Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Tara Prescott

DOCTOR: But you can’t eat a TARDIS, it would destroy you. Unless—unless—

  TARDIS: Unless you deleted the TARDIS matrix first ... but House can’t just delete a TARDIS consciousness, that would blow a hole in the universe, so he pulls that matrix, sticks it into a living receptacle, and then it feeds off the remaining Artron energy. You were about to say all that. I don’t suppose you have to now [“The Doctor’s Wife”].

  By voicing what the Doctor is going to say in the future before he can, the TARDIS establishes herself quite firmly in the conversation. Felman, in her summary of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, states that in Western discourse, there is a “latent design to exclude women from the production of speech” (9). Indeed, the TARDIS has been excluded from the ability to talk and engage in conversation for almost the entire show. However, in this situation, the TARDIS not only speaks quite intelligently about the topic at hand, but she does so before the Doctor can even formulate the thought. Granted, the TARDIS is apparently taking the Doctor’s words from the future and saying them before he can, thereby depending on the Doctor’s knowledge. However, her claiming the words as her own gives her power within this conversation, for her prompting propels the narrative by causing the Doctor to realize the gravity of their situation. Thus, the TARDIS, after many years of being the silent companion of the Doctor, engages frequently in a discourse with the Doctor, establishing herself firmly in a conversation that, in the end, does not fall completely silent.

  In addition to creating a foundation for equality between the Doctor and the TARDIS, Gaiman’s episode continually returns to this shifting idea of who stole or was stolen. This is evident in a scene in which the Doctor and the TARDIS are attempting to build a ship to chase House:

  TARDIS: Do you ever wonder why I chose you all those years ago?

  DOCTOR: I chose you. You were unlocked.

  TARDIS: Of course I was. I wanted to see the universe, so I stole a Time Lord and ran away. And you were the only one mad enough [“The Doctor’s Wife”].

  Once again, this conversation inverts the traditional origin story of the Doctor and the TARDIS. In this reading, the TARDIS chose the Doctor rather than vice versa. The TARDIS has agency of her own—a desire to see the universe—but required a pilot in order to reach that goal. Therefore, she developed and executed a plan. While leaving herself “unlocked” may seem like a passive action or what de Beauvoir calls a secondary role, the TARDIS cancels out any natural passivity that comes with being something that is (sometimes) controlled by another by creating her own itinerary and the frankness with which she addresses the Doctor. The Telegraph review of “The Doctor’s Wife” calls this conversation “utterly superb,” mentioning that because of this episode, viewers “had a greater exploration between the two core elements of the programme than has been achieved before” within the show (Fuller). It seems that for Gaiman, as well as for reviewers, the richness of Doctor Who exists in this relationship between the Doctor and the TARDIS, which, as viewers see, is much more complex than previously assumed.

  Interestingly, the Doctor does not respond negatively to the TARDIS’s possessiveness or her newfound ability to talk back to him. While at first he is frustrated and takes the opportunity to criticize her ability to land in the correct place, her responses, rather than creating lasting anger or frustration, delight the Doctor. The following conversation occurs when the Doctor’s frustration with the TARDIS reaches its highest point:

  DOCTOR: You know, since we’re talking, with mouths, not really an opportunity that comes along very often, I just want to say, you know, you have never been very reliable!

  TARDIS: And you have?

  DOCTOR: You didn’t always take me where I wanted to go.

  TARDIS: No, but I always took you where you needed to go.

  DOCTOR: You did. Look at us, talking! Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could always talk, even when you’re stuck inside the box?

  TARDIS: You know I’m not constructed that way. I exist across all space and time, and you talk and run around and bring home strays [“The Doctor’s Wife”].

  Though the TARDIS has frustrated the Doctor by responding to his criticisms with some of her own, the argument never gets more serious than bickering. Such a reaction speaks to the strength of the relationship and the Doctor’s own opinion of the TARDIS for, instead of becoming irritated that something that seems not to be his equal—while living, the TARDIS has been somewhat controllable—has been silent for most of their travels is now telling him what to do, he is delighted that they can now communicate. Indeed, at the end of the episode just before the TARDIS becomes silent again, she says that the “big, complicated word” that is “so sad” that she has been looking for is “alive” (“The Doctor’s Wife”). She adds, “I’ll always be here, but this is when we talked” (“The Doctor’s Wife”). These two statements equate being alive with the ability to communicate clearly, once more underlining the importance that verbal communication has to both of them. The Doctor does not attempt to silence the TARDIS but rather welcomes her conversation. This is emphasized by the title of the episode, “The Doctor’s Wife.” The title comically emphasizes the closeness and mutual reliance between the Doctor and the TARDIS. This moves resists the history in which women were secondary characters to their heroic husbands or lovers, which de Beauvoir recounts, as well as the purposeful silencing that Felman addresses. Quite simply, without the TARDIS, the Doctor is nothing and though he is certainly annoyed with her (vocal and physical) bossiness, once she is able to explain her actions, the Doctor welcomes her judgment.

  Just as he welcomed the TARDIS’s critiques, the Doctor is also surprisingly receptive to the revelation that the TARDIS has equal power in their relationship. He is excited but this newfound information rather than concerned about the possible repercussions of a struggle between the sexes. This is an interesting aspect to examine, as science fiction has had a long history of a battle of the sexes. As Brian Attebery points out in the introduction to his Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, until the 1960s, traditional gender roles were “one of the elements most often transcribed unthinkingly into SF’s hypothetical worlds” and that “even if an author was interested in revising the gender code, the conservatism of a primarily male audience ... kept gender exploration to a minimum” (5). Science fiction, until the New Wave in the 1960s, primarily did not address a possible reversal or overturning of gender roles or power. Indeed, as Joanna Russ addresses in “The Image of Women in Science Fiction,” the imagined worlds and relationships between men and women in Science Fiction were often “present-day, white, middle-class suburbia” (81). As she continues, when a struggle between the sexes took place, the work was typically populated with “vicious, sadistic” women, “openly contemptuous of the men” who had power over men because they were physically stronger (86–87). Again, this returns to what Felman discusses in regards to the “mad” women who act outside of their prescribed roles. They were depicted as having undesirable traits such as being mad, vicious, or sadistic. Thus, female characters were shallow and static, showing little depth of character and acting as little more than cautionary tales. However, with the advent of the New Wave, writers such as James Tiptree, Jr. and Ursula K. Le Guin began to explore and challenge differences between the sexes and gender roles.

  Under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr., Alice Bradley Sheldon made a career out of writing short stories that highlighted the problems and dangers of man-woman relationships and how easily they can tilt into violence. For example, she depicts the mass-murder of women in “The Screwfly Solution” and the complete extinction of men in “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” One critic comments that Tiptree is “[determined] to follow the implications of gender difference to their grimly logical conclusions; her stories read like darkly parodic representations of the extremes of gender difference” (Hollinger 305). Power dynamics are also often a subject for examination in Le Guin’s work. A narrator in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Dar
kness wonders if those responsible for creating the race of androgynous people “[considered] war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity, a vast Rape, and therefore in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femininity that is raped” (Le Guin 96). Here, Le Guin discusses how sex and gender roles play into dominance and violence. Indeed, the entirety of The Left Hand of Darkness is focused on this discussion.

  Interestingly, “The Doctor’s Wife” also references an event similar to Le Guin’s “vast Rape.” Upon seeing the remnants of other TARDISes that House has eaten, the TARDIS remarks, “All of my sisters are dead, they were devoured, and ... we are looking at their corpses” (“The Doctor’s Wife”). Such a line, while overlooking a field of burnt out and dead TARDISes, is reminiscent of the violence in Tiptree’s work, such as the multitude of dead female bodies left in rivers or fields in “The Screwfly Solution,” as well as the “vast Rape” that Le Guin mentions in The Left Hand of Darkness in which the rape is destruction or invasion of land or societies. The “vast Rape” here is the murder and devouring of the TARDISes, leaving their bodies to rot in a field on an asteroid. This is violence against women by men, and like Le Guin, Gaiman works against established techniques in the canon of feminist science fiction. As Hollinger notes, “sf by women writers, and specifically by feminist writers,” uses two “‘monstrous’ figures, the alien and the cyborg” (Cambridge Companion 132). The only monstrous character in “The Doctor’s Wife” is House, who has lured hundreds of Time Lords to his asteroid and devoured their living TARDISes. While House is an alien, so too are the TARDIS and the Doctor. In this way, Gaiman appears to be rewriting previous canon from feminist science fiction, removing the “otherness” present in the use of a cyborg or alien against a human or humanoid. In addition, the way in which the TARDIS ultimately triumphs over House—by chasing him down and destroying him once she has returned to the console room—speaks to both the strength of her relationship with the Doctor and her own ability to take care of herself. For although the Doctor helps the TARDIS get to where she needs to go (an interesting reversal of the TARDIS taking the Doctor where he needs to go), she is the one who ultimately defeats House. Such strength also underlines the “I chose you,” claim she makes to the Doctor, for one can assume from this episode that if the TARDIS did not want the Doctor, she would have been able to dispose of him easily. The TARDIS requires clear trust and intimacy with the Doctor.

  The intimacy that is brought to the surface in “The Doctor’s Wife” draws attention to the ways in which the TARDIS has been given a sexuality. Near the end of the season premiere in 2010, which introduces a regeneration of the Doctor (Matt Smith), a new TARDIS is also revealed. The TARDIS, having crashed at the start of the episode, repairs itself, creating a new look to which the Doctor exclaims, “Look at you. Oh, you sexy thing. Look at you!” (“The Eleventh Hour”). Though the TARDIS has been coded as female since the 1970s, the TARDIS has never been described as sexy. Within “The Doctor’s Wife,” the most obvious sexualization of the TARDIS is the body the TARDIS ends up in: a woman in her early thirties, wearing a low-cut dress. The TARDIS becomes sexual right away, and furthermore, when she first greets the Doctor, she kisses him (“The Doctor’s Wife”). Though there may be concern over the Doctor referring to the TARDIS as “Sexy” when she is in Idris’s body, it is important to note that the Doctor initially called the TARDIS sexy after her regeneration in “The Eleventh Hour.”

  Because the Doctor refers to the TARDIS as sexy while she is still a ship, it negates any interpretation one can make about the Doctor and the TARDIS-as-Idris, for he has already decided that she is sexy prior to seeing her new appearance. In fact, the Doctor is not interested in Idris at all—recoiling from her kiss and dismissing her with, “You’re a bitey, mad lady!”—until he realizes that she is actually his TARDIS (“The Doctor’s Wife”). Furthermore, when the TARDIS says, “I think you call me ... Sexy,” the Doctor becomes embarrassed, stating defensively, “Only when we’re alone!” (“The Doctor’s Wife”). He does, of course, resume calling the TARDIS “Sexy” when she reminds him, “We are alone” (“The Doctor’s Wife”). Later, the Doctor calls her “you sexy thing” and “old girl” easily, though when the TARDIS introduces herself to Amy and Rory as “Sexy,” the Doctor again becomes embarrassed (“The Doctor’s Wife”). Indeed, the Doctor was alone in “The Eleventh Hour” when he initially called the TARDIS sexy, so perhaps it is something that is supposed to be restricted to a private sphere, further making the argument that the Doctor and TARDIS have an intimate and highly personal relationship.

  The affection that the Doctor feels for the TARDIS clearly has not gone unnoticed by his companions. Even Amy asks the Doctor if he “[wished] really, really hard” when he explains the TARDIS is in a human body (“The Doctor’s Wife”). But what is most interesting about this is that while the Doctor has consistently referred to the TARDIS as “Sexy” in the new series, he first called her that before she ended up in an attractive human body. Indeed, the use of “sexy” as a nickname seems to underline the closeness of the relationship between the TARDIS and the Doctor. “Old girl,” the TARDIS’s previous nickname, is certainly affectionate, but carries the connotation of being an impersonal and traditional naval term. “Sexy” is much more personal. Such a nickname suggests that to the Doctor, the TARDIS is not simply a ship. As Hollinger mentions, “sf has often been called ‘the literature of change’ [but] has for the most part it has been slow to recognize the historical contingency and cultural conventionality of many of our ideas about sexual identity” (Cambridge Companion 126). Gaiman certainly challenges this slow recognition by creating a close relationship between the Doctor and the TARDIS that is not overtly sexual but is implied and joked about, as with Amy’s comment. Indeed, the entire concept of the TARDIS allowing the Doctor to steal her is rife with intimacy: she left herself “unlocked” or open to the Doctor; she chose him to be her companion in their travels. Ultimately, the TARDIS chose the Doctor as the one person to spend the rest of her life with, for it is quite possible, given her ability to see future events, that she knew of Gallifrey’s destruction. Thus, the TARDIS is not merely a sexual being, but an emotional one as well, further emphasizing her close, highly privatized relationship with the Doctor.

  Eventually, the TARDIS must return to the box. Just after this moment in the episode, the Doctor tells Amy and Rory that “being alive” is the “best thing there is” (“The Doctor’s Wife”). He then changes the subject to their next destination, including the TARDIS in the conversation, and Amy observes:

  AMY: Look at you pair. It’s always you and her, isn’t it? Long after the rest of us have gone. A boy and his box, off to see the universe.

  DOCTOR: Well, you say that as if it’s a bad thing. But honestly, it’s the best thing there is [“The Doctor’s Wife”].

  Interestingly, the Doctor’s repeated “best thing there is” equates being alive with traveling in the TARDIS, implying that both are of equal importance to him. Amy is correct when she comments that it is “you and her ... long after the rest of us have gone” (“The Doctor’s Wife”). Even audience members who are only familiar with the new series have already seen eight companions come and go, some in as little time as one episode. The very nature of a companion is transient, and it is only the TARDIS that has been the constant companion to the Doctor. Arguably, this is because the TARDIS has proven that she is equal to the Doctor, something that all other companions could not maintain for an extended period of time without consequences. When the companions have attempted to be equals to the Doctor, it has nearly killed them: Rose almost died after absorbing the time vortex; Martha was hunted for a year; and Donna, after becoming part Time Lord, had to have her memories wiped or else die (“The Parting of the Ways”; “The Last of the Time Lords”; “Journey’s End”). Like their time on the TARDIS, these companions’ moments of equality with the Doctor are transient.

  In speaking about th
e Doctor’s companions one must consider River Song, who the Doctor actually has married and whose life we see out of order, beginning with her death (“The Wedding of River Song”; “The Forest of the Dead”). River Song comes the closest to being an equal to the Doctor, for she is a Time Lord as well, but without any remaining regenerations (“Let’s Kill Hitler”). Though technically, River Song is the Doctor’s wife, Gaiman infers that the TARDIS is the Doctor’s wife. Taking into consideration what has been previously discussed in regards to the intimacy of the Doctor/TARDIS relationship, one can only assume that Gaiman is using “wife” here as an indicator of a constant, loving relationship between equals. As an episode review of IGN.com states:

  It was an audacious and challenging move to attempt to personify and humanise the most important, but consistently underappreciated relationship underpinning the entire franchise, but it was given glorious clarity through Amy’s perspective-lending comment—while companions and enemies will always come and go, there’s only ever been one irreplaceable partner he could always rely on [Risley].

  River, the Doctor’s legal wife, is not a constant, which audience members know for almost her entire time on-screen. Thus, Gaiman is using “wife” in this context, not as the legal term, but as a way to communicate this idea of a “constant companion.” The TARDIS is the Doctor’s wife in the sense that she is the one on which he may always rely and who will always be with him, which is something other companions are unable to do—even River Song.

  At the end of the episode, when the TARDIS has returned to her box, it seems she has become silent again. Alone in the control room, the Doctor calls out, “Are you there? Can you hear me? ... The Eye of Orion, or wherever we need to go” (“The Doctor’s Wife”). After a moment, a lever next to him flips on its own and the TARDIS takes off; in response, the Doctor cheers and spins around the console (“The Doctor’s Wife”). While not a traditional form of speech, the TARDIS still finds a way to still communicate with the Doctor, even while herself. The Doctor echoes the TARDIS’s claim “I always took you where you needed to go” when he tells her to take them “wherever we need to go.” In this way, the Doctor acknowledges her presence and participation in their relationship, consciously giving her equal choice in their travels. To his credit, Gaiman set up the Doctor/TARDIS relationship in such a way that the major changes of the TARDIS can be contained and examined in one episode, but still allow viewers to assume that the TARDIS continues to play an active role in the Doctor’s travels, for audiences know that she will always have control over their destination. She is quite firmly established as no longer a secondary character to the sometimes mythic-hero Doctor. The TARDIS is the Doctor’s only equal, and this is why she is referred to indirectly as his constant companion or wife. The episode suggests that the key to creating a lasting, equal, and functional relationship is to create one with interdependency. As seen in previous Doctor Who serials, neither the TARDIS nor the Doctor can function completely without the other. It is this reliance that creates a working relationship between the TARDIS and the Doctor that all other companions do not quite manage. Due to the nature of their relationship, the TARDIS is the one companion that can remain with the Doctor.