Unlike Clea Strange, who is very vocal when it comes to taking charge of a situation, Susan Storm does so almost imperceptibly. If Clea’s role is associated with the act of speaking, Susan’s is related to the act of listening. Throughout most of the story Susan remains on the sidelines as a sister and a wife, invisible literally as well as metaphorically. By the end of the series, however, while the rest of the main characters try to figure out a way to save their world from the temporal anomaly, it is Susan that steps in and subtlety solves a major dilemma. She is able to convince Donal to become the god Thor again because of her “active” listening:
DONAL: Do you think ... do you think if I were to become him again, that I would ever let myself change back into this?
SUSAN STORM: Donal. Is he wiser than you? [...]
DONAL: Aye. His mind—it’s like a silver fish in a clear brook. Everything is simple for him.
SUSAN: Then why don’t you let him decide?
DONAL: You were listening to me, weren’t you?
SUSAN: I told you I was.
DONAL: Damn you. Damn you all. [transforms into Thor]
THOR: You are wiser than all of them, Susan Storm.
SUSAN: No, I just listened when he spoke [8:21].
Susan’s special skill besides invisibility is, then, the oxymoron of being an “active” listener. With those two rather “passive” characteristics combined, Susan Storm remains an absent character throughout most of the action. She is never seen and is barely heard throughout the entire series. As such, Susan’s role could be seen then as one that underscores the lack of representation, or invisibility, of women characters in action-centered narratives. In the scene of the dialogue quoted earlier, for example, despite the fact that Susan is present is the room from the beginning (one would assume), her presence can only be visually perceived in the panels in which she has lines. In a manner most suited for an invisible woman, it is her absence in the panels that speaks volumes.
Clea Strange and Susan Storm are both emblematic opposites of how “voice” can be a motif used to subvert complicitous discourses within a postmodern historiographic metafiction to underline a feminist critique. Another noteworthy example of this motif is, however, seen in the male role of Werner, the X-man Angel of this reality. If, as Sanders points out, the “retrieval of lost or repressed” voices is a common motif in re-writings, Angel stands out for being one of the very few characters that works as first-person narrator to the story (140). In the original X-Men series, Angel’s character, an arrogant multi-billionaire playboy, would probably not have been qualified as a “lost or repressed” voice, but his situation is drastically changed in the reality of 1602. Within this context he is in a much more vulnerable position. First of all, he does not have any material possessions and is rescued from the Inquisition stake with only the clothes on his body, making him the last to join Javier’s pupils in the College for the Sons of Gentlefolk. The most remarkable change of this character in relation to the original version is, however, his homoerotic relationship with Master “John” Grey. Queer characters are not exactly novel in the Marvel universe but their roles have been somewhat minor and their sexuality is often downplayed. A classic example is Northstar. Despite John Byrne’s claim that the hero was conceived in 1979 as a gay character, open references to his sexuality did not appear in the comic until 1992 (“Comic Strips and Books,” “Questions”). In this re-writing, however, not only is queerness associated with one of the original X-men, but with one of the very few characters, the only one in Javier’s team for example, that acts as a first-person narrator, thus making his role pivotal to the story.
Epistemologically, to say that Angel could be seen as a queer character in the 1602 universe would be much more appropriate than to refer to him as a gay or as a homosexual character. As Michel Foucault argues, homosexuality was not seen as an expression of sexuality until the late nineteenth century, “when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul” (History of Sexuality 43). The sinful act of sodomy had been seen until then as a “temporary aberration;” it was only around the late nineteenth century that the homosexual effectively became a pathological identity or a “species” (43). As such, to view homoeroticism or same-sex desire as manifestations of a “gay” or “homosexual” sexuality in the Renaissance age would incur in an anachronistic and socially inaccurate portrayal. Borrowing Eve Sedgwick’s words on the relation between the speaker “Will” and the “Fair Youth” in Shakespeare’s sonnets, “within the world sketched [here], there is not an equal opposition or a choice posited between two such institutions as homosexuality (under whatever name) and heterosexuality” (35). Accordingly, thus, the question of identity related to Angel’s sexuality does not come up in 1602. In the final issue of the series, though, Angel explains his feelings for “John” Grey: “I was truly deceived, and thought that Jean Grey was a man. But I do believe I was in love with that young man” (8:11). Not unlike the speaker in Shakespeare’s sonnets, Werner does not deny his feelings for the “Fair Youth,” John Grey. On the contrary, he owns them throughout.
As a first-person narrator, Angel brings to the surface some of the parallels between mutants and queers, a long withstanding metaphor: “My people—for so I think of them, although we are not united by country or creed, we are joined by our strangeness, made one by our differences—my people are hopeful, I think, but also scared” (6:6). Concurrently, the metaphor of the closet is also embedded in the doubleness of this speech, for the witchbreed are constantly forced to hide themselves in the effort to pass as humans. The ability to appear as human, or at least as non-witchbreed, is essential to their survival much like the closet is for a lot of queers. After spending a whole life in hiding, Angel fully appreciates the freedom of being true to himself, of being out of the closet, as a mutant:
One gets used to hiding. After a while it becomes second nature ... I am grateful to Sir Javier for so much—for my life, obviously, and all that he is teaching. But most of all I am grateful that here, I can be myself. At least here, among ourselves, friend John, there is no need, ever, to hide [3:10].
Which of course is not entirely true, since his interlocutor in this scene, Master “John” Grey, is actually a woman forced to disguise as a man to be able to belong to the group and enjoy the liberties that would otherwise be denied her in the time period.
Unlike Angel, who is both literally and metaphorically able to spread his wings at any time, Jean “John” Grey is constantly under the scrutiny of her suitor, Scotius Summerisle, and is kept at a distance from the decision-making process of the group and from contact with outside people. Cross-dressing gives Jean some liberties, but still does not set her free from the gender roles of the time. For instance, at a crucial point in the narrative Javier’s group is forced to decide a course of action that could land them in the Tower to be judged as traitors; which prompts a lively debate between the members. Each voices their opinion on the matter—except for Master John Grey, who just stands quietly next to the professor. Visually, Jean’s lower status in the group is clear in this scene. As their debate occupies the entire page, four panels are dedicated to close-ups of Scott, Werner, McCoy, and Roberto with their respective opinions on the matter. The final panel is wider and shows Javier addressing the messenger Peter Parquagh, while Jean is positioned in the far left corner, almost out of the page, in a darker space, completely separated from the other characters, silent (4:15).
Grey’s role in the group is well summed up in the very first introduction of her character to Angel: “He speaks but little” (1:33). In a world where women are not permitted simple liberties such as walking unaccompanied, the farce of John Grey is a “convenient fiction,” as Scotius puts it (7:12). Maybe a more appropriate word to describe Grey’s pretense would be “necessary.” Looking up the history of women in England in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf concludes that, despite being praised and glorified in
verse and stage, women of those times were in reality insignificant, as they were “locked up, beaten and flung about the room” (590). This would be the fate expected of Jean Grey if it were not for the recourse of cross-dressing, which enables her, at least partially, to belong to a world outside of the domestic sphere. Perhaps that is why there was much “cultural anxiety about women wearing men’s clothes” at the time (Rampone, Jr. 42). King James expressed concern especially about women sporting wide hats, doublets, and short hair, whereas “the popular literature and ballads of the day focused on the pants as the center of male power” (42). Men in power were concerned that women would appropriate known signals of patriarchy (42). In this sense this is exactly what happens in 1602. Despite Werner’s naiveté, there are clear indicators that Grey is female. In the script for the scene where Grey is first introduced to Werner, Gaiman writes to artist Andy Kubert:
Page 27 panel 6. A shot of Master Grey—in “his” monk’s robe, at the back of the boat. He is smiling, and has raised a hand. “His” hair is short, like a girl’s, but c’mon, this has got to be a beautiful red-haired girl in male drag. Scott keeps talking...
The script indicates how the visual narrative element can work to subvert the concurrent discourses on the page. In this particular sense, the visual narrative underlines the inherent performative character of gender, borrowing Judith Butler’s definition of the term. If, as Butler argues, gender is an assignment that is “never quite carried out according to expectation,” the obviousness of Master Grey’s female identity only works to expose the regulatory ideals that guide that performance (231).
As a universe that favors stories, 1602’s heterotopia manages to revisit not only those stories of the classic superhero age but also the fabric of history itself, which, as it turns out, is just another story as well. The self-consciousness of this historiographic metanarrative is seen in several passages where the text gently “nudges” the reader and points to the implicit doubleness of the narrative. Such duplicity carries an inherently political tone, which, as Hutcheon argues, is one of the main aspects of the postmodernist fiction. Recalling Rich’s definition: re-vision is “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction,” and in a lot of ways Gaiman’s heterotopia does exactly that (18). Perhaps a simple re-writing, such as seen in titles like Elseworlds or What If—in which known heroes of the DC and Marvel worlds are placed in alternative scenarios and realities—would not be seen as being re-visions per se in the context of this debate. 1602, however, is packed with political innuendo and double meanings for the reader, all the while dealing with a host of all-too-familiar characters in not-at-all familiar situations. Gaiman affirms in a press conference that reading 1602’s narrative simply as an Elseworlds or a What If does not get the reader very far (Weiland). The author refers to the fact that, unlike these other titles, 1602 is not just an imaginary story outside the universe’s continuity; it is set in the actual Marvel universe, only one that saw the rise of the mutant age 400 years too early. 1602’s novelty is its critical edge: it is a re-visionist work.
WORKS CITED
Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Print.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discoursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Print.
“Comic Strips and Books.” The Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures. Vol. 2. New York: Garland, 2000. Print.
Fleming, James. “Incommensurable Ontologies and the Return of the Witness in Neil Gaiman’s 1602.” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 4.1 (2008). Print.
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality—Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Print.
_____. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Fraser, Antonia. The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605. London: Orion, 1996. Print.
Gaiman, Neil (w), Andy Kubert (a, i). Marvel 1602. #1–8 (Nov. 2003—June 2004), New York: Marvel. Print.
Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Brave New World: A History of Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. Print.
“Questions about Comic Books Projects.” Byrne Robotics. N.p., 21 Jan. 2012. Web. 30 Jan. 2012.
Rampone, W. Reginald, Jr. Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2011. Print.
Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English 34.1 (1972): 18–30. Print.
Robinson, Bruce. “The Gunpowder Plot.” BBC History. Web. 26 Jan. 2012.
Sanders, Julia. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Print.
Weiland, Jonah. “Marvel’s ‘1602’ Press Conference.” 27 June 2003. Comic Book Resources. Web. 21 Aug. 2011.
Woolf, Viriginia. A Room of One’s Own. Selected Works of Virginia Woolf. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2007. Print.
Outfoxed
Feminine Folklore and Agency in The Dream Hunters
BY CORALLINE DUPUY
In 1999, Neil Gaiman was immersed in Japanese folklore while writing the English version of the dialogue for revered Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke. In order to translate and adapt the story, Gaiman closely studied Japanese folklore and was fascinated by its riveting imagery and nuances. He saw his task as being the mediator between Japanese culture and non–Japanese audiences and aimed “to try and fold in enough background surreptitiously” (cited by McCabe 9). His fascination with Japanese culture soon lead to an artistic collaboration with revered Japanese graphic artist Yoshitaka Amano, who painted Dream for a poster to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Sandman #1 (Gaiman “Afterword”). Together, Gaiman and Amano created The Dream Hunters, the ill-fated love story about a kitsune (fox spirit) and a young monk. The story takes several themes and characters from The Sandman series and places them in a Japanese folkloric context. In a fascinating interview with Joseph McCabe, Amano explains that it was his reluctance to collaborate with Gaiman on a comic that motivated the decision to make The Dream Hunters a piece of illustrated prose fiction. P. Craig Russell later made his own set of illustrations for the story, resulting in the fully realized “comic adaptation” of the novel. Both the Amano version and the Russell version were recently anthologized in the Absolute Sandman.
The story’s title alludes to a Japanese folk tale about mythical creatures. In the rich world of Japanese deities, demons, and spirits, the Baku are Dream Eaters, spirits whom humans may invoke to get rid of ominous dreams. While the Baku are the Dream Eaters, the identity of the Dream Hunters in the title is hidden until the end of the story.
The Dream Hunters opens with a battle of wits between a badger and a fox to see who can drive a monk from his temple. As the two creatures vie for the temple, in another city, an evil trio of powerful witch-like women also conspire against the monk, but in a much more sinister manner. These women are The Dream Hunters’ incarnation of Sandman’s Kindly Ones, Stardust’s Lilim, or the three Fates. The unnamed creatures of this unholy female trinity give the villainous lord, the onmyoji, the means to hurt the innocent young monk.
Initially, the story appears to be centered on its male figure, the monk. This quickly changes, as the female character of the fox gains prominence in the tale. The fox is an independent, self-sacrificing agent of love and healing. She is a strong, determined character who secretly barters access to knowledge and help. Using her magic, she is able to appear in different forms, including a beautiful young woman. In her human guise, s
he falls for the monk as he falls for her, setting in motion a series of events that can only end in ruin. Initially a playful trickster, the fox emerges as the most complex and fascinating character of the narrative. She represents a female dissenting voice, a protester who fights for self-expression and who endeavors to wrestle control.
The monk, fox, and badger live in an idyllic mountain setting. After introducing these characters, the story shifts to Kyoto, where the Lord of Yin-Yang (ironically named, since he is quite unbalanced) is a powerful wizard and statesman. The onmyoji’s household contains several minor female characters, including a wife who “treated him in every way as a wife should treat a husband,” a “very beautiful” concubine who is “barely seventeen,” and servants (40). These details prepare the reader for a man who is used to women being subservient, pretty, and young—details that the clever fox will use against him at the end of the story. Despite his wealth and power, the onmyoji knows no rest because his life is overshadowed by fear: “He was frightened. And the fear stole the joy from any moments of pride or happiness, and leeched the pleasure from his life” (42). The course of the two sets of characters (rural and urban, poor and wealthy, honorable and dishonest, good and evil) collide when the onmyoji requests help from three mysterious witches who weave a spell to steal the monk’s strength and peaceful life-force through three consecutive poisoned dreams.
Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Page 20