Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Tara Prescott

  Though Palmer’s eyes remain open (though apparently unseeing) in these photographs, the uncanny sense of doubling is evoked by her frequent appearances as her own twin throughout the collection. Gaiman himself has discussed the significance of mirrors, a trope inextricably linked with doubling, in his work: “Fantasy—and all fiction is fantasy of one kind or another—is a mirror. A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but it’s a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see” (Smoke and Mirrors 2). In her discussion of the Gothic, writer Angela Carter discusses her fondness for such “Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious—mirrors; the externalised self; forsaken castles; haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects” (460). Carter’s tacit connection here between mirrors and the “externalised self” evinces psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror-phase of development as the moment of identity-formation, the individual’s entry into the realm of the Symbolic.7 Doubling, then, is one way in which the fairy tale genre’s traditions allows for new perspectives on old problems.

  For example, in the photograph which accompanies Gaiman’s story “The Sword,” there are two Amandas: a dead Amanda in mime makeup and black and white striped tights with blood running from her mouth, over which laughs a victorious living Amanda, in a corset and flamenco skirt, wielding a sword. As the mime costuming is typical of Palmer’s stage appearance in the Dresden Dolls, this tableau represents Amanda’s Dresden Dolls persona (31–32). The photograph by itself seems primarily a statement about Palmer’s solo album, as her new solo stage persona slays her former Dresden Dolls one. Gaiman’s story, however, which opens with the line, “You only get to kill yourself once,” brings a more explicit element of black humor to the scenario (31). The story also takes the scenario out of the immediate moment of Palmer’s career to a larger, more mythic level. For example, Gaiman makes overt references to time travel, as Amanda “materialized in the alley in a crackle of blue sparks and the sharp scent of ozone like all terminators” (32). Further, in Gaiman’s narration of the photograph, Amanda is killing her younger self, an act that Gaiman connects to larger themes of “art and compromise” (32). Though the actual sword in the picture is barely visible, by naming the story “The Sword” and ending it with images of Palmer practicing “fight[ing] shadows,” Gaiman draws attention to the epic aspect of the scene, to the eternal need to overcome the past in order to survive the present. Further, this image of Amanda fighting shadows posits an empowered femininity through the juxtaposition of her ball gown and the strength of her swordsmanship.

  Similar to “The Sword,” another instance of doubling occurs in the photograph and story about Amanda Palmer, the “famous dancer” (116–118). Another dreamlike image, in this photograph Palmer (described as a famous actress) appears in her underwear on a lit stage, while her sole audience member is a fully clothed Palmer (described as a famous dancer), slumped over dead in a folding chair. The text begins with a straightforward description of the scene, describing both what the reader sees (Palmer slumped over in the audience) as well as what she doesn’t see (the collapsed roof allowing the sunlight in). The story ends ambiguously: “Amanda Palmer is waiting for the sunlight to fall on her face. Then she will close her eyes and let her face stare ecstatically upwards” (116).8 The photograph alone brings up questions regarding the dynamics of performer and audience as well as performer and self. The text emphasizes and complicates these distinctions by making both of the Amandas in the photographs performing artists, though one is an actress and the other a dancer.

  This tension is further complicated by the fact that the more abstract artist, the dancer, is the one who is dead and in the audience. Though the dead Amanda is foregrounded in the photograph, she is in shadow. So, too, in Gaiman’s text, it is the living Amanda (who is on the stage) who is alive, sunlit and ecstatic. Gaiman’s commentary on performance is ambiguous here. As it is the Amanda in the audience who is dead, Gaiman may be proposing that it is in performance when we are most alive. Even more unclear is the story’s claim that the onstage Amanda has ovarian cancer. Is this to be read as real cancer, an attribute of the “character” on the stage, or in some more abstract or metaphorical fashion? As ovarian cancer is a particularly gendered cancer, Gaiman’s inclusion of this detail acts as a commentary on the ability of the female artist to create through art. There is a sense in which Amanda’s impending death brings her closer to the ineffable and less tied to earthly matters; in this manner, Gaiman invokes both the mythic as well as the feminine in this scene.

  The story continues on the next page, where a fully dressed Amanda performs for the dead audience member Amanda. The story ends with the “life-giving energy” of the sunlight shrinking her cancer. The performing Amanda’s vision is blurred with afterimages, while the audience member Amanda grows cold. The story ends with the living Amanda sure she is cured of cancer, though the narrator notes that she is wrong. What to make of all of this ambiguity? In one respect, it is a commentary on the power of art. The fairy tale tropes of twins and danger are once again twisted into modern life dangers of ovarian cancer and the cold reality of death. However, the confusion of performer and audience and of performance itself makes it difficult to nail down one static interpretation. Instead, the ambiguity of the story and its images allows for multiple interpretations simultaneously, resulting in further doublings through the potential multiplicity of meanings.

  Yet another form of doubling occurs in “The Two of Them,” where there are again a dead Amanda and a living one. As the dead Amanda has a plastic bag over her head, however, it is not as clear that they are the same person: in fact, Gaiman’s story refers to the two women as the “Palmer twins” (54).9 These women are less representative of Palmer’s stage personae than they are of her playing at being a traditional lady, wearing floral chintz and drinking tea in a drawing room. In the photograph, the living Palmer holds a teacup as she looks nervously behind her, implying that she was at least complicit in (if not responsible for) her sister’s murder. Gaiman’s text here is less a complete short story and more an evocative scenario, depicting a conversation between twin sisters in which the younger complains of feeling a sense of doom and experiencing omens (including hearing footsteps and seeing shadows) which the older twin dismisses. Once again, the fairy tale trope of doubling—of twins, of sisters—is utilized in the service of black humor, presenting stereotypical characters in a murder tableau. Unlike the overt triumph of “The Sword,” however, here the implied guilt undermines Palmer’s propriety, and in fact calls into question the very idea of innocence inherently connected to femininity and class. Once more, Gaiman’s text plays up the subversiveness in Palmer’s crime scene photograph.

  The ultimate result of using the fairy tale genre in the modern, urban settings of Who Killed Amanda Palmer is a change in the focus of the story. Carter’s description of the genre (which she refers to simply as “the tale”) is succinct and apt:

  Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretenses at the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind every experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience [460].

  Such a remove from the quotidian that the fairy tale provides allows Gaiman to wrest the focus away from the kind of interpretation of prurient violence which the photographs of naked women (some of them bruised and the victims of outright violence) by themselves might evoke.

  Both Gaiman and Palmer have discussed the importance of realizing the true focus of art, particularly in reference to their own work. As much of Palmer’s work (particularly in this collection) might be considered to border on the pornographic, their thoughts on the na
ture of pornography are useful here.10 Gaiman, who once wrote for the “British ‘skin’ magazines” Penthouse and Knave magazines (Smoke and Mirrors 24), explains that after his perusal of these magazines, he realized that the types of pictures they publish are often misinterpreted. According to Gaiman, “Penthouse and magazines like it had absolutely nothing to do with women and absolutely everything to do with photographs of women” (24). In other words, the photographs of naked women in these magazines are not conveying information about the women themselves; rather, the photographs of naked women convey information about societal stereotypes of how naked women are supposed to be viewed. Problems emerge when these two different meanings—the meaning of the naked body itself, and societal stereotypes of what the naked body means—are confused and conflated.

  Many feminist theorists have similarly addressed understandings of and interpretations of the female body. In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Elisabeth Grosz reflects many of these interpretations in her explanation that “the body is literally written on, inscribed, by desire and signification, at the anatomical, physiological, and neurological levels” (60). Each individual body has its own individual, contextual meaning, which is difficult to convey in a photograph: even at a purely physical level, scars, stretch marks, and tattoos are all examples of such physical markers which are inscriptions of very specific meanings on bodies. These meanings are connected to, but should be differentiated from, the body’s placement within society. As theorist Judith Butler explains in her discussion of how bodies are understood in terms of the desires of others, “To the extent that desire is implicated in social norms, it is bound up with the question of power” (2). As Gaiman explains, the failure to understand the difference between women and photographs of women means that we do not see the difference between the stories of real, individual women (nearly unintelligible in unannotated photographs) and the ways in which stereotypical images of women contribute to their interpolation within the larger circulations of power in society.11

  Palmer has discussed at length (on her blog and elsewhere) the ways in which many kinds of misinterpretation of her work have been a problem for her. In particular, audiences often miss the dark humor which pervades much of her work. A good example of this is the outcry that erupted after the release of her song “Oasis” (the lyrics of which are included in Who Killed Amanda Palmer). Palmer describes “Oasis” as

  a tongue-in-cheek, ironic up-tempo pop song. a song about a girl who got drunk, was date raped, and had an abortion. she sings about these things lightly and joyfully and says that she doesn’t care that these things have happened to her because oasis, (her favorite band) has sent her an autographed photo in the mail. and to make things even better (!!), her bitchy friend melissa, who told the whole school about the abortion, is really jealous [sic] [“On Abortion, Rape, Art, and Humor”].

  Some were offended by what they interpreted as Palmer’s flippant attitude toward the serious topics of date rape and abortion. Palmer’s response, however, is that, “if you cannot sense the irony in this song, you’re about two intelligence points above a kumquat” (“On Abortion, Rape, Art, and Humor”). More importantly, Palmer explains that “the song isn’t even so much ABOUT those topics, it’s about denial, it’s about a girl who can’t find it in herself to take her situation seriously” (“On Abortion, Rape, Art, and Humor”). What both Gaiman and Palmer emphasize is the question of determining the true focal point of a text. Palmer’s song is not about rape in the same way that Penthouse magazine is not about naked women. While Penthouse encourages the fantasy that the scenarios evoked by pictures are genuinely reflective of individual identities (and the individual narratives inscribed on their bodies), Who Killed Amanda Palmer instead highlights the distance between the viewer and the subjects of the photographs, through both the incorporation of Gaiman’s narratives as well as the focus on death—an uncomfortable subject for many readers. The result of this discomfort is to shift the reader’s focus to the more fundamental issues from which these images and ideas emerge.

  To borrow a term from photography, what these provocative stories and images do is expand the reader’s depth of field. Without the text of the “Toads and Diamonds” story, for example, the viewer would simply see an image of a dead Amanda who choked on what at first glance looks like pills. How-ever, the fairy tale quality of the story results in a shift in focus, a willingness in the reader to see things metaphorically or symbolically. The story encourages us to look more closely at the picture and realize that it is not pills but jewels we are seeing—and then to question our original assumption that these jewels were choked on and consider other narrative possibilities. The distance created by the narrative formulation of the fairy tale allows us to re-examine our expectations of the stories frozen in these photographs. This distance, this shift in perspective caused by the juxtaposition of the text and the photographs, causes a friction which allows these frozen stories to melt and unfold.

  In fact, Angela Carter points to the qualities of both black humor as well as pornography as crucial in the kind of mythic tale that allows for just such a shift. In this genre, Carter explains,

  characters and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions. Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural—and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. Its only humour is black humour. It retains a singular moral function—that of provoking unease. The tale has relations with subliterary forms of pornography [460].

  Similarly, Gaiman has pointed out that “humor and horror and pornography are incredibly similar—you know immediately whether you’ve got them right or not because they should provoke a physiological change in the person reading” (Zaleski 56). It is this very fairy tale quality of these stories (as described by Carter and Gaiman) which provides a distinctly feminist dimension to the collection of Palmer’s photographs, a dimension which would be much less obvious if the photographs were collected without Gaiman’s stories. In the introduction to Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of his short fiction and poetry, Gaiman talks about the nature of fantasy and fairy tales: “Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated” (Smoke and Mirrors 2). In the face of the violence portrayed in the photographs, the mythic stories Gaiman tells offer just such hope in the face of the bleakness of violent urban reality.

  Without the stories, the more overt dark humor in photographs, such as those of Amanda dead on a golf course (21, 79) or of her corpse as part of an art installation (69–70), would be eclipsed by the accumulation of horror at (or worse, desensitization from) the less overtly funny, more disturbing photographs, such as Palmer’s bloody body shoved in a shopping cart (63). Page after page of crime scenes and dead bodies, though humorous and at times even quite beautiful,12 by themselves would easily lead a reader to reach a critical mass of despair, disgust, or even ennui. Accompanied by Palmer’s lyrics, they would achieve a certain additional dimension of critical distance, which might allow a certain deepening of perspective. However, Palmer’s lyrics to songs like “Guitar Hero” (a song about Columbine-like school violence [76]) and “Oasis” (a song about rape [24]) are in a dark register which is quite similar to her photographs. Gaiman’s stories, with their fairy tale evocations, elevate the collection by providing a counterpoint with a much needed mythic quality for the darkly humorous and pornographic elements.

  For example, “Case of the Besmirched Dirndl” shows a dirndl-clad Palmer, a dropped beer stein at her feet, with a quite phallic clarinet apparently shoved halfway down her throat. The text, a wonderful homage to Sherlock Holmes, is full-on satire:

  “I will advise the police,” said the consulting detective, “that they are looking for a man. He is dark-haired, left-handed, and extremely tall, in all probability a basketball player. He has spent time in Bavaria, but his passport is almost definitely Gu
atamalan. He was here for the woodwind convention, but will have checked out early” [95].

  The use of costume, introduction of death-by-clarinet, and photograph of a dead Amanda deep-throating a woodwind instrument are amusing while also disturbing. Parodying both detective fiction as well as pornography, Gaiman’s text once again changes the reader’s focus by reframing the photograph as an evidentiary photo in a fictional narrative. In a way, Gaiman more firmly reminds the reader that the collection is making statements about the portrayal of women (and not necessarily about individual women themselves, except for perhaps the role of women in art). Combining these parodies once again demonstrates the brilliance of Gaiman’s collaborative powers, as this death scene is straight black comedy.

  However, Gaiman’s stories are not uniformly optimistic. To the contrary, there are certain stories accompanying photographs which, rather than mediating the violence with a mythic spin, instead drive home the real dangers which women still face. The short text and photograph titled “The Boys Room” is particularly troubling in this respect. It recounts a fight between the unnamed narrator and Amanda, during which “we got kinda stupid,” and now “she’s not talking” (76). In the accompanying photograph, Palmer’s body is not immediately evident—the picture of a cluttered bedroom has at its center a sunny window, which highlights a video game steering wheel. It seems to be a typical boy’s bedroom—only a closer look reveals Palmer’s shadowed, slumped body in the corner of the room. Something is wrong with her arm—there is blood—and she is wearing a short t-shirt and men’s briefs (76). The unexplained violence and matter-of-fact tone in the text are troubling. This is one of the few unmediated displays of violence in the collection, which is ironic, given that its one of the least overt displays of violence. It takes some time and effort to see what has happened, and it is up to the reader to piece together possible hypotheses.