Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Tara Prescott

  The greatest QCG of The Sandman series are the Furies, called The Kindly Ones in the eponymous installation of the series. The Furies enforce “the oldest rule” in the multiverse of The Endless, namely the avenging of blood-debts (28:23). In this way The Kindly Ones are also primordial goddesses, having apparently existed since nearly the beginning. As they begin their pursuit of Morpheus (to avenge his mercy killing of his son, Orpheus), all the parallel worlds are affected, as whatever passes for the normal laws of nature in their respective pocket universes break down. Destiny meets a copy of himself, Desire closes off its realm, and Delirium transforms into a school of tiny fish. As the walls between the parallel realities (in both the Guth and Everett senses) begin to break down, Destiny is faced with myriad versions of himself, and multiple Destinies note:

  “As events happen, the conflicting destinies will merge into a whole.”

  “As the events take place, the conflicting destinies will cease to exist.”

  [...] “Events that never did happen and now never shall, will cast their conclusions and occurrences out into the world.”

  “Cause and effect will jostle, unable to tell quite which came first. The event horizon will come closer and closer, wrecks and mirages of time and occasion...” [Sandman 67:14–15].

  Finally one version finally asks the rhetorical question, “Am I the true Destiny? Are you?” (67:15). When the Furies finally meet up with Morpheus they explain that they are his doom. “We will destroy your dreamworld, Morpheus.... And, in the end, we shall destroy you” (64:18–19). The cosmological powers of The Kindly Ones, and their connections to both classic mythology and modern science, are clear.

  There is another QCG in The Sandman who deserves our attention. The previously described gravitational vortex that Door condemns Islington to in Neverwhere is similar to the vortex in The Dreaming created by Rose Walker in The Sandman: The Doll’s House. Just as a black hole attracts all matter and energy to it, Morpheus explains to the raven Matthew that Rose will “attract the stray dreams to her—or she’ll be drawn to them” (11: 9). Indeed, in her dreams Rose reaches out to all dreamers simultaneously and begins breaking down the walls between their individual dream universes, “loosing them into the flux.... And it would be so simple to create one huge dream” (14:15, 19). Morpheus explains to Rose that these occasional vortices are humans who have the power to “destroy the ordered chaos of the Dreaming” by gathering the dreams and dreamers together before “the vortex collapses in upon it all.... It leaves behind nothing but darkness” and destroys entire worlds (16:5). Rose Walker is therefore a sort of psychic or supernatural black hole who has the power to destroy worlds—a powerful modern cosmological goddess indeed.3

  Another QCG who creates—and unwittingly causes the near destruction of—worlds in her dreams is Helena Campbell of MirrorMask. She creates a parallel world by drawing it, and is herself drawn into (and temporarily trapped inside) this other universe through the power of the MirrorMask (wielded by the Princess of the Land of Shadows). The Princess (an alternate version of Helena) escapes into Helena’s universe, and throws all the parallel universes “out of balance,” threatening to destroy them in a selfish attempt to escape from her own unsatisfying existence. After all, she notes in her goodbye letter to her mother, the Dark Queen, “you can’t run away from home without destroying somebody’s world” (57). The Princess nearly succeeds, crumpling up Helena’s drawings and therefore crumpling the parallel world “into blackness and nothing” (69). In order to stop the Princess and return to her own world, Helena desperately seeks the MirrorMask, but when she finds it she initially realizes that “It wouldn’t take me to my own world, but it would give me what it had given her. Another world. Another girl like me to displace. It would be a way out. And I couldn’t do it” (61).

  Helena decides that she can instead use the mask to draw the Princess back, and finds that as she puts it on, “It was like being in the eye of the hurricane; the world swirled and shook around me, but I was fine. I could feel her being pulled towards me, being pulled into the window. For a moment I couldn’t remember which one of us I was” (73). Therefore, in Helena’s description we see both the black hole meme of Door and Rose Walker’s adventures, and the encounter between parallel versions of one’s self of InterWorld and The Sandman: The Kindly Ones.

  Thus far in our discussion of cosmological goddesses and their powers of creation and destruction, the language of reproduction has repeatedly cropped up. The usage of reproductive metaphor is also central to the inflationary model, with its “baby” or “child universes” and “mother universes.” João Magueijo describes the theory as a “union” between “two enemy gods” (quantum mechanics and general relativity), and the inflationary era itself “a brief affair,” a “temporary flirtation,” and a “naughty episode in the life of the baby universe” (115). Therefore the very concept of a multiverse draws on our respect for (and awe of) the most fundamental of all feminine powers, that of procreation. In the multiverse of Gaiman’s publications, new cosmological goddesses share in this fecundity of the laws of physics, not only by traversing universes, but in creating and destroying them. While science is very much at the core of these characters, they also maintain a very definite mythological, magical, or spiritual element, at the very same time, in keeping with the awe-inspiring power of a Creator (whose presumed powers, despite the recent protestations of physicist Stephen Hawking, cannot be disproven by the laws of physics, but simply rendered superfluous). Seen in this light, Gaiman’s QCG bridge the gap between the ancient cosmological mythologies and a new scientific mythology that acknowledges both the importance of the laws of physics and the influence of consciousness on those laws.

  Perhaps the primary example of the intricate relationship between science and spirituality in Gaiman’s works is InterWorld. Here Joey Harker learns that the Walkers are caught in a battle to control the entire Altiverse between the uber-technologists of the Binary and the magic-based empire of HEX. The purpose of InterWorld is to try to instead promote a balance between the two extremes, because “the Altiverse functions best when the forces of magic and science are in balance” (75). Such a respectful balance between the spiritual and the rational—two important aspects of the human psyche—is reminiscent of paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould’s “Principle of NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” which he describes as a

  principle of respectful noninterference.... Science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty) [5–6].

  But without conflict there is no story, so Joey Harker and his fellow Walkers (male and female “joeys” from other Earths in the Altiverse) are pitted against the Binary and HEX, the latter represented by Lady Indigo and Lord Dogknife.

  Among the most powerful of the Walkers is Jo, a winged “joey” who flies not by means of the laws of aerodynamics, but because she has “the conviction that she can fly” (95). As a citizen of one of the more magical worlds, she appears on the surface to be more of a throwback to Faerie than a QCG, but the same could also be said of Lady Indigo, who uses spells and enchantments to gain power over others. But such an analysis would be myopic at best, and goes against the central, anti-“black-and-white” message of the novel. After all, according to the often-quoted adage attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For while both Jo and Lady Indigo rely on magic, they also manipulate science/technology, and transcend this cumbersome dichotomy. For example, Lady Indigo’s ship, the Lacrimae Mundi, is a spaceship, despite the magic that works within it. Jo may come from a magic planet, but her greatest power is being a Walker, with the ability to traverse realities by relying on her own innate power (simil
ar to her innate ability to fly without reliance on either science or magic). Her power is rather her consciousness, the same power which splits universes in the first place in the Many Worlds Interpretation. Therefore Jo comes closer to harnessing the ultimate power of reality as compared to the other characters.

  While the Walkers can travel between realities much faster than Lady Indigo, because they can travel from portal to portal directly through the hyperspace of the In-Between rather than relying on the mush longer route through its fringes (the Nowhere-at-All), there are limitations to the Walkers’ powers as well. They cannot create portals just anywhere, but instead have to search for “potential portals” where the entrance and exit points in space-time are “congruent” (167–168). Therefore both science and magic have limitations in the Altiverse.

  This opening of portals or doorways between universes is reminiscent of both C.S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Gaiman’s love for (and frustration with) Lewis’s works led him to write the short story “The Problem with Susan” (Fragile Things), while Pullman (an agnostic) has said of Lewis: “I realised that what he was up to was propaganda in the cause of the religion he believed in,” and called the Chronicles “monumentally disparaging of girls and women.... One girl [Susan] was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys.” Gaiman himself has described “the things that were so amazing” about Pullman’s trilogy as including “the pleasure of being in, and discovering an alternate universe, which is a very specific pleasure” (Bookwitch). While Lewis’s multiverse is a clearly an almost entirely magical/spiritual one, Pullman’s universe is closer to both InterWorld and the NOMA of Gould in its appreciation of both science and spirituality as facets of the world we inhabit. As previously noted, modern science and spirituality are blended in Pullman’s works just as they are in Gaiman’s, for example in the character Mary Malone, a former nun and physicist who discovers that dark matter is actually conscious (and central to the relationship between angels and humans).

  There is yet another fundamental connection between the cosmos and humanity, one hinted at in Pullman’s series. Mary Malone discovers that the amount of dust has increased greatly since the time of the first truly modern humans, when our consciousness could interact with the consciousness of the “dust.” The so-called anthropic principle likewise connectshuman intelligence and the universe in a very fundamental way. In 1961, physicist Robert Dicke explained that we live in a universe whose fundamental constants seem finely tuned to support human life simply because we could not exist in a universe whose constants were otherwise. Since that time, this “weak” anthropic principle (WAP) has been used by Stephen Hawking and other physicists to cull ‘unlivable’ universes from theories of the multiverse. But others have taken this idea much further. For example, the strong anthropic principle (SAP), developed by Brandon Carter (1974) suggests that the universe had no choice in its fine-tuning because the eventual existence of intelligent observers was a necessity. Rather than to merely note that the fine-tuning of the universe makes our existence possible (the WAP), the SAP seeks to answer why the universe is fine-tuned by appealing to our very existence. As speculative (and controversial) as the SAP is considered, even more so are the final anthropic principle (FAP) and participatory anthropic principle (PAP). The former claims that not only is the eventual existence of intelligent life a necessity for the universe, but that once it has arisen it will continue to exist indefinitely. The PAP is related to questions of the role of the observer in quantum mechanics. It claims that because of observers are necessary to make decisions, observers are also necessary to bring the universe into full existence (Barrow and Tipler, 22–23). However, the SAP, FAP, and PAP appear unlikely, as the only form of intelligent observers currently known did not arise until the universe was well over 10 billion years old and long after all its basic structures (such as stars, galaxies, and superclusters) came into being.

  The possibility that the universe somehow depends on intelligent observers to give it meaning (if not existence) is an interesting one. The same can be said of deities—after all, without someone to worship, what need is there for something to be worshipped? This idea is central to the plotline of Gaiman’s American Gods, and brings this essay (like Einstein’s spherical universe) back to the place it began, namely considering Bast and the Zorya. Having originally considered them classical cosmological goddesses, more specifically of the lunar variety, we must re-evaluate our superficial analysis and realize that they form a bridge between the classical and the quantum—a semiclassical approximation in the words of those who are frantically trying to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity into a “theory of everything.”

  The first clue that these goddesses are more than lunar deities comes in the basic cosmological geography of the novel, where only certain beings can pass freely between the world of humans and the world “behind the curtain,” the realm of the gods. Mere mortals are seldom aware of this parallel world, except in places where “Reality was thin,” such as Rock City (Gaiman, American Gods 535). Zorya Polunochnaya specifically displays her powers over reality by appearing to pluck the moon from the sky for Shadow, yet the moon still remains there at the same time. Shadow himself understood the power and importance of Zorya Polunochnaya much later in the novel, after dying upon the great tree, when he realized she would be there to meet him in the underworld. Indeed, she does, and acts as a spiritual guide, but one of the quantum rather than classical variety. For this is the Gaimanverse, one in which, like in the Many Worlds Interpretation, multiple potentials exist simultaneously, and it is the decision of a single human mind that changes the course of reality. Zorya Polunochnaya receives the moon coin back from Shadow and resets it into the heavens of the underworld to light his way. When Shadow asks which path he should take, specifically “which one is safe,” she answers that not only are they mutually exclusive, but “neither path is safe” (American Gods 471). Similarly, in the Many Worlds Interpretation, the universe splits when a decision is made, and it cannot be made singular again. What could be more fraught with the potential for danger than creating an entirely new reality? Nevertheless, Zorya Polunochnaya does recommend one path (for the price of Shadow’s true name), and he continues on his journey.

  Shadow’s next guide is the other lunar goddess of American Gods, Bast. Seeing her in her humanoid form for the first time, Shadow does not recognize her. Bast reveals that she has been carefully watching over him, as have her people, since the start of his journey. Of the three possible choices set before him, Bast tells Shadow that one path will “make you wise,” while another will “make you whole” and the third will kill him (American Gods 476). In keeping with the uncertainties of quantum mechanics, Shadow does not know which to choose, and Bast turns the table, playing the role of the human observer in deciding for Shadow, thereby splitting the universe and setting events into motion that will have cosmological consequences. For Shadow’s choices shape his new universe, and that of all the characters in the novel. In aiding Shadow in making these choices, Zorya Polunochnaya and Bast are therefore QCG, cleverly disguised as mere lunar deities. As is so often true in the Gaimanverse, little is what it initially seems to be.

  Ely, Melzi, Hadge, and McCabe argue that female agency—including “the needs for achievement and power” (261)—has historically been overlooked and suppressed because agency has been seen as the sole province of the dominant male gender. But perhaps it is also the definition of “power” that has been narrowly shaped by the patriarchal hegemony. Certainly the power of reproduction—of giving birth and guaranteeing the continuation of life and the species—can only be mimicked by men, even in science (for example, in the case of cloning). A central aspect of this new female cosmological principle, the ability to give birth to entire realities without the need for a father or male principle, appears to be a connection to, rather than divorced from, another important facet of the human expe
rience, namely the spiritual. In the famous passage from American Gods, which he has said “is the most direct expression of his religious beliefs” (Goodyear), Gaiman argues (through the character of Sammi “Sam” Black Crow),

  I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not ... I can believe that light is a particle and a wave, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere that’s alive and dead at the same time ... I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe into motion and went to hang out with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos ... [394–395].

  The references to quantum mechanics (such as the wave-particle duality and the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment) are clear and undeniable, as are the references to both science and the spiritual. In creating his modern quantum cosmological goddesses, Gaiman does not turn his back on myth and spirituality, but instead aligns his works with one of the most surprising aspects of modern physics, namely the important role of the observer—of human consciousness—in giving the universe not only meaning, but ultimately reality. As Jay explains to Joey Harker, “Consciousness is a factor in every aspect of the Multiverse. Quantum math needs a viewpoint, or it doesn’t work” (Gaiman, InterWorld 72–73). It appears that Gaiman is closer to the truth than one might suspect, for not only does one create entirely new worlds in one’s dreams, but these dreams have, at least in theory, the potential to split the universe at the quantum level. Perhaps we truly are all gods and goddesses in disguise.