Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  Gaiman’s language around this act of violence is also troubling: Dream never uses the word “rape,” but instead issues a euphemism: “fathered her mother on sleeping Unity” (Sandman 16:22). However, Gaiman’s initial description tells the reader: “[1939] Unity Kinkaid was raped seven years ago. She gave birth to a baby girl. The scandal was hushed up” (1:18). Gaiman reminds the careful reader that Morpheus is softening the accusation; the feminist reader acknowledges this rape. Unity cannot consent because she is asleep, exhibiting one way in which the phallocentric discourse disallows for feminine sexuality and solely represents reproduction of the male. For although Desire can embody all forms of gender, in this context, s/he dons the sexual agency of man and utilizes that power to force reproduction upon woman. When desire is forced rather than mutual, Desire is defined by the misogyny of phallocentric dominance. Desire not only eliminates woman’s sexuality, but also her choice to reproduce in motherhood. While sidestepping the crime, Dream emphasizes the violation, telling his sister-brother that “the endless are the servants of the living—we are NOT their masters” and threatening more serious (possibly lethal) action if such a violation is repeated; however, the actions of the other characters speak in stark contrast, and their actions speak louder than his words as the threat carries no penance for the act (16:23). Desire shows the reader how the mortals, particularly women, are in reality pawns in the games of the Immortals they create, and to transform his/her creators into pawns, Desire simply taps into the power available to “him” inherent in the dominant discourse.

  Gaiman demonstrates yet again how “neutrality is impossible where hierarchical thinking prevails” (Homans 387) in his short story “Changes” from his collection Smoke and Mirrors (1998). Presenting the reader with other characters who, at first glance, challenge the gender binary, Gaiman displays the ways in which phallocentric discourse dominates and defines androgynous characters, rendering them unable to break free of the gender binary. This story commences with a cure for cancer. That cure, which operates by “rebooting” the patient’s genetic code and “fixes it,” produces an interesting side effect: it changes the person’s sexual identity. Rajit, the creator of Reboot, spends the days after the first successful test wondering at the result: “[A]s the autopsy demonstrates beyond a doubt, the [female] patient now has a penis and is, in every respect, functionally and chromosomally male” (133). Twenty years after the creation of Reboot, people take this cancer drug recreationally to change sexes and genders at will. One character, Jo/e takes a dose to change into a female/woman for a night out, donning “the bustle, the petticoat, the bodice, and the gown, new breasts (high and conical) pushed together” (134). After the weekend, Jo/e takes another dose before going to bed because “Jo/e’s job identity during the week is strictly male” (134). The drug makes “gender reassignment surgery obsolete” and people take it for “reasons of desire or curiosity or escape” (135). Due to this drug, changing one’s sex and gender becomes fluid and a choice a person can make on their own and at whim.

  Unfortunately, the dominant phallocentric discourse abides and in this story, Gaiman shows his readers how it operates still to oppress those who are still not considered men. Taking advantage of the changes Reboot brings, patriarchy utilizes the drug to maintain its tight grasp and subjugate women:

  Boys (in Thailand and Mongolia) were being forcibly rebooted into girls to increase their worth as prostitutes. In China newborn girls were rebooted to boys: families would save all they had for one single dose.... In several of the Pan-Arabic countries men who could not easily demonstrate that they had been born male and were not, in fact, women escaping the veil were being imprisoned and, in many cases, raped and killed [135–6].

  Instead of providing a sense of freedom from the dominant discourse, sectors of the patriarchy initially use this drug as a means of oppression, perpetuating the oppression of the gender binary. The hegemonic hierarchy shifts slightly, but still remains, as it segregates between the “changed” and the “unchanged.” Being born man still prevails as the top of the food chain as the possibility of making gender irrelevant enters the diaspora. Gaiman shows here not how the dominant discourse allows for more varying voices, but how it perpetuates itself by recognizing the new voices as still Other. These new men, these “changed” men, while now literally possessing a penis, are still devalued for being “changed”: they are not natural men and despite their penises still do not possess the phallus/power.

  The story ends, however, with Gaiman painting a picture of a future society that moves beyond phallocentric discourse, moving beyond the gender binary, and evidences a perspective and discourse that is propagated on truth rather than convenient fictions. A generation later, the creator of Reboot, Rajit is now a very old man and as he dies upon the beach, he is “surrounded by the golden people, who were not men, who were not women” (Gaiman “Changes” 140). Everyone is changed. Rajit calls them “Angels” (140), and these “angels” reiterate Rajit’s story emphasizing the true events rather than the fictionalized version generated by the current discourse (starring recognizable actors in lead roles and directed by the man responsible for Back to the Future and Gaiman’s own revision of Beowulf). Much like his admission by the elder in the beginning of The Doll’s House, Gaiman echoes Luce Irigaray, except this time it is her notion of angels: “Through the angel (or rather angels, for Irigaray conceives them most brilliantly and suggestively in a couple), Irigaray gestures to the as-yet-unimagined, perhaps unimaginable flourishing of identity that might occur with the advent of true sexual difference” (Ugrina 13). For Irigaray, these angels operate as higher forms of femininity and masculinity, simultaneously different and alike, beyond the understanding of the phallocentric discourse. “Between them the flesh holds back and flows forth before any mastery can be exercised over it, or after a fort-da far more sophisticated than the real, a fort-da of the possibility of presence and of sharing in something divine that cannot be seen but can be felt, underlying all incarnation” (Irigaray “Belief Itself” 45). In the form of these angels, Gaiman and Irigaray imagine gender and sex differences as fluid and flowing, but only in the realm beyond the phallocentric discourse. Unfortunately, this “unimaginable” realm exists only in the worlds of speculative science fiction.

  Neil Gaiman posits his female and androgynous characters into the already established masculine discourse and thereby creates comic narratives that “[substitute] feminine power for masculine power,” yet remain circumscribed “because this reversal would still be caught up in the economy of the same ... a phallic seizure of power” (Irigaray Sex 129). Still, despite the repetition of sameness (or possibly because of the repetition of sameness), the pervasiveness of male voices, and the limited identities and voices of even his highly lauded female characters, Gaiman’s gender discourses resonate with the women who read his comics, and can legitimately be called “feminist” within the operating discourse of Anglophone culture. We identify with Gaiman’s women and with the phallocentric discourse because we too abide therein, and this discourse functions in creating our own identities and limiting our relationships with other women, including our mothers. We identify with Gaiman’s female characters because they feel “true” and the desire for truth determines “the order, the hierarchy, the subordination of the interventions by which differences are regulated and declinable as more or less ‘good’ copies of the same” (Irigaray Speculum 262). But they are, of course, not exact copies. Their dissonance begins to deconstruct the anticipated frameworks of the phallocentric narrative. The good and the bad copies of women and mothers in Gaiman’s works operate together in the iteration of each of these signs, slightly modifying the graphé of the iterative subject. In this way we see and understand Gaiman’s characters as we see and understand ourselves, retroactively defined by the discourse and always already at a dissonance with it. For Gaiman there is “no longer is any truth value attributed to [purely phallocentric discourses]” due to the limit
ing nature of the framework they operate within, and his readers face a “readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful” (Derrida Structure 201). Without the appearance of a more useful instrument, without any other language or discourse readily available with which writers can create and become “angels,” creative minds like Gaiman’s critique the existing discourse and employ it “to destroy the old machinery to which they themselves [we ourselves] are pieces. This is how the language [of Gaiman] criticizes itself” (Derrida Structure 201). Like the indigenous grandfatherly elder, all the stories told no longer utilize the language of women, if they ever did. Gaiman’s work points to a need to rediscover what he calls “tales the women tell, in the private tongue men-children are never taught and older men are too wise to learn” (Sandman 10:1), moving to a new, and perhaps divine, way of thinking the world.

  NOTES

  1. Another issue this raises for me is the question of the universality of “female identity” and the way in which I and other critics use the term “women.” In this work, I recognize that I use “female identity” and “women” narrowly, particularly with regards to race. However, a discussion of the universal assumptions of terms such as “female identity,” “women,” and “feminine” with regards to race is not part of the purview and scope of this paper, but better served by a lengthy analysis.

  2. Brute and Glob have convinced Hector that he is the Sandman, protecting the dreams of the world’s children.

  3. There is yet a fourth “Susan” introduced in Gaiman’s narrative. She is neither fully grown nor fully cognizant of her identity. Naming herself “Suzy,” she is the infantilized and undernourished Susan, utilized in the narrative as a pawn for the plot and as a foil to Susan’s growing self-awareness (both as an catalyst and an alternative).

  4. Sylvain not only imprints Black Orchid’s identity upon her verbally, but he also literally creates her in his greenhouse through his scientific breakthrough. Like many earlier comics, the theme of man “messing with” nature leaves characters who do not seem to belong within society, displaying nature (which is always referred to in the feminine pronoun) as enslaved to man’s “arrogant claim to sovereign discretion over everything” (Irigaray Speculum 204).

  5. Black Orchid originally appears in other earlier DC comics, but without any origin narrative or background. Gaiman includes in his origins narrative of Black Orchid other DC comic characters and settings, including Swamp Thing, Poison Ivy, Batman, Lex Luthor, and Arkham Insane Asylum: “coaxing an origin from both the Mayer/DeZuniga originals and a story from the first narrative arc of the Alan Moore/Stephen Bissette/John Totleben Saga of the Swamp Thing, Gaiman ingeniously linked the various DC vegetable characters via a singular backstory” (Wagner et al. 197).

  6. And the double entendre, of course, reinforces the phallocentric language of the discourse, though perhaps this only a bit of supplemental play.

  7.  We do see anti–Helena fighting with Helena’s dad, but we are told time and time again that she is not Helena: Helena says, “She looks like me, but she isn’t me” (MirrorMask). The reader could interpret anti–Helena as another example of iteration in this film.

  8.  Dream is known by many names: Dream, the Sandman, and Morpheus.

  WORKS CITED

  Burke, Carolyn. “Irigaray Through the Looking Glass.” Feminist Studies. v. 7 no. 2, Summer 1981. 288–306. Print.

  de Beaugrande, Robert. “In Search of Feminist Discourse: The ‘Difficult’ Case of Luce Irigaray.” College English. v. 50 n. 3, March 1988. 253–272. Print.

  Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Barbara Johnson, tr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Print.

  _____. Limited Inc. Samuel Weber, tr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977. Print.

  _____. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Alan Bass, tr. Writing and Difference, 1966: 278–95. Print.

  Gaiman, Neil. “All Books Have Genders.” Web. 13 March 2011.

  _____. “Changes.” Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Print.

  _____. Coraline. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Print.

  _____. MirrorMask. Dir. Anthony Shearn. Perf. Jason Berry, Rob Bryson, Stephanie Leonidas, and Gina McKee. Sony Pictures, 2005. Film.

  Gaiman, Neil (w), Dave McKean (a, p). Black Orchid #1–3 (Dec. 1988–Feb. 1989), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Chris Bachalo, Dave McKean (a), Dave McKean, Marck Buckingham (i). Death: The High Cost of Living #1–3 (March–May 1993), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Mike Dringenberg (a), Malcolm Jones III (i). “Tales in the Sand.” The Sandman #9 (Sept. 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), Mike Dringenberg (a), Malcolm Jones III (i). “Los Hearts.” The Sandman #16 (June 1990), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  Gaiman, Neil (w), Dave McKean (p). The Wolves in the Walls. New York: HarperCollins Children’s, 2003. Print.

  Halion, Kevin. “Parasitic Speech Acts: Austin, Searle, Derrida.” Deconstruction and Speech Act Theory. Web. 18 March 2002.

  Holmlund, Christine. “The Lesbian, the Mother, the Heterosexual Love: Irigaray’s Recoding of Difference.” Feminist Studies. v. 17 no. 2, Summer 1991. 283–308. Print.

  Homans, Margaret. “The Woman in the Cave: Recent Feminist Fictions and the Classical Underworld.” Contemporary Literature. v. 29 no. 3, Autumn 1988. 369–402. Print.

  Irigaray, Luce. “Belief Itself.” Sexes and Genealogies. New York: Columbia Universtiy Press, 1993. 25–26 Print.

  _____. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Print.

  _____. This Sex Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Print.

  _____. To Speak Is Never Neutral. New York: Continuum, 2002. Print.

  Jaffe, Sarah. “Neverwhere and Neil Gaiman’s Female Characters.” Web. 1 January 2009.

  Ugrina, Luciana. “Redeeming Sexual Difference: Stigmata, The Messenger and Luce Irigaray’s Bleeding Woman.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. v. 21 n. 1, Spring 2009. Print.

  Wagner, Hank et al. Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009. Print.

  Whitford, Margaret, ed. The Irigaray Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995. Print.

  The Power of the Perky

  The Feminist Rhetoric of Death

  BY LANETTE CADLE

  Death is just a girl, after all. Just a perky, Goth-clad, ankh-wearing girl, or at least in the world of Neil Gaiman she is. Gaiman’s Death defies expectations while adhering to the letter of the folkloric law. She does have a thing for black, but to rephrase Jessica Rabbit, she could claim, I’m not depressed, I’m just drawn that way. The visual rhetoric of black clothes, pale skin, and Egyptian Book of the Dead-style makeup paired with a positive feminist outlook makes for an unlikely personification of Death, but one so effective that the old hooded guy may as well set down the scythe and head to the archetype employment office. With the opposing visual rhetoric of black clothes and makeup on pale white skin combined with Death’s incessant, calm cheerfulness, she could be viewed as an embodiment of millennial feminism. Seen that way, her outward appearance—the nod to the past—honors the role Death plays in the cycle of life. The irrepressible perkiness, especially when faced with those who are depressed or unaccepting of their fate, is the source of her power and an expression of the feminist rhetorical move towards consensus over conflict, with consensus being in the original meaning of agreement within the body developed by the sophists rather than in the later, more bloodless Aristotelian sense. Gaiman’s Death takes the iconic character and gives it her own, joyful twist, making her far more than the dull, sinister wraith found in legend. The change is greater than a shift from male to female or from morose to upbeat. With her embodi
ed rhetoric, Death invokes the power of the perky—a confident acceptance of femininity and its performance—and in doing so, gives a possible answer to how feminist rhetoric works.

  In appearance, her style is distinctive, yet easily recognizable to anyone who has a teenager—or has been a teenager—who embraced the fashion outlook called “Goth.” She varies her look a bit within the genre. In “Façade” she goes for a shredded top with a deep-v neckline, the better to show cleavage; in Death: The High Cost of Living she shows less skin in a camisole covered by a blazer, but what skin shows is still ultra-white, soft, and rounded. When shown in a historical context, as in “Men of Good Fortune,” she matches the era while remaining stylish, feminine, and far from demure (1:1–4), but the ankh necklace, top, skin-tight pants, and adventurer’s boots (like pirates wear) all in black is her standard current-day look. In chapter three of Death: The High Cost of Living she accessorizes with a smiley face button (the yellow is her one splash of color) and a top hat (1:17). Her face, usually smiling, is accentuated by deep red, almost-black lipstick and heavy, cat-eyed eye makeup that would fit equally well at a rock concert or in an Egyptian tomb. All of this is of a piece and expected; it is definitely a power look, not that of a demure young miss. However, like some of the teens who take up this look, she smiles too much to be defined by it. She is not sad. On the contrary, she is young in appearance and irrepressibly perky, as only a young, healthy woman with good, common sense can be. Roland Barthes speculates that “rhetorics inevitably vary by their substance (here articulated sound, there image, gesture, or whatever) but not necessarily by their form; it is even probable that there exists a single rhetorical form, common for instance to dream, literature, and image” (161). Barthes’s point about image is well made; the representation of Death is indeed embodied rhetoric on all those levels. In other words, the image of Death is consensual, an embodied act of consensus, not something off to the side or something superficial which is not to be considered.