Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman
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The real/false mother split is more complicated in MirrorMask since the real (ill) mother has a representative figure—the sleeping White Queen—not just a counterpart in the dream world. Despite her illness/state of unconsciousness, Joanne/the White Queen remains a crucial force in Helena’s quest. Her physical absence is overcome through symbolism, an encounter in the dream world, and some pragmatic advice recollected in a threatening situation. The Prime Minister is unimpressed by Helena’s declaration that she will wake the White Queen. He explains that “finding the Charm (whatever that was) was, as propositions go, completely, utterly, unarguably, quintessentially hopeless” (22). It is discouraging response to put it mildly. When he ends his speech, however, the “white rosebud on the Queen’s chest blossomed into a perfect white rose” causing him to concede, “maybe it’s not quintessentially hopeless” (23). Unable to speak, the maternal figure encourages Helena through this sign of hope. She will continue to do so as Helena moves through the dreamscape. At one point, the link with Helena’s real mother becomes more explicit. The White Queen and her mother merge in Helena’s dream: “My mum said, ‘Honestly love. What have you lost now?’ She didn’t look like my mum. She looked more like the White Queen” (44). The advice she offers is clearly in Joanne’s practical voice: “It’s probably staring you in the face” (44). Vague and yet useful, the words are a catalyst for a more focused search but the wayward princess reaches it first, extending the quest. Once again, Helena must draw upon her mother’s “Two Rules for Finding Things That You’ve Lost” and, in so doing, does indeed find the MirrorMask staring her right in the face (5). Lest we miss the significance of the mother’s input, the final page in the Really Useful Book insists “REMEMBER WHAT YOUR MOTHER TOLD YOU” (58). The voice of the (real, authentic, feminist) mother is privileged in MirrorMask.
Coraline also draws strength from her mother’s words. In her desperate bid to close the door between the two worlds, Coraline is aided by the “other people in the corridor—three children, and two adults” (133). With the touch of the ghosts “suddenly she felt strong” but one voice in particular galvanizes her: “a voice that sounded like her mother’s—her own mother, her real, wonderful, maddening, infuriating, glorious mother—just said, ‘Well done, Coraline,’ and that was enough” (134). A simple phrase and yet it is precisely what Coraline needs to hear; she continues to battle and ultimately seals the barrier. Gaiman does not end the book with this victory, requiring Coraline to once again defeat the other mother in a continuation of the maturation begun in the other world. In order to succeed, Coraline must be meticulous in her planning and brave in the execution—traits her real mother models.6 The “protective coloration” of a tea party with her dolls is a subversive use of the patriarchal model of girlhood the other mother sought to impose (153). This time it is Coraline who fabricates a scene to lure the other mother (or at least her hand—the part that made it through the door between the worlds). Parsons, Sawers, and McInally read the scene in a negative light. They argue that “all of the potential advances ... made by Coraline’s real mother seem lost in this climactic moment” (376). Acknowledging that it is a ruse, they still contend that it is “her ability to perform appropriate femininity that saves the day for Coraline” (376). Placing the key over the disguised well is an ingenious move on Coraline’s part. The trap is shaped by the predator she wishes to capture. It is a thoughtful performance with one purpose in mind. If Coraline were sincerely enacting “appropriate femininity” she would not be single handily taking on her adversary—even if it is a single hand.
The Dark Queen and other mother are extreme examples of what Adrienne Rich labels “the old, institutionalized, sacrificial, ‘mother-love’” (246). Each character puts the daughter before everything else; everything else, that is, except motherhood. In their willingness to sacrifice the individual child in support of the institution of motherhood the Dark Queen and other mother personify sacrificial motherhood gone grotesquely awry. Rich, however, argues it always goes awry and needs to be countered with “courageous mothering” (246). “The most notable fact that culture imprints on women,” Rich proposes, “is the sense of our limits” (246). As a result, “the most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities” (246). The example of the mother—the way in which she expands her own life—is a key factor in this process. Empowered children come from empowered mothers insists Andrea O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws 13).
Coraline and MirrorMask should be read as part of an invigorating debate about mothering and motherhood in the twenty-first century. The complexity of motherhood can only be recognized through “an excavation of the truths of motherhood disguised and distorted beneath the mask,” insist Podnieks and O’Reilly (3). Susan Maushaurt calls it an unmasking of motherhood. She advocates an open and honest discussion of motherhood freed from its unattainable ideal. Coraline and MirrorMask may seem to be unlikely candidates for re-theorizing motherhood, but as Marianne Hirsch points out, fiction is the “optimal genre in which to study the interplay between hegemonic and dissenting voices” (9). Gaiman’s voice is powerful in popular culture; his interrogation of motherhood reveals the hopes and fears lurking beneath the surface. There is a danger of the Dark Queen and other mother overshadowing their real world counterparts, but a closer analysis of the texts reveals that Gaiman is engaged in something more subtle than merely reproducing the motif of the good versus bad mother. In his hands, the concept of a “good” mother becomes more complex.
Gaiman’s work does not ignore the tension between mothers and daughters—indeed the plots hinge on it—but he does distinguish between the mother who approaches her daughter as a possession and the approachable mother who encourages her daughter’s self-possession. The presence of the demonic mother complicates any reading of the feminist aspects of Coraline and MirrorMask but does not negate them. The encounters with the various mothers answer the “prayer for a blueberry girl” Gaiman offers in another of his works:
Help her to help
herself,
help her to
stand,
help her
to lose
and
to find [Gaiman, Blueberry Girl 2, 19].
NOTES
1. With the growing awareness that race, class, and sexuality (among other factors) complicate any feminist theory, “sisterhood” has become a “problematic concept for third-wave feminism within their own generation ... as well as across feminist generations” observes Nadine Muller (126).
2. Discussion of the merits of psychoanalytical theories falls outside the boundaries of my paper.
3. Muller provides a useful explanation of third wave feminism: it “can be said to consist of those feminist voices emerging towards the latter half of the 1990s which insist upon their dependency on, as well as their need to move away from, the feminist politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Third wave feminism also opposes the 1980s backlash against feminism and the second wave’s focus on white, middle-class, heterosexual women, emphasizing the necessary co-existence of a multiplicity of feminisms and female experiences” (131–2).
4. The cat will cast doubt as to the origins of the other world—“made it, found it—what’s the difference?” (Gaiman, Coraline 75)—but it is clear that the other mother controls it.
5. A matrilineal narrative, Tess Cosslett explains, “either tells the stories of several generations of women ... or ... shows how the identity of a central character is crucially formed by her female ancestors” (7). The second part of the definition is applicable to Coraline and MirrorMask in that both central characters look to their mothers to find their own strengths.
6. At this point, Coraline draws courage from her father’s song; mothers are clearly privileged in the two texts but the fathers are emotional anchors for Coraline and Helena, albeit from the periphery.
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The Fairest of All
Snow White and Gendered Power in “Snow, Glass, Apples”
BY ELIZABETH LAW
“Snow White,” as with all folktales and fairy tales, exists in multiple renderings. The tale “Schneewittchen” (Little Snow White) as recorded by the Brothers Grimm is one among many versions of the tale Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm encountered as they compiled Nursery and Household Tales. In modern American society however, the Disney film version Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the best-known iteration. In the hands of Neil Gaiman, the tale of “Snow White” becomes “Snow, Glass, Apples.” Narrated from the perspective of the “evil queen,” Gaiman’s tale interrogates the standard of beauty that would elevate the deathly pallor of “skin as white as snow,” questions the motives of a prince who is attracted to an unconscious girl in a glass coffin, and demonstrates how a society driven by fear damns itself when it chooses a scapegoat over the truth.
The realm of fairy tales, like that of psychoanalysis, is one of symbols. In the words of Bruno Bettelheim, “fairy stories teach by indirection” (210). While this may very well be true, what is being taught (however indirectly) by a fairy tale is not a single, unchanging lesson. Whether “Cinderella” is an inspiring tale about a young girl who transcends the social sphere to which she was born or an insipid fable that instructs young girls to wait for their fairy godmother to improve their lives depends on who is relaying the tale. The stories we tell end up telling us, for “each age creates its own folklore through rereadings as well as retellings” (Tatar, Off with Their Heads 230). It is in the realm of fiction, especially folk and fairy tale fiction, that we explore the dark corners and get lost in the deep forests. Equally important, it is through fairy tales and their revisions that we are able to see the ways in which our “truths” change and shift. Fairy tales force us to question our assumptions and presumptions. Beggar women may be witches or princesses in disguise. Beasts may be flesh-eating ogres or enchanted princes. One’s station in life is never fixed, and the moment you believe you know the truth and operate under that assumption, you will be proven wrong.
Fairy tales remind us, time and again, that few things are as dangerous as certainty. The moment we are sure of something, we close our eyes to other possibilities. We convince ourselves that there is nothing in that dark corner; it’s just a shadow–but even shadows shift. “Snow, Glass, Apples” is an exploration of these shadows. Following the tenets of the fairy tale genre, Gaiman’s rearticulation reveals that not all princesses are beautiful virgins, not all stepmothers are wicked, and not all princes are charming and handsome. Instead, Gaiman illuminates the valorization of dehumanized women and the gendered nature of power in “Schneewittchen” and Disney’s Snow White. In place of Snow White’s happily ever after, we are left with a frigid vampiric bride, a controlling necrophiliac prince, and a wise woman roasted for dinner.
“Snow White,” perhaps more than any other of the Grimms’ Tales, has been read as exhibiting anxiety of female virginity (Bettelheim 201). Gaiman’s tale interrogates the patriarchal ideal of virginity as presented in Snow White. This virginity, epitomized by an unconscious preteen encased in a glass coffin with “skin as white as snow,” is revealed to be a complete absence of passion: not purity but frigidity. Snow White’s beauty is tied directly to the contrast of her red, white, and black features, but nearly all written versions of the tale use the title “Snow White” (Bettelheim 199–200). The title and the heroine’s name insist that white is the dominant color and the heroine’s defining trait. Though her hair is black and her lips are red, it is the paleness of her complexion that is prized above all other features. Her skin presumably reflects her soul, pure and untainted as freshly fallen snow. If, as Bettelheim claims, the “problems the story sets out to solve” relate to “sexual innocence, whiteness, ... [as] contrasted with sexual desire, symbolized by the red blood,” then concomitant with the exaltation of Snow White’s pale skin over her red lips and black locks, is the praise of sexual innocence over sexual desire in young girls and women (Bettelheim 201).