Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  Lyta’s journey is not easy. She struggles, literally and metaphorically, up a cliff side only to encounter a vanity, a replica of her mirror in The Dream Dome. She sits and she converses with herself. The last conversation Lyta held with her mirror-self, the figure in the mirror was also the reality as she sat in The Dreaming. This time, her conversation offers her a decision: continue on her journey or “open your eyes, climb off this bed, walk out the door, put your life back together again” (63:17). It is the choice offered her by Hector, Brute, and Glob in The Dream Dome. It is the choice offered her by Morpheus after her release. The third time, she answers clearly for herself—“Sometimes there just aren’t any choices at all...”—and she smashes the mirror, forfeiting her last connection to her real self (63:18). Here, she meets the Furies. Gaiman has carefully crafted a feminist narrative for Lyta Hall. He begins by characterizing her as the classical woman whose security is ripped away by a forced, patriarchal independence as she is invested by the external hierarchy to assert her individual (feminine) identity. Thus freed and left to her own devices, she flounders until given a direction, focusing on an external identity that was wholly dependent on the randomness of chance, and ultimately limited by the inevitable separation of mother and child. When stripped of the name of mother and protector, she is lost in anger and vengeance; she cannot see another direction. While Gaiman is careful to represent the masculine tropes of feminine power, he necessarily has Lyta reject them. All that remains in Lyta’s narrative is the choice between independence and another hierarchical system. What follows is certainly a critique of contemporary feminism, and is answered twice in a single word. There is a sense that Gaiman attributes this drive for power from a deep well of misplaced resentment, for Lyta’s ire is directed towards Morpheus, who has not wronged her. In fact, as the story unfolds, it is other malevolent characters who frame Dream for Daniel’s kidnapping and still others, like Larissa, who assist Lyta in furtherance of their own agendas. In a metaphor for the modern feminist movement, Gaiman seems to be asserting that the anger, the force of destruction that Lyta Hall represents when she becomes The Fury is ultimately misplaced. The mode of myth appropriation that fuels the misandrist ire from the feminist left falls short of genuine empowerment.

  Feminist criticism in the face of three thousand years of male-dominated literary composition asserts that the feminine embrace and embody the monstrous representation of her, the madwoman: “What this means, however, is that the madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage” (Gilbert and Gubar 78). The critical bedrock of this theory is, of course, The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Their thesis is, in essence, that women writers (directly; implicitly all women) must appropriate both the positive and negative tropes of femininity in order to understand, overcome, and revise them into their own unique form of gendered generation. Gaiman disagrees. To understand what he finds problematic and to address his solution, however, the reader must continue the story of Lyta Hall to its conclusion. The Eumenides are a curious choice for Gaiman to use as the tropes of feminist empowerment. “The Kindly Ones” is named for its principle actors, the Eumenides, who have been figured previously in the series as the Weird Sisters (10:19), the Hecate, and the Fates (57:1). Once the super-heroine “The Fury,” Lyta Hall calls to her namesakes: “There’s a ... man. I want to do more than bother him. I want to destroy him ... he killed my son. He stole and killed my son” (63:22, 23). But the oldest rule of the Furies requires that they exact revenge for the killing of kindred blood (Aeschylus ll.210–213), and Lyta Hall’s call for personal vengeance is not enough. As fate (or machinations, such as it is) would have it, however, Morpheus has killed his own son in an act of mercy. This warrants the Furies’ ire. They will hound the Dream King, destroy his kingdom, and before they are done, they will have ensured the death of Lyta Hall’s son (and Dream’s heir), Daniel. The mythological “Furies” appear a few times in various guises, and while some situations in which they are depicted (Athena’s court case in The Oresteia, for example) are sociologically significant, of themselves they are incidental: road blocks to the greater message of the story. While they don’t even merit their own chapter in Robert Graves’s compendium, The Greek Myths, they are still respected powers in the Greek pantheon. A single paragraph, though, suffices to capture them. “It is unwise,” Graves writes, “to mention them by name ... hence they are usually styled the Eumenides ... ‘The Kindly Ones’” (122). They are the “personification of curses pronounced upon a guilty criminal” (Peck, par. 1), euphemized by Orestes after his acquittal (par. 1). Three women, born of Night, along with their sisters the Fates (Hesiod 9). They are the Erinyes: Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera, and in English, they are called the Furies (Peck, par. 1). Like many of the ancient Gods, the origin of the Furies multiplies with the sources available. In the oldest, they are the daughters of Earth, born of blood wrought from the Genitals of the Great Heaven (Hesiod 8). Yet within a few moments, their identity is confused with those daughters of Night, “who prosecute the transgressions of men and gods—never do the goddesses cease from their terrible wrath until they have paid the sinner his due” (Hesiod 9). Their identity begins in question, but their function never wavers. In Homer’s Illiad, the Furies curse Phoenix with infertility for transgressing his father’s will (266, ll.554–558). Iris soothes Poseidon, reminding him that “the Furies always stand by older brothers” (394, ll.239–244). Agamemnon invokes their name, swearing to his honor:

  ... and Furies stalking the world below

  to wreak revenge on the dead who broke their oaths—

  I swear I never laid a hand on the girl...

  Briseis remained untouched within my tents [498–499, ll.305–307, 310].

  They enforce order by punishing transgression. In fear of them, Telemachus refuses Antinous’s demand to expel Penelope from her home:

  and some dark god would hurt me even more

  when mother, leaving her own house behind,

  calls down her withering Furies on my head,

  and our people’s cries of shame would hound my heels.

  I would never issue that ultimatum to my mother [Odyssey 97 ll.150–155].

  The threat of their retribution forestalls the abandonment of the mother and Queen. And they do not reserve their power for the favored alone (Odyssey 368 l.525). They are the vengeance of the lost, the hounders of the damned, and the embodiment of retribution. They are the enforcers of family honor. Given voice in Aeschylus’s The Eumenides, they appear as the “women who serve [Clytemnestra]’s house, they come like gorgons, they wear robes of black, and they are wreathed in a tangle of snakes ... the bloodhounds of [Orestes’] mother’s hate” (Aeschylus LB l.1048–1050, 1054). When Orestes is found by Apollo, he is surrounded by their hideous, sleeping forms (Eum ll.46–59), and they are soon awakened by the ghost of Clytemnestra (ll.94–130). In the consequent conversation, Aeschylus states what Gaiman will later refer to as “the oldest rule” (XII 23): The Furies hound those who are guilty of “shedding of kindred blood” (Aes Eum l.213), for “motherblood drives [The Furies], and I go to win my right upon [Orestes] and hunt him down” (ll.230–231). But they are not just. Protected by Apollo, Athena, law, and judgment, The Furies still pine for the punishment of Orestes (ll.778–792). The murder of Clytemnestra and her husband is demanded by Apollo as retribution for her murder of Orestes’s father, but for The Furies, it is irrelevant. They condemn the blood-transgression. The rest of the story is white noise (ll.582–613). Ancient, powerful, feared, and unjust, The Furies are the embodiment of the feminine mother-voice in Greek mythology. As the religion fell into the tropes of mythology, the fearsome revenging Furies ceased to function. Their ability to drive men mad with their whispers, their hideous shapes, and their vicious revelations become the nag, the hag, the mothe
r-in-law. By the Romantic period, Shelley’s Prometheus knows “Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes / And yet, I pity those they torture not” (Shelley I.632–633). Unable to fulfill their proscribed function, they depart with a flourish: “Thou pitiest them? I speak no more!” (634). The old gods no longer serve their function; they are, without any irony, impotent, unable to rise to their function. The Eumenides, denuded by Athena, dismissed by Shelley, lost in the list of near-forgotten “Classics,” their fearsome countenance is only a shadow, a faded memory, an echo of a power able to drive men mad. By the age of the Romantics, the Eumenidies could be well-described as the most annoying Gods, able to drive men to distraction with their incessant harping. They were caricatures of themselves. Gaiman’s revision imbues them with their old power, focused through the once-heroic super-heroine, The Fury. She owns both the light and dark of her genetic identity, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest.

  In projecting their anger and dis-ease into dreadful figures, creating dark doubles for themselves and their heroines, women writers are both identifying with and revising the self-definitions patriarchal culture has imposed on them. All the nineteenth- and twentieth-century women who evoke the female monster in their novels and poems alter her meaning by virtue of their own identification with her. For it is usually because she is in some sense imbued with interiority that the witch-monster-mad-woman becomes so crucial an avatar of the writer’s own self [79].

  Lyta Hall becomes the “witch-monster-mad-woman” literalized and set upon the masculine patriarchy of the creative endeavor. The Furies, for all their power and prowess, are the most potent critics of males in the history of literature, and Dream is nothing if not the anthropomorphic figuration of the facility of (masculine) imagination. The purpose, one hopes, of the feminist formulation is to empower women and deny force to the misanthropic troping of the female in literature, thus allowing women to be freely creative without the overwhelming confinement of patriarchal imposition. But Gaiman proposes, through Lyta’s narrative, that this approach may be flawed. To appropriate the basest and most disfiguring tropes of male literature as a reactionary stance, born of anger, frustration, and desperation is—in sequence—destructive, self-defeating, and ineffective.

  Lyta is inhabited by the Eumenides, and she enters the Dreaming. Her arc is always drawn from the first-person perspective, she is the Triple Goddess and she is herself, The Fury and the Furies. When she is encountered, her victims address her in the singular. And they are all victims: Lucien, Marv, Cain, Abel, Eve, and the rest of Dream’s avatars. They are injured or killed or worse: erased from memory. It is the greatest literary death, simply to be forgotten without another copy. Lyta Hall’s swath of destruction leaves little to the allegorical imagination: her appropriation of feminine tropes as a means of empowerment destroys the figures, archetypes, and storehouses of imagination, whether or not they are of patriarchal construction. That is the purpose and always the intent of that power, and it is a sword—once drawn—that remains unsheathed, wielding itself wantonly on every possible subject, and ultimately unabated by its supposed goal. Gaiman seems to assert that even while the intent of appropriating misogynist types is to disarm them from their derogatory generation and empower their revisionists, they never stray from their original function. They are destructive and divisive by nature. When Lyta Hall discovers that Daniel is not dead, and in fact it was Morpheus who saved him from the kidnappers who would have destroyed him, she pleads for the Furies to call off their assault on the Dreaming. She cries, “We have to rescue Daniel. Bring him back. We don’t have to hurt anyone anymore.” The Furies reply, “We do not rescue, my little smelfungus. What do you think we are? After all, he killed his son. And we hated his son9 ... he made us weep. He made the ladies weep with his songs and his things that never were and never shall be. Stories. Made-up rubbishy stories. Makes you sick” (67:21). Once unleashed, the Furies serve their own purpose: not merely to carve a space but to undo all that has been done. It is likely overstating things to say that Gaiman is anti-feminist. He is certainly not. However, his critique of the literary feminist agenda ends with Lyta’s realization that, for all she has gained (power, identity, destruction, vengeance), she has lost the issue of her endeavor. She returns to her existence an exile, knowing what she’s done, and in Larissa’s words, “As I understand it, your actions have ensured that you will never see Daniel again ... I’d take a shower, and then start running, if I were you. Lots of people are going to want to hurt or kill you for what you’ve done. Including me” (69:20). Of course, there is some potent literary license here if one is to read this as a comment on feminist appropriations as a means to a positive identity, however it does speak to a more general sentiment that this approach, while clearly empowering, has unintended negative consequences. The effects of choosing this path to empowerment may be inherently flawed, since the tools for its inception are rooted firmly in an existing system of misogynist, or at least highly limiting, myths, stories, tropes, and types. Again, Lyta’s failure is defined by her self-imposed limitations by choosing to appropriate the figurations of feminine power created in the patriarchal hierarchy and only realigned by a feminist hierarchy that serves no more constructive purpose than to tear down. In her act of vengeance, she fails to transgress the socially constructed roles she desires to fulfill. Thus it is with ease that Death dismisses Lyta’s Furies.

  Simone de Beauvoir imagines Lady Death as a figure from the French literary tradition: “Thus the Woman-Mother has a face of shadows: she is the chaos whence all have come and whither all must one day return; she is Nothingness” (147). The alternate face of “mother,” she is the negatively constructed antidote of the masculine rising sun. With his usual penchant for the unexpected, and since he comes from the post-modern British tradition that figures Ingmar Bergman’s Death whose black robe, white face, and scythe are more representative of imminent demise than de Beauvoir’s matron, Gaiman offers a very different form of the empowered female in Death. She is poised as Gaiman’s contrapuntal figure to Lyta Hall. Graphically, he illustrates the dichotomy through contrasting images: Lyta, joining the Furies, is drawn in shadow, her red eyes glowing and silhouette backlit by the moon (63:22). Death stands behind a mosaic figure of the sun, fully visible wearing a black jacket, a slightly bemused expression, and her ever-present ankh pendant. Gaiman’s response to the feminist problematic is an ungendered solution. Like his Death, Gaiman’s perspective seems to resonate with the matter-of-fact individuality that demarcates his most potent characters. As Mary Borsellino notes:

  [Gaiman writes:] “God gives you a body, it’s your duty to do well by it. He makes you a boy, you dress in blue, he makes you a girl, you dress in pink.”

  This quote from chapter six in A Game of You represents a way of thinking and a set of attitudes that Gaiman’s work breaks down—not through contradiction or subversion, but through simple disregard [51].

  Death does not need to be anything but what she already is, fulfilled in her complex and demanding role, she lives, empowered by her own knowledge of her self. She is the choice that Lyta denied. Gaiman introduces this practical, sensible, caring figure at the end of his first story arc, in an interlude. Dream sits feeding the pigeons, and Death joins him. She is soon excoriating him for not seeking her out and confiding in her: “You are utterly the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane! ... Didn’t it occur to you that I’d be worried silly about you?” (8:8–9). She leads Morpheus through a few hours of her job, escorting the anticipating and the surprised through the transition between life and death, all to the sound of wings. She is, like Dream, just an idea (though in fiction, this is a marginal limitation), but she is free from the gendered types of the patriarchy, unlike Morpheus or Lyta. She has accepted the “person” she is, terrible, beautiful, finite, inevitable. She is feminine, certainly, but it does not define her: such definitions are incidental. So when the sto
ry ends, and Morpheus sits with Death upon the top of a craggy rock, awaiting the end, the Furies’ vengeance in full force, they demand: “Dream-King, we are destroying the Dreaming. Can you not feel it? What will you do to stop us? What can you do?” It is not Dream who answers, but his sister. She ends it with a word: “Enough!” (69:9). And they are dismissed. When faced with the certainty of being, they have no power. Like Prometheus, who pities the Furies flying by him, their encounter with Death ends ineffectually. True empowerment is immune to the slings and arrows of mere fortune, and so she can dismiss what Dream cannot, what Lyta cannot bear, and what the Furies continue to be. The story ends with a return to the Furies, now the Fates, as they cut one string and begin another. “There. For good or bad. It’s done” (72:24). They remain unchanged, as critical perspectives often do, waiting to be unleashed again, for better or worse. But they are what they always were, a tool for the angry, the vengeful, the lost, and the insecure. Death continues on her way, being who she is, aware of and embracing the feminine that assists her, the self that defines her, and the knowledge that empowers her. From the beginning, she is the expectation fulfilled.

  NOTES

  1. Comics are constructed as a cooperative medium. The writer manages both the dialogue and sequence of the art, thus Gaiman probably dictated much of the composition of the drawing. However, the artist, Chris Bachalo and later Marc Hempel in The Kindly Ones, may have also contributed considerably to the structure and certainly set the artistic tone of the illustrations in this issue. Throughout the references to the comic, I will make note of the illustrator. However, without the original script (which is not publicly available), it is impossible to tell how much of these sequences are uniquely Gaiman’s and which are collaborative products. Scholars of film, another collaborative medium, have tackled the same problem by attributing decisions to the director. Therefore, I will follow this convention and attribute decisions to the “director” of the comic, which in this case is Gaiman.