Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  Lanette Cadle privileges the character Death, Sandman’s most popular and enduring female character, and addresses the manifold concepts of a complex and appealing character whose appeal is both feminist and something that is more difficult to define and categorize. Justin Mellette offers an overview of the discordant sister Delirium, examining the limits of feminine agency and influence within the text. Tara Prescott then focuses on a single issue from the series, “Calliope,” exploring Gaiman’s metacritical dialogue with his audience and his representation of myth, narrative, and sexual violence. Aaron Drucker takes a wider look at the sprawling nature of the series, pondering Gaiman’s critique of second wave emblematics. The four Sandman essays in this collection explore the issues that attract and problematize the relationship between the author and his audience, between the narrative and the moral, and between the commercial, the philosophical, and even the mythological.

  After exploring feminist issues in Gaiman’s comic literature, the collection turns to somewhat lesser-known but equally accomplished works. Gaiman’s early works about relatively minor DC characters reveal a sea change in how comics can be perceived and the audience they can attract. Gaiman’s comic series Black Orchid is an early revisioning of another minor character in the DC Universe. In her essay on Black Orchid, Sarah Cantrell looks at the importance of Gaiman’s transformative interpretation of this little-considered figure. Unlike the overwhelming majority of comics, Gaiman’s books attract significant numbers of female readers, making a target and subject for feminist interpretations and critiques. Even his more commercial ventures, like the historically revisionist series Marvel 1602, reimagine and renegotiate the histories of long-established characters, breaking with tradition. In this series, Gaiman subverts continuity by presenting an infamous playboy as a gay man and depicting a notorious beauty as an androgynous boy. Renata Dalmaso explicates the impact of these changes, focusing on how, by retelling a tale and resetting the past, Gaiman addresses issues of sexuality and identity that impart complexity to familiar characters, resist expectations, and deny easy answers. Rounding out the discussion of feminism in Gaiman’s comics, Coralline Dupuy examines The Dream Hunters, delving into the Japanese-inspired fairy tale world which features a mythopoetic Orpheus, an alterative Dream, and a mediated and hybridized text.

  As Gaiman moves away from comic books to greater opportunities in prose (and occasionally poetry), his peculiar ability to revise with an errant comment does not fail him. He writes one episode of Doctor Who and revises a thirty-year canonical history with a feminine twist and a single word (bettering The Doctor by three). Emily Capettini’s essay on Gaiman and the good Doctor looks at the fraught nature of this casual and cataclysmic emendation. Gaiman moves from one medium to another, with equal felicity, imparting messages to little boys and girls, to grown men and women about agency and ability, about transgression and the improbably bizarre world right in front of them. He whispers in his reader’s mind of death and life and life in death, of the living (in spite of the odds), and of the pleasant haunting of those never quite gone. Our contributors selected a few examples from his dozens of stories and several novels, focusing on prevalent themes that recur throughout his work. Themes emerged, as they often do, and recurrent motifs are emphasized in several essays. What we thought would be a clear example of Gaiman’s feminist tendencies is well explored in Danielle Russell’s essay on Coraline and MirrorMask, which examines the questions raised by Gaiman’s interrogation of third wave motherhood. The representation of “mother” and the issue of female agency is natural and recognizable fare for feminist critique, but Gaiman’s approach is often at odd angles to the traditional take on either.

  Continuing the exploration of motherhood, children’s literature, and genre expectations, Elizabeth Law looks at what it really means to have skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood in Gaiman’s short story, “Snow, Glass, Apples.” The departures from traditional Romance and fairy tale traditions is also the subject of Jennifer McStotts’s essay about the short story “Chivalry.” Moving away from individual short stories, Monica Miller discusses the collaborative (and rather difficult to locate) Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, a coffee table book Gaiman co-created with Amanda Palmer—lead singer of The Dresden Dolls, ukulele aficionado, Gaiman’s wife, and all-around cool cat. She observes the multifaceted approaches to the fairy tale in Gaiman’s re-visions as he works traditional (and somewhat less traditional) narratives to complement the evocative images of Ms. Palmer. The Princess, it turns out, sometimes lands face down in the gutter, burbling her last breath as treacle that drains into a sewer. In fact, fairy tales don’t always happen in a land far, far away or necessarily end happily ever after.

  Moving away from the theme of fairy tales, Agata Zarzycka looks at Gaiman’s exploration of domesticity in another short story, “Queen of Knives,” as well as the depiction of older women and their own types of empowerment in her reading of “Chivalry.” The expectations of fairytale witches and the power of older women takes a stranger turn in Gaiman’s comic novel, Good Omens. Jessica Walker explores what it means to be a witch in this novel (hint: weight relative to a duck is irrelevant) and the influence of the classical notion of female “secret writing” in English literary tradition. Finally, in the last essay of the collection, Kristine Larsen illustrates Gaiman’s progression from fairy tale to mythology as she explores the physics of Gaiman’s universes, offering a fresh, multidisciplinary approach to understanding his texts.

  This collection of essays started with a fairly simple proposition: what is the relationship between Gaiman’s work and feminism? All too quickly, one question led to more: is Neil Gaiman a feminist? Is his writing feminist? What does it mean to be a feminist writer or to create a feminist work? The essays in this collection do not offer a definitive answer to these questions because we can only speculate on the nature of Gaiman’s own feminist convictions. However, we do have some tentative propositions, relationships that show a clear trail of affective narrative as an author revises one genre and the next, finding ways to reach the marginalized, the questioning, the curious, and those that speak for the ones who can’t.

  What is left is the next conversation, which must necessarily take place in two parts. First, there is the conversation we begin here: the reactions to and revisions of the claims we make in the essays in this book. We hope they are fruitful. We know reading each essay that we were constantly driven to add a note in our own “to do” library of essays yet to be written. The second is to address the many things we necessarily missed because of space and time constraints. There is certainly a book-length engagement on The Sandman series and its dialogues with feminism still awaiting, as there are myriad commentaries on the novels, teleplays, and social media that we are looking forward to reading. There is a long and productive future discussion to be had, both in conversation and in print, and we believe that this is a fine way to get it started. With that in mind, let’s begin.

  @AaronDrucker

  @DrTaraPrescott

  #gaimanandfeminism

  A Note on Citation

  Comic books and graphic novels have the unique privilege of being relatively new to literary scholarship. As scholars integrate this new medium into our scholarly vocabulary, there is some disagreement about how to formalize the citation process. We adopted a slight variation on Allen Ellis’s citation guidelines for the Popular Culture Association. He argues, rightly, that comics are a multi-contributor medium, and while we will often discuss one primary aspect of the work (the writer or the illustrator, for example), it is appropriate to list the significant artistic contributors to the work. As such, we have followed his bibliographic citation system:

  Author (w), Illustrator/Artist (a), Inker (i). “Story Arc/Issue Title.” Series # (month year), Location: Publisher. Media.

  Thus, a standard citation for an issue of The Sandman looks like this:

  Gaiman, Neil (w), Chris Bachalo (a), Malcolm Jones III (i). �
��The Doll’s House: Part 3.” The Sandman #12 (Jan. 1990), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  And a complete arc, including multiple artists and inkers, is referenced:

  Gaiman, Neil (w), Chris Bachalo, et al. (a), Malcolm Jones III, et al. (i). “The Doll’s House.” The Sandman #10–16. (Nov. 1989–June 1990), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  Within a given title, comics are listed first by author, then in chronological order (so Sandman #1 will come before Sandman #19). When the artist and inkers are the same person, we use the notation (a, i). If there are multiple writers, artists, or illustrators in a series, then we list them by frequency (so if Mark Hempel illustrates the majority of a run, his name is first, then additional contributors by sequence).

  There is no agreement on in-text citation, so we chose to use an issue:page structure. Subsequently, a quote is followed by (Gaiman 42:10) for The Sandman, issue 42, page 10. If the discussion requires panel sequencing, we append a frame number: (Gaiman 42:10 fr. 2). While Ellis adopts a slash (42:10/2) for the frame, we think that this becomes distracting when referencing multiple sequential frames. So, multiple frame reference is noted by (fr. #). Consequently, when we discuss panels in issue 42 on page 10, the notation sequence reads: (Gaiman 42:10 fr. 1) then (fr. 3), (fr. 5), (fr. 6). Names are omitted if the writer is clear, but all in-text citations utilize the issue:page annotation for clarity.

  For a more thorough explanation of the bibliographic reference system we are using, please see Allen Ellis’s article at: http://www.comicsresearch.org/CAC/cite.html.

  Speaking the Cacophony of Angels

  Gaiman’s Women and the Fracturing of Phallocentric Discourse

  RACHEL R. MARTIN

  “Becoming a woman really does not seem to be an easy business.”—Luce Irigaray

  Comic books and graphic novels are often criticized as being solely a male genre: by men, about men, and for men. Critics attack comics for depicting women as two-dimensional stereotypes, whose limited role in the stories is only to further the masculine narratives. When Neil Gaiman began working with DC Comics on the 1989 series Black Orchid, he asked if they thought anyone would buy this story, and their response echoes the idea that comics are the realm of men: “[The main character’s] a female character, and nobody buys books about female characters. So, no, we don’t think it’s going to sell” (qtd. in Wagner, et al. 201). Gaiman challenged this notion and wrote (and continues to write) for and about women. His narrative women resonate with male and female readers alike to considerable achievement. When discussing Gaiman’s most popular series, The Sandman, Hank Wagner and colleagues in Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman write:

  In addition to the typical comic book readership—mostly male—the series developed a passionately loyal female readership. At the time, sales to female readers were a small fraction of the overall business of comic book retailers. Other series had appealed to that small group of female readers prior to The Sandman, but Gaiman’s flagship series was able to do so without alienating the existing male readership [30].

  Gaiman’s writing entices and draws in female readers through his inclusion of feminine lead characters. However, Gaiman’s inclusion of women as subjects and readers highlights the extent of the masculine discourse at work. Gaiman operates within and utilizes the phallocentric discourse in his creation and depiction of women, even to the extent that he evokes some of his strongest, most popular female characters through the voices of his male characters and through dominant narrative structures, utilizing the dominant discourse to critique and problematize its own assumptive frameworks. Writing about women or writing women into comic narratives does not legitimate the subject of woman1 within comics or within society completely because these narratives still deploy a phallocentric discourse and construct women via this discourse. As Beaugrand observes in his “Search for Feminist Discourse”: “Each solution eventually becomes another part of the problem” (255). The language of Gaiman’s narratives strives for a critical self-awareness within a discourse he is unable (and perhaps unwilling) to fully transgress, but in the attempt, he motions towards a fuller understanding of the limits the language we use.

  Neil Gaiman writes tales, comics, and novels, which many (including Gaiman himself) consider feminine narratives. For Gaiman, “books have sexes; or to be more precise, books have genders. They do in my head, anyway. Or at least, the ones I write do” (“All Books Have Genders”) and many critics agree with Sarah Jaffe’s observation that “Gaiman is far better at writing women and getting into their heads than most other male writers, comic or otherwise” (para. 5). He crafts tales about characters other than men, stories with fully developed female protagonists, and narratives showing those not fitting into a simplified gender binary. He depicts girls conquering worlds and saving adults (Coraline, Mirror Mask, and The Wolves in the Walls), women acting as superheroes or antiheros (Black Orchid, Death, and Lyta Hall in Sandman), and beings who occupy spaces as both/neither man and/or women (Desire, Delirium, and the angels in “Changes”). The women in much of Gaiman’s work draw readers in as recognizable and identifiable, but why are they read as such? What is it about Gaiman’s writing and the women he creates that speak to his readers?

  Drawing from the theories of feminist scholar Luce Irigaray and French philosopher Jacques Derrida, language and discourse are not an “essentially neutral conceptual apparatus” but a “violent hierarchy in which one of the two terms governs the other” (Beaugrande 256–7). In the case of Gaiman’s writing, as feminist readers of Gaiman’s works, we clearly see men assigning, creating, and governing the identity of woman, and whether or not the writer or speaker appears to be cognizant of the hierarchical discourse does not matter, as he is bound to it and by it:

  Thought, reality, the self or subject ... [are] determined by, if not created by, language.... We cannot deny that language influences our vision of the world at large and that its problematics spill over into many areas of human situation. Language subjects the world to a barely resistible power to posit, designate, signify and organize [Beaugrande 257].

  Whether aware of his placement within phallocentric discourse, Gaiman’s words and narrative structures demonstrate the masculine/feminine binary at work therein. His depictions exemplify for us the ways women are always “already dominated by an intent, a meaning, a thought; by the laws of a language” (Irigaray Speculum 230).

  The Doll’s House (1995), Neil Gaiman’s second arc in his ground-breaking Sandman series, begins with an origin narrative of an unnamed indigenous people. The speaker, an elder of the tribe, frames the story by acknowledging that this story, like all the stories he knows and has heard, is man’s version, not one of the “tales the women tell, in the private tongue men-children are never taught and older men are too wise to learn” (9:1). Gaiman here recognizes the differences in languages and stories spoken by men and spoken by women: even the best male storytellers, telling stories about women in the most effective ways, utilize a masculine language. In this (albeit brief) section, Gaiman appears to echo Luce Irigaray’s notion of the absence of a language to describe women due to the fact that we abide within phallocentric discourse. The elder continues in the tradition of man to tell his grandson the story of their tribe’s origin in his masculine language. Through the weaving of his narrative, the elder creates the first queen of their tribe. Each of the tribe’s generations repeat this story and recreate this queen in the masculine, phallocentric discourse, whereby “women are trapped in a system of meaning” (Irigaray This Sex Is Not One 122f). Society never hears woman’s voice, her language, her discourse. Woman never enters the story that creates and defines her. She is always created within the elder’s (read: father’s) words, through his tongue. Gaiman, through this elder in The Doll’s House, recognizes that “woman’s language might articulate experiences that are devalued or not permitted by the dominant discourse,” according to Carolyn Burke (290). Using Gaiman’s naming of women’s “private tongue”
and Irigaray’s call for a deconstruction of phallocentric discourse, even some of Gaiman’s most lauded feminine characters (Black Orchid, Death, Helena Campbell, and Coraline), his lesser known ones (Lyta Hall and Lucy), as well as his androgynous characters (Desire and the angels), when critically examined, show how their identities, their personal and familial narratives, and our understanding thereof continues to come solely from the masculine representation of woman.

  As part of Gaiman’s acclaimed Sandman series, The Doll’s House volume draws upon the idea that the mortals are the playthings or the dolls of the Immortals (specifically The Endless). Through this theme and the volume’s title, Gaiman directly draws from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, in which the main character realizes that she and her entire life are lived as a doll in a doll house, performing perfectly for first her father and then her husband, where “femininity is a role, an image, a value imposed upon [her] by male systems of representation” (Irigaray Sex 84). In Part Three, “Playing House,” Lyta Hall perfectly embodies this image of femininity: “she has all the dresses she can wear, and a husband who has very important job.... In her dream house, in her pretty dresses, Lyta doesn’t think about anything much any more” (12:1). The rouge Immortals, Brute and Glob, trap Lyta and her husband Hector in a pocket realm of The Dreaming, limiting her to the isolated and static role of domestic housewife. As she sits and examines her own image, brushing her long hair in a mirror, her thoughts drift over her own existence, questioning: