Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  At the end of this comic miniseries, the male narrator again relates that Death is not truly someone; she is not even a person. Sexton Furnival reveals that “it would be really neat if Death was somebody, and not just nothing, or pain, or blackness. And it would be really good if Death could be somebody like Didi. Somebody funny, and friendly, and nice, and maybe just a tiny bit crazy” (Death: HCL 3:22). For all their experiences together and all his wishing, Sexton still cannot deconstruct the claim that Death is who or what she claims to be because, as part of the male dominated hierarchy, phallocentric language defines what constitutes reality and not the other way around. Sexton decides, although it would be nice if Death was a person, she certainly is not a person, let alone a woman, and her words exist merely the mutterings of madness.

  Sexton’s discourse has no words and no room for Death: she is beyond his narrative capacity, beyond description in his discourse. Because of his limitations, he cannot process or acknowledge her existence, much less recognize her true identity, and so he reduces and limits her to an identity he understands. Sexton and, in this narrative, the masculine discourse he uses, still operate as if man is the center of all things; however, Death’s very existence, beyond description by Sexton’s narrative powers, disrupts the center of Sexton’s discourse. Derrida’s notion of free play applies here. Between Death’s presence and the absence of discourse to define her, her very being alters or completely removes the fixed origin of Sexton’s discourse. Sexton himself continues on unaware of this disruption: “in the beginning was the end of her story, and that from now on she will have one dictated to her: by the man” (Irigaray Speculum 43). The masculine discourse operates despite the disruption of its center: it operates regardless of the existence of woman, who is ultimately beyond its definition, and reduces her to merely the m/other of man, literalizing the originary definition, “from man,” as a stabilizing buttress of the dialogic discourse.

  One way of maintaining the subjugation of women, the masculine discourse disallows two women means of communicating in productive ways with one another. Positing two women against one another reoccurs thematically in several other Gaiman’s works, particularly where the one is a mother and the other is her daughter. Irigaray and other feminist scholars say a great deal about the relationships of women or rather the inaccessibility of female-to-female relationships due to the limitations of the phallocentric discourse in which society operates. Gaiman’s works exemplify the way phallocentric discourse places women at odds with one another in ways that readers see as natural relationship strains by (re)iterating relationships in doubled binaries that fracture the phallocentric discourses of his female protagonists. The Other Mother in his 2002 novel Coraline is the most clear formation this iteration in Gaiman’s works. Brought into the world through the door (reminiscent of Alice’s Rabbit Hole), the titular protagonist, Coraline, momentarily confuses Other Mother as being her mother and briefly succumbs to the seduction of the phallocentrically circumscribed mother-type. Upon first meeting Other Mother, Coraline admits that Other Mother’s voice “sounded like her mother” and she even looked mostly like her mother (Coraline 27). Coraline also notes the difference in Other Mother: “She looked a little like Coraline’s mother. Only ... only her skin was white as paper. Only she was taller and thinner. Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving.... Her eyes were big black buttons” (28). Upon confessing that she never knew she had another mother, Coraline learns that “everyone does” (29). Coraline’s Other Mother and Other Father have been waiting for Coraline: they are attentive to her and fawn over her in ways that her first parents do not. All of the attention leads Coraline to think, “This is more like it” (30), and she acquiesces to the seduction of Other Mother: “at first that reality seems to be perfect, complete with attentive parents and delicious food. But Coraline soon comes to realize that horror hides behind the façade of that world, and she struggles to return home” (Wagner et al. 365).

  Repeating his own pattern of young girl heroines like Coraline, Gaiman depicts Lucy in his 2003 children’s book The Wolves in the Walls. Lucy hears wolves living in the walls of her house. She tries futilely to warn her family, who dismiss her warnings. The inability of Lucy (or the inability of all girls) to garner her family’s attention with her words is because “the ‘reasonable’ words—to which in any case she has access only through mimicry—are powerless to translate all that pulses, clamors, and hangs hazily in the cryptic passages” (Irigaray Speculum 142). The wolves in the walls become louder and louder with each passing day, but still “Lucy alone recognizes the initial threat; silenced, ridiculed, and ignored, she is unable to protect her family from the disaster she alone sees coming” (Wagner et al. 371). Lucy first attempts to talk about the wolves with her mother. Her mother is the picture of domestic work, busy making preserves and jams: “Lucy’s mother embodies domestic order” (Wagner et al. 371). Without even looking up from her jams, Lucy’s mother rebuffs her daughter’s warnings, telling her, “There are no wolves in the walls. You must be hearing mice, I suppose” (Wolves 5). When Lucy insists, her mother retorts, “I’m sure it’s not wolves, ... For you know what they say ... if the wolves come out of the walls, then it’s all over” (Wolves 5). The underlying phallocentric discourse at work excludes the little girl from any real relationship with her mother (Irigaray Speculum 77), so no matter how hard Lucy tries, communication fails between the mother and daughter, in a similar fashion to Helena and her mother in MirrorMask.

  Because her conversation with mother leaves her lacking, Lucy attempts to talk to her father about the impeding dangers. When the discourse disallows true communication between the mother and the daughter, “the girl turns towards her father ... because she turns away from her mother in disillusion” (Irigaray Speculum 62). In Lucy’s case, conversation goes no better than the one with her mother: “I don’t think there are [wolves in the walls], poppet.... You have an overactive imagination. Perhaps the noises you heard come from rats. Sometimes you get rats in big old houses like this” (Wolves 9). Lucy’s warnings continue to fall on deaf ears as she then tries to warn her brother. Even once the wolves come out of the walls, proving Lucy’s assertions of their existence, the family does not listen to this little girl. “At its core, The Wolves in the Walls is about a child’s [a girl child’s] frustration with a family’s fragmentation and lack of communication” (Wagner 371). Lucy is bound by the masculine discourse, which strips her warnings of any potency.

  After single handedly mobilizing her family and reclaiming their home, at the end of this story, the reader finds Lucy hearing larger things in the walls: “she heard rustlings and scratchings and squeezings and creakings in the old house, and then, one night ... she heard a noise that sounded exactly like an elephant trying not to sneeze” (Wolves 49). Instead of being confident that her family will believe her warnings this time around, Lucy seems to recognize her powerless place in the phallocentric society and decides not to tell her family, accepting that “they’ll find out soon enough” (Wolves 51). Like many of Gaiman’s strongest heroines, who save their parents or the world and restore order to their homes, Lucy is ultimately still mute within the phallocentric discourse. Women and young girls have no access to the language they need to find their voice.

  In his 2005 script MirrorMask, Gaiman depicts just such a relationship between the protagonist Helena Campbell and her binary relationships with her true mother (the Queen of Light) and the Queen of Shadows, her mother’s narrative counterpart. Reiterating themes from other children’s works, including C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, Gaiman’s own Coraline, Stephen King’s The Talisman and Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams, MirrorMask tells the story of a girl, 15 years old and on the cusp of womanhood, who must save the world, or at least save an imaginary world of her own creating by “escap[ing] the control of the Queen of Shadow, find[ing] the MirrorMask, figure[ing] out how it works, and revers[ing] the magic that the anti–Helena has worked so she can ret
urn her and her twin back to their own lands before the Lands of Light and Shadow are forever destroyed” (Wagner et al. 468). All the destruction that Helena must undo correlates directly with a fight she and her mother have at the very beginning of the movie (mirrored in the fight between anti–Helena and her mother the Queen of Shadows), which sets the plot in motion.

  According to Wagner, in this movie Gaiman “plays upon the common childhood fear that our parents (particularly mothers) will turn out to be something else entirely, either secretly evil or not our parents at all” (Wagner et al. 469), but Gaiman’s depiction more accurately shows the struggle between mothers and daughters, specifically a daughter’s rebellion against the mother, due to their enclosure within the phallocentric discourse. Although mother and daughter love each other, they constantly clash and communication fails them time and time again. The first instance of this failure appears at the beginning of the movie when Helena and her mother fight. “You’ll be the death of me,” says her mother, and Helena retorts, “I wish I was” (MirrorMask). Later we see the fracture and failure of true communication when Helena attempts to apologize and then confesses to her father that despite her attempt, she has not “been able to say I’m sorry—not so that she really believes me” (MirrorMask). Gaiman shows perfectly what Irigaray means by the absence of genuine dialogue between mother and daughter. Because of this absence of genuine dialog, “love borders on hate” (Holmlund 291). The inability to “speak” to one another limits, stunts or destroys the mother/daughter relationship and this is due to the dominant discourse: “The domination excludes the little girl from any discovery of the economy of her relationship with her mother” (Irigaray Speculum 77). Gaiman’s depiction of the mother/daughter relationship represents this void created by the phallocentric discourse.

  Accurately enough, Helena directs her rebellious words and attitude towards her mother and not at her father.7 Even when Helena’s father directly asks her what she has been saying to her mother, giving her the perfect opportunity to lash out at him as she just has her mother, Helena responds, “Nothing” (MirrorMask). Helena’s respect for her father stems from the fact that “woman’s rebellions are never aimed at the paternal function—which is sacred and divine—but at that powerful and then castrated mother” (Irigaray Speculum 106). Western culture, aided by the terms of Freudian discourse, often talks of the struggle between mothers and daughters and notes the reverence little girls have for their daddies, and Gaiman gives us just such a family dynamic in MirrorMask.

  Both the theme Wagner describes of the childhood fear of the mother turning out to be something “either secretly evil or not our parent at all” and the positing of mother against daughter also appear in Gaiman’s Coraline. The story centers on a young girl, Coraline, and her adventures in another reality, “a distorted version of the world she already knows” (Wagner et al. 365). Coraline spends a great deal of time wandering around by herself because her mother and father pay little attention to this little girl: “they treat her with a sort of benign neglect” (Wagner et al. 366). When Coraline talks to her parents, they either kindly tell her to “go away” (Gaiman Coraline 18) or ignore her words complete. At one point, Coraline shops with her mother and even though her mother asks her questions, when Coraline answers, “her mother ignored her” (23). Like Helena’s relationship with her mother, Coraline’s relationship with her mother leaves her lacking and bored: “she is left with a void, a lack of all representation, re-presentation, and even strictly speaking of all mimesis of her desire for origin” (Irigaray Speculum 42). To fill this void, like Helena, Coraline finds a second mother figure, attempting to seduce her with the attention and affection she lacks in her original maternal relationship.

  While Coraline and Helena’s second mothers appear to be bad copies of the protagonists’ mothers (both Coraline and Helena ultimately abscond from the seduction and see the other mothers as evil, as Lucy recognizes the wolf family as a doubling of her own family, including their faults and vulnerabilities), the other mothers are a repetition of the sign (mother) nonetheless. These other mothers “will be ‘like’ her mother but not in the same ‘place,’ not corresponding to the same point on the number line. She will be her mother and yet not her mother” (Irigaray Speculum 76). Coraline’s mother and Other Mother, Helena’s White and Shadow Queens, and Lucy’s binary families constitute parts of the same sign/word-type: mother. Even as these young women grow to recognize the differences, they accept the binary as part of the discursive term:

  For the structure of iteration implies both identity and difference. Iteration in its “purest” form—and it is always impure—contains in itself the discrepancy of a difference that constitutes it as iteration. The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account the fact that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and that it hence bears the mark of this difference [Derrida Limited 53].

  The differences in Other Mother, those things that make her and her narrative parallels the Other in Gaiman’s work, are inherent to the iteration of the mother. In other words, “when something is repeated, another instance of that something comes into existence. Thus repetition is tied to alterity, i.e. otherness. In the case of signs, what counts as a repetition may appear quite different” (Halion 4). Without the mother, there could be no Other Mother and thereby Coraline knows her mother is her mother because of the existence of her Other Mother, Helena validates the significance of her matrilineal bond because of the Queen of Shadows, and Lucy inverts the hierarchy of domestication by recognizing its unviability in the failures of the substitution. The sign becomes an event, becomes a sign, through its repetition.

  Even when Gaiman pens characters who supposedly breach the gender binary, these characters still act out and are acted upon in very gender specific ways: despite their attempts to transcend the hegemonic roles of masculine or feminine, the discourse labels, defines, and limits them nonetheless. When Gaiman fans think of androgyny in his work, they immediate think of Sandman’s Desire. First appearing in The Doll’s House, Dream’s8 younger sibling, Desire, takes the form of whatever or whoever it is that humans desire, male and female—both/and, either/or. Twin of Despair, Desire is the third youngest Endless, whose siblings refer to as “sister-brother.” At first glance, Gaiman has written Desire to abscond the gender binary and in many s/he does: s/he plays with gender, embodying every little whim the mortal heart wants—man, woman, and anyone or anything in between. Desire looks and sounds much like Derrida’s description of the copy: “mimicry imitating nothing” as “a ghost that is a phantom of no flesh, wandering about without a past, without a death, birth, or presence” (Dissemination 206). Desire, by taking on the forms of all human desires, represents the ghost of a character without a true identifiable self. With this understanding of Desire, Dream makes sense when he tells Desire that the Endless are the servants of mortals, evoking a hierarchy with the mortals at the top: “we do not manipulate them. If anything, they manipulate us. We are their toys. Their dolls, if you will” (Sandman 16:23). However, Desire disagrees with Morpheus’ proposed hierarchy and the reader through this text has seen why.

  Despite Gaiman’s claims at universality and androgyny in the form of Desire, the reader experiences “what claims to be universal is actually the equivalent of a male idiolect, of a male imaginary of a sexed world—and not neuter” (Irigaray Speak 250). Upon first read, Desire may be viewed as represented gender in the form as a continuum; however, being able to take on any form of gender allows Desire to fully embody all that defines man and demonstrate the full extent of masculine power embedded within the phallocentric system. At the conclusion of The Doll’s House, in a confrontation with sibling Dream, Desire confesses to impregnating a sleeping Unity Kincaid—in other words, Desire confesses to the rape of an unconscious woman. Desire rapes and impregnates Unity in a plan to trap the Sandman by having him unknowingly k
ill a blood relative. When Desire needs power to meddle in the life of her/his brother (Dream), Desire enacts a violent act against womankind. Desire performs masculinity in a way that removes woman’s voice and choice, and in fact acts in a counterintuitive manner to his/her own dialectic. Through Desire, Gaiman demonstrates how even his androgynous characters operate within the phallocentric discourse and when in need of power their “neutrality” becomes “masculinity” when the need to exert dominant control overrides the strictures of