Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Tara Prescott

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  “Anathema liked to read about herself”

  Preserving the Female Line in Good Omens

  BY JESSICA WALKER

  The New Testament describes the end of the world as “that day and hour [that] knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (Matthew 24:36). The title pages that separate the sections of Good Omens, written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, underscore this context: after “In the beginning,” the titles move directly to “Eleven years ago,” and then a countdown of days: “Wednesday,” “Thursday,” “Friday,” “Saturday,” and “Sunday (The First Day of the Rest of Their Lives).” The book therefore suggests a sort of timelessness, in which the reader is invited to associate events not with a specific past, but with a general type of day. “Saturday” could be any Saturday, including this coming weekend. The story hinges, however, on a fictional text from a specific historical moment. Agnes Nutter, through her Nice and Accurate Prophecies, speaks to us from England in the mid-seventeenth century. In this time and place, developing ideas about historiography and gender, intensified by the English Civil War, encouraged autobiography in general and women’s family memoir in particular. By examining Agnes’s fictional work in context with actual seventeenth-century female-authored family histories, we may better understand her purpose, her idiosyncrasies, and how her connection with Anathema shapes the latter’s development as she struggles with her identity as a “professional descendant” (Gaiman and Pratchett 210).

  The memoirs I examine here may not seem comparable to Agnes’s Prophecies. Early modern women’s autobiographies document true events; the content is serious, even grim. Agnes’s text, on the other hand, is a fiction within a fiction, and a humorous one at that. Memoir recounts the past, while prophecy predicts the future. Nor is there any reason to assume that Gaiman and Pratchett are familiar with, or deliberately invoking, seventeenth-century women’s memoir. Examining these texts together, however, underscores important characteristics of Good Omens—namely, the importance of the Prophecies in helping Anathema establish her identity as a Device, a witch, and a woman. By tracing common threads between Agnes and her real-life counterparts, we can better understand the importance of her writing to the text as a whole.

  At first glance, Agnes seems to belong to the tradition of mid-seventeenth-century apocalyptic women prophets like Eleanor Davies and Hester Biddle. Such women, however, framed their prophecies for the public, addressing powerful political and religious figures. Eleanor Davies’ 1651 prophecy “The Benediction. From the A:lmighty O:mnipotent,” addressed to Oliver Cromwell, references public events such as the Plague and the Thirty Years War. Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole’s 1655 prophecy To the Priests and People of England a
ddresses the nation: “Oh apostate England, what shall the God or mercies do for thee? What shall he do unto thee?” (146). Hester Biddle preferred to target particular cities in her Woe to Thee, City of Oxford and Woe to Thee, City of Cambridge.

  Agnes, on the other hand, envisions a specific, private audience for her prophecies; she publishes the book not “for the sales, or the royalties, or even for the fame” but for “the single gratis copy of the book that an author was entitled to” (Gaiman and Pratchett 53). She wants a bound copy of the book not for herself, but as an heirloom for her descendants, whom the predictions seek to guide and protect. It turns out that Agnes’s text is not so much a work of prophecy as a collection of “[r]acial memory,” a memoir from the future: “Agnes didn’t see the future. That’s just a metaphor. She remembered it.... We think she’s best at remembering things that were going to happen to her descendants” (218). In this sense, Agnes’s work most closely resembles that of seventeenth-century women autobiographers who recorded their experiences for the edification of their children, immediate community, and descendants.

  Throughout the first century of the Renaissance, women’s options for writing, circulation, and publication were limited. As the early modern period progressed, “a divide grew up between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres,” and for women, family life was “supposed to map out the limits of their world” (Hobby 3). These limits were often physical as well as cultural, for the “requirement of chastity kept women at home, silenced them, isolated them” (M. King and Rabil xxiii). Any act in the public sphere could threaten a woman’s most valuable commodity, her reputation: “for women to be in public affairs was for women to be whores” (Purkiss 67). Only aristocratic, well-educated women, of good families and secure reputations, had access to conventional forms of writing like poetry or drama; others found written expression was more acceptable at a remove, translating male-authored works or commenting on religious texts. These works were circulated among the elite but were rarely performed or printed for the general public.

  The Civil War fueled a profound shift in English life writing and family memoir. The tensions and dangers of the Civil War and Interregnum “stimulated the writing of lives in ways that demonstrate how productive of biographies eras of disruption may be.... It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact of the Civil War upon the development of English biography in the seventeenth century” (Pritchard 11–12). Rather than events being recorded after the fact by elite court historians, print culture provided readers with current accounts of battles, sieges, and political developments. Such pamphlets declared themselves authoritative not by the position of the author or his connections, but by the position of the witness. Information was valued according to its novelty, exclusivity, and immediacy, privileging history as a lived experience rather than an abstract intellectual exercise as it had often been for Renaissance humanists: “You may confidently believe this narration; for you receive it not from my ear, but from my eye” (“A Copie of a Letter” A4).

  Many of the people involved with the struggles recounted in these pamphlets were women. With a large percentage of the men away at war or exiled, women became “defenders of their homes, pensioners for estates and generally responsible for their families’ survival” (Crawford 213). Wartime news pamphlets such as “A Briefe and Exact Relation of the Most Materiall and Remarkeable Passages that hapned in the late well-formed (and as valiently defended) Seige laid before the City of Glocester” report women fetching turf to build fortifications, putting out fires, and dodging explosions. Women “petitioned parliament,” “agitated for social reforms,” and took part in political debate, which “forced them to refine and sharpen their arguments, and so led to further publications” (Hobby 85, Crawford 213). When censorship of the press ceased in 1641, “they shared with men in the greater freedom to publish,” producing political commentaries, prose literature, and personal narratives (Crawford 231). Such involvement in the public world had a profound effect on women’s life writing. Much more so than at any previous time in English history, everyday people, aided by increased access to education and freedom of the press, sought to understand their personal lives within the context of staggering public events. When danger and exile drove women from their homes and forced them into the public space in both ideological and physical ways, “many female writers described or analysed their experiences” (Hobby 78). Like most autobiographies of the era, these works were not intended for general publication; but autobiography, “even if not intended for print publication, presupposes an audience beyond the self,” and these works usually had intended audiences: one’s immediate family, descendants, or religious community (Seelig 73).

  The latter half of the seventeenth century provides a wealth of women’s accounts, including Lucy Hutchinson’s defense of her husband, Anne Halkett’s account of her work as a Royalist spy, Margaret Cavendish’s tale of exile in the service of Henrietta Maria, and Brilliana, Lady Harley’s letters describing her defense of her home against prolonged siege. Two memoirists in particular, Lady Anne Clifford and Lady Ann Fanshawe, demonstrate in their diaries and autobiographies many of the same concerns that we find in Agnes’s text. Writing for manuscript circulation within their families and immediate community, both authors recorded their personal and family struggles for the edification of future generations. If the Devices are “professional descendants,” then Clifford and Fanshawe were professional ancestors, seeking to guide and protect their families as Agnes does through her prophecies.

  By making connections between Agnes’s text and the writing projects of seventeenth-century women memoirists like Clifford and Fanshawe, we may ultimately better understand Anathema’s position as a reader of and participant in her own life. Like Agnes, Clifford and Fanshawe write to preserve their family line in general and, either overtly or subversively, the female line in particular. To do so, they frequently engage in a nonlinear style that demonstrates the difficulty of recording the past to better understand the present and prepare for the future. Women’s writing, Hélène Cixous argues, “un-thinks the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield. In woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history” (352). Rather than producing traditional historiography, these women apply the importance of historiography to a different way of inhabiting and recording the past.

  Clifford’s work resists many typical features of early modern historiography: centralization of men’s stories, linear narrative, and a binary between public and private events. Her dual-columned diaries enable her to place experiences in a variety of contexts, allowing her to live and write on the border between public and private. She centralizes female figures, rejects linear narrative in favor of drawing temporal and spatial connections based on personal relationships, and creates an inclusionary history that refuses a division between public and private experiences. Fanshawe’s text is similarly fractured; beneath the surface narrative, a traditional memoir of a devoted subject and his dutiful wife, lurks a Gothic horror story of a traumatized woman struggling with her maternal role. Clifford and Fanshawe read and write their lives as feminist critics, questioning the usefulness of traditional narratives in forming their senses of self. In the case of Agnes’s text, the burden of contextualization and interpretation shifts from the author to the reader—the generations of Devices who bear the responsibility of making sense of her obscure, nonlinear style. Ultimately, Agnes’s lessons lead to a resolution of the horrors of the past, through the union of the last of her descendants, Anathema, with Newt Pulsifer, descendant of the Witchfinder General who ordered Agnes’s death.

  Because Clifford and Fanshawe act as interpreters of their family histories, some background context is necessary to understand their writing. Anne Clifford was born in 1590 to one of England’s wealthiest aristocratic families, her parents’ only surviving child and therefore “a sole heires
s to a great fortune” (Acheson 11). The baronies of Clifford, Westmoreland, and Vescy had belonged to her family for more than three centuries, but “the law was not settled in one way or another” concerning women’s rights to inherit such properties (Acheson 18). When Clifford’s father died in 1605, he left her a substantial dowry but willed all his estates to his brother. In response, Clifford and her mother Margaret commenced a legal battle that would last for nearly four decades.

  To prove that the inheritance of these particular lands was not restricted to male heirs, Clifford and her mother began to collect documents of the Clifford family history going back to the reign of King John. In addition to this family research, Clifford began to keep records of her own life and struggle to gain her inheritance. At the age of 53, she finally claimed the estates for which she had fought for so long by outliving all the male claimants. Once she had possession of the property, “she spent the rest of her life compiling proof that it should have been hers all along,” assembling the Clifford family history into a thousand-page tome known as The Great Books of the Clifford Family. She also “employed professional scribes to make three almost identical copies of the series which would be preserved for use and edification of her posterity” (Myers 581). In addition to her family history, the work included Clifford’s autobiography (starting at conception, no less). She continued to keep a diary until the day before her death in 1676.

  “[N]othing,” Benedict Anderson writes, “connects us affectively to the dead more than language” (145). Both Clifford and Fanshawe write to connect with deceased family, just as Agnes writes to connect with her family to come. Though Clifford’s “desire to document the histories of her family and herself ... [was] stimulated by the need to construct a picture of her lineage and rights that would help her in the legal disputes,” she continued to compile the “Chronicles” (a word that she uses to describe both her family histories and her diaries) even after they were no longer needed (Acheson 15). As important as the actual possession of the property was Clifford’s sense of identity as “a commentator of the family’s past and a guardian of its future” (Myers 588). She intended for the diaries to be preserved and read, and had scribes copy them to that end, later adding further notes in the margins to provide a wider context for her observations. By recording her legal battles “for the future uses of her family members and herself,” she inserts herself into her own family history (Acheson 26).