Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Tara Prescott

  Gaiman, Neil. “An Introduction.” Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. 1–32. Print.

  _____. “Chivalry.” Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. 33–47. Print.

  Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “‘But Oh! That Deep Romantic Chasm’: The Engendering of Periodization.” The Kenyon Review, New Series 13.3 (1991): 74–81. Web.

  Haase, Donald. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Print.

  Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folk Tale. 1968. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Print.

  Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003. Print.

  Rowe, Karen E. “Feminism and Fairy Tales.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6.3 (1979): 237–257. Web.

  Stone, Kay. “The Misuses of Enchantment: Controversies on the Significance of Fairy Tales.” Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture. Eds. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. 125–45. Web.

  Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Print.

  Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. 1946. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Print.

  Young, Helen. “Approaches to Medievalism: A Consideration of Taxonomy and Methodology through Fantasy Fiction.” x 27.1 (2010): 163–179. Web.

  Feminist Fairy Tales in Who Killed Amanda Palmer

  BY MONICA MILLER

  “Like you, I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard Amanda Palmer had been killed.”—Neil Gaiman, though possibly Amanda Palmer1

  Evoking shades of Marilyn Monroe, Nancy Spungen, and Twin Peaks, the coffee table book Who Killed Amanda Palmer: A Collection of Photographic Evidence creates its own delightfully twisted mythology. It invites the reader into the mythic tragedy of the imagined murder of pop singer (and Brechtian Punk cabaret icon) Amanda Palmer. The collection consists of photographs of the singer in various death tableaux, accompanied by her own song lyrics as well as short stories written by Neil Gaiman. In one photograph, a naked Amanda lies dead on a golf course; another shows her as a suicidal fifties housewife with her head in the oven; another shows a woman, a pre–Raphaelite vision in flowing white translucent cloth, an inch below the water; and so on. What started as a collaboration on liner notes for Palmer’s first post–Dresden Dolls solo album evolved and expanded into a book-length collection of photographs, lyrics, and short fiction. The photographs (which run the gamut from amusing to uncanny to disturbing) provide a cultural commentary on the portrayal of the female body in popular culture. Highlighted by Palmer’s lyrics and Gaiman’s short fiction, the book addresses provocative subjects, including high school violence, compulsory heterosexuality, teen abortion, and rape. Gaiman’s fairy-tale like prose builds on the song lyrics and images to offer a multivalent feminist critique of these issues. His prose brings a mythic dimension to the photographs. Without his words, the collection of photographs and lyrics would remain in the realm of violence, pornography, and black humor. Gaiman’s stories provide a mythopoetic dimension that situates the collaboration firmly in the realm of the postmodern fairy tale. Through its use of black humor and parody, Who Killed Amanda Palmer acts as a postmodern feminist fairy tale that negotiates the blurry territory between the world of fantasy and the world of reality. Gaiman’s evocation of the unique scenarios which are possible in these interstices allows for new understandings of feminist perspectives.

  Gaiman and Palmer first met in 2008 at a fundraising event for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Gaiman admits to being a fan of Palmer’s work in the Dresden Dolls, the band in which Palmer has performed since 1996 (“The Life and Times of the Dresden Dolls”). When they met, Palmer was finishing Who Killed Amanda Palmer, her first solo album. Gaiman agreed to write the liner notes. The album, originally intended to be a “really simple, stripped-down, record-it-in-my-underwear-in-my-apartment-in-boston [sic] kinda thing,” finally resulted in both a studio album produced by Ben Folds and a coffee table book, both of which share the title Who Killed Amanda Palmer (“A Short History of Who Killed Amanda Palmer”). In their correspondence about the project, Palmer told Gaiman that she had been taking photographs of herself dead for about fourteen years and had originally planned to use some of these photographs in the album’s liner notes. Gaiman says that the examples she sent him were intriguing, and that he saw the photographs as “small frozen stories” for which he could provide the words. These interactions led to greater collaboration, as Gaiman went to Boston where he worked with Palmer, photographer Kyle Cassidy, Palmer’s assistant Beth Hommel, and others in staging, photographing, and imagining various death scenes. While Gaiman claims that most of the time during the photo shoots, he was “off to the side, scribbling in a notebook,” he occasionally took a more active role, such as in the scenario titled “The Girl in the Carpet,” in which he carries a dead Amanda over his shoulder down a dark alley (“How to order WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER”). The resulting 119-page coffee table book, whose 10,000 copy, limited first edition run was an instant collector’s item for both Palmer and Gaiman fans, is a truly eclectic collection.

  Palmer’s photographs and lyrics alone pose a (not unproblematic) third-wave feminist cultural critique, through their postmodern parody and interrogation of images of the violated female body in popular culture. Palmer appears naked and in various states of dress and undress throughout. While some of the death scenes involve striking costumes—from ball gowns to dirndls—Palmer is frequently and provocatively naked in the collection. Knowing that his readers, who were not necessarily established Amanda Palmer fans, might be taken by surprise, Gaiman wrote:

  I should probably warn people about the nudity. There are lots of photos where Amanda is fully dressed, but she doesn’t seem to have anything resembling a nudity taboo, and is fearless when it comes to getting the photo she wanted, so is fully or partly naked in some of the strangest places.... It’s definitely art, not porn, but there, such warnings are useful [ “How to Order WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER”].

  Though Gaiman denies comparisons to pornography, Who Killed Amanda Palmer’s depictions of nudity and violence do situate the book within larger feminist debates surrounding pornography. In contrast to much of the staunch anti-pornography scholarship and activism of many second wave feminists, which posited a direct link between pornographic images of women and the perpetuation of violence against women,2 many people who identify as third wave feminists also identify as “pro-sex.” These feminists defend pornography, recognizing that, as feminist writer Linda Williams explains, “the perverse sexuality of the ‘other’ can be crucial to the empowerment of women as sexual agents” (234). According to Williams, any differentiation between the perverse and the “normal” in sexuality is troubling. Rather, she advocates for acknowledging the “perverse dynamic” that underlies all sexuality, “of ‘diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks’” to offer a more general “opposition to the dominant representations of pleasure” (262). This opposition can ultimately result in the proliferation of previously-unheard voices within sexual realms (262). Certainly, Who Killed Amanda Palmer as both a coffee table book and an album provides media for Palmer’s voice and artistic expression. What is troubling about Palmer’s work in this collection, however, is its emphasis on violence against the (often scantily clad or naked) female body. Still, such violence might be considered under the rubric of the perverse in Williams’ argument. The tableau on the cover is represented three times throughout the book. It shows a woman lying prone on a Victorian couch. Were the body fresh, it would be alluring. However, it’s been there a while, strewn with dead leaves on the moldering couch, with “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” scrawled on the wall above the body, a question or a clause is the witness’s reading. The book’s cover states (and shows) the object and su
bject of the project: “A Collection of Photographic Evidence (with Stories by Neil Gaiman).” It is shocking, a scene of violation, the subject and object of the photograph is evidence of the violence against this woman and the viewer whose gaze witnesses the grotesque image. The second reproduction (iii) is a full-page bleed opposite an advertisement for the accompanying Amanda Palmer solo album (“The record is available for download, on CD and on vinyl. You should buy it” [ii]). The photograph now rereads as an advertisement, a billboard for the Palmer’s commercial project, an album of music and a coffee-table book, the image separated from the mystery it poses and the uncomfortable scene it presents. Finally, Gaiman’s original text accompanies a third iteration of the photograph. Reduced in size, no longer a bleed, instead, the photograph is inset with a margin and given a photographic attribution “Gregory Nomoora” (68). The image is recast as a photo of an installation piece by an anonymous artist. The text describing the work reads: “who killed amanda palmer—installation. sofa. leaves. amanda palmer (dead). plasterboard. paint” (69). The image is now completely removed from the original photograph’s authentic violations and is now wholly objectified, literally selling the body as product at auction for Christie’s New York ($672,000). Gaiman’s text, describing the artist’s intent, the work’s provenance, and the rationale for its monetary value, completely materializes the object of violence, emphasizing not only the disturbing reality originally photographed, but also parodying the rapid acceptance and commercializing of evidence depicting violence against women. The model’s “decay ... [is] able to be viewed in time-lapse photography, now as Quicktime films on the web,” Gaiman notes in the brochure text (69).

  Palmer’s problematic artwork gains an important mythic as well as social dimension from Gaiman’s fiction. These stories, like much of Gaiman’s work, are in a distinctively mythopoetic register, utilizing fairy tale tropes, themes, and narrative structures to further illuminate the photographs. Gaiman’s incorporation of such a mythic dimension into the text forges a connection between the violence in Palmer’s work and a larger tradition of violence against women in literature. However, his stories do not simply reproduce stereotypes of female victimhood, such as those in the Brothers Grimm canonical stories. Rather, following in the tradition of (re)visionary feminist writers such as Angela Carter and the work of Palmer herself, Gaiman’s fairytale-like stories often subvert reader expectations, defamiliarizing the images of violence against women.

  Gaiman’s stories clarify Palmer’s themes of wresting ownership and control of this kind of imagery, which traditionally has normalized (and some say even perpetuated) the victimization of women. Gaiman’s text together with Palmer’s photographs and lyrics twist these stereotypes and expectations into subversive foundations for feminist agency and artistic empowerment. The mythopoetic aspects of these stories both strengthen the focus and elaborate on the book’s feminist cultural critique. Many of his stories contain traditional fairy tale characteristics, which like the “paradigmatic Grimms’ fairy tale,” are

  constructed rationally to demonstrate the virtues of an opportunistic protagonist who learns to take advantage of gifts and magic power to succeed in life, which means marriage to a rich person and wealth.... Most of the female protagonists are beautiful, passive, and industrious. Their common feature is cunning: they all know how to take advantage of the rules of their society and the conventions of the fairy tale to profit [Zipes, “Introduction: Towards a Definition of the Literary Fairy Tale,” xxvi].

  Certainly, the repeated image of a dead Amanda Palmer fits the criteria of having a beautiful and passive female protagonist.3 Further, the myriad unusual circumstances in which she is shown—including as a singer, dancer, musician, society woman, and housewife—can be interpreted as reflecting a certain kind of variation that resists the easy categorization of female roles.

  Gaiman’s stories highlight Palmer’s natural resistance, often by providing a fuller ground for interpretation or a counterintuitive narrative that nonetheless explicates the photograph. The story which accompanies Palmer’s untitled self-portrait as an overdose victim is the oldest photograph in the collection. Palmer originally created it for a self-portrait assignment when she was in art school (Amanda Palmer and Nervous Cabaret Tour). In this photograph, we see a close-up of Palmer’s face with a pile of pills spilling from her mouth, dead from what at first glance appears to be an overdose. A closer look, however, reveals that what at first appear to be pills are in fact jewels and jewelry, spilling from her mouth as though she had vomited them up and choked on them (35–6). As with much of the photography in the book, the photograph is simultaneously disturbing, confusing, beautiful, and funny. It compels the reader to look closer, to look longer, and to try and untangle the image’s story.

  The story that accompanies this image has the most overt fairy-tale structure in the collection. It begins, “Once upon the olden times, when the trees walked and the stars danced” (35). In this postmodern fairy tale, however, such stereotypical fairy tale language is grounded in a recognizable (albeit stylized and even stereotypical) urban setting. This is a retelling of the French story titled “Les fées” (The Fairies) by seventeenth-century writer Charles Perrault (which also appears in Andrew Lang’s nineteenth-century English translation of Perrault, and is included in Lang’s Blue Fairy Book with the title “Toads and Diamonds”). Gaiman recasts the rural story of a widow and her two daughters to a dangerous cityscape.4 While the virtuous daughter in Lang’s story is sent to fetch water for her evil stepmother, in Gaiman’s version the virtuous “Amanda” is sent to buy drugs for her stepmother. Along the way, Amanda encounters various obstacles and temptations, including a mistreated, talking dog to whom she gives water, a prostitute with a swollen face to whom she gives both an apple as well as the drugs intended for her stepmother, and the drug dealer whose filthy apartment she cleans. Not only is her journey itself reminiscent of the mythic quest narrative which so often structures fairy tales, but it also contains several key fairy tale tropes, including kindness to animals, an evil stepmother, an apple, and obstacles which challenge her generosity and unselfishness.

  As in the original stories, Amanda’s patience and unselfishness are ultimately rewarded. In both “Les fées” and “Toads and Diamonds,” the virtuous girl is rewarded with flowers and diamonds falling from her mouth when she speaks; meanwhile, her stepsister is punished with snakes and toads crawling from her mouth. In Gaiman’s story, jewels fall from Amanda’s mouth when her stepmother beats her for failing to procure her drugs, while her stepsister emits frogs and snakes from her mouth after ignoring the needy dog and prostitute and bringing her stepmother drugs. However, unlike the Lang story, in which the selfish daughter dies and the virtuous daughter marries a prince, Gaiman’s urban fairy tale has a more ambiguous, less “fairy tale” ending. The story ends with Amanda quoting Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know”—after which a final sapphire drops from her lips, and she dies (35–36). Ironically, in Gaiman’s story, the jewels, which in the photograph appear to be choking Amanda, are instead a product of and a reward for her virtue.

  The photograph makes an intriguing statement about fatal femininity. As Amanda seems to be choking to death on an excess of ornamentation—an expected feminine expression—the photograph conveys the idea that feminine expression is fatal. In contrast, Gaiman’s overt framing of the narrative in fairy tale terms brings in the gendered expectations of a Cinderella or a Snow White story in which an evil stepmother’s punishment of her perfect, selfless stepdaughter becomes the grounds for the heroine’s ultimate reward. Though the photograph makes it seem that Amanda has overdosed on ingesting these symbols, in the Gaiman story they fall from her lips. They are emerging from her, not choking her.

  Unlike the canonical “Les fées” stories, however, Gaiman rejects the princess imagery in the original story for a more ambiguous ending
, keeping the story in the register of a mythopoetic quest tale. As Teresa de Lauretis (like many other feminist scholars) observes in her reading of fairy tales, the role of the princess in these stories traditionally is to be a “sought-for person” (79). In the older versions of the story, then, the virtuous girl becomes a princess, the goal of a quest instead of the questing heroine. Her virtue is rewarded by a transformation from subject to object. Gaiman’s replacement of the princess plot with a more ambiguous, poetic meditation on silence is a significant, feminist reworking of the fairy tale. In Gaiman’s version, the virtuous girl retains her subjecthood.

  Also, Gaiman’s allusion to Keats’ poem here is a deft choice, as the poem celebrates the idea that unheard melodies are sweeter than heard ones. While this theme is most obviously about anticipation, it is also a commentary on silence. The entire story itself is about silence, as it is ultimately words that choke Amanda, finally quieting her. Where the photograph provokes a certain narrative of understanding—a beautiful girl, a fatal overdose, the meaning of the jewelry instead of the expected pills—Gaiman’s prose provides a supplementary narrative of agency. By interpreting the photograph through these traditional fairy tale tropes with a feminist revisioning, the photograph is no longer of a suicidal young woman, but is instead the mythopoetic genesis of a fairy tale heroine.

  Doubling, like the mirror morals of the jewels, is another fairy tale quality which Gaiman often finds uniquely suited to this (feminist) project. David Rudd points out that Gaiman’s use of doubling is often linked to the uncanny (161).5 While Jack Zipes, in his discussion of the subversive potential of fairy tales, notes that Freud’s original analysis specifically excludes fairy tales from the realm of the uncanny, Zipes points out that “the very act of reading a fairy tale is an uncanny experience in that it separates the reader from the restrictions of reality from the onset and makes the repressed unfamiliar familiar again” (Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion 174). Rudd’s Freudian reading of the uncanny reads doubling as a form of castration. Specifically, such castration is linked to the cutting out of the eyes, as Freud himself discusses in his analysis of the German Sandman story (162–163).6