Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Tara Prescott

  Both Clifford and Fanshawe strive to preserve the female line in the patriarchal world, lamenting the passing of their mothers and expressing anxiety over the futures of their daughters. Just as Agnes guides Anathema across the centuries, Anne Clifford’s text records her mother Margaret’s support and guidance. Even after her death, Margaret Clifford remains a strong influence on her daughter: when Anne’s husband once again tries to convince her to cease her proceedings, she tells him “that my promise was so far passed to my mother and to all the world that I would never do it whatsoever became of me and mine” (16 April 1617 129). Anecdotes about Clifford’s young daughter, Margaret’s namesake, also appear frequently. The emphasis on female support systems extends beyond her relationship with her mother; the vast majority of her observations in the diaries concern news and scandal among the powerful women of Clifford’s community. Motherhood is a significant event in their circle, and Clifford’s diaries record a dozen pregnancies and births over the course of the 1616–1619 record. Privileging women’s identities and experiences, she identifies men by their connections to women: “my Lady Thomas Howard’s son” (3 January 1616 63); “my Lord Chancellor Egerton my Lady Derby’s husband” (March 1617m 122). In observations such as “I went to the court, where the Queen sent for me into her own bedchamber and here I spoke to the King” (4 November 1617 149), Clifford’s sentence structures give women primacy even over sovereigns.

  Like Agnes with her hodgepodge of prophecies, Clifford views public and private events as equally significant. Her diaries are written in a double-columned format; her original entries were copied by a scribe, with a wide margin in which Clifford recorded relevant observations in her own hand. The margins do not reflect a division between public and private, but rather show both kinds of events in close proximity: “Upon the 18th, being Friday, died my Lady Margaret [Clifford’s daughter]’s old beagle” (18 October 1616m 98) is followed by “Upon the 4th Prince Charles was created Prince of Wales” (4 November 1616m 98). The dual-columned format helps Clifford contextualize her experiences, interpreting her own text as the Devices interpret their ancestor Agnes’s.

  The very act of recording the past for the benefit of the future is an act of defying time itself: that which should be behind us is still mentally present; that which has not happened is already being considered. To write a family memoir is to consciously demonstrate the non-linear nature of time. The historian must always place her or himself in multiple moments: the past of the event, the present of the writing, the future of the reading and interpretation. Fanshawe’s, Clifford’s, and Agnes Nutter’s narratives all demonstrate this anxiety about the nonlinear nature of memory. Clifford’s writing doubles back on itself, placing events in context with other important times and places rather than telling them in a linear order. Frequently, she emphasizes links between important female figures: “The child was brought down to me in the gallery which was the first time I had seen her after my mother died” (December 1616m 102). She recounts her mother’s death thusly:

  Upon the 24th, being Friday, between the hours of six and seven at night died my dear mother at Brougham in the same chamber where my father was born, thirteen years and two months after the death of Queen Elizabeth and ten years and four months after the death of my father, I being then 26 years old and four months and the child two years old wanting a month [24 May 1616m 84].

  This description places her mother’s death in context with every other significant event of Clifford’s life, creating meaning through repetitions and connections.

  The same desire to preserve family lines through memoir emerges in Lady Ann Fanshawe’s work. Fanshawe was born Ann Harrison to a Royalist family in 1625; she was well-educated, although we know little about her upbringing other than what her autobiography provides. In 1644 she married her second cousin, Richard Fanshawe, Charles II’s Secretary of War. During the years of the war and Interregnum, the Fanshawes followed Prince Charles’s forces to France, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. In 1676, a decade after her husband’s death and four years before her own, she composed a memoir of their travels for their only surviving son. Unlike Clifford, Fanshawe writes not to connect with her ancestors, but with her immediate descendants. Having only four surviving children out of twenty pregnancies, she categorizes experiences compulsively and is obsessed with sites of erasure: gravesites, unburied bodies, restless ghosts.

  Fanshawe’s relationship with preserving matrilinearity is more complex and troubled than Clifford’s. Her narrative, on the surface, is a patriarchal project: she obeys her father, follows her husband around the world, supports her exiled king, favors her male children (she admits that when “[b]oth my eldest daughters had the small pox att the same time,” she “neglected them, and day and night tended my dear son” [139]) and composes the memoir for her only surviving male heir. She is curiously silent about a vital part of her experiences as a woman: the numerous births, deaths, and miscarriages of her children. Constantly on the move throughout the years of the war and Restoration, she endures some twenty pregnancies, fourteen births, and nine childhood mortalities. Although she occasionally recounts pregnancy-related illnesses, we learn little of her feelings about her experiences: the pains of childbirth, the grief at losing children, the lives of her surviving children as they accompanied her on her travels, the terror that must have attended every pregnancy in a time of high mortality both for mothers and children. Mary Beth Rose argues that Fanshawe emphasizes her experiences as a diplomat’s wife because she values that role above all others: “in her selection of incidents and her choice of narrative strategies, she assigns of secondary value to those material aspects of her experience that are uniquely female: namely, the capacity to conceive and give birth” (70). Yet there emerges, in the silences and asides of her text, a preoccupation with traumatic, repressed maternal experience.

  This obsession emerges in the form of three uncanny tales. In the first, her mother falls ill not long after Ann’s birth and appears to have died. Upon waking, she reports having seen “two by me cloathed in long white garments” who had granted her wish to live “15 years to see my daughter a woman” (Fanshawe 109). Her mother’s death occurs, Fanshawe reports, “just 15 years from that time” (109). In the second, Fanshawe reports seeing “a woman leaning into the window through the casement, in white, with red hair and pale, gastly complexion”; she learns that this woman “was many ages agoe got with child by the owner of this place, and he in his garden murdered her and flung her into the river under your window” (125). In the third, she recounts the story of a brother and sister who desecrate their parents’ tombs and take some of their hair for a “frolick” (151). When the sister dies soon after, her brother “kept her body in a coffin sett up in his buttry, saying it would not be long before he dyed, and then they would be both buried together” (151). These ghost stories contain a recurrent theme of love between mothers and daughters, the wish to preserve the maternal line and the hope for family bonds stronger than death itself. This sense of love echoed in her moving account of her daughter Ann’s death: “upon the 20th of July, 1654, at 3 a clock in the afternoon, dyed our most dearly beloved daughter Ann Fanshawe, whose beauty and wit exceeded all that ever I saw of her age. She was ... the dear companion of our travells and sorrows.... We both wished to have gone into the grave with her” (136). At the same time, she is haunted by associations between birth and death, and the ghost stories she recounts reflect an anxiety about desecrated burial sites of mothers and children.

  Fanshawe’s memoir does not defy chronology as overtly Clifford’s does, but its content constantly reflects anxieties over the nonlinear nature of grief. She associates patriarchy with action, forward momentum, movement into the future. After her life is thrown into chaos shortly after her mother’s death (her father loses his property due to his Royalism and relocates the family to a series of impoverished dwellings near the King’s new wartime court in Oxford), she seeks stability in marriage. Yet the pas
t is literally present at the wedding:

  But as in a racke the turbulence of the waves disperses the splinters of the rock, so it was my lot; for having buried my dear brother Will Harrison in Exeter Colledge Chapell, I then married your dear father in [16]44 in Wolvercot Church, 2 miles from Oxford, upon the 18th of May. None was at our wedding but my dear father (who by my mother’s desire gave me her wedding ring, with which I was married) [111].

  Through the image of the dead brother’s burial and the dead mother’s ring, the deceased are in attendance metonymically and linguistically. Fanshawe’s obsession with hauntings and desecrations that upset the normal linear order of death, burial, and eternal rest continue to resurface in her ghost stories: the resurrection of her own mother, the murdered mother carelessly flung into the river, the violated tomb of the mother and the unburied coffin of her daughter. When her husband dies abroad, she takes their last journey home “with the body of my dear husband dayly in my sight for near 6 months together” (189). Denied resolution, she seeks to give the dead a proper burial through her writing.

  In the case of Agnes Nutter, resolution of past trauma comes not through the writing of her text but through the development of its most important reader, Anathema. Agnes’s collection of prophecies is “the sole prophetic work in all of human history to consist entirely of completely correct predictions concerning the following three hundred and forty odd years, being a precise and accurate description of the events that would culminate in Armageddon” (Gaiman and Pratchett 52–53). But although “Agnes had a line to the Future ... it was an unusually narrow and specific line” (209). The prophecies rarely concern public events; the prediction for the date of the Kennedy assassination, for instance, is “about a house falling down in King’s Lynn” (210). While Agnes’s predictions may be “almost totally useless” for the public at large, however, they are “generally very good if her descendants were involved” (209, 210): Anathema’s father was visiting King’s Lynn on November 22, 1963, so “while he was unlikely to be struck by stray rounds from Dallas, there was a good chance he might be hit by a brick” (210). After more than a century of struggling to interpret Agnes’s obscure prophecies, her descendants realize that, like Clifford’s and Fanshawe’s work, “the Nice and Accurate Prophecies was Agnes’s idea of a family heirloom. Many of the prophecies relate to her descendants and their well-being. She was sort of trying to look after us after she’d gone” (210).

  The nonlinear nature of the texts examined here underscores the paradox of writing memoir: recounting and examining the past (or in Agnes’s case, the future) makes it part of our present experiences. The Prophecies exist in the same ahistorical space as Clifford’s marginalia and Fanshawe’s ghost stories. Her descendants are left not knowing in what order the predictions should go: “Agnes was a bit slap-dash about timing. I don’t think she always knew what went where ... [W]e’ve spent ages devising a sort of system for chaining them together” (220). Time itself seems to collapse around the book; Aziraphale is so transfixed by its contents that the cup of cocoa he makes before he begins to read cools and condenses to a “congealed brown sludge” before growing “[g]reen fur ... on the inside of the mug” (160, 170). The title page of the prophecies is comically framed with all the details of a modern-day publication: the assurance that the text is “More complete than ever yet before publifhed” and a blurb from Mother Shipton calling it “Reminifent of Nostradamus at hif beft” (115). Agnes herself is “so far adrift in Time that she was considered pretty mad even by the standards of seventeenth-century Lancashire, where mad prophetesses were a growth industry” (209). Among her pronouncements are characteristically twentieth-century recommendations for penicillin, handwashing, jogging, and eating plenty of fiber—suggestions that strike her neighbors as so nonsensical that finally a “howling mob, reduced to utter fury by her habit of going around being intelligent and curing people,” drags her from her cottage to be burned at the stake (194).

  It may seem counterintuitive to compare memoirs that record the past with prophecies that predict the future. Memoirists, like all historians, struggle with the inescapable and unchangeable nature of the past. They can frame it, justify it, even ignore it: but they cannot change it. Only the future is open and free, a place of possibility where their offspring may be guided by them even after they are gone. But since Agnes’s prophecies are completely accurate, the future she foresees is every bit as unchangeable as the past recorded by typical family historians. While Clifford and Fanshawe record their experiences so that they might better understand them, Agnes makes no such effort; she can only record, never contextualize: “it’s not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means. Agnes was like someone looking at a huge picture down a tiny little tube” (210). Since “by the time it’d been filtered through her own understanding it’s often a bit confused,” here the readers rather than the author are left to interpret what cannot be changed (218). The distinction here is vital to understanding the novel: the burden of interpretation is placed not with Agnes but with Anathema, the text’s principal reader. Through her developing relationship with the Prophecies, Anathema will come to establish her own identity and make peace with her ancestral past.

  Since Agnes’s predictions only make sense in retrospect, such as the advice for the year 1972: “Do Notte Buye Betamacks,” her descendants are left with the task of making sense of her writing (209). Interpreting the prophecies requires the Devices to think like Agnes, a “half-crazed, highly intelligent seventeenth century witch with a mind like a crossword-puzzle dictionary,” combining her paranormal insight with their understanding of their own time (93). The cards on which the Devices record their commentary recall Anne Clifford’s dual-columned diaries. Newt observes on one of the cards: “It had a ruled line down the middle. On the left-hand side was a short piece of what seemed to be poetry, in black ink. On the right-hand side, in red ink this time, were comments and annotations” (206). Like Clifford’s marginalia, the Devices’ comments put Agnes’s prophecies into perspective so they can be better understood.

  The project of organizing the prophecies proves not only advantageous for individual family members who might benefit from Agnes’s advice. This act of interpreting the family future also strengthens the bond between the Devices, whose marginalia reveal a conversation across the generations. Unable to interpret a prophecy about Armageddon, one Device comments in 1789, “I feel good Agnes had drunk well this night”; another replies in 1854, “I concur. We are all human, alas” (220). When Newt learns that Agnes foresaw his sexual relationship with Anathema, he is embarrassed to find that “down the ages, various Devices had scrawled encouraging little comments in the margin” (284). The affectionate, familiar tone in the marginalia shows the power of text and supertext to speak across centuries: Clifford and Fanshawe preserve their family identities through their writing, but Agnes actually creates her family identity.

  Although the prophecies contain advice for all the Devices, they only mention Anathema by name. She bears special significance in being the last remaining Device when Armageddon comes; the “first sentence she had ever read out loud,” a description of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, concludes: “And ye shalle be theyr alfo, Anathema” (38). But she is more than simply the last Device; more than any of her family, she is Agnes’s heir, connected to her ancestor through their shared qualities of psychic abilities and good sense. Despite her occult powers, Agnes is practical and down-to-earth. After her death, her mystical possessions, the book and a mysterious box, are found “on the kitchen tale beside a note cancelling the milk” (195); the massacre at her execution is not the result of “any divine or devilish intervention,” but of “the contents of Agnes’s petticoats, wherein she had with some foresight concealed eighty pounds of gunpowder and forty pounds of roofing nails” (195). Like Clifford and Fanshawe, Agnes guards her family’s prosperity (warning against investing in technology that will soon become obsolete) and t
heir safety (the King’s Lynn warning). Clifford and Fanshawe offer guidance to their descendants, but their advice is less specific and more abstract: how to persevere in the face of opposition or danger; how to value mothers and children and cope with their loss; how to weather the storms of marriage and survive the loss of a beloved spouse; how to travel to new countries or maintain one’s home; how to honor a dead king, or defy a living one. Agnes, on the other hand, teaches her descendants how to avoid falling bricks when a roof caves in.

  Anathema’s own form of witchcraft is similar: “any prowling maniac would have had more than his work cut out if he had accosted Anathema Device. She was a witch, after all. And precisely because she was a witch, and therefore sensible, she put little faith in protective amulets and spells; she saved it all for a foot-long bread knife which she kept in her belt” (88). She “suspect[s] that she could occasionally think like Agnes” (93) and speaks of her own psychic abilities “as through she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she’d much prefer not to have” (221, emphasis mine). Having identified so strongly with Agnes and the prophecies her entire life, Anathema is anachronistic. As a child, her teachers “upbraid her for her spelling, which was not so much appalling as 300 years too late” (39). While identifying strongly with the past, “Anathema ... in the very nature of things always looked to the future”; much of her attention focuses on the inevitable apocalypse that she knows she will see in her lifetime (203).