The witches are knowledgeable and powerful, yet they obey the onmyoji and work for him, a relationship that echoes Macbeth. They are clearly dangerous and their destructive aspect is reflected in the description of their dwelling:
On the outskirts of the city, where thieves and the brigands and the unclean lived, the Master of Yin-Yang kept a dilapidated house, and in that house there were three women: one old, one young, and one who was neither young nor old. The women sold herbs and remedies to women who found themselves in unfortunate situations. It was whispered that unwary travellers who stopped in that house for the night were often never seen again [42].
The liminal location of their dwelling on “the outskirts” signifies their isolation from society and by extension their distance from social and moral strictures. Their seclusion is also an indication of their evil nature, according to the paradigms of Japanese fairy tales: “Demons frequent abandoned storehouses or abandoned chapels, the upper stories of city gates, mountain clearings, bridges, and other obviously twilight-zone places” (Tyler 48). But the strongest evidence of their power and dark skill is the line that alludes to the ways in which they cater to “women who found themselves in unfortunate situations” (42). This simple sentence does not engage in a debate about whether facilitating an abortion helps an unfortunate woman or destroys a life. Instead, it emphasizes the way they capitalize on the misfortune of others. Their role as abortion facilitators is a common attribute of witches in several cultures. In popular folklore, witches often prey on children. In particular, the Russian baba-yaga is a terrifying figure who can travel fast. She has no fixed location, since her house is built on chicken legs. Moreover, the baba-yaga can travel through the air in her giant mortar and pestle so that she can swoop down on children and abduct them. The reference, seemingly in passim (but this seeming nonchalance is an illusion), to the termination of pregnancies purposely emphasizes the three witches’ power and aligns them with a certain folktale tradition of female predators. Several of the witches’ other characteristics fulfill the same function; firmly placing them within this frame of reference. At the end of the tale, after their home burns down, the text reveals: “No one knows if they were in the house when it burned, for the only remains that were found in the ashes were the bones and skulls of babes and of small children” (118).
The three witches in Dream Hunters are repeating characters (or a three-in-one character) from Gaiman’s work, an element he borrows and expands upon from earlier tales. The fact that the triad is female is particularly important. As Mary Borsellino notes, “Femininity is very much an elemental force, most commonly seen in triad: maiden, mother, crone” (52). To the reader familiar with Gaiman’s universe, the three women echo the Fates as well as specific members of the Endless. The youngest woman, or the maiden, is a vampire-like femme fatale with “cold lips” and “cold fingers” (46). Like the Velvets in Neverwhere, her cold beauty is alluring and lethal: “The onmyoji was most afraid of the youngest of the three women, for he suspected that she was not alive” (46). The middle-aged woman, or the mother, is endowed with traditionally female breasts, but they are made grotesque and animal-like: “down her chest curved two rows of breasts, like the breasts of a she-pig or a rat, her many nipples black and hard as so many lumps of charcoal” (46). The old woman, or the crone, has physical attributes similar to Despair: “She was naked, and her breasts hung like empty bags upon her chest, and on her face she had painted the face of a demon” (42).
Amano’s luscious two-page spread illustration of the three witches in repose bears a striking resemblance to Gustav Klimt’s famous 1905 painting The Three Ages of Woman (44–45). This is no coincidence, as Amano acknowledges his admiration for Klimt and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Three Ages of Woman is a massive work depicting a young woman at its center, her head bowed down and nestling against the head of a child she cradles against her, while an elderly wrinkled woman covers her eyes and stands on the left. All three are naked. Klimt’s palette of colors—charcoal, brown, cream, and black punctuated by bursts of gold leaf, burnished reds and oranges, and deep violet—are also reinterpreted and reimagined in Amano’s work. According to Viennese Secession art critic Gottfried Fliedl, Klimt wanted to give a pictorial representation of the never-ending cycle of life and death that would emphasize the fragility of the young child in the center (Fliedl 43). However, one cannot help noticing that the mysterious older woman on the left garners the viewer’s attention. Whereas the young woman and the child interact with one other, the older woman is clearly excluded. The picture is far more ambiguous than its straightforward title might indicate. The title creates an illusion of simplicity and direct meaning; the title tells the viewer that this is a representation of youth, maturity, and old age. The complexity of the picture generates several interpretations and shatters this illusion. Amano’s depiction of the three witches reflects and distorts Klimt’s work. The Three Ages of Women evokes youth, fertility, and love (as well as old age and despair), but Amano’s work only shows lust, despair, and old age. The three witches are the visual embodiment of the frightening, dark side of the picture, whereas his portraits of the fox emphasize her beauty and sensuality.
The three evil women represent the “uncanny” of female sexuality, the “class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud 220). According to Freud, “a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is an intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not” (233). Thus, the youngest vampire-like witch is repellent because of this crucial hesitation experienced by the observer: is she alive or not? The typical uncanny experience is an uncomfortable blend of the familiar (heimlich, literally like something at home) and the unfamiliar (un-heimlich). It is the simultaneous experience of resemblance and difference. These states should not coexist, yet they do and the unease experienced by the viewer is created by the incompatible juxtaposition. In Amano’s illustration, the third woman’s breasts and nipples are familiar; women have breasts. Yet, their aspect and their number make those breasts a symbol of the uncanny. This detail is far from accidental: the uncanny experience is firmly located in a female body.
The analysis of their appearance emphasizes their connection with the Endless characters Death, Despair, and Desire. The three witches present a distorted reflection of these characters. In fact, the motif of distorted reflections runs throughout the tale. The reflection acts as a reminder of the character it resembles, yet its imperfection points to the fact that it is an illusion, an imitation. The three crones introduce this motif, which later is expanded through the kitsune.
The mythological dimension of the three witches is emphasized by the reference to weaving. In Ancient Greek myth, the Fates are the three sisters who respectively spin, weave, and then cut the threads of human lives. In The Dream Hunters, they weave a piece of silk. The ageless crone explains to the omnyoji that a curse to kill the monk is woven into the silk: “once I have woven, you will have only until the next full moon to cause his death. And he must die without violence, and without pain, or the weaving will fail” (46). The repeated references to weaving are reminders that these witches, though in an unfamiliar Japanese folk tale, are nonetheless familiar types that carry across multiple tales and cultures. Gaiman weaves for the reader several connections between this story, his other works (The Sandman, Stardust), and classical fairy tales. The Dream Hunters works on its own as a fairy tale for the reader to enjoy, regardless of whether he or she knows the other texts. Yet it also works as a catalyst for a reflection on fairy tales, femininity, feminism, and the Japanese folktale. The two readings of the same text coexist seamlessly, like two threads from different materials woven in the same pattern.
Historically, weaving and the fabric arts have been considered part of the female sphere. At the same time, the weaving of textiles and the weaving of stories is also connected: many fairy tales originated as stories shared by women as they
wove. Therefore, on an intertextual level, Gaiman subtly acknowledges his indebtedness to oral tradition by alluding to the origin of fairy tales as stories shared by women as they wove, before the stories were collected by male authors such as Charles Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, and Hans Christian Andersen. Since the re-vision of fairy tales through a feminist lens in the 1970s by writers such as Angela Carter, Robin McGinley and Margaret Atwood, the gender dynamics of fairy tales and folk tales have been critically scrutinized and creatively reimagined. In her analysis of gender and the revision of fairy tales, Cristina Bacchilega uses the metaphor of the fairy tale as a mirror of femininity. According to Bacchilega, the mirror presents to the reader a reflection and a refraction: “The wonder of fairy tales, indeed, relies on the magic mirror which artfully reflects and frames desire. Overtly re-producing the workings of desire, postmodern wonders perform multiple tricks with that mirror to re-envision its images of story and woman” (146). In The Dream Hunters, Gaiman plays with the concept of the magic mirror, both literally (at the end of the tale, the monk finds the fox in a mirror) and figuratively (by offering a mirror image of Japanese folk tales). He warps the reflective surface in order to emphasize the beauty and uniqueness of the kitsune.
Both the author and his creation question rules. Gaiman challenges the paradigms of fairy tales and gender roles by writing within the expectations of the genre while simultaneously deviating from its tenets. The kitsune challenges power structures and gender politics. On a superficial level The Dream Hunters looks like a faithful image of a Japanese folktale, seeming to correspond to Baudrillard’s first stage of the sign-order. The readers may initially believe that the reflection in the mirror is accurate and offers a “reflection of a profound reality” (Baudrillard 6). This impression is shattered by the kitsune, who deviates and diverges from the normative constraints of gender. The kitsune breaks the boundaries and it is through this character that Gaiman moves his story to a superior level: his tale questions storytelling and gender norms.
Although the kitsune is a staple figure in Japanese folktales, in Gaiman’s hands this character is decidedly different. Gaiman endows the fox-spirit with the most contrasting and nuanced attributes of femininity. Through her, Gaiman introduces a modern feminist concern: the dissenting female voice daring to question masculine authority figures. Gaiman’s fox is a blend of modern and traditional. In the foreword to his collection of folktales, Keigo Seki differentiates between the Japanese mukashi-banashi (“once-upon-a-time stories”) and their European counterparts.1 He explains that since modern Japan only emerged after 1868 with the Meiji Restoration, folk culture and its beliefs are still very strong. As a result, legends and rituals are still incredibly potent in Japanese culture. The fox, for instance, in the Japanese cultural context, is not a mere animal, but a shape shifter, who once was the special messenger for Inari, the god of abundance (Seki 12). In the genre, the role of trickster is played by either a rabbit or a fox. The rabbit (or hare, depending on the story) often brings revenge. Both the fox and the rabbit are clever and cunning, and excel at outwitting their bigger adversaries. Moreover, the fox is endowed with a flair for shape-shifting and feminine sensuality, as we can see in The Dream Hunters.
The fox initially agrees to trick the monk in order to win a bet. Her impulse is playful rather than mean: “And the fox smiled with her sharp teeth, and blinked her green eyes, and she swished her brush and she looked down the hill at the temple and at the monk, then looked at the badger and she said: ‘Very well. A wager it is’” (6). Kitsunes are the tricksters of Japanese tales.2 The fox is almost a textbook case of a trickster figure. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote a fascinating study on the Trickster Figure.3 His analysis of Mercurius delineates the complexity of the trickster. Jung sees Mercurius as a combination of typical trickster motifs: “his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half-animal half-divine, his exposure to all kinds of tortures, and—last but not least—his approximation to the figure of a saviour” (255). In addition to his shape-shifting powers, the trickster experiences pain, and his suffering helps others: “the wounded wounder is the agent of healing, and that the sufferer takes away suffering” (256). In addition, Jung sees the trickster as a “psychologem: an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity” (260). The fox combines the cheekiness and altruism of the trickster with her feminine wiles. In fairy tales, tricksters are outside the bounds of traditional morality, and use their wits instead of force. For critic J. C. Cooper, the trickster in fairy tales “uses ruses and intelligence to circumvent difficulties and pitfalls,” and stands for the triumph of “brain over brawn” (94). The fox is therefore empowered by her gender, audacity, and intelligence. At the beginning of the tale, she turns into an attractive “young woman, soaked by rain” so that she can double her chances of tricking him: either by taking advantage of his kindness and sense of chivalry or by seducing him physically (10). The fox initially is a feminine figure, endowed with strong powers of seduction and intelligence.
As the story progresses, the fox becomes a feminist figure by endeavoring to wrestle control of the plot and by trying to counteract the powerful male authority figure, the onmyoji. The fox even confronts the imposing Lord of Dreams and dares to contest his rules. She challenges the patriarchal order and tries to subvert its rules by offering herself as a sacrifice to save the monk. She is a dissenting voice. The story becomes her story, the story of her fight.
The fox does not know how to save the monk, but she intuits that she must make an offering in order to receive the information she needs. She begins by selecting her most precious possession, a jade carving of a dragon that, years ago, she procured with great effort from the base of a tree. The fox carries the dragon “for many miles” and then tosses it off a cliff into the sea, declaring, “all I ask is the knowledge of how to save the life of the monk” (29). The “little statue of the dragon had brought serenity and peace to her den,” but she willingly sacrifices it in order to help the monk (29). This is an important point, as it once again connects and delineates the main characters: the monk has peace, the onmyoji desperately lacks it and is willing to kill for it, and the fox is willing to sacrifice it in order to save another.
Her sacrifice pays off when she returns to her den, falls asleep, and enters The Dreaming. Her pilgrimage through the realm of dreams and her willing self-sacrifice mark her as the tale’s heroine. She clearly follows Joseph Campbell’s path of the hero, the road of trials. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell maps out the path of the hero towards the actualization of his potential as a hero. Leaving home is the beginning: “The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown” (Campbell 82). The fox achieves this first by leaving her den for the cliff at the ocean, and then by leaving her world for The Dreaming. According to Campbell, “With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ‘threshold guardian’ at the entrance to the zone of magnified power” (Campbell 77). The fox crosses the threshold of The Dreaming (and, we will learn later, her body eventually rests on the threshold of the monk’s temple).4 Finally, she meets the Dream Lord, who assumes the shape of “a huge fox,” “bigger than any creature the fox had ever seen” (30).5 She begs his audience then asks who the other strange animals in the realm are. They are the Baku, the Dream Eaters, and she soon learns that the only way to save the monk is to catch the Baku who have consumed the dream meant for him. In order to protect the monk, the fox needs to deflect the curse on herself. There is no other solution.
Her intelligence and understanding of rules and their consequences mark her as resourceful, smart, and brave. The Dream Lord grants her request and allows her to enter the monk’s dreams to save him. She does so discreetly, so much so that the monk almost misses her completely. In the first dream, “he thought he saw the flick of a fox’s tail through an open door” (52)
. In the second dream, he realizes “that he was being watched [...] and he looked around him, but there was nothing in his dream, save for the distant seagulls and a tiny figure on a distant cliff which might, the monk thought, have been a fox” (56). In Japanese folktales, foxes can travel through different spaces and realms. For example, in the folk tale “The White Fox: Four Dreams,” a fox is able to travel in the realm of dreams and back (Tyler 304). The dreamer dreams that he holds the fox’s tail, and his wish comes true when he wakes up. In folklore, foxes are associated with the god Inari, who grants abundance. Foxes are his messengers.
The fox in Gaiman’s tale endeavors to shield the monk from the curse. The monk is unaware of her sacrifice. The fox turns from a playful tormentor into a benevolent guardian for the monk and his temple. In fact, when the dream is over, the monk finds her slumbering body “stretched out across the threshold of the temple” (56). This is in keeping with the paradigms of kitsunes in folk tales, in which foxes are agents of protection for those who have earned their respect through kindness or innocence. In the tale “The Fox’s Ball” for example, a fox helps a traveler escape from robbers (Tyler 299–300). The fox agrees to protect the traveller after the traveller gives him a ball that the fox is very attached to: “we always repay a debt of gratitude” (299). The traveller realizes the favor that the fox did for him after he sees the terrible bandits who were preparing to ambush him:
The fox had led him this way—a way no ordinary person would know—just because the bandits would not be looking for a traveller to pass so close. The fox disappeared once he was safely by, and he reached home without further difficulty. The fox stayed faithfully with him and often rescued him again. More and more touched by its fidelity, he was very glad indeed that he had had the good sense to return the ball [Tyler 300].
Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Page 21