Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Read online

  This method is especially good for situations that are too complex for the traditional reliance on logos, situations with multiple yes and no possibilities. Classical rhetors who were proponents of consensus include the sophists and later Aristotle, who introduces the idea of common knowledge, although his vision of this form centered on abstract ideas rather than the people behind the ideas or audience. A contemporary theorist who deals with consensus and what he calls rational-critical debate is Jürgen Habermas with his concept of the public sphere, the physical or intellectual space where ideas are exchanged. Applying his view of the public sphere to the egalitarian, webbed media typical of social media such as Twitter, blogs, or forums, Matthew Barton in “The Future of Rational-critical Debate in Online Public Spheres” points out that the equality proclaimed for the French salon or the English coffee house was of a particular, limited sort, beginning with Habermas’s claim for equal opportunity for expression within these societies:

  In principle, anyone with reason and the willingness to learn was “able to participate” in these societies (p. 37). Of course, in practice there were many people altogether excluded, yet the idea of universal access and equality was highly influential in bourgeois thinking of this time. The public’s use of its reason was only an influential concept as long as that reason was generally considered free from prejudice; the truths arrived at through reason were true for all.

  Barton goes on to propose that online writing venues such as forums, wikis, and blogs form a more inclusive, egalitarian public sphere, a view that Habermas himself famously does not share since he does not view the internet as a potential public sphere, but Barton’s view is one that has been gaining ground in technical and writing scholarship since he introduced it in 2005. What is important about Barton’s view of the public sphere in terms of how Death persuades others is how Barton sees the need for more inclusion and less of a top-down, mass media/consumer binary. This webbed rhetoric is far closer to the feminist representation of Death and how she consensually deals with those who face her.

  In fact, a good example of a parody of rational-critical debate is the “family dinner” scene in “Season of Mist: Prologue” (Sandman 21). In it, Destiny is prompted by the Fates to refer to his book and then call all of his siblings (sans Destruction) for a face-to-face meeting. Given the wildly differing personalities involved, there is little hope for any rationality and plenty for the wrong kind of critical talk. All the same, it is predestined in his book, so he must do it. The first to arrive is Death, dressed in blue jeans and a black sleeveless top. She quickly changes, after being prompted by Destiny, to a more formal black dress, which is tight on top blossoming into a tutu below with coral beaded accents and a deep coral fob (21:5), reminiscent of Dolce and Gabbana or a shredded update of eighteenth-century elegance. Next is Dream, morose and elegant in a tricorn, a gold-trimmed driving coat, and skin-fitted trousers to rival any Regency buck (21:6). He is quickly followed by Desire and Despair, and at last, Delirium is summoned (21:7). Once they are seated around a seven-sided table, the scene quickly deteriorates into the kind of awkward silences and infighting that family does best (21:12–18). Finally Dream rises to Desire’s bait and storms out of the room, quickly followed by Death (21:19–20). The dinner table “debate,” interspersed with Delirium’s odd stream-of-consciousness narrative and Desire’s practiced taunting is far from rational and eerily like most current public political debates: petty, avoids anything of substance, and aims to hurt. In lieu of the travesty of a dinner party inside, one without dinner and without polite small talk, the conversation between Dream and Death in the garden is direct and goes straight to the point; Death considers Dream’s feelings, but also considers him enough of an adult to face facts; Dream needs to right a past wrong and Death unflinchingly states it. Dream replies, “Is this how you feel? Truly? That I have been unjust?” Death simply answers, “Yes,” leading Dream to state, “Very well, then. My course is clear” (21:22). His decision is emotional, but emotion based on his knowledge of his sister and her ethos. He trusts her judgment, leading to an easier meeting of the minds than through any family council, especially for a family like this, which has had centuries to disagree. Traditional debate with assumed opposing positions is a poor fit for human interaction where concerns are far less likely to be abstract and “sides” less clear. Death’s appeal to Dream’s sense of justice using his knowledge of her ethos was much more likely to succeed. Death’s reclaimed sophistic rhetoric works well while also allowing her to incorporate her feminine, feminist, emotional self.

  Another reclaimed rhetoric that connects well to the character Death appears in Patricia Bizzell’s “Praising Folly: Constructing a Postmodern Rhetorical Authority as a Woman.” In it, Bizzell uses an analysis of the 1515 Hans Holbein pen and ink drawing of Folly in Desiderius Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly to reclaim what could be viewed as a negative stereotype of women in order to construct a postmodern rhetorical authority. She begins by pointing out that Folly is in academic garb teaching a group of men who are also in academic regalia (27), a renaissance situation just as unlikely as Gaiman’s Death being young, female, perky, and in full goth regalia.

  Next, Bizzell points out the postmodern connection and the reason why this is a good female figure to reclaim. She writes that the fool “is allowed to wander over boundaries supposedly held inviolable; and again, insofar as we watch without preventing the violation, we become complicit in it” (34). The fool speaks truth and wanders freely, speaking forthrightly to emperors and sycophants alike. The pastiche of millennial times means many overlapping communities or discourse groups, many overlapping borders; Death speaks effectively to all by letting her appearance and good humor romance them and her intimate knowledge of what it means to be human allure them. Like Bizzell’s careful construction of a female rhetorical authority through the reclaimed female figure, Folly, the character Death is necessarily a creature of the borderlands, a term often associated with the work of Gloria Anzaldua and her new mestiza and mestiza consciousness. For Anzaldua, being Indian, Mexican, and living as an academic in a white world makes her declare the following about what that borderland would be like:

  So, don’t give me your tenets and your laws. Don’t give me your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks, and mortar and my own feminist architecture [44].

  Death’s metaphoric borderland, which is not inhabited by any “lukewarm gods,” is no small space; instead, it is a dimensional layer, overlapping all space and time. This eternal border is physically defined in “The Sound of Her Wings” (Sandman 8) when she walks the streets that are not the streets with her brother Dream. He muses:

  Soundlessly we travel.

  No heads turn to mark

  our passing.

  The churning crowd

  parts as we walk

  through it looking

  everywhere else

  but not at us.

  In the world of the

  waking, of the living,

  we move silent as a

  breath of cool wind [8:11].

  The haiku-like speech gives the context for their borderlands, their meta–Earth. She must walk in the spaces between heaven and Earth, must communicate with humans in the moment when communication seems beside the point but is in fact, of the utmost importance. Gaiman’s Death seeks understanding for those about to pass over and does it by performing consensus, by channeling her audience-of-one’s emotions into a more peaceful acceptance of the inevitable. As she tells Raine in “Façade” (Sandman 20):

  Anyway, I’m not blessed, or merciful ... I’m just me. I’ve got a job to do and I do it. Listen, even as we’re talking, I’m th
ere for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I’m in cars and boats and planes, in hospitals and forests and abattoirs. For some people death is a release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I’m there for all of them.

  This speech can be seen as simple declaration, but how it declares shows the feminist and consensual nature of Gaiman’s version of the character Death. She chooses existence and performance over manipulation. The empathic witness, in the end, is valued more than the most carefully chosen words.

  To show the reasons behind the declaration, when enacting her role, Death takes pains to be egalitarian; she aims for the commonalities rather than the supernatural differences between herself and humans. For instance, her iconic role is a “job,” not divine appointment, and her function is to be there, humbly, for all, an apt description for feminist mentoring, a form of persuasion which only works between equals. It also shows that to this Death, how her audience feels matters, and even though in the end her argument is the one that no human can win, she approaches it as a calm appeal to shared reason rather than an agonistic battle to be won. In this speech, Death reaches for consensus, even consubstantiation through her femininity, her calm “I’m just me,” and that stance is her feminist strength.

  Part of that strength is accepting rather than fighting the views of others. Bizzell states that through the voice of Folly, Erasmus “proceeds to demonstrate how to argue all sides of a question and to force the reader who attempts to make sense of her varying tones to see all sides of a question too” (37). The personified Folly in The Praise of Folly is female and historically a figure of ridicule rather than an icon of wisdom. The act of perceived folly is to show enough feminine weakness to acknowledge all alternate points of view and by doing so, let the reader make sense of the complete rhetorical situation. In Death’s case, or in the case of the mortals who face her when at the point of death, seeing multiple points of view rather than the bodily “I hurt” or “Why me” is the only path to acceptance, the way to bypass despair. By using consensus and the egalitarian stance of a feminist, the character Death exemplifies kairos—using the best persuasive tools at hand for her situation, a move any classical or contemporary rhetor would approve, but one especially valued by feminist rhetors such as Bizzell or Anzaldua. Finally, Bizzell describes acting the fool when persuading, or “the woman who adopts a mock-innocent rhetorical stance is thus enabled to break taboos about what may be spoken of,” with the caveat that even so, she may not be believed (40). Bizzell’s “hope is that the widespread hunger for compassion and for an expression of compassion in a more just social order will allow this speaker to be heard” (40–41). There is no situation more immediate, more pressing, than the moment of death. If Gaiman’s Death to the uninitiated (the living readers) seems a bit frivolous, even foolish in her perkiness and tattered folderols, it is only so she can use all the means at hand, even her living or not-so-living flesh, to ease one more spark of humanity to their natural and inevitable end. The living have no other mentor available in that moment than Death, and a compassionate Death is much more effective and uses kairos better that the traditionally dispassionate characterization.

  In terms of mentoring, the times when Death walks the Earth as human are the best examples of her feminist mentoring. This mentoring could be viewed as on-on-one consensus, a leading that is both sensual and consensual. The three-volume Death: The High Cost of Living is an extended mentoring piece, one where she shakes a young man named Sexton out of his precocious ennui and shows him not only what it is to live, but what its value is. Even the character’s name makes a point about his role: a sexton is the church official in charge of church property, usually the graveyard, and the name employs the obvious pun on “sex,” which is, of course, the ultimate consensus. It makes sense that Death would spend her one day on Earth in a century helping a Sexton.

  And she does help him, but as a mentor rather than an authority. In fact, the very word mentor may mislead with its lexical roots in “man.” However, it is the term still used even within feminist studies, despite being less top-down hierarchical and lacking the assumption of an all-male polis. In order to practice feminist mentoring, one must avoid an unequal power construct where the relationship is a simple sending and receiving from mentor to mentee. In other words, this is not the business school form of mentoring where a powerful vice president takes an up-and-comer under his wing; this form of mentoring demands a letting loose of power, a setting aside, so that the mentor can fully understand the mentee’s needs as an equal. Using the mentoring situations typical of graduate school, Janice Lauer, well known for her feminist scholarship, states that “this process of mentoring and graduate student professional development contributes to an ethic of care” (234). This ethic of care, a now common term originated by Lauer that is used to describe the feminist approach to mentoring, means that even though the mentor has knowledge the mentee does not, the mentor approaches the mentee as an equal and does not co-opt her cognitive processes; instead the mentor gives what knowledge is needed, but treats the mentee as equal by letting the mentee work out her or his own way to the answer. In other words, care, an emotional and ethical point-of-view, is part of the mentorship role. Instead of acting as the superior giving instructions, the feminist approach to mentoring repositions the mentor as a co-equal, one ready to assist but not impose. Just like in the best poetry, the trick is to show, not tell. Death in the human form of Didi cares about Sexton and wants him to enjoy the tremendous gift he has, that of being alive. Her best persuasion, aside from the example she gives through her actions of living each moment to the utmost and accepting it all—good and bad—is when they walk in Central Park. She listens to Sexton, letting him share his own troubles in more words and more reflectively than he has spoken before (3:15). Her response, after a few attempts at metaphor, is to answer directly his question about whether she enjoyed bad things along with the good: “No, I didn’t like that. But ... it’s part of the whole thing and there is a whole thing out there. And it’s all part of living. The good bits and the bad bits and the dull bits and the painful bits” (3:16). Through her mentoring, Death exhibits an “ethic of care” in order to show Sexton how to live, not just exist—even through the bad bits.

  Through the countless years, the emotions, the deaths, and the temporary experiences of living, Death constructs her own gender, her own feminism, and does it through a sequence of performative acts, as do we all. She earns her perkiness. Laboring through the centuries, through the initial sadness, the rejection of her role, her reborn acceptance, and through her continuing return to a temporary humanity, she has earned an irrepressible joy. That perkiness, which after all, is just joy with a thin layer of mockery given to it by those who think they are better than the young and female, that perkiness is a most persuasive and engaging emotion, one that allows Death to approach mortals with sincerity and a sense of equality, even though she literally holds their fate in her hands. She chooses consensus, she chooses to mentor, and that choice is of a piece with her femininity and yes, her feminism. After all, death is bad enough without adding the agony of agonistic persuasion on top of it. What could be viewed as perkiness and disparaged as silly female emotion is really a positive, consensual approach to persuasion, one that uses kairos, the available means, and allows those near the embodied Death to embrace a consensual decision and have peace.

  WORKS CITED

  Amos, Tori. “Afterword: Death.” Eds. Neil Gaiman and Ed Kramer. New York: HarperTorch, 1996. 393–395. Print.

  Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera: the New Mestiza. 3d ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007. Print.

  Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

  Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’
s, 2004. 152–163. Print.

  Barton, Matthew D. “The Future of Rational-critical Debate in Online Public Spheres.” Computers and Composition. 22 (2005): 177–190. Print.

  Bizzell, Patricia. “Praising Folly: Constructing a Postmodern Rhetorical Authority as a Woman.” Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in American Compostion and Rhetoric. Eds. Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Janet Emig. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. 27–42. Print.

  Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

  Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. London: Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1887. Print.

  Gaiman, Neil (w), John Bolton (p). “The Road to Nowhere.” Books of Magic #4 (Feb. 1991), New York: DC Comics. Print.

  _____ (w), Dave McKean (i). Death Talks about Life. New York: Vertigo-DC Comics, 1994. Print.