s dream, he is able to do just that: leave the confines of his crib, his room, and his world. The issue’s main action focuses around Daniel entering The Dreaming, the realm of Morpheus, and hearing stories from Cain, Abel, and Eve.6 While the stories these avatars of the Dreaming relate to the toddler are interesting, Daniel’s brief adventure recalls de Beauvoir’s admonition of a mother’s fears, for Daniel is, on the surface and in every physical way, a perfect child. Blonde haired and blue eyed, he is sweetly tempered, alert, healthy, and receptive—if a bit precocious. But he is also unnatural. He moves consciously and deliberately between veils of reality, crawling from his crib into the dreaming world with wanton intent. Inasmuch as it is curious exploration, he is innocent in the engagement, but he is nonetheless tainted as supernatural, defective in the sense that he is beyond the normal expectations. While in the world of comic books it is normal for the children of super-powered couples to have extraordinary gifts, Daniel’s abilities go beyond the limits of what Hector and Lyta Hall’s abilities should produce. His gestation in The Dreaming has left him different, altered. While Lyta talks on the phone, her son transcends the human boundaries of reality and crawls into another universe of his own volition. In ignorance, she wakes him after his return from the Dream Lord’s realm only to discover a black feather in his bed. Its origins never occur to Lyta. It is tempting to read this story as “just a dream” of Daniel’s, if an extraordinary one, but Gaiman forces his readers to resist this at several points: Daniel’s movement from reality to The Dreaming is deliberate (he gets out of his crib and crawls through the boundary (40:3); the characters and stories told to Daniel are known to the reader but unknown to him, so it is not invention but experience in which he is engaged; and finally, the story is punctuated by Matthew’s7 feather brought back into the real world when Daniel returns. Lyta discovers it, pronouncing it “a dirty old feather” and wonders, “Where on Earth did you get this from?” (40:24). While Lyta is caretaker to her son, the connection that she assumes to him is only an appearance, as illusory as a dream. She has no sense at all of who her son is, what he can truly do, or the contents of his reality. As in de Beauvoir’s reflection, Daniel is not the being of Lyta Hall, and as she defines herself through him, her definition is ultimately as hollow as her existence with Hector. Again, she does not acknowledge her reality. While with Hector, she was living in the static limits of the old patriarchy, the dutiful wife: barefoot and pregnant. She could not acknowledge the monotonous trance of her bound world. After her release from the dream prison (the thousand thousand screens of Bentham’s panopticon), she enters the nightmare of the real world. Her illusion disintegrates, leaving her with only her independence. With the birth of her son and Dream’s naming, she is circumscribed by the “mother” trope. She lives for her son exclusively, without boundaries. Her motherhood is her defining characteristic, imposed upon her by the patriarchal figures that foreground her. Hector’s dreams always came first, and now Dream’s constant presence, through his original admonition, defines her actions. Lyta’s only purpose is to confound Morpheus from his promised purpose. Without understanding whether Morpheus’s intent is malicious or benign (or even heroic), she would stand in his way, and thus she structures her identity as mother/protector. When she returns to the series in “The Kindly Ones,” she continues to be confounded by the evidence of Daniel’s excursions into the Dreaming: “SAND! There’s sand all over the bed. Why, you, you little.... So, Daniel was sleeping in my bed. I put him down for his nap, there. Next thing you know, the sheets are covered with sand” (57:4). In the intervening two years, she has not recognized Daniel’s connection to his father figure’s realm. While he continues to sleep and return with foreign articles upon his awakening, she has only become suspicious of Dream, assuming that it is his interference (and not Daniel’s own initiation) that causes these anomalies. To that end, she has never left his side, giving up all o
utside endeavors from socializing to “the costume thing.” She has become overprotective of him, to the point of assaulting a homeless man for his kindness.8 And yet, Gaiman does not allow the limitations of Lyta’s circumscribed identity to wallow in her paranoia. When she steps away for just one evening out (and granted, it is engineered by Lucifer and engaged by Loki and Puck), Daniel is taken. Constructing Lyta’s identity through pre-feminist configurations of feminine patriarchal identities, those original female roles so hard-fought against by the second wave feminists of the late 20th century, Gaiman sets the ground for the argument in “The Kindly Ones.” He literalizes the woman bound by hearth and home and umbilical cord as a hollow shell of herself: static and immobile, her depth and independence curtailed utterly by her externally defined identities. The image of woman de Beauvoir and her contemporaries sought so hard to reform is carefully represented in the figure of Lyta Hall as Gaiman builds the narrative towards Daniel’s kidnapping. When the child is taken, Lyta is not merely devastated; she is un-defined. Seeking definition, Lyta turns to the empowerment methodologies of the 20th century feminist movement by seeking to engage and acquire the tropes of feminine mythological power.

  However, as Lyta descends into her mythological exploration of feminine power, Gaiman asserts two significant narrative arguments about her direction. Lost, she seeks to regain her son by killing Morpheus. To do so, she begins a Dantesque journey through a reality that is both real and beyond real. But before she begins, she encounters three women divining over a cauldron. Awakened in a dream, she descends a steep stairwell into a dark, cave-like room, where she encounters the women focused on a divining ritual (58:14–17). They are unknown to Lyta Hall but instantly recognizable too the reader. They are the Triple-Goddess in their tripartite role. They wear the guises of the Hecate, the Fates, and the Furies, and the reader has been warned before: “Be satisfied with the trinity you have. F’r example, you wouldn’t want to meet us as the Kindly Ones. We can only caution you, Sister. We can’t protect you” (10:19). To Lyta Hall, they are instantly recognizable as the Weird Sisters, the three witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Their appearance in Sandman echoes Banquo’s description of the Weird Sisters:

  ... What are these

  So wither’d and so wild in their attire,

  That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth...

  You greet with present grace and great prediction...

  If you can look into the seeds of times

  And say which grain will grow, and which will not,

  Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear

  Your favors nor your hate [I.iii ll.39–41, 55, 58–61].

  From these “so wild” women, Lyta, gathers a prediction of what is to come, what path she should follow to gain her ends. The Crone promises: “Of course we’re going to hurt you. Everybody gets hurt” (Gaiman 58:15 fr. 3). The Mother confirms for her: “Your babbie has been stolen from you, after all.... They’re going to put him in the fire, my little diddly-pout” (fr. 4; 58:16 fr. 4). The Daughter informs: “You’ve met already those who took him” (58:16 fr. 3). The Triple Goddess provides the future but not the answers Lyta seeks, as Macbeth is told of his rise to glory and its ultimate futility. But it is not Lord Macbeth but Lady Macbeth who is told of fate, and like Lady Macbeth, Lyta concludes that to attain the goal she seeks, she must acquire power through means available only to her. And like Lady Macbeth, following that path ends in folly and pathology. The final stroke of Gaiman’s narrative arc begins when the first “clear” prophecy of the Weird Sisters appears to come to fruition. In the guise of police officers, the kidnappers (Loki and Puck) show Lyta a photograph of Daniel’s immolated corpse. She remembers Dream’s annunciation; she reiterates Dream’s perceived abrogation of her happiness; and she goes mad. From its inception, Lyta’s journey is an act of (im)potent madness, and her consciousness splits into two worlds, walking both through city streets and the world of mythology. She meets a cyclops who waits for the “seventh son of a seventh son comes by, carrying a white rose and a golden whistle” to grant her release (60:9). The cyclops metaphor remains the classic representation of the monocular vision, the tunnel vision of those who cannot attain perspective. The cyclops waiting at the crossroads is the woman who cannot see the absurdity of her position. She awaits the impossible (or at least, highly improbable), and yet she continues to carry the identity defined by her “seven poor sons, and my faithless husband, the king” (60:9). At her first stop, Lyta meets a warning about her journey: focused only on one outcome, her perspective lost, she is destined to be bound by the impossibility of success. External validation will never come, though the cyclops is only a vision, an anthropomorphic hallucination of a stoplight, and Lyta continues on her journey when the light changes. She then encounters Bast, the Egyptian cat-goddess, a sympathetic ear but equally locked in her own story. Again, Gaiman echoes a warning: “But ... don’t they ever learn?” Lyta asks her companion (60:10). “They can’t. They’re part of the story, just as I am,” she replies (fr. 5). Lyta is again reminded that she falls into the cycle of her own narratives: wife, then mother, invested in form by the patriarchal hierarchy. She is defined by what she has been told to be, and she is about to return to her narrative pattern. Bast gives her the truth by which she may break the pattern and restore her sanity. But she does not. She seeks something more than simply undoing her limiting narrative, and in so reaching, she dismisses the warnings granted to her by negative example: females trapped in roles of power and persuasion, but as trapped as the prototypical feminine roles that these new tropes violate. She does not learn from the old stories of women bound and beguiled by patriarchal narratives, instead seeking another path than the traditional feminine traits of obedience, false hope, and guile. Fully rejecting the patriarchal expectations of femininity as ineffective exercises in power, she descends into the appropriation of modern feminist tropes of empowerment. Gaiman’s allegory has reached its first apotheosis with the wholesale rejection of the pre-feminist ideal of womanhood. In Lyta Hall’s breakdown, Gaiman frees her to choose her own path to independence, released of the patriarchal demands and strictures imposed upon her by the men who would define her. But without that definition, she again becomes un-defined, and she must make a choice.

  She begins her journey alone, discovering herself through the contemporary tropes of illicit knowledge. She encounters first the three-headed snake, who Gaiman notes in The Sandman Companion is Geryon, killed by Hercules during his twelve labors (197), but he also doubles as Eden’s tempter. Offered to join the sisterhood by two veiled women, Stheno and Euryale, she sits in their garden and eats of the golden apple, “more like the other tree ... the tree of life” (60:18). He encourages her to take all she wants. But he warns her, “Ladies who sent you down here.... Sleep in their house—eat this food.... Well, wouldn’t recommend it, that’s all” (60:19). But like Eve before her, she eats. The veiled ladies are gorgons themselves, inviting Lyta to join them, but again, this visage “whether she is beautiful or hideous, the veiled woman reflects male dread of women” (Gilbert and Gubar 472). While potentially figures of empowerment for the contemporary feminist, becoming Medusa’s successor embraces the misogyny of patriarchal empowerment. Perhaps she would have remained there, stuck in the garden (or even ultimately expelled), and accepted the gorgon’s gift (“Life until death” (61:15)), but as she requires the attributes of the gorgon, as her hair begins to transform into snakes (61:3), she recognizes the futility of their offer. They are liminal creatures whose purpose is to create the indefinite stasis that is cast in the patriarchal figuring of the powerful woman. She must move on. As she wanders, she encounters the reflection of herself, but it turns into mere confusion: “But which one of us am I?” she asks herself. “It doesn’t matter,” she responds (61:21). She remains unable to define herself without assistance, and for the first time in her narrative, it is a woman, Larissa (previously called Thessaly), who finds her. Once Dream’s l
over, Thessaly is a witch: independent, outspoken, knowledgeable. She is a modern woman, and she protects Lyta so the journey can continue. She appears to Lyta as a white bird, the signifier of an oracular presence (as the dove descends to announce the Holy Spirit’s word (John 3.15), and when she is secure in Larissa’s protection, she faces her mirror for the second time.