Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman
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Marie, even less developed as a character than Galaad, appears only twice in the text and is mentioned a third and final time in regard to her elopement with the hero-knight. What little the reader knows from Gaiman’s description is that she was “seventeen, slightly overweight, and dressed [at first] in a baggy mauve jumper that looked like she had bought it from the shop” (33) before her sartorial transformation (dressing in “a rather smart skirt” and wearing lipstick), presumably inspired by her encounter with Galaad. The reader can extrapolate reasonably from Gaiman’s characterization—how she takes quizzes in women’s magazines and preens as she hopes for a repeat encounter with Galaad—that Marie is something of a hopeful romantic whose young personality is still forming and dependent on the perceptions of others. However, even more than in the case of Galaad, the reader knows nothing of Marie’s past, her thought processes, or her hopes and dreams.
While Galaad and Marie are depthless and stylized archetypes—a fairy-tale prince and a damsel peasant, tropes rather than three-dimensional characters—the widow Whitaker is complexly cast. Gaiman tells the reader about her family, including her late husband whom she misses and her nephew whose family she visits regularly. She has friends whom she is shown interacting with, revealing much about her directly and indirectly; she is the kind of woman who meets with her companions weekly, valuing both the interaction and routine, and the kind of woman who visit friends in the hospital (thoughtfully leaving the walnuts out of the fruitcake for the one whose teeth are growing sensitive with age). She has made a life of gardening and housekeeping and her routines, including these visits and her regular trips to the secondhand store.
Mrs. Whitaker’s Third (Feminist) Dimension
What advantage does it give to the story to develop Mrs. Whitaker in so much domestic detail? This is a story that focuses on the surfaces of daily life: ordinary household matters, gardens and fruitcakes, chores and routines—and developing Mrs. Whitaker in this much domestic detail provides a layer of armor for the narrative. A better question to ask is, why choose to re-imagine Galahad’s story from this perspective at all? The hero seeks the Grail, which is guarded not by a hoarding dragon or villainous monster but by a sympathetic widow who rightfully acquired the object. Certainly one way to retell the story would have been through Galaad’s eyes, exploring the mind of the conquering hero when it would be wrong to vanquish his antagonist, when in fact it would go against the ideas of chivalry, gallantry, and honor to mistreat this elderly woman. Much of the fairy tale atmosphere could have been retained in a story told from this perspective and with the themes of good, evil, and righteousness explored in greater detail—a worthy aim, but obviously not Gaiman’s intent.
He also could have written the story from Marie’s perspective. A woman winning the virgin Galahad’s heart would have been a unique spin on the classic story, and a British shopgirl is no less extrinsic to a Grail quest than a British widow. One would be hard pressed to deny, however, that Mrs. Whitaker is more unexpected and humorous within the Grail quest than Marie, a woman of acceptable age and stature to be a damsel, despite the lack of overt distress. A feminist effort to redeem the damsel as a character type by demonstrating her worth and depth of character would be predictable, even obvious, and increasingly common in young-adult re-imagining of fairy tales.
Gaiman chose a more elaborately feminist path by humanizing and feminizing the treasure-hoarding dragon as a Mills-&-Boon reading, childless widow on a pension. Mrs. Whitaker is not the villain but a morally neutral figure who doesn’t aim to thwart the hero; neither altruistic nor selfish, she nonetheless obstructs his goals in the act of affirming her own desires. There is nothing innately feminist about a romance-novel reading widow, and it would not be unreasonable for her to make demands of Galaad. Mrs. Whitaker is not profit-motivated nor dreaming of what possible gains could come from bartering with one such as Galaad, despite some of the treasures he offers her. She is likewise unconcerned with any threat he or other Grail-seekers could pose, or with planning for her future. Instead she is allied with the “revolutionary and antirational forces identified with nature, with imagination, with unconsciousness, and with spontaneity, all qualities historically defined as ‘feminine’” (Gilbert and Gubar 75). She exists purely in the moment, deciding what favors to ask of him and whether to accept his offers for the Grail based only on her code of fairness, her instinct, and the immediate variables at hand—that she has gardening chores waiting or heavy objects needing to be moved, or that she does not need gold to spend or a sword that will do nothing more than hang on the wall.
Here is where the feminist consequences of Gaiman’s artistic choice become more involved: by crafting Mrs. Whitaker as spontaneous in her decision-making, neutral to others’ wishes, and yet committed to this deep code of fairness (her own version of Galaad’s chivalry), Gaiman creates an empowered female character walking a fine line between selfishness and selflessness. Mrs. Whitaker neither hands over the Grail against her own desires nor holds Galaad hostage to her needs. She makes the most of his presence without being manipulative and without malice; while there’s a gentleman there, one bound to a code of chivalry, why not have him help with heavy tasks she cannot do alone? Yet, when she requires his aid, perhaps taking advantage of his code of honor, she also thanks him with tea and food for the journey, each time engaging in a fair exchange of domestic hospitality for his chivalrous aid, a reflection of her own code of fairness and good conduct. Her code requires courtesy but not generosity, fair dealing with others as much as for herself; in other words, her code is one of balance not victory.
While Mrs. Whitaker’s character fills the role of antagonist to the hero, of dragon or villain or mystical gatekeeper, she is not defeated in the course of Galaad’s quest. He gains the Grail (and rescues Marie from the fate of a boring life, it seems), but the key to a feminist reading of “Chivalry” is how the widow gains as well, quid pro quo, and balances the scales by requiring labor of Galaad and bartering for the exchange of the Grail. By inverting the perspective of the story, the traditional characters’ roles, and the meaning of victory to one of balance, Gaiman valorizes the complexly feminine and thereby crafts a feminist fairy tale.
One counter-argument to this could be that the two-dimensional Marie runs away with Galaad to the wedding that is often the happy ending of a fairy-tale or romance7; if Gaiman’s re-imagining values the complex female, then why doesn’t Mrs. Whitaker choose youth and possibly Galaad instead of (or in addition to) the Philosopher’s Stone and Phoenix’s Egg? Precisely for the reasons alluded to in the ending of the story, which finds Mrs. Whitaker declining to purchase Aladdin’s lamp from the same secondhand store: she “put the lamp back where she had found it, in the back of the shop. After all, Mrs. Whitaker reflected, as she walked home, it wasn’t as if she had anywhere to put it” (“Chivalry” 47). The widow’s mantelpiece, and her life, are full. After pondering the image of her husband, she declines the apple and thereby eternal life and youth. By valuing Mrs. Whitaker’s well-lived life so highly, Gaiman’s ending shifts the definition of victory within the fairy tale quest away from happily-ever-after.
But what about Marie? Mrs. Whitaker wins by celebrating the value of her life well-lived and bartering for a good exchange on the Grail without sacrificing her own interests. But Marie’s superficial behavior is rewarded with Galaad’s heart and a happily-ever-after ending after she changes her behavior and appearance, sitting up straighter and wearing nicer clothing and make-up. The point of “Chivalry,” as the title reminds us, is not winning Galaad. By having Mrs. Whitaker choose to continue the natural course of her life, rather than to prolong it or to re-live it with new adventures, making a fairy tale out of herself, Gaiman ironically uses fantasy to value realism and mortality over a wishful Disneyesque storybook ending. Again, Mrs. Whitaker is allied with the forces historically defined as feminine by choosing the natural progression of her life over an artificial albeit magical extension. This
is particularly interesting in light of the fact that Mrs. Whitaker is childless, given that she will not live on through her family.
In juxtaposition, Mrs. Whitaker and Marie represent the tension that continues to exist for women between historical ideals of femininity, changing cultural practices and norms, and what Donald Haase calls “the deceptive ideals of the fairy tale,” which according to Haase “still exert an ‘awesome imaginative power over the female psyche’” (5; quoting Rowe 248). Marie yields to this pull, choosing the skirt, the lipstick, and the knight. However, to read this in a non-feminist, traditional interpretation—that the moral of Gaiman’s story is the prettier, younger woman wins the man—requires that the reader assign more depth to the characters than a fairy tale allows.
Galaad and Marie are brought together in the narrative because they are the knight and the damsel; those are the roles they fill, and that is the intuitive logic of the fairy tale. It may even have been Gaiman’s intent to foreshadow this pairing by naming the damsel Marie (Mary) after another famous virgin. Had Galaad and Marie never come together, the story might have failed to manifest the fairy tale form fully, detracting from the elegance of the inversion of the main character from villain to neutral obstacle, from dragon to widow-in-a-thrift-store. That Marie apparently wins Galaad’s heart is not a reward for her make-up and new clothes or women’s magazine reading ways; it is simply the just-so ending of a fairy tale.
Gaiman’s introduction to Smoke and Mirrors—the second volume in which “Chivalry” is collected—reads:
I wrote it in a weekend, a gift from the gods, easy and sweet as anything.... Several years ago, on a signing tour, someone gave me a copy of an academic paper on feminist language theory that compared and contrasted “Chivalry,” Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” and a Madonna song. I hope one day to write a story called “Mrs. Whitaker’s Werewolf” and wonder what sort of papers that might provoke [17].
Like many writers, Gaiman admits that often his stories do not end where he expected them to go when he first sat down to write them (16). He may have thought a Grail quest beginning with the discovery of the cup in an unexpected place by an unexpected person was worth exploring on the page and given no thought at all to the fairy tale simplicity of the narrative, the craft techniques Bernheimer attributes to fairy tales, or the relative complexity of Mrs. Whitaker. Nonetheless, by telling the story from the perspective of the neutral guardian of the Grail—the hero’s antagonist—and by giving that guardian dimension, by making her a complex female character, Gaiman gave value to the complexly feminine. If the reader is pleased by Galaad and Marie’s elopement, that is the fairy tale form at work, and the reader is likely equally pleased, if not more so, by the choices Mrs. Whitaker makes and by her realization, in the closing lines, that her life is too full for even a genie’s three wishes.
Facets of Chivalry
What makes Mrs. Whitaker relatable is the chivalry with which she treats Galaad, that she has a code of conduct by which she operates. Although this code is never referred to expressly, it is a form of chivalry, and each main character is chivalrous in their own way: Galaad, most obviously, is a literal knight, but he also possesses those characteristics and virtues of an “ideal knight,” such as “pure and noble gallantry, honour, courtesy, and disinterested devotion to the cause of the weak or oppressed,” though there are no weak and oppressed characters in this story for him to champion. He seems, as mentioned above “disinterestedly devoted in the service of the female sex” those his elopement with Marie upon the completion of his quest would seem to indicate something more than disinterest. Marie’s chivalry is in the semantically rarer sense of “quixotic”; she is idealistic, tilting at the windmills of Prince Charmings riding through town on white horses, because a realistic girl in a realistic world would almost certainly balk at running away with a stranger on horseback dressed in authentic medieval garb.
For Mrs. Whitaker, chivalry takes the form of her strong sense of fairness, of right and wrong, of the balance with which she engages Galaad. She never asks anything of him without making things even, by her reckoning, nor does she accept an offer for the Grail that does not, to her, outweigh the value of having it on her mantel, even if that small aesthetic value might seem trivial to the rest of us. The reader respects Mrs. Whitaker despite her eccentric tastes and jejune attachment to the Grail because she operates under a code of fair conduct rather than using manipulation or expressing any fear that Galaad might treat her unfairly. Moreover, Gaiman sidesteps the potential pitfall of turning Mrs. Whitaker into a matchmaking godmother-type character by keeping her dealings with Marie detached; while she approves of the “smart skirt” and lipstick in the way a woman of an older generation might approve of a teenager taking on the traditional trappings of her gender, she doesn’t concern herself with Marie’s singlehood or her interest in Galaad, nor does she nose in on Marie’s social life.
We want Mrs. Whitaker to be happy at the end of the story for all of these reasons, for her chivalry and fair treatment of others and because she is endearing, or, to use her own language, “nice.” Yet a sophisticated reading of the story, a feminist reading, is not about Mrs. Whitaker winning. To want her to choose immortality, to keep the Grail, to win Galaad somehow, to want her to have the fairy tale itself and its “deceptive ideals,” would be against Mrs. Whitaker’s own code. What Mrs. Whitaker gains from the story is a greater awareness of her own life and the value it has. As Kay Stone notes, “many females find in fairy tales an echo of their own struggles to become human beings” (144). Mrs. Whitaker has critically engaged with the romantic myths, has stood at the threshold of becoming the fairy tale, and has chosen her own life: “If women remember fairy tales, consciously or unconsciously, they can reinterpret them as well. It is the possibility of such reinterpretation that gives hope that women can eventually free themselves of the bonds of fairy tale magic, magic that transforms positively at one age and negatively at another” (143). Marie’s choice of Galaad becomes necessary in another way, if we apply this interpretation as a counter-point to Mrs. Whitaker’s choice, as a reminder that the allure of the fairy tale when we are young may be strong, but ever-after may not seem so appealing when we have lived a life worth choosing in the balance.
NOTES
1. The collection, edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer is titled Grails: Quests, Visitations and Other Occurrences (Atlanta: Unnameable Press, 1992).
2. The number three bears significance, for instance, in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Snow White,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Vladimir Propp, in his Morphology of the Folk Tale (1968), argues that the threefold structure came from the principle that because each element of a folk tale could be negated twice, it had to be repeated a third time in many stories across Western cultures.
3. For an interesting collection of resources on Galahad, as well as other Arthurian elements, see The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/galmenu.htm).
4. In addition to her credits as an author, Bernheimer has edited three influential fairy tale anthologies: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (1998); Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (2007); and My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (2010), which won the 2011 World Fantasy Award for best anthology. I first encountered Bernheimer’s definitions directly at a workshop she taught at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in 2010.
5. It is possible to piece together the approximate time of the piece as the time of publication (1992): the picture of Henry on the mantel was taken in 1953. (“Chivalry” 35), which Mrs. Whitaker describes as “almost forty years away” (“Chivalry” 44).
6. It is worthwhile to note that contemporary fairy tales, as one might expect, stretch even the boundaries of Bernheimer’s very recent definition. Gaiman’s own “Snow, Glass, Apples”
re-imagines the Snow White tale, for instance, with much greater depth in the stepmother character. In that instance he maintains the fairy tale form by stripping depth from all other characters and from the world itself, by enhancing the unreality (the everyday magic or marvelousness) of the world, by abstracting the characters within the plot and by abstracting creatures from other myths into the story, and finally by increasing the sense of intuitive logic in the plot, which marches forward inexorably due to what one might call the deathbed perspective of the narrator.
7. The Romance Writers of America define a romance as a love story between two people than ends in a constructive resolution—industry jargon for a happy ending—though scholar Pamela Regis defines the genre as a courtship leading to a betrothal. There are plenty of fairy tales that do not resolve happily, but those that do, especially those involving a Prince Charming, mostly end in nuptials, especially after the Brothers Grimm.
WORKS CITED
Bernheimer, Kate. Interview. Room 220: NOLA Book and Literary News. 23 February 2011. Press Street. 14 August 2011. Web.
_____. My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales. New York: Penguin, 2010. Print.