Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Tara Prescott

  The initial reveal of the protagonist Orchid in the Gaiman comic also makes her the visual center of the scene. Up to that point, and in fact throughout the comic, all the characters have been painted in extremely desaturated colors. Orchid, here and throughout the work, is painted in striking shades of purple. Gaiman’s dialogue, though, pairs with the art in this scene to caution against the objectification of the heroine. The man who removes her disguise remarks solely on her appearance in a manner that immediately objectifies her: “Oh, nice. Verry pretty. You got one of those costumes under there too? Ohhh Yesss. Pretty in purple!” (1:7). This man goes on to kill Orchid. In this scene, the first scene where we see any version of Orchid, the only person who comments on her appearance is a villain, and he does so as a verbal slap in the face. In fact, throughout the Gaiman and McKean version, no one but the antagonists ever comment on Orchid’s appearance.

  By contrast, in the 1973 version, Orchid’s appearance is a frequent subject of commentary by characters on both sides of the law and even by the narrator. In the second issue, the narrator even introduces her in a manner that places equal emphasis on her superpowers and her looks: “She has the strength of a regiment, flies through the air like a bird of prey ... and has the beauty and compassion of a young girl!” The narrator of Gaiman’s Black Orchid, Orchid herself, only comments on her appearance once. This aspect of the text demonstrates the extreme to which Gaiman and McKean’s version deviates from the original.

  The final issue of Gaiman’s Black Orchid closes much as Gaiman’s first issue began, with an emphasis on Orchid’s consciousness. Another triptych closes the final issue, this time a three-panel image series of Black Orchid silhouetted against a setting sun. The first of these panels flanks the image with thought bubbles, just as in the first panel of the first issue. However, while the series’ opening displays an orchid icon, a stand-in for the actual Orchid, in the final panel, Orchid has shrunk into the upper distance, barely discernible against the light of the sun, and a thought bubble appears in the center instead. If the beginning of the series drew attention to Orchid’s mind, the final image makes her consciousness inescapably central.

  Just as in the first three panels of the entire series, the dialogue in the last three again emphasizes feeling and desire rather than action: “The flight will be long, and tiring, but I can caress the updrafts of the wind with my form. I am alive in the colors of the leaves, and in the sunset, and in the moist tropical air” (3:48). Orchid’s final words leave her plan of action ambiguous: “I have never been more alive. And together we soar, we climb, we ascend. Together. Into the sun” (3:48). This ending leaves the narration situated within Orchid’s consciousness. This deviates from classic superhero comics, which typically end with the same third-person narration with which they begin. Gaiman’s ending is especially striking in comparison to the original Black Orchid, in which each issue closes on a male character from that episode musing about Black Orchid and her identity. These endings intimate that Orchid’s existence in her own right is secondary to her existence as an object in the thoughts of even minor male characters. Gaiman’s use of first-person narration radically increases the importance of Orchid’s consciousness.

  If the opening and closing of Gaiman’s Black Orchid series emphasize Orchid’s subjectivity, the plot makes her subjectivity absolutely essential. Her first spoken line is “Who am I?” (1:19). Finding the answer to this question becomes Orchid’s guiding quest. Orchid, as rewritten by Gaiman, is not an action hero in the traditional sense. In fact, with her first-person narration and the extent to which the story is driven by her search for self, Orchid seems more like the protagonist of a fictional autobiography. If we view Black Orchid as ultimately a story about the search for self-knowledge, it mirrors characteristics of nineteenth-century women’s autobiography as a text that is particularly concerned with parentage and parenting.

  Soon after her initial awakening (which could perhaps better be described as a birth), Orchid encounters the man who helped create her, Phil Sylvian. Orchid directly asks, “Are you my father?” to which he replies, “Yes. Yes, I suppose I am ... in a way” (1:34). Sylvian is Orchid’s first stop in her search for her identity. But ultimately, Sylvian, Orchid’s “father,” proves ineffectual in helping her establish a sense of self. He describes her history, or rather Susan Linden’s history. He also explains some of the science behind her creation. However, he cannot satisfactorily explain her identity in her current incarnation except as a matter of DNA. He cannot explain who Orchid is in terms of her consciousness. After Sylvian is murdered, Orchid is even more lost in terms of her identity: “If I could be what Phil wanted me to be.... If I knew what he wanted.... If I knew what we were...” (2:23). Orchid’s “father” dies, leaving her directionless.

  Another type of ineffective father is present in the figure of Susan Linden’s father, shown in flashbacks in Black Orchid. Mr. Linden runs to the opposite extreme from Phil Sylvian, but he proves no less ineffective. Linden attempts to tightly control Susan’s identity. He sees her as “Daddy’s little girl” and attempts to lock her into that version of herself. In short, he tries to keep Susan a child and reacts violently to anything that threatens that childhood. In this case, a prepubescent kiss between Phil and Susan drives her father into a rage and results in Susan running away from home. She reaches adulthood on her own, with no father for guidance. Where Sylvian proves inept and weak, unwilling or unable to direct Orchid, Mr. Linden proves too controlling, too determined to force Susan into an identity she is outgrowing.

  Gaiman’s text offers yet another father, less literal but no less symbolically potent. In terms of Orchid’s identity as a superhero, Batman is one of her most prominent predecessors, and in a metatextual sense, he is another kind of father to Orchid. In the Gaiman story, Batman appears and leads Orchid to Pamela Isley, one of Sylvian’s colleagues, who may have information to help Orchid decipher what or who she is. Once that avenue fails, Batman tells her how to find Alec Holland (the Swamp Thing), the last of Phil’s surviving colleagues. On a metatextual level, however, Batman stands in for Orchid’s fathers in the superhero genre. He gives her guidance in her own detective work, but he is unable to give her answers about her identity. Ultimately, Orchid leaves Batman behind much as Susan leaves Mr. Linden. On a metaphorical level, this is representative of the text, Black Orchid, leaving behind the traditional superhero comic tropes in search of a new space where a female hero like Black Orchid can establish her own identity.

  The fact that Black Orchid’s search for identity leads her to father figures who are ultimately unable to help ties to the “anxiety of authorship” theorized by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar rework Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence” felt by authors, who are necessarily subject to the influence of their precursors in the field but who must also break away from that influence and strive for originality. In the hands of Gilbert and Gubar, the “anxiety of authorship” refers more specifically to the struggle of women writers to write themselves into a patriarchal literary tradition that includes few female precursors. Gilbert and Gubar make the case that even the few women who formed a part of the early literary canon were suspect, writing less with their own voices than they were with the voices of the patriarchal codes they were unable to overcome. A woman writer, particularly in the nineteenth century, which is the focus of much of The Madwoman in the Attic, had to invent not only a new literary tradition that included a space for women but also to invent herself, lacking, as she did, a literary “mother” in the canon.

  Gilbert and Gubar’s theory applies to women writers, not to characters, but in a sense, Gaiman’s Orchid attempts to write herself, to give herself a story. To do so, she must grapple with the reality that, though a woman, she must model herself using only the limited definitions of woman available in the hegemonic patriarchal narrative tradition would “reduce her to extreme stereoty
pes (angel, monster) [which will] drastically conflict with her sense of self” (Gilbert and Gubar 48). These extreme archetypes of femininity, the Angel in the House and the prostitute, lingered longer in that most masculine of genres (superhero comics) than in many other literary genres of the twentieth century.

  Like the nineteenth-century women writers that were the focus of Gilbert and Gubar’s work, Gaiman’s Black Orchid lacks a female precursor. The story of who the original Orchid was and why she became a superhero is fragmented and murky. The Gaiman text offers at least four separate plot-significant versions of Orchid. In addition to the incarnation of Orchid whose search for identity forms the majority of the story, there is Susan Linden, whose DNA was cloned to make the first Orchids. There is also the Orchid clone who dies in the first few pages of the text. Finally, there is “Suzy,” the partially-matured Orchid clone who becomes a daughter/sister/sidekick to Orchid.

  These multiple versions of Orchid call into question the boundaries between self and other. Each of these four share DNA, and to an extent Orchid sees these alternate versions as a possible clue to her own identity. She turns to the history of Susan Linden, but ultimately Linden’s history can’t satisfy Orchid as to her current identity. Orchid ultimately recognizes Linden as a separate individual, not as herself. The Orchid who dies in the beginning of the Gaiman text also provides few clues to the identity of the new version of Orchid. Orchid (and the reader) knows very little about that predecessor, except that she died and that, according to the best guess of Alec Holland, she “appointed herself to fight ... crime. Perhaps ... she sought revenge ... for Susan’s death.... Perhaps ... that is too ... simple ... an explanation” (3:7). In other words, the history of Orchid’s decision to become a superhero is left murky. The relationship between Orchid and Suzy is also slippery. Orchid most often refers to Suzy as “sister.” However, near the end of the text, Suzy refers to Orchid as “Mom” (3:47). The identities and the relationship between the identities are fluid, blurred.

  In fact, Black Orchid is a text full of multiplicities and eliding boundaries. Orchid’s identity is the most uncertain, but other characters’ identities are evasive and unreliable. Pamela Isley (Poison Ivy) appears in the text as a villain imprisoned in Arkham Asylum. Before we encounter Isley, we see the results of one of her cruel and gruesome experiments, a rat-eating cat-plant hybrid. The cat looks eerily like the result of a vivisection, with bleeding, fleshy tendons on top of its head. Isley rejects Orchid’s desperate plea for help: “I never got any breaks, you know. I screwed up my life on my own, with no help on the way down from anybody else. You can damn well do the same” (2:40). Up to and including this point in the text, Isley acts as an antagonist, or at least a character designed to draw no sympathy from the reader. However, after Orchid leaves, Isley breaks down in tears, mourning the death of Phil Sylvian, revealing a complexity that blurs her identity as a villain in this text. The same blurring occurs with Carl Thorne, the man who murdered Susan Linden, the majority of her clones, and Phil Sylvian. As the primary villain in the story, Thorne seeks to murder the Orchid whose story guides the text. Nevertheless, his actions at the end of the story save Orchid’s life, when he shoots the men who were sent to slaughter her. In an interesting confluence of events, Thorne’s final line emphasizes the lack of boundaries to Orchid’s identity: “You aren’t Susan. You never were. You aren’t anything...” (3:42). Orchid, of course, isn’t “anything,” in the sense that she is not any one thing in particular.

  The blurring boundaries between Orchid and her other selves is also reflected in Black Orchid’s unusual art style. Most mainstream superhero comics up to the 1980s utilized bold linework, which gave objects and characters solid visual boundaries. McKean’s art for Black Orchid, however, mostly uses very fluid washes of watercolor. Orchid’s body, in particular, lacks finite and definitive boundaries. In almost every panel in which she appears, her hair and legs fade into the scenery. Julia Round, in her exploration of feminism in Black Orchid, claims that McKean “subverts the superheroic” with a “feminised aesthetic” (10, 3). Certainly, as she points out, “the Orchids are not costumed or linked to any specific logo,” unlike nearly every other superhero in mainstream comics (10). Instead, after a short homage to the 1973 Orchid costume, McKean depicts Orchid in the nude. It may seem that Orchid’s unclothed state emphasizes her body more than the skintight costumes worn by most superheroines. McKean, however, delays the depiction of Orchid’s body and minimizes the detail in which her body is painted in order to de-emphasize her corporeality. His illustrations work hand in hand with Gaiman’s writing to emphasize Orchid’s consciousness rather than her body.

  Orchid’s lack of costume also seems appropriate to the unformed nature of her identity. The use of a costume is a kind of declaration of self that Orchid cannot participate in, since her selfhood is unformed. She does assert deliberate control over her appearance at one point in the text, but only to hide and not as a way of declaring her identity. In order to board a train, she takes on a human appearance. When someone comments on her violet eyes, she changes them to blue. She muses that “appearance is the simplest thing. Pigment and petal only” (2:25). But without a clear sense of the identity she wants to establish, a visual representation of that identity is meaningless.

  McKean’s softer, atmospheric renderings reverberate with third-wave feminist critiques of binaries. In her essay “Sorties,” Hélène Cixous casts binary oppositions as characteristic of masculine writing and thinking. Feminine writing, she argues, must reject these firm and oppositional binaries and instead embody “the very possibility of change.” She characterizes feminine writing as open and multiple, traits which Gaiman’s Black Orchid certainly exhibits. This is not to say that such essentialist feminist thought is particularly convincing, or that Gaiman and McKean are men who are somehow writing an essentially female text. However, the openness and multiplicities within Black Orchid add to the ways in which this text attempts to establish a new way to approach feminine subjectivity in mainstream superhero comics.

  If Black Orchid describes a complex relationship between Orchid and men as father figures, the relationship between Orchid and men as lovers is no less complex. Orchid’s encounter with Alec Holland (the Swamp Thing) is in some ways the climax of this text, or at least of Orchid’s search for a metaphysical selfhood. In this scene, Holland essentially impregnates Orchid, giving her the new identity and direction as mother. This placement of Orchid’s moment of enlightenment is appropriate, given that Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing was the superhero comic closest in narrative style to that used in Black Orchid and undoubtedly a strong influence on the Gaiman text.

  When Orchid finally meets Holland, she kneels before him like a child, thinking, “I’ve never met a god before. He’s beautiful” (3:9). Throughout the scene, she maintains a childish, slumped posture and diminutive height (compared to Holland). Her language breaks away from the fairly controlled, spare dialogue of the bulk of the text into emotionally-charged, rushed, overlong sentences: “And I thought you were dead, but the masked man said you were here. And I didn’t know where else to go ... and I’m here and I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t know what I am and I don’t like it and, and, it’s...” Holland hushes and comforts her. The “seeds” he gives her are literal ones, so although the fertilization here is technically sexual, requiring both a male and a female “plant,” it is accomplished without sexual intercourse.

  Nevertheless, this is the most sexually charged scene in the text. A brief exchange between Holland and his wife, Abigail Holland, points out the tension between the sexual and asexual natures of Orchid’s encounter with Holland:

  “Alec? Who was that?”

  “She was ... is ... an old friend ... of an old friend. I was ... giving her ... babies.”

  “Uh. Right. Y’know, Alec. I, uh, I think we’re going to have to have a talk about this” [3:9].

  Throughout the rest of Black Orchid, although Orchi
d is depicted in the nude, she is drawn without detailed postsecondary sexual characteristics. Nipples are absent, and pubic or any other body hair is never indicated specifically. In this scene with Holland, however, for the only instance in the entire story, Orchid’s nipples appear (3:4). Orchid’s more sexually complete appearance in this scene indicates the sexual awakening she experiences with Holland.

  Ultimately, whether we read this scene as sexual or not, and whether we read Holland as a lover or a father or something entirely different, the aspects of the interaction most important to the story are the information and seeds that Orchid receives. In other words, this is ultimately a results-based encounter, and the results are both things that Orchid can take and use for herself as tools in forming her own identity. As Holland asserts, “How the story ends...? That is your affair” (3:8). The sexual awakening implied in this encounter requires that Orchid have a lover, but ultimately he merely acts as a necessary stage in her journey. The formation of her identity is still left to her.

  Black Orchid presents motherhood as the most effective means for Orchid to establish an identity, although in the end even this is not entirely satisfying for Orchid. In the first portion of the text, Orchid meanders, directionless, except for the guiding question “Who am I?” Once she is in possession of the seeds, or what Holland calls “babies,” Orchid takes on a more protective role toward Suzy, her partially-matured clone. She rescues Suzy from her kidnappers with the only feat of strength she exhibits in the story, ripping the door off an armored car. More importantly, Orchid establishes a concrete goal—to find a place where she and Suzy and the seeds can be safe. Orchid must create a home. It is important to note that the seeds Holland gives Orchid are taken from within Orchid’s own chest.