Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  As far as her body is concerned, it is obvious that Death is gendered female, and not half-heartedly female at that. In her first visual appearance in the Sandman series, “The Sound of Her Wings” (she is mentioned several times in issue one but not seen), she mimics her brother Dream’s body language but not his facial expression and begins the conversation with a joke about pigeons. She is bubbling over with life, albeit a stark, white-skinned black-wearing form of life, but lively she is, wearing a spaghetti-strap camisole and, at one point, shades, the better to soak up the sun and enjoy the day (8:4–5). Granted, Dream has earned his morose mood this time, having just escaped “three score years and ten” (1:22) of imprisonment in a bubble, but in opposition to the traditional role played by the folkloric death, Gaiman’s Death is bent on turning Dream’s view away from the past and towards life and the simple joy found in the folly and foibles of being human, despite the fact that the two of them are, of course, not human. It could be argued that by creating a female Death character, especially one that embraces such positive feminine and feminist energy, Gaiman is practicing feminist reclaiming in the same way the Cheryl Glenn did in Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Outside of scholarly circles, feminism might be considered a joyless pursuit; as a counterpoint, Death is female, all-powerful, and joyful. Clearly, there are feminists who are comfortable in their skin and clearly, there are ones who celebrate life with all its folly, but the contemporary stereotype can be a dour one, thus the need for a reclaiming of feminine values into the feminist picture. In Rhetoric Retold, Glenn does a similar reclaiming by taking the rhetorical canon and weaving back existing female rhetors. She writes about how they were previously silenced:

  Even though gender is merely a concept borrowed from grammar, it nevertheless continues to have far-reaching effects on cultural notions of the relation between the sexed body and its behavior. Gendered experiences continue to be difficult, if not impossible to separate from human ones. And for that reason alone, the masculine gender, just like every male experience or display, has come to represent the universal. Men have appropriated many public social practices, particularly prestigious practices like rhetoric, as universally masculine; the feminine experience (that of bodies sexed female) has come to represent exceptions, or the particular [173].

  Since mythology is very much a place of constructed being (and we are definitely talking about restructured mythology when discussing Gaiman’s Endless family), and since myth is a place where the telling and retelling fabricates reality, who are we to say that Gaiman does not tell the truth when he offers a vision of Death that is female ... and perky? By taking an archetypal figure and regendering, Gaiman moves Death out of historical patriarchy into a mythos where women are just as likely to hold power, and not merely by re-inscribing old practices. This iteration of Death is new, and all woman.

  In her book, Glenn also points out that “the project of regendering rhetorical history is a feminist performative act, a commitment to the future of women, a promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women” (174). She adds that “it is regendering that unsettles stable gender categories” (174), an idea that transfers well to the regendering and retelling of myth. Gaiman’s mythology is remarkably gender-inclusive, and can also be seen as a “feminist performative act.”

  Of course, when the term performative is used, one has to turn to its source, Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performative in Gender Trouble. She writes, “That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (185). Death, then, is female and clearly marked as feminine not because her body has breasts and hips, but because Death chooses to be feminine: her performance is her reality. Going one step further, a feminist performative act, such as Gaiman’s creation of Death, is not just for show; the very act itself is saturated feminism, not a surface gesture. Whether or not Gaiman intended Death to be a feminist performative act, she exists, and through her existence, she unsettles staid gender tropes in a genre (comics, graphic novels) that at times relies on bulbous breasts and heavy-handed gender stereotypes that are easy for readers to decode.

  Death is a less predictable representation and joyfully smashes the female stereotype when needed. In “A Night to Remember” (Gaiman Death: HCL 2) she breaks out of what could be seen as stereotypical, nurturing femininity to show her badass side when she chastises Sexton for being overly superficial in making a judgment about a fellow human being. She asserts, “I don’t want to hear that stuff, Sexton. This is a real person you’re talking about, and he’s not breathing properly, and I’m sure he’s done a lot worse than saying not, but I’m telling you, sometimes you really piss me off, and right now that last smart-aleck shit is the last thing I need to hear, right?” (2:23). Feminism operates in a similar, slippery way. Just when you think you have it defined, it shows another layer, another way to celebrate its performance, whether by female, male, or an all-powerful iconic Death archetype who chooses to show an egalitarian, feminist side. After all, complete predictability is simply another way to describe a stereotype, and even though stereotypes serve a function, seen up close and in the flesh, real people, real feminists, are more complicated. Part of the embodiment for Death is her character, using the term in the sophistic sense, that of ethos.

  The stylistic choices made by Death become more complex when viewed as an aspect of ethos, a concept that is part of Aristotle’s Trivium of ethos, logos, and pathos, but also a concept widely used by others, most notably the sophists. Her ethos, in other words, her intrinsic character or what qualities she has that makes her worth listening to, contributes to that complex rhetoric which is Death; her words, actions, intentions, and motives embody more than the clothes on her body. Beginning with that appearance though, one assumes that Death could appear in any form she pleases, so this one must please her and either assists in her job or runs contrary to occupational function while lending a sort of ironic, comic pleasure by its incongruity. One thing it could never be is random. The beauty of visual rhetoric involving the body is that the rhetor makes choices even when she (or he) denies making a choice. That too is a choice and one that adds to the allure of visual rhetoric, in this case a constructed identity. Since Death could choose any appearance, it is interesting to consider how she reacts to her own: is she pleased, is she indifferent, does she think her hips are too big? There is no direct evidence for how she thinks of her appearance. She doesn’t check herself in mirrors; she also never makes that scrunched-up face many women make when they look at themselves and are unsatisfied. On the contrary, she oozes self-satisfaction and is happily amused by the male reaction to her as Didi in “The High Cost of Living.” When she is on her once-a-century vacation, she gets to have skin and she is comfortable in it. In other words, once she is in the flesh, she takes on the pleasure of bodily senses while she has them, giving her body memory for when the embodied vacation ends. Even better, this means that others are comfortable talking with her, which results in a heightened ability to use her allure to romance them into a sensual (through the senses), consensual agreement. For example, in The Sandman: Three Septembers and a January (Sandman 31), Death comes for the Emperor of the United States, a beloved historical figure who lived in San Francisco during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this retelling, Dream ultimately wins a bet with Desire by giving the man Joshua Norton a dream that gives Norton a new identity: an Emperor who has nothing yet desires nothing more than to serve others. When Death comes for him, Norton has already defeated Desire and Despair, and is standing, grey-toned, next to his body in the rain. Even then, he thinks of others first, and tips his hat at Death, for after all, this Death is a lady. She empathizes with him and celebrates the selflessness of his life as Emperor by pointing him towards a possible role in the afterlife that he would find as equally alluring as the life he had once led. She
notes his Jewish past and tells him of the “36 Tzaddikim”: “They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints—36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world.... I’ve met a lot of kings and emperors and heads of state in my time, Joshua. I’ve met them all. And you know something? I think I liked you best” (31:24). He thanks her for her kindness and they walk off arm in arm, his top hat on her head. She loves him, and that love is a reflection of the man’s love for all humanity. In this case, consensus was easy. The Emperor Norton is an exceptional example in that he allows Death to fully be that softer self. He is practicing the same feminist, even sophistic, approach to ethos in persuasion by letting what is highest and best in him speak to what is highest and best in her.

  With those less noble, Death does not seek to dominate, but still aims to persuade in the feminist sense of an embodied argument that embraces both writer and audience. There is no doubt that she could dominate. Volume 4 of Gaiman’s The Books of Magic has Death appear at the end of time to wrap things up, end the universe, and send her eldest brother, Destiny, to his end as well. She has no girlish hesitancy in completing these most final acts; instead, she notes, “it’s my job to put it all in order, now, and lock the place behind me as I leave” (4:40). Rather than the domination-mode familiar to viewers of Sunday morning press debate shows or the manipulative words that are commonly referred to as “just rhetoric,” Gaiman’s Death constructs an embodied, feminist rhetoric, seeking consensus and actively mentoring (in the feminist, not the classical sense) rather than merely imposing her will, as of course, she could. It could be argued that, in this end-of-universe scene Death imposes her will by making the villainous Erik walk back to his own time (4:41). At the same time, her decision to send him back to his own time is a compassionate one; she could have let him stay and be destroyed. Instead, she gives him time and a possibility—the possibility that sometime through that billions of years journey back, he might reclaim his humanity. Talk would not have worked; instead, Death creates a situation, a piece of embodied rhetoric that forms an argument for change that each step of Erik’s body would understand and use to convince him. Yes, it was a power move, but one tailored to the situation, one that uses kairos. After all, she’s Death. She is comfortable talking to everyone, she goes out of her way to be engaging, and she knows fully what each rhetorical situation is and uses that knowledge for the good of all concerned.

  Clearly, communicating effectively to one and all in their final moments is her job, and it is a tricky one. To do it well, she takes the contrast between her appearance and demeanor and uses it to appeal to and engage others to act in ways that aim towards the general good (as well as the specific, i.e., their lives and deaths). That is why Death is a natural for the public service comic, “Death Talks About Life.” In it, she details safe sex practices, including how and why to use condoms, noting, “there’s another side effect to unsafe sex. I mentioned it in the beginning. It’s called life.” Her demeanor is calm, but with a bountiful sense of humor waiting to emerge, as it does with the requisite banana jokes. There’s no preaching involved, just a calm detailing of the consequences of unsafe sex (AIDS, gonorrhea, Chlamydia, herpes) and the obvious one that young people nonetheless may not consider: a new life, a baby. Her persuasion is born of identity, the ultimate ethos, rather than technique. She’s there, she knows, and her audience knows it.

  This cellular-level knowledge of Death’s ethos means that Gaiman doesn’t need to include the character sketch that he gives for the other immortals in “The Season of Mist: Prologue” (Sandman 21). For example, “Desire smells almost subliminally of summer peaches, and casts two shadows, one black and sharp-edged, the other translucent and forever wavering, like heat haze” and is “never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you have ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are” (21:9). Delirium is also described, her (and his, for s/he is also dual) scent that of “sweat, sour wines, late nights, old leather. Her realm is close, and can be visited; however, human minds were not made to comprehend her domain, and those few who have made the journey have been incapable of reporting back more than the tiniest fragments” (21:10). Each of the Endless get a turn in the spotlight, but for Death Gaiman only notes, “And there is Death” (21:11). To know more about who Death is when she’s at home, one has to turn to the woman that Gaiman chose to give that inside view. Tori Amos writes a visually patchworked, somewhat stream-of-consciousness introduction to Death: The High Cost of Living. It was reworked into an afterword for the edited collection of short stories, The Sandman: Book of Dreams while still retaining the stream-of-consciousness flow and Amos’s distinctive reasoning. In it Amos writes:

  She told me once that there is a part of her in everyone though Neil believes I’m more Delirium than Tori, and Death taught me to accept that, you know, wear your butterflies with pride. And when I do accept that, I know Death is somewhere inside of me. She was the kind of girl all the girls wanted to be, I believe, because of her acceptance of “what is.” She keeps reminding me that there is change in the “what is” but change cannot be made till you accept the “what is” [394].

  This insider view of Death acknowledges the surface contradiction between the girlish performance and the all-knowing all-powerful self. Death uses this acceptance of “what is” to help others do the same. For example, in “The Sound of Her Wings” (Sandman 8) she holds a baby gently in her arms, and when the infant asks, “But is that all there was? Is that all I get?” she acknowledges the validity of that last plea when she replies, “Yes, I’m afraid so” (8:18). Of course, being gentle to a baby is no stretch, but Death is also kind to those who may appear to deserve it less. For example, she offers solace to the lowlife character Theo in “The High Cost of Living” (Death: HCL 3:16–23). Death can be a badass to the core when needed, but she never stops being a soft, pretty girl who would prefer to deal with those she faces in her role as Death as equals. In this case, even though Theo intends to lead her to robbery and her death, she treats him with kindness, even seeking medical attention for him, up to the moment of his death. The reason why is given in “Death: A Winter’s Tale.” In this story, she muses about her existence, her job, and the sadness she felt in the beginning when “the only people who greeted me with relief did so as an escape from something bad or intolerable. The rest of them just wished I’d go away, as if dying were some kind of admission of failure” (222). Her reaction was “walking out,” in other words, removing death, the result being a world where life did not end, a place where “the chaos and the pain got bad, and they got worse” until a young man came to her and “pleaded and I went and looked at what I’d done” (223). Even so, she later found herself becoming “hard and cold and brittle inside” until as an answer to another plea, this time from a young girl, she decided to take on flesh and live the human viewpoint for one day a century (224), a physical and very persuasive form of consensus. After all, a meeting of the minds, a consensual joining, is far more abstract when one of the entities involved is abstract, i.e., not alive. The embodied Death is capable on the cellular level of deep knowledge about what it means to be human, which means she has essentially joined the body human, an ultimate and complete version of putting oneself in another’s place, the root of consensus. The result is a Death with compassion and a greater understanding of the balance between her world and the human one.

  This ability is what sets her apart from her Endless siblings, Destiny, Dream, Desire, Despair, Delirium, and yes, even Destruction, who walked away from his realm and in part 7 of “Brief Lives” (Sandman 47) ineffectively tries his hand at creation as human, making bad art (47:1–2) and better cooking (47:28). To rephrase Plato’s claim about rhetoric, it is all cookery for Destruction, thus his success with cooking and not with poetry or art. In contrast, Death is not trying to be human. She is t
rying to be her best possible self, and that means knowing humanity intimately while retaining her own features and functions. This yearning for community, for communing with humans, is the emotional force behind her consensual persuasion.

  The idea of consensus as a persuasive method is not new, of course, but it is one that is greatly valued in feminist rhetorics because of its egalitarian nature and its embodiedness. In consensus-based argumentation, the audience is not passive; in fact, by being consensual, this form not only includes the audience, it needs the audience and what they bring to the argument in order to be complete. The goal is not to subvert the audience’s will or to attack a viewpoint and come out victorious; the audience is a larger part of the process in that the goal is to have most of the audience agree that the viewpoint being proposed is reasonable. This is done through a call to ethos and pathos, with a comparison of alternatives rather than an attack on an alternate point-of-view. Death does this well when faced with Hob Gadling, the man who in “Men of Good Fortune” (Sandman 13) cheerfully calls death a “mug’s game” (13:1). Not knowing who he is speaking to, Hob gives an energetic argument for his plan of simply not choosing death in order to live forever. Death listens actively and weighs the man’s ethos, meaning who he is and how much his character is wrapped up in his argument, and his pathos, the emotional weight he gives the argument. Since his argument appeals to her, she does not bother trying to talk him out of his idea by revealing her identity and her authority over life and death, thus not using the agonistic method that attacks head-on and conquers. Instead, she listens, acknowledges, and then gives him a gift—immortality until he calls for her—that will persuade him through his future experiences, choosing actual persuasion over abstract persuasion.