Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  2. Though, like most characters in the DC Universe, Lyta Hall has multiple “origin stories” due to a complex “reset” of the continuity called A Crisis on Infinite Earths, her career as “The Fury” and her namesake remain consistent. In the second revision, she is the daughter of The Fury, who was a founding member of the Justice Society and also the daughter of Hyppolita of the Amazons. The summary of her origin and life to the point of Sandman #11 is taken from the D.C. Database (http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Fury_(Lyta_Hall)) and “Who’s Who in the D.C. Universe” (http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Hippolyta_Trevor-Hall_(New_Earth)).

  3. In comics books, a radiated series of straight, abstract lines that lead from, or follow from, a character’s figure are called “force lines” and are traditionally used to express fast or violent motion.

  4. While not directly relevant to this argument, the choice of “Daniel” as the name for Lyta’s son is actually very clever in terms of the mythological typologies Gaiman is juggling. While Morpheus is Dreaming, his figured derived from the Greek God of Dreams, Daniel becomes the Dream of the Judeo-Christian age. As the pantheons of the Greeks and Romans (and other “pagan” religions) have been passed by as “mythology,” the weaver of dreams, whose role as interpreter of dreams, maker of kings, and eventually king himself, in the contemporary pantheon is sensibly a figuration of the Bible’s Daniel, whose book is a series of dreams told, dreams interpreted, and dreams yet to be. While Daniel’s ascension does not come until late in the series (Issue 72), the naming concisely foreshadows the progress of events as they unfold to their ultimate reconciliation.

  5. In a somewhat eerie echo of Issue 12, Lyta tells Daniel, “Now, you know what’s going to happen now? You got it, babycakes. Time for your nap.” She reassigns Hector’s demeaning nickname for her to her son. While this is now an appropriate use of an affectionate term, it also echoes past abuse with disturbing implications of the user’s own denial. Like Hector, Lyta does not see the real situation of her charge.

  6. This, again, reinforces the general Judeo-Christian re-mythologizing Gaiman engages in his invention of Daniel’s character.

  7. An avatar of Dream, Matthew is a talking raven who was once a man and is now page (or counsel or jester) to Morpheus. He was one of the characters who attended Daniel on his excursion to Abel’s home, the House of Secrets in The Dreaming.

  8. While a “normal” mother might avoid a homeless man’s gift, the reader always keeps in mind that Lyta Hall has nothing to fear from normal men and women, as her gifts make her extraordinarily able to defend Daniel and herself in “average” situations. When the homeless man attempts to engage her and her son with a flower in an effort to be charming, her violent reaction and forceful threat are disproportionate to any reasonable reaction to the situation.

  9. According to the chronicles of The Sandman continuity, Orpheus was the son of Dream.

  WORKS CITED

  Aeschylus. The Eumenedies. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953: 133–171. Print.

  _____. The Libation Bearers. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953: 91–132. Print.

  Bender, Hy. The Sandman Companion. New York: D.C. Comics, 1999. Print.

  Borsellino, Mary. “Blue and Pink: Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Work.” The Neil Gaiman Reader. Ed. Darrell Schweitzer. New York: Wildside Press, 2007. Print.

  de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Random House, 1989. Print.

  Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. Print.

  Gaiman, Neil (w), Mike Dringenberg (a), Malcolm Jones III (i). “The Sound of Her Wings.” The Sandman #8 (Aug. 1989), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Mike Dringenberg (a), Dave McKean (p), Malcolm Jones III (i). “The Doll’s House.” The Sandman #10 (Nov. 1989), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Chris Bachalo (a), Malcolm Jones III (i). “Playing House.” The Sandman #12 (Jan. 1990), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Kelley Jones (a), Malcolm Jones III (i). “Season of Mists: Chapter One.” The Sandman #22 (Jan. 1991), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Jill Thompson (a), Vince Locke (i). “Convergence: The Parliament of Rooks.” The Sandman #40 (Aug. 1992), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Mark Hempel, et al. (a, i). “The Kindly Ones.” The Sandman #57–69 (Feb. 1994—July 1995), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Dave McKean, Michael Zulli (a, i). “The Wake: Chapter Three.” The Sandman #72 (Nov. 1995), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic, 2d Ed. New Haven:Yale University Press, 2000. Print.

  Goodyear, Dana. “Kid Goth.” The New Yorker (25 January 2010). Web. 29 April 2012.

  Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths: Volume 1. Baltimore: Penguin, 1955. Print.

  Hesiod. Theogony & Works and Days. Trans. M.L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Print.

  Homer. The Illiad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1996. Print.

  _____. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1990. Print.

  McGee, Arthur. “Macbeth and the Furies.” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production. (1966): 55–67. Print.

  Murphy, Patrick D. “The High and Low Fantasies of Feminist (Re)Mythopoeia.” Mythlore. (Winter 1989): 26–31. Print.

  Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. Print.

  Peck, Harry Thurston. “Eumenides.” Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. 1898. From Project Perseus Archives. Boston: Tufts University, 2005. Web. 20 April 2012.

  Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d ed. Ed. Evans, G. Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Print.

  Shelley, Percy. Prometheus Unbound. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2d ed. Eds. Neil Fraistat and Donald Reiman. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002: 206–286. Print.

  Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Print.

  Feminist Subjectivity in Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid

  BY SARAH CANTRELL

  In 1988, Neil Gaiman and illustrator Dave McKean took an obscure DC comic book hero, Black Orchid, and reworked the character for eponymous publication by Vertigo (a DC imprint specializing in slightly smaller-circulation, slightly less mainstream titles). Although Gaiman preserved a few of Orchid’s basic characteristics, he completely revamped the feel of the comic and radically changed the degree to which Black Orchid emphasizes Orchid’s consciousness. In so doing, Gaiman created a text especially rich for feminist study, particularly because its focus on a female superhero is housed in a first-person narrative. This type of narrative simulates autobiography. Both filter the text to some extent through a focal character’s internal consciousness. The end result of both first-person narrative and autobiography is the privileging of interiority.

  The narration in Black Orchid blurs the boundaries between first- and third-person, and in so doing functionally creates two separate Black Orchids—the Orchid who thinks and the Orchid who speaks in the text. Narratologists have explored a distinction between several types of first-person narration in a way that explains how this split self is produced. Monica Fludernik’s handbook for narrative scholars explains that in fictional first-person narratives, “the focus can be either on the so-called narrating self or the experiencing self” (90). A narrating self reports events “from the perspective of a now older and wiser narrator” and often “indulges in retrospection, evaluation and the drawing of moral conclusions.” An experiencing self, on the other hand, reports events as they take place and usually differs from a narrating self by relying more heavily on the present tense. The narrator of Gaiman’s Black Orchid is clearly an experiencing self, occupying the same time frame as the actions being depicted in the story. The unity of time frame created by an experiencing-self narrator, however, does not in this cas
e result in a corresponding unity of identity between the self as narrator and as character in the story. Fludernik suggests that an experiencing-self narrator, like that in Black Orchid, creates some tension between the part of the consciousness that narrates the action and the part of the consciousness that experiences the action. When in these narratives “the emphasis is on the protagonist’s consciousness,” Fludernik assigns them to the figural narrative situation (90). In making this claim, she utilizes the earlier work of narrative scholar Franz Karl Stanzel and his chart of the “typological circle.” Stanzel’s chart uses the term “figural narrative situation” to indicate third-person narrative, and it makes a distinction between that type of narrative and a first-person narrative with an experiencing narrator. By categorizing the experiencing-self narrative as a type of figural narrative, Fludernik shows that these narratives somehow function as both first-person and third-person, or at least that the experiencing-self narrator functions separately as narrator and as character. This is the case with Orchid. In Orchid, we see an attempt to negotiate between two selves, between the self as defined as an internal consciousness that narrates one’s own story and the self as defined as an agent acting in the world. Ultimately, the self that is constituted by her internal consciousness is the focus of the Gaiman text.

  The first-person narrative style in Black Orchid is paired with a plotline that is centered on Orchid’s search for identity. Black Orchid, of course, is a fictional character, and she is not a character who literally writes. Nevertheless, in a metatextual sense, Orchid attempts to find and ultimately create an identity for herself, and in that sense she is writing her identity. This mirrors the characteristics of women writers of the nineteenth century as theorized by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The parallel between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century comics literary history is more natural than it may seem at first. The struggle for acceptance of women in the comics industry of the twentieth century is not greatly different from nineteenth-century women novelists’ struggle for acceptance in the broader literary scene. Orchid’s struggle equally parallels the attempts of women to find a place in the comics industry, both as writers and as characters. That Black Orchid seems to echo two such temporally distant cultures reveals the extent to which superhero comics lagged behind other genres that more progressively broke away from gender stereotypes.

  There is a great deal of scholarship on autobiography and fictional first-person narrative of the kind that Black Orchid utilizes, particularly over the past few decades, thanks in large part to the work done by narratologists on subjectivity and its representation. Since the 1980s, these genres have also become a locus of study for feminist scholars exploring the depiction (or construction) of gendered subjectivity. These genres are explicitly concerned with metaphysical selfhood, so they provide a glimpse into the ways in which women created and were created as selves.

  In comics, autobiography and fictional first-person narrative were slow to find wide popularity with audiences and even with critics. In recent years, they have become an immensely popular comics genre. Marjane Satrapi’s 2000 Persepolis was successful enough that it was adapted for film in 2007. In 2006, Time Magazine and The Times (London) both listed Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home as a top entry in their list of the ten best books of the year. Earlier works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992), along with the work of largely autobiographical comic writers like Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, have seen a huge resurgence in popularity. Pekar was even the subject of the biopic American Splendor, released in 2003. Autobiography and fictional first-person narrative in comics, though, began with the underground comics movement.

  Historically, autobiographical and autobiographically tinged comics have been published in limited numbers by small publishing houses. Justin Green’s 1972 work Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, considered by some the first autobiographical comic, became highly influential on writers like Spiegelman and Crumb but was published by the obscure Last Gasp Eco Funnies and quickly went out of print (although a new edition was finally released by McSweeney’s in 2009.) Maus began in 1972 as a three-page strip in Funny Aminals, an obscure underground comic published by Apex Novelties. Crumb and Pekar allied themselves from the start with the underground “comix” movement rather than big comics publishers like DC and Marvel. These authors and their groundbreaking work in autobiographical comics have until fairly recently been wholly separate from mainstream comics, which in America have traditionally been dominated by superhero stories that rely on action and dialogue and occasional third-person narration. If one can posit an opposition in style or approach between any two comics genres, that opposition historically lay between autobiographical and superhero comics.

  The barrier between superhero comics (with their external focus) and autobiographical and fictional first-person narrative comics (with their internal focus) wasn’t broken until the early 1980s, when Alan Moore took over as writer for DC’s Swamp Thing superhero comic. This was the first superhero comic to present a sustained glimpse of the inner consciousness of a superhero. Other autobiographically styled superhero comics soon followed, including Alan Moore’s Watchmen, also published by DC starting in 1986. These titles incorporated autobiographical style into mainstream superhero comics and for a brief period helped DC win readers away from Marvel, which was slower to incorporate the more subjective style. However, female superhero titles had yet to demonstrate an almost entirely first-person narrative style. The first comic to incorporate a first-person narrative style into a female superhero title was Gaiman’s Black Orchid in 1988.

  With Black Orchid, Gaiman and McKean created a new approach to female superhero comics. This radical reworking of Detective Comics’ 1973 Black Orchid replaces the traditional superhero power narrative, which hinges on physical solutions, with an emphasis on subjectivity that borders on fictional autobiography. Gaiman’s Black Orchid is about mind, not body.

  With Black Orchid, Gaiman followed hard on Moore’s heels in taking this more subjective approach and used it to rework the comic superheroine. Lillian Robinson, in her 2004 book Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes, claims that “the female superhero originates in an act of criticism—a challenge to the masculinist world of superhero adventures” (7). Robinson presents superhero comics as more exclusively gendered than most genres. Superhero comics, according to Robinson and to the general consensus, are traditionally masculine, featuring male (even hypermasculine) characters. Robinson claims that any female superhero must contend with the masculine history of the genre. If a superhero is traditionally defined as masculine, a text that introduces a female superhero must then redefine the genre to allow for femininity. In traditional superhero comics, female superheroes behave much like male superheroes. The power sets are often similar (flight, super strength, speed). The plots center on the protagonists overcoming villains with physical combat in much the same way that male superheroes do. The femininity of these characters is mostly a matter of appearance—they have hyper-feminized or sexualized bodies, with tiny waists and large breasts. They’re often drawn with costumes that emphasize their bodies. In other words, the traditional approach to female superheroes is to couch a male superhero’s actions in an overtly sexualized female body. The gender of these characters is coincidental except as a matter of objectification. The engagement of Gaiman’s Orchid in feminist conversation is perhaps inevitable. But Gaiman’s Black Orchid grapples with gender and genre in a way that makes it strikingly different from the same title as originally handled in a more traditional way by Sheldon Mayer and illustrator Tony DeZuniga in 1973.

  The first page of Mayer’s original 1973 Black Orchid is dominated by the image of the titular figure in full costume, splashed full-length across the page, looking directly at the viewer. Her vivid purple costume stands out against the backdrop of an abandoned house, painted in greyscale. The only other bright color on the page comes from the golden moon in the background, which is
partially obscured by the house and skeletal trees, and the title, which is partially hidden behind Black Orchid’s lower legs. The impression in this panel is that Black Orchid, as a physical presence, is central to the text. That impression is strengthened by the final panel of Mayer’s Black Orchid, a slightly larger than half-page panel that is nearly filled with another full-length image of Orchid, spread-eagled in flight against the backdrop of a house and distant lawn.

  The opening page of Gaiman’s Black Orchid takes a very different visual approach. It begins with a three-panel image series of an orchid flanked above and below in each panel by thought bubbles that express Black Orchid’s consciousness. Where the reader’s attention in the 1973 version was drawn inexorably to Orchid’s body, the attention is here drawn to her mind. What’s more, these thought bubbles express not a narration of action but rather what Orchid feels and desires: “Winter is coming. I feel it in the warm autumnal air. I scent it at sunset. I want to see the colors of the leaves before they fall, to caress the updrafts of the wind with my form” (1:3). This style of narration is wildly different from the third-person narration in the opening of classic superhero comics. The original Black Orchid begins:

  It was midnight ... a man ... a good man ... was in trouble ... and she appeared! It was as simple as that! She showed a strength that was impossible to believe ... removed the man from danger ... and then vanished!—Nothing more was known about her, except that everyone who saw her agreed that she looked like a huge flower—-an orchid—a—Black Orchid [AC 428:1].

  This opening, more typical of traditional superhero comics, is full of action, both in what it narrates and in the use of exclamation marks and bold font. Not only does Mayer make no attempt here to convey Black Orchid’s inner consciousness, he privileges corporeality over consciousness by placing emphasis on what “everyone who saw her agreed that she looked like.”