I cannot find even the darkest form of humor in this story and photograph, unless it is the exception of the extremely dark irony implied by the understatement in the dialogue when compared with the violence in the photograph. This in itself may be a commentary on violence against women, at how often it can go overlooked. Here is the flip side of Palmer’s “Oasis.” If “Oasis” is about denial, then Gaiman’s “Boys Room” illustrates the rest of Palmer’s commentary on the media controversy over her song:
i think it makes people uncomfortable to hear the truth about a very real and sick situation: if you don’t know—or have never encountered—a teenager who is going through intense heavy experiences (like rape, abortion, eating disorders, abuse, fill-in-the-blank) and is laughing these things off like THEY DON’T MATTER, then you are not ALIVE and AWAKE and living on this planet. IT’S HAPPENING EVERYWHERE. i see it all the time. it’s called being a confused teenager. it’s real. it SUCKS. abortion is serious. rape is serious. lots of things are serious. do they think i’m blind? [“On Abortion, Rape, Art, and Humor”].
Palmer’s blog entry ends with a call to arms to not ignore such ugly topics, but instead to bring them into focus: “our COLLECTIVE freedom to approach situations with humor, with irony, with anger, with sadness, with darkness, with an edge, from a different perspective, from within the situation...it’s ESSENTIAL” (“On Abortion, Rape, Art, and Humor”). As this story lacks the kind of fairy tale qualities so prevalent in the other stories, its very lack of fantastic elements forces the reader to once again change her focus, bringing a newly heightened form of attention to the issue of violence against women. By once again changing the depth of field, Gaiman is able to bring fresh attention to an important idea.
NOTES
1. In the interests of recognizing the collaborative nature of this project, I will follow the way each of the authors is credited in the book: Neil Gaiman (writer), Amanda Palmer (collaborator), Kyle Cassidy (photographer), and Beth Hommel (photographer). While Gaiman is presumably primarily responsible for the text of the stories in the collection, because of the collaborative nature of the project, I will attribute the stories to both Gaiman and Palmer.
2. See Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women; In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings, eds. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. Mackinnon.
3. That the passive body is being portrayed by a known living body does, to a certain extent, create an affective tension which underlies these photographs. Further, that this project was conceived of and directed by Palmer herself also gives weight to a reading of empowerment.
4. See Jack Zipes, “Perrault, Charles,” The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, 379–381; “Lang, Andrew,” The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, 288–90; “Toads and Diamonds,” The Blue Fairy Book.
5. Rudd also notes the irony in the fact that in Freud’s discussion of the uncanny, he uses the original German Sandman tale to illustrate his theory (162).
6. Echoes of which can be seen in other works by Gaiman. The Corinthian from The Sandman series springs most immediately to mind.
7. See, e.g., Lacan, “The Mirror-phase as formative of the Function of the I.” As Lacan’s work is foundational to much recent feminist theory, it is particularly appropriate to identify the applicability of his work to a feminist reading of Who Killed Amanda Palmer.
8. That this image of Palmer’s face upturned in ecstasy is also evocative of saint imagery simply reinforces the mythic undertones of the text.
9. That they are referred to as “older” and “younger” twins, seemingly oxymoronic phrases, only heightens the unreal quality of this vignette.
10. This idea of the distinction between subject and reality is perhaps most eloquently explored in Michel Foucault’s seminal text on art and perception, This Is Not a Pipe (1968; trans. James Harkness, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982]) in the opening chapter, “Two Pipes.”
11. Although Gaiman has distinguished this collection specifically as being art and not pornography, because it is a published collection which includes photographs of an attractive, naked woman, I think that comparisons to pornography are fair.
12. See the monochromatic portrait of Palmer in her slip (74), or floating in a lake, surrounded by diaphanous fabric (57).
WORKS CITED
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Carter, Angela. Burning Your Boats. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. Print.
De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Print.
Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Plume, 1991.
Gaiman, Neil. “How to order WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER and why outer space tastes of raspberries.” Neil Gaiman’s Journal. April 29, 2009. Web. 19 May 2011.
_____. Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions. New York: Harper, 1998. Print.
_____ (w), Amanda Palmer (c), Kyle Cassidy (p), Beth Hommel (p). Who Killed Amanda Palmer: A Collection of Photographic Evidence. New York: Eight Foot Books, 2009. Print.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.
Dworkin, Andrea, and Catharine A. Makinnon, eds. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Print.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the I.” Trans. Jean Roussel. New Left Review 51 (September-October 1968): 71–77. Print.
“The Life and Times of the Dresden Dolls—Chapter 1: So Far...” The Dresden Dolls. Web. 14 June 2011.
McCabe, Joseph. “Interview with Neil Gaiman.” Hanging Out with the Dream King: Conversations with Neil Gaiman and His Collaborators. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2004. 5–14. Print.
Palmer, Amanda. Amanda Palmer and Nervous Cabaret Tour. Bijou Theater, Knoxville, Tennessee. 22 November 2009.
_____. “On Abortion, Rape, Art, and Humor.” Amanda Palmer. February 3, 2009. Web. 19 May 2011.
Rudd, David. “An Eye for an Eye: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Questions of Identity.” Children’s Literature in Education 39 (2008): 159–168. Print.
“A Short History of Who Killed Amanda Palmer.” Who Killed Amanda Palmer. Web. 19 May 2011.
“Toads and Diamonds.” The Blue Fairy Book. Ed. Andrew Lang, 1889. Project Gutenberg. Web. 29 June 2011.
Williams, Linda. “Pornographies On/Scene: or Diff’rent Strokes for Diff’rent Folks.” Sex Exposed: Sexuality in the Pornography Debate. Eds. Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 233–265. Print.
Zaleski, Jeff. “Comics! Books! Films! The Arts and Ambitions of Neil Gaiman.” Publishers Weekly (July 28, 2003): 46–57. Print.
Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New York: Wildman Press, 1983. Print.
_____.“Introduction: Towards a Definition of the Literary Fairy Tale.” The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern. Ed. Jack Zipes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xxvi. Print.
_____.“Lang, Andrew.” The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern. Ed. Jack Zipes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 288–90. Print.
_____.“Perrault, Charles.” The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern. Ed. Jack Zipes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 379–38. Print.
Liminality and Empowerment
The Aged Woman in Neil Gaiman’s “Queen of Knives” and “Chivalry”
BY AGATA ZARZYCKA
Older female characters, though present mostly in the background of Neil Gaiman’s works, definitely deserve critical interest as not only a prominent motif, but also as politically significant constructs shaped by believable combinations of age, gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuali
ty factors. The theme of aging or aged womanhood has left its imprint on Gaiman’s longer narratives such as The Sandman series, American Gods, Coraline and Anansi Boys, as well as several short stories, including “The Problem of Susan,” “Feeders and Eaters,” “Queen of Knives” and “Chivalry.” What makes them especially worth considering from the perspective of female aging is both their extraordinary sensitivity to some of the major problems identified by the contemporary gerontology and their cultural self-awareness. These stories handle the questions of aging with an undertone of subversion.
I argue that “Queen of Knives” and “Chivalry” in particular address the problem of marginalization faced by the aged woman in Western society and culture, as well as enable readings which promise a reversal of power relations, yet when juxtaposed with each other, reveal the lack of easy answers to problems at the intersection of gender and age. The subversive potential of “Queen of Knives” and “Chivalry” is partly due to their identification with what Farah Mendlesohn calls “liminal fantasy” (XXIII), which relies on the discrepancy between the characters’ and the reader’s perception of the supernatural (182). In addition to this effect, which is frequently achieved through “irony” (191), the stories blur the borders between fantastic, figurative, and realistic discourse in the process that can, after Mendlesohn, be defined as the “concretization of metaphor” (195–196). Despite the similar sources of the aging female characters’ empowerment, each work differs in terms of scale and type of empowerment. “Queen of Knives” employs “liminal irony” to build a complex picture of power relations, in which the characters’ strikingly passive attitude towards the sudden disappearance of an elderly woman draws the reader’s attention to the issue of marginalization. The possibility of this woman’s empowerment, traceable but unconfirmed throughout the poem, is provided mostly by the potential “concretization of metaphor” suggested in the title.
“Chivalry,” in turn, focuses on depicting the elderly heroine in a position of control, founded not so much on a lack of the complexities present in the other text, as the protagonist’s attitude towards them. While the “concretization of metaphor” may be seen as the source of her immediate agency, as she becomes a dispenser of powerful items which are simultaneously mythic, symbolic, and material, the “irony” established through the heroine’s anticlimactic distance towards her situation provides her with an agency on the narrative level, constituted by both the story and its utilization of the Arthurian myth. By preserving a detached attitude towards the developments of the narrative, the protagonist can impose her own rules on the plot and her function in it. The moderation, or restraint, that allows her to do so, however, may be perceived as empowering in general terms, yet limiting from the perspective of the discourse of aging. As discussed further, in the light of Tillie Olsen’s views on aged womanhood, the identity of Pearl from “Queen of Knives” is in a transitional stage1 marked by disintegration, but signaling a potential turn towards something new. Arguably, Mrs. Whitaker from “Chivalry” has moved beyond that stage and developed an integrity marked by moderation. Still, such an interpretation touches on the problematic concepts of “wisdom” (Woodward, “Against” 187), spiritual sublimation, and isolation (Stuart-Hamilton 13–14) ascribed if not enforced upon the aged identity (Stuart-Hamilton 14; Woodward, “Against” 187).
While the subversive potential in “Queen of Knives” appears inconspicuous, it offers a rather balanced incorporation of age and gender identity aspects. The elderly heroine’s empowerment in “Chivalry” is more spectacular, yet its relationship with the age factor may be seen as ambiguous. This claim is intended not to devalue or deny the story’s subversive character, but rather to emphasize its entanglement with one of the most difficult challenges in Western culture: a coherent conceptualization of aging, with an additional acknowledgement of the gender perspective.
Aging in Theory and Practice
According to scholarly accounts, the growing preoccupation with aging in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has paralleled an ongoing marginalization. On the one hand, researchers mention the increasing importance of older persons as a social group and as target consumers (Blaikie 22, Stuart-Hamilton 6), as well as point to the rise of the age-focused research in sociology, cultural studies, and as a separate discipline of gerontology (Blaikie 11–12, 18; Stuart-Hamilton 5–6), whose study fields include “literary gerontology” (Wallace 390). Diana Wallace traces the interest of writers and artists in the theme of aging, as reflected, for example, by the recent development of the “the memoir of a parent” genre (398). This convention has some traces in “Queen of Knives.” Though the poem deals with a memory of the narrator’s grandparents, its autobiographical quality is signaled in Gaiman’s commentary. He writes that “Queen of Knives” is “close enough to the truth that I have had, on occasion, to explain to some of my relatives that it didn’t really happen. Well, not like that, anyway” (22).2 Gerontologists continue to hunt stereotypes about aging, perpetuated by society in general (Stuart-Hamilton 11, Whitbourne and Sneed 247–248), the realm of culture (Blaikie 18, 23, 96) or academia (Whitbourne and Sneed 248–249).
Describing the most traditional depictions of old age in Western culture, Ian Stuart-Hamilton underlines their contradictory character: “On the one hand, [old age] is a reward to be enjoyed [mostly due to the longevity and experience it signifies], but if anything goes wrong, then it is a punishment” (5). Accordingly, psychological approaches to growing old deal with the dilemma by focusing on the internal work the aging subject executes so the process is harmonious and satisfying. Such work involves, first of all, handling the sources of one’s past negative experiences, as well as embracing the prospect of death, gradually detaching oneself from the mundane aspects of existence imposed by physicality, egocentricity and social obligations (13).3 Thus, contradictory depictions of the old age experience might be explained by its presumed link with the respective failure or success in the tasks specified above. The same link is also crucial for the fact that, as Kathleen Woodward puts it, “In the West the time-honored association of wisdom has been with aging, where wisdom is defined in various ways, but almost always understood as a capacity for balanced reflection and judgment that can only accrue with long experience” (“Against” 187). Woodward perceives the seemingly complimentary connection between old age and sapience as a stereotype whose social and political repercussions lead to denying elderly people as a social group the right to effectively voice their objections to the marginalization they face, and pressing them into a position of passive acceptance (205–206). While Woodward’s gender focus is noticeable at various points of her essay (e.g., 186–187, 190, 197–200, 204, 207–209), its mission is to “declare a moratorium on wisdom” (205) as a quality ascribed by the Western culture to the old age in general. A number of other stereotypes identified by gerontologists, however, turn out to be women-specific.
The significance of the intersection between age and gender is often emphasized, with the women’s experience of old age pointed out as socially dominant (Blaikie 78) yet, paradoxically, insufficiently researched (Blaikie 78; “Woodward,” “Tribute” 88, “Performing” 162).4 Still, the interdisciplinary explorations carried out so far have led to the identification of several problems crucial for the representations of aged womanhood, and revolve mostly around the factors of oppression, transparency and the focus on youth in Western culture. Apart from the already mentioned cultural and theoretical transparency of female aging–e.g. Woodward goes so far as to claim an actual erasure of the older woman from the classical psychoanalysis (“Tribute” 79, 87) and her “invisibility” in the realm of art (“Performing” 162–163)–researchers underline the extraordinary susceptibility of aging women to the social oppression on the grounds of age- and gender-based discrimination combined (Blaikie 83), especially as far as the physical appearance is concerned (Wallace 408, Whitbourne and Sneed 249).
Through Eyes Young and Old
> Woodward defines an important problematic feature of cultural approaches to aging in the notion of “the youthful structure of the look” (“Performing” 163–164), which manipulates the receiver into perceiving the aged character from the perspective of someone less advanced in years (164), and thus results in “the culturally induced tendency to degrade and reduce an older person to the prejudicial category of old age” (164). Though Woodward applies this concept to film (164), the concept is also relevant to the construction of the first-person narrator of “Queen of Knives” as he shares with the reader a childhood memory of a time spent with his grandparents. The family’s visit to a local theater leads to the grandmother’s disappearance as a result of a stage trick during which she is locked in a container and subsequently cut with various blades. After an unsuccessful attempt to obtain some explanation from the performing illusionist, the grandfather and grandson return to their ordinary life. In the final scene, taking place some time after the incident, the boy observes the older man “stab[bing] a knife into a box” (Gaiman 132).
The narrator’s unconventional perception of old age is signaled at the very beginning of the poem:
I knew they [the grandparents] were old–
chocolates in their house
remained uneaten until I came to stay,
Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Page 34