A couple of weeks ago I uploaded onto this blog an essay I had written about Neil Gaiman's comic The Sandman for a course I am taking. In this essay I talked a little about the story-arc "A Game of You". I wrote the essay to a deadline, and to a word-limit, so I didn't say everything I could have said about this story, but I have thought about it a lot more since and so intend to write a more detailed interpretation of this story in tonight's post. It will help if you've read Gaiman's original comic, and it will help if you've read my earlier essay, but this post should still make sense even if you haven't.
Gaiman is a darling of queer theory because he often features gay, lesbian and trans-gender characters, and so what I am going to suggest may seem controversial –that I do not believe at heart Gaiman is interested in deconstructing or undermining gender difference or advocating on behalf of the queer community. Rather I believe that Gaiman is committed to confirming and strengthening the male/female binary opposition and that the exploration of gender difference is his chief interest. The queer and trans-gender characters in his fiction are usually either treated unsympathetically or are killed off. For instance, Desire, a character who is neither male nor female is almost always presented unsympathetically. (An exception occurs in an issue in the "Endless Nights" series but this was written many years after the original run.) Hal, a gay man, is presented more or less sympathetically in "A Doll's House" but, later, in "The Kindly Ones" he is shown much more negatively. And Wanda, the pre-operative transexual in "A Game of You", who is presented sympathetically, is removed from the world when a building collapses on him/her towards the end of the story. Admittedly Gaiman does treat lesbian characters more positively but even then there is still a kind of violence at work. Generally, the unquestionably masculine and feminine characters, such as the comic's main protagonists Dream and Death, are presented most favourably. The issue of gender is important to Gaiman. Not all of Gaiman's fiction is centrally concerned with gender but a lot of it is, and this is why he is fascinated with gay, lesbian and trans-gender people – because they do not sit neatly either side the gender dichotomy. They are, to use Derrida's term, 'undecidables'. Gaiman's strategy is to introduce ideological tension, conflict, by presenting these characters in his stories, before either eliminating these characters or subordinating them to the dominant gender binary. And this strategy of excluding or expelling the sexually problematic or ambiguous is very much the prevailing dynamic in "A Game of You".
The protagonist of "A Game of You" is Barbie. Barbie is introduced in the story-arc "A Doll's House" as the girlfriend of a guy called Ken. I suppose I need to point out that Barbie is thoroughly heterosexual. Barbie and Ken seem the perfect heteronormative couple on the surface, seem perfectly suited, but have very different dream lives – in Barbie's dreams she is the princess of a fantasy realm called the Land where she has talking animal friends including a big dog or bear called Martin Tenbones and a dodo called Luz. Ken's dreams by contrast revolve around money, sex and power. In "A Doll's House" a supernatural event occurs in which people's dream worlds get mixed up, and as a result the masculine violence of Ken's dreams contaminates Barbie's feminine fantasy. As a consequence of this traumatic breaching, having seen each other for who they really are, Ken and Barbie break up. Barbie furthermore is severed from the Land, stops dreaming about it. This results in a long lasting identity crisis. No longer a princess in her dreams or her waking life, Barbie loses contact with her core sense of self, and starts compensating for this lack of essential identity by performing a role, for instance by painting checkerboard patterns on her face when she goes out to cafes. This is how we find her at the beginning of "A Game of You."
The Land however has continued to exist without Barbie and the masculine contamination that had occurred because of Ken's influence has led, directly or indirectly, to its being taken over by an evil being called the Cuckoo. The Land has become a place of carnage, desolation and eternal winter. The first scene in "A Game of You" shows Barbie's dream friends concluding that they need her to return to the Land to save them. Martin Tenbones travels to the waking world to find her, to give her a magic amulet called the Porpentine and to bring her back. Tenbones does succeed in finding Barbie and giving her the Porpentine, but he is killed in the process; Barbie shortly after is conjured back to the Land. Once returned, she and her dream friends, believing this the only way to defeat the Cuckoo, embark on a quest to take the Porpentine to the Shining Sea. This in fact is what the Cuckoo wants, what it has conspired to bring about, although Barbie and the reader don't learn this until much later.
"A Game of You" can be considered a 'girl's story'. It contains strong Fantasy elements and is usefully compared to Labyrinth, another 'girl's story'. In Labyrinth, the young female protagonist Sarah embarks on a quest to save her baby brother from the Goblin King; Labyrinth can superficially be seen as a tale of female vs. male but if we look deeper we see this interpretation is too simplistic – the Goblin King is played by the androgynous David Bowie. Both "A Game of You" and Labyrinth concern childhood notions of gender. In most respects, however, "A Game of You" differs greatly from Labyrinth. It subverts traditional female Fantasy fiction and contains a great deal of horror; Barbie's dream friends are all killed one by one, her trench coated rat friend Wilkinson, for instance, having his throat slit. The story greatly disturbs. There is a question about whether this really is a 'girl's story' and it is certainly not a kids' story. Barbie's fantasy land has been fatally compromised by masculine violence. The unsettling quality in "A Game of You" is brought home by the scene in which Barbie finally confronts the Cuckoo; up until this point it is has been reasonable to suppose that the Cuckoo is a demagogic male but when it appears it is in the form of a little girl. This completely subverts traditional Fantasy fiction. At this meeting, the cuckoo delivers the following speech to Barbie, that I quoted in the earlier essay but is worth quoting again. "Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they're faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly The Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clarke us really Hyperman. Yes? [...] Now, little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they'll be happy for ever and ever." "A Game of You" is a Fantasy story about Fantasy stories.
The Cuckoo delivers this speech to lull Barbie into a kind of hypnotic trance so that she will do its bidding. This is a sinister magic the cuckoo has, to persuade and control others through its voice and presence, through deception. The Cuckoo is a liar, and its big lie is its pretence of being a little girl, when really it is a monster, perhaps even a male being. The Cuckoo is a kind of transexual. And it is not the only transexual in Barbie's life. In the waking world, Barbie lives in an apartment building with Thessaly, an ancient witch, two lesbians and a preoperative transexual named Wanda. The reason Wanda has not had a sex-change is because s/he is afraid of surgery, perhaps a sign that at some deep unconscious level s/he still feels a man. The three unproblematically female characters are able, using Thessaly's magic, to travel to the Land to help Barbie but Wanda, although s/he identifies as a female is viewed by Thessaly's gods as a male and is unable to accompany them. This seems cruel of Gaiman– Wanda, unlike the Cuckoo, is always presented sympathetically. But both Wanda and the Cuckoo are alike in being 'undecidables'.
After falling under the Cuckoo's spell, at the Cuckoos's command, Barbie smashes the Porpentine against the Hierogram, a monument on a promontory in the Shining Sea. This action, which the Cuckoo wanted, initiates the destruction of the Land and the death of all its inhabitants, an event which the Cuckoo desires because the land has been a kind of cage for it and this will set it free. The Cuckoo has never wanted to rule the Land, only to eradicate it. Morpheus himself appears on the scene, in a sort of deus ex machina, to facilitate the death of the Land and, later, to save Barbie and her friends. Abstractly, the last part of "A Game of You" works to resolve the tensions the story has created by removing undecidables and restoring traditional gender norms, something Gaiman achieves in a number of ways. The appearance of Morpheus puts a strong unproblematically male character for the first time in the position of supreme power; and the witch Thessaly, up until this point great and terrible, gets an inkling of a crush on Morpheus. The undecidables are eliminated. Wanda dies as the result of a hurricane caused by Thessaly's magic. And also tragically the Land itself, too contaminated by masculine violence to be saved, perishes. The Cuckoo drops its little-girl-disguise and all its lies, and takes on its real form, a bird, to fly away. Barbie asks Morpheus if he is "going to do anything about the Cuckoo" saying "she's dangerous. She's evil." Morpheus replies, "Dangerous? Perhaps. But evil? She acts according to her nature. Is that evil?" The undecidable quality in the Cuckoo has been resolved because its true nature has won through. It seems that, in the end, the 'natural' order has to prevail, and that there is no place in nature for the unnatural, for supernatural creatures who pretend to be little girls or for men who believe they're women, for undecidables.
"A Game of You" is disturbing for many reasons but chiefly because it has an unhappy ending. The Cuckoo wins and the Land is destroyed. The reader wants to ask: Could Gaiman have finished the story differently? Could Barbie have defeated the Cuckoo and saved the Land, making it again a purely female fantasy realm? Could he have resolved the issue of gender undecidability in a more positive way? When reading it however one senses that it is going to end tragically the moment we first see the Cuckoo as a little girl, when she delivers her speech about little boys and little girls and shows Barbie Barbie's childhood bedroom with its toys. The land is doomed because it is founded on a childish view of gender, rather than an adult's view of gender. Barbie has failed to grow up, to put away childish things. The Land is irrecoverable. The profound truth that Gaiman is subtly telling is that prepubescent children understand gender differently than post-pubescents and that children need to change their views of what constitutes gender difference when they grow up. Barbie needs to let the land go, to develop a different, more mature sense of what constitutes femininity; the Land itself cannot be saved. It is unnatural. Barbie's mistake is perhaps also Wanda's. Perhaps Gaiman is suggesting that Wanda's gender dysphoria may also be rooted in childhood experiences and beliefs but, if so, he is suggesting it very tactfully indeed.
The horrifying, unsettling and disturbing feel of this story stems from the fact that it is set in a world where all sexual and gender norms are in doubt. It is about the failure of childish notions of gender.
I'll finish this post by talking about the conclusion of the story. Barbie begins "A Game of You" in the grips of an identity crisis that has lasted since she was severed from the Land and the identity crisis is still present at the end of the story. She continues to perform her identity, penning a veil on her face before attending Wanda's funeral. Almost nothing has changed. The last ditch effort by her dream friends to save the Land and, by extension, Barbie, has failed, Barbie's childhood idea of what it means to be a girl is gone. But nor has Barbie been able to grow up. Still Gaiman finishes on a slightly positive note. At the very conclusion, Barbie has a dream in which she sees Wanda, with Death, as a perfect woman. "And when I say perfect, I mean perfect. Drop-dead gorgeous. There's nothing camp about her, nothing artificial. And she looks happy." In this way, too, the undecidabilty of Wanda's gender is resolved. In the universe Gaiman created, people get what they want when they die even when they can't get it in life. This scene is ambiguous, but another way to see it, the way I see it, is as Barbie's wish-fufillment fantasy. It is a dream of unqualified unproblematic femininity. Perhaps Gaiman is suggesting that she has in fact grown up.
Thursday, 29 June 2017
Sunday, 25 June 2017
Concerning Stigma, and Janet Frame
I don't know if people are still reading my blog, but I hope so. In today's post I want first to clear up some slight errors in what I have written in previous posts, before talking about the attitudes towards mental health in this country. Bear with me. The first part of the essay is clerical but I may say something quite interesting later on, especially when I talk about celebrated New Zealand novelist Janet Frame.
One of the most important posts I have written is "My First Psychotic Episode"but I may have made a couple of slight errors in this. I said that while working at bFM I reported live from an "amphetamine lab explosion" on K Road. What I should have said was that it was a "metamphetamine lab explosion" – but my readers may have guessed that I meant this. I don't know for sure if the fire resulted from a P-lab explosion but it seems probable. Also in this post I described a series of mental events that occurred in the day or two prior to my considering drowning myself. These events were, in chronological order, 1. I felt the impulse I described in that post. 2. I decided that everyone in the world, including my father, was gay except me. 3. I decided that my father had divorced my mother when I was seven to stop me from being gay, to save me. I got these mental events out of order. In fact, it went 2, then 1 and then 3. This may seem a small difference but it is significant. In the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3" I said that the psychotic symptom I experienced started in 2013 or 2014 at the age of 33 or 34 but, although I still think it fair to say it started in 2013 or 2014, it definitely started when I was 33. I am born in August.
For around the last several decades, public attitudes towards mental illness in this country have greatly altered. One of the first people to come forward publicly as someone who had suffered depression is ex-All Black John Kirwan, a remarkable figure in that he became the 'face' of mental health. Kirwan fronted a campaign raising awareness of mental illness, advising the community that depression and anxiety are not things to be ashamed of and that it is okay to ask for help. Occasional newspaper columnist Deborah Hill-Cone suffered a severe bout of depression I think about ten years ago and reacted to this mid-life crisis by going back to university to study psychology; she writes now regularly about her life, her 'illness' and about recent psychological research. Mike King, an (ex?) comedian travels around schools speaking to students about mental health issues with the same message as John Kirwan, that depression and anxiety are not problems to be ashamed of and that it is okay to seek help. There has, in other words, been considerable work put into de-stigmatising the concept of mental illness. We don't need to look too hard to find a reason for all this government-funded publicity and all these individual initiatives. New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. I don't think anyone knows why. It seems inexplicable – why should New Zealand have a higher suicide rate than the US when America is demonstrably so much more fucked up? It could be that the suicide rate in the States only seems lower because many more suicides might go unreported there than here. Or it could be something to do with the fact that New Zealand is one of the most secular, most atheistical, countries on the planet, as a friend of mine suggested just yesterday. For whatever reason, the issues of mental illness and the high suicide rate has been deemed an issue to be discussed publicly, a problem for which solutions should be sought, rather than shameful secrets to be swept under the carpet as they once were.
This concerted effort by the government and individuals to de-stigmatise mental illness has had an odd unintended consequence, a by-product that I don't think anyone anticipated. It has brought to the public's attention the inadequacy of the Mental Health System. In the 1950s and 1960s, say, a person who suffered one psychotic or depressive episode, one bout of post-natal depression, would be thrown in an institution for the rest of his or her life. He or she would be subjected to ECT, insulin shock therapy, ice baths (in Lake Alice), even lobotomised, all barbaric and ultimately ineffective and unjustifiable, indefensible forms of 'therapy'. Psychiatrists. little more than monsters, were believed infallible gods and the mentally ill were considered and treated little better than animals. The stigma surrounding madness made patients unwilling or unable to come forward with stories of mistreatment but all this has changed. The destigmatisation of mental illness that has occurred in the last decade or two has enabled, empowered, patients to tell their stories and has shone a spotlight on the failings of the Mental Health System, a system that, in fact, has never worked. It is an escapable fact that forty per cent of all suicides in the country are mental health patients, the ones who have actually sought help. Mike King, to his great credit, has made communicating this scandalous truth a part of his mission. On 7 Sharp a month or two ago he said (and this is an exact quote) "People can say over and over again that there's nothing wrong with the Mental Health System but that doesn't make it true." More recently the current affairs show Sunday reported on a young man, misdiagnosed with Narcissistic Personality disorder, who had killed himself while an impatient in a Mental Health Ward in Christchurch; King was interviewed about this and said, "Stories like this make a mockery of everything I do." Seeking help is useless if those who seek it don't receive it.
Mental illness and the Mental Health System seem set to be key issues in this year's national elections.
So, destigmatisation seems a very good thing. The attitude towards mental illness in New Zealand is not only more sympathetic and compassionate than it once was, it is better than in other countries, particularly the US. My impression is that the stigma associated with mental illness in America is terrible. Stephen Colbert in the past would often mock Donald Trump by saying that he had forgotten to take his pills and Bill Maher still regularly calls Trump a mental health patient. To say that Trump is a mental health patient is incredibly insulting to mental health patients – this sounds like a joke but I am only half joking. My feeling is that America has a serious, serious problem with suicide and mental illness but that Americans aren't in the slightest prepared to acknowledge it. And with all America's other problems, such as racism in the police force, the repeal of Obamacare, battles over gun control and planned parenthood, the 'opioid epidemic' and so on, improving the treatment of the mentally ill probably falls quite far down the to-do list.
If New Zealand has a different attitude towards mental illness than the US, this is partly attributable to a different culture. New Zealanders value fairness and tolerance highly, whereas Americans value freedom and rights more. But if I were to try to put a name on why New Zealand has a better attitude towards mental illness than the States, I would pick one person as a reason– Janet Frame. It is Janet Frame who will be the subject of the remainder of this post; I intend to talk a little about her life. As always I should say my sources. I have read a number of her novels, admittedly over ten years ago. Just yesterday I finished the first volume in her autobiography, "To the Is-Land." The second volume, "An Angel at My Table", is on my bed-side table but I haven't cracked it open yet. My main source though is the Wikipedia entry about her. When writing about other famous people, such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and John Nash, I have relied heavily on Wikipedia but I do warn readers to be careful. The Wikipedia entry begins "Nene Janet Paterson Clutha ONZ CBE (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author who published under the name Janet Frame" implying that 'Janet Frame' was a pen name. This is false. Janet was born 'Janet Frame' but changed her name to Nene Clutha in 1958 because of an acute shyness or fear of public recognition associated with her fame (or notoriety). Generally though I feel and hope that Wikipedia is more or less reliable.
Frame was born in 1924 and spent most of her childhood in the small Otago town of Oamaru (near the bottom of the South Island). In 1945, at the age of twenty-one, while training to become a teacher, she attempted suicide by ingesting aspirin tablets. As a result she started receiving therapy from a junior lecturer at Otago University, John Money, a psychologist who would later develop an international reputation as a sexologist interested in gender reassignment. Money is seminal, in a way: he invented the term 'gender role' and paved the way for future study of transexuality, and much feminist and queer theory, such as the work of Judith Butler, is indebted to him. Money was also a horrible quack and a pervert (see his Wikipedia page if you don't believe me). In her sessions with Money, Frame developed a strong crush on him and started telling him things he wanted to hear (this last fact is not drawn from her wikipedia page but from something I read elsewhere). Later that year Frame had another breakdown after a visit from a school inspector and was admitted to a psychiatric ward for observation. Over the next eight years, she was in and out of a variety of mental asylums. According to Wikipedia, she was usually admitted 'voluntarily' but the word 'voluntary' in this context is slippery and I know from my own experience that people can often coerced or bullied into being hospitalised or receiving treatment. During this period, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. She received ECT and Insulin Shock Therapy. In 1951, she was scheduled for a lobotomy – but the lobotomy was cancelled when a book of short stories she had written, "The Lagoon and Other Stories", unexpectedly won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. Apocryphally, that elusive creature, the Good Psychiatrist, appeared at the asylum, took an interest in her, vouched for her, said, "This woman shouldn't be here in this madhouse" and this led to her eventual release.
Frame was discharged from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum four years later and went to live in a hut out the back of Frank Sargeson's house in Takapuna, on Auckland's North Shore. (Sargeson is another famous New Zealand short story writer.) There she wrote her first novel, "Owls Do Cry." Nine other novels, collections of short stories, poetry and the three volume autobiography would follow before her death in 2004. Frame is considered perhaps the greatest New Zealand novelist. When I was studying my MA in English Literature, one of my lecturers, who had been a friend of hers, told us that he had repeatedly nominated her, albeit unsuccessfully, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. (For readers interested in Frame, who don't have time to read her books, Jane Campion made a film about her in 1980s called 'An Angel at my Table".)
Much has been written about Frame. The revered New Zealand historian Michael King wrote a biography on her, "Wrestling with the Angel" which is probably very good, but which I haven't read. Can anything new be said about her? In an earlier post I wrote about Virginia Woolf and perhaps the two can be compared; Woolf and Frame are alike in that both were woman novelists who sometimes wrote formidably difficult books, and both, apparently, 'struggled with mental illness'. In all other respects, however, I feel that the two are totally different. For one thing, Virginia Woof, in Mrs Dalloway for instance, wrote about what it is like to be mentally ill, to be psychotic; in the novel Faces in the Water, Frame describes a very brief psychotic episode, an episode that resembles an acid trip more than anything else, and then a lifetime trapped as a sane woman in a lunatic's asylum. In other words, from all I've read about her so far, you could be forgiven for thinking Frame was never mentally ill at all.
In this blog I have often discussed sexuality and so the reader might be curious about whether I have anything to say about Janet's sexuality. From all I've read, one would have to say that Frame was totally heterosexual all her life. In this, too, she differs from Virginia Woolf. True, Frame never had any public relationships with men – but this is understandable because she suffered acutely from social anxiety and depression, partly, surely, because of her terrible experiences of incarceration, and lived most of her life a hermit. But issues of sexuality did play a role in her life however. She fell in love with a male psychologist whose specialty was gender reassignment and remained friends with him for much of her life. She lived for a time with Frank Sargeson, a gay man. And in the 'sixties, while in the States, she formed a close friendship with painter Theophilius Brown and his long time male partner, something she later described as "the chief experience of my life". This hint in Wikipedia, together with some coy insinuations made by a friend of mind more acquainted with Frame than I am, raise an interesting possibility – that Frame might have had a brief menage a trois with two males. To put it bluntly, I believe Frame was sexually attracted to gay men. All this may seem a shocking thing to say about a New Zealand literary icon but perhaps we live in a world now in which this may seem not scandalous but an indication of a free spirit.
Leaving aside the details of her life, the fact remains that Frame was diagnosed schizophrenic, spent over ten years on and off in lunatic asylums and was almost given a lobotomy, before being released and becoming one of New Zealand's greatest novelists. I should say, because I need to, that Frame never took medication – she lived in an age before antipsychotic medication. So if she was well it was nothing to do with pills. One wonders: how many sane men and women, men and women not lucky enough to unexpectedly win New Zealand's greatest literary prize in the nick of time, were wrongly lobotomised in this era? I suspect psychiatrists in New Zealand dislike being reminded of Janet Frame. In 2008, I mentioned Frame to my asshole psychiatrist; I believed then that Frame had probably been misdiagnosed lesbian as I felt I had been misdiagnosed homosexual. He told me patronisingly that she was 'bi-polar' (rather than schizophrenic). Where did he get this diagnosis from? He pulled it out of his arse, on the spot – even then, I knew more about Frame than he did. In 2007, after Frame had died, The New Zealand Medical Journal published an article by a medical specialist who proposed that Frame may have been on the Autistic Spectrum. Was Frame autistic? Of course not. Autistics lack verbal fluency and Frame was enraptured by the magic of language. Autistics have difficulty with theory of mind and Frame was a novelist always seeking to capture others' personalities in writing. Most importantly, Frame had a sense of humour and this is something autists lack. It seems that psychiatrists are completely unwilling to admit they fucked up with her, still regularly fuck up with others, and, even in death, they can't leave Janet alone.
I'll finish this post by saying something out that I have implied but not categorically said. Frame grew up in an ordinary poor family in a provincial New Zealand town, her pastimes being the reading of nineteenth century lyric verse, solving mathematical problems set by her teachers (something she enjoyed) and milking the family's cows. In 1945, she ended up the patient of a psychologist who was quite evidently homosexual and believed that gender was a social construct. This over forty years before homosexuality was decriminalised in New Zealand. Is it any wonder Frame went a little mad?
One of the most important posts I have written is "My First Psychotic Episode"but I may have made a couple of slight errors in this. I said that while working at bFM I reported live from an "amphetamine lab explosion" on K Road. What I should have said was that it was a "metamphetamine lab explosion" – but my readers may have guessed that I meant this. I don't know for sure if the fire resulted from a P-lab explosion but it seems probable. Also in this post I described a series of mental events that occurred in the day or two prior to my considering drowning myself. These events were, in chronological order, 1. I felt the impulse I described in that post. 2. I decided that everyone in the world, including my father, was gay except me. 3. I decided that my father had divorced my mother when I was seven to stop me from being gay, to save me. I got these mental events out of order. In fact, it went 2, then 1 and then 3. This may seem a small difference but it is significant. In the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3" I said that the psychotic symptom I experienced started in 2013 or 2014 at the age of 33 or 34 but, although I still think it fair to say it started in 2013 or 2014, it definitely started when I was 33. I am born in August.
For around the last several decades, public attitudes towards mental illness in this country have greatly altered. One of the first people to come forward publicly as someone who had suffered depression is ex-All Black John Kirwan, a remarkable figure in that he became the 'face' of mental health. Kirwan fronted a campaign raising awareness of mental illness, advising the community that depression and anxiety are not things to be ashamed of and that it is okay to ask for help. Occasional newspaper columnist Deborah Hill-Cone suffered a severe bout of depression I think about ten years ago and reacted to this mid-life crisis by going back to university to study psychology; she writes now regularly about her life, her 'illness' and about recent psychological research. Mike King, an (ex?) comedian travels around schools speaking to students about mental health issues with the same message as John Kirwan, that depression and anxiety are not problems to be ashamed of and that it is okay to seek help. There has, in other words, been considerable work put into de-stigmatising the concept of mental illness. We don't need to look too hard to find a reason for all this government-funded publicity and all these individual initiatives. New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. I don't think anyone knows why. It seems inexplicable – why should New Zealand have a higher suicide rate than the US when America is demonstrably so much more fucked up? It could be that the suicide rate in the States only seems lower because many more suicides might go unreported there than here. Or it could be something to do with the fact that New Zealand is one of the most secular, most atheistical, countries on the planet, as a friend of mine suggested just yesterday. For whatever reason, the issues of mental illness and the high suicide rate has been deemed an issue to be discussed publicly, a problem for which solutions should be sought, rather than shameful secrets to be swept under the carpet as they once were.
This concerted effort by the government and individuals to de-stigmatise mental illness has had an odd unintended consequence, a by-product that I don't think anyone anticipated. It has brought to the public's attention the inadequacy of the Mental Health System. In the 1950s and 1960s, say, a person who suffered one psychotic or depressive episode, one bout of post-natal depression, would be thrown in an institution for the rest of his or her life. He or she would be subjected to ECT, insulin shock therapy, ice baths (in Lake Alice), even lobotomised, all barbaric and ultimately ineffective and unjustifiable, indefensible forms of 'therapy'. Psychiatrists. little more than monsters, were believed infallible gods and the mentally ill were considered and treated little better than animals. The stigma surrounding madness made patients unwilling or unable to come forward with stories of mistreatment but all this has changed. The destigmatisation of mental illness that has occurred in the last decade or two has enabled, empowered, patients to tell their stories and has shone a spotlight on the failings of the Mental Health System, a system that, in fact, has never worked. It is an escapable fact that forty per cent of all suicides in the country are mental health patients, the ones who have actually sought help. Mike King, to his great credit, has made communicating this scandalous truth a part of his mission. On 7 Sharp a month or two ago he said (and this is an exact quote) "People can say over and over again that there's nothing wrong with the Mental Health System but that doesn't make it true." More recently the current affairs show Sunday reported on a young man, misdiagnosed with Narcissistic Personality disorder, who had killed himself while an impatient in a Mental Health Ward in Christchurch; King was interviewed about this and said, "Stories like this make a mockery of everything I do." Seeking help is useless if those who seek it don't receive it.
Mental illness and the Mental Health System seem set to be key issues in this year's national elections.
So, destigmatisation seems a very good thing. The attitude towards mental illness in New Zealand is not only more sympathetic and compassionate than it once was, it is better than in other countries, particularly the US. My impression is that the stigma associated with mental illness in America is terrible. Stephen Colbert in the past would often mock Donald Trump by saying that he had forgotten to take his pills and Bill Maher still regularly calls Trump a mental health patient. To say that Trump is a mental health patient is incredibly insulting to mental health patients – this sounds like a joke but I am only half joking. My feeling is that America has a serious, serious problem with suicide and mental illness but that Americans aren't in the slightest prepared to acknowledge it. And with all America's other problems, such as racism in the police force, the repeal of Obamacare, battles over gun control and planned parenthood, the 'opioid epidemic' and so on, improving the treatment of the mentally ill probably falls quite far down the to-do list.
If New Zealand has a different attitude towards mental illness than the US, this is partly attributable to a different culture. New Zealanders value fairness and tolerance highly, whereas Americans value freedom and rights more. But if I were to try to put a name on why New Zealand has a better attitude towards mental illness than the States, I would pick one person as a reason– Janet Frame. It is Janet Frame who will be the subject of the remainder of this post; I intend to talk a little about her life. As always I should say my sources. I have read a number of her novels, admittedly over ten years ago. Just yesterday I finished the first volume in her autobiography, "To the Is-Land." The second volume, "An Angel at My Table", is on my bed-side table but I haven't cracked it open yet. My main source though is the Wikipedia entry about her. When writing about other famous people, such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and John Nash, I have relied heavily on Wikipedia but I do warn readers to be careful. The Wikipedia entry begins "Nene Janet Paterson Clutha ONZ CBE (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author who published under the name Janet Frame" implying that 'Janet Frame' was a pen name. This is false. Janet was born 'Janet Frame' but changed her name to Nene Clutha in 1958 because of an acute shyness or fear of public recognition associated with her fame (or notoriety). Generally though I feel and hope that Wikipedia is more or less reliable.
Frame was born in 1924 and spent most of her childhood in the small Otago town of Oamaru (near the bottom of the South Island). In 1945, at the age of twenty-one, while training to become a teacher, she attempted suicide by ingesting aspirin tablets. As a result she started receiving therapy from a junior lecturer at Otago University, John Money, a psychologist who would later develop an international reputation as a sexologist interested in gender reassignment. Money is seminal, in a way: he invented the term 'gender role' and paved the way for future study of transexuality, and much feminist and queer theory, such as the work of Judith Butler, is indebted to him. Money was also a horrible quack and a pervert (see his Wikipedia page if you don't believe me). In her sessions with Money, Frame developed a strong crush on him and started telling him things he wanted to hear (this last fact is not drawn from her wikipedia page but from something I read elsewhere). Later that year Frame had another breakdown after a visit from a school inspector and was admitted to a psychiatric ward for observation. Over the next eight years, she was in and out of a variety of mental asylums. According to Wikipedia, she was usually admitted 'voluntarily' but the word 'voluntary' in this context is slippery and I know from my own experience that people can often coerced or bullied into being hospitalised or receiving treatment. During this period, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. She received ECT and Insulin Shock Therapy. In 1951, she was scheduled for a lobotomy – but the lobotomy was cancelled when a book of short stories she had written, "The Lagoon and Other Stories", unexpectedly won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. Apocryphally, that elusive creature, the Good Psychiatrist, appeared at the asylum, took an interest in her, vouched for her, said, "This woman shouldn't be here in this madhouse" and this led to her eventual release.
Frame was discharged from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum four years later and went to live in a hut out the back of Frank Sargeson's house in Takapuna, on Auckland's North Shore. (Sargeson is another famous New Zealand short story writer.) There she wrote her first novel, "Owls Do Cry." Nine other novels, collections of short stories, poetry and the three volume autobiography would follow before her death in 2004. Frame is considered perhaps the greatest New Zealand novelist. When I was studying my MA in English Literature, one of my lecturers, who had been a friend of hers, told us that he had repeatedly nominated her, albeit unsuccessfully, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. (For readers interested in Frame, who don't have time to read her books, Jane Campion made a film about her in 1980s called 'An Angel at my Table".)
Much has been written about Frame. The revered New Zealand historian Michael King wrote a biography on her, "Wrestling with the Angel" which is probably very good, but which I haven't read. Can anything new be said about her? In an earlier post I wrote about Virginia Woolf and perhaps the two can be compared; Woolf and Frame are alike in that both were woman novelists who sometimes wrote formidably difficult books, and both, apparently, 'struggled with mental illness'. In all other respects, however, I feel that the two are totally different. For one thing, Virginia Woof, in Mrs Dalloway for instance, wrote about what it is like to be mentally ill, to be psychotic; in the novel Faces in the Water, Frame describes a very brief psychotic episode, an episode that resembles an acid trip more than anything else, and then a lifetime trapped as a sane woman in a lunatic's asylum. In other words, from all I've read about her so far, you could be forgiven for thinking Frame was never mentally ill at all.
In this blog I have often discussed sexuality and so the reader might be curious about whether I have anything to say about Janet's sexuality. From all I've read, one would have to say that Frame was totally heterosexual all her life. In this, too, she differs from Virginia Woolf. True, Frame never had any public relationships with men – but this is understandable because she suffered acutely from social anxiety and depression, partly, surely, because of her terrible experiences of incarceration, and lived most of her life a hermit. But issues of sexuality did play a role in her life however. She fell in love with a male psychologist whose specialty was gender reassignment and remained friends with him for much of her life. She lived for a time with Frank Sargeson, a gay man. And in the 'sixties, while in the States, she formed a close friendship with painter Theophilius Brown and his long time male partner, something she later described as "the chief experience of my life". This hint in Wikipedia, together with some coy insinuations made by a friend of mind more acquainted with Frame than I am, raise an interesting possibility – that Frame might have had a brief menage a trois with two males. To put it bluntly, I believe Frame was sexually attracted to gay men. All this may seem a shocking thing to say about a New Zealand literary icon but perhaps we live in a world now in which this may seem not scandalous but an indication of a free spirit.
Leaving aside the details of her life, the fact remains that Frame was diagnosed schizophrenic, spent over ten years on and off in lunatic asylums and was almost given a lobotomy, before being released and becoming one of New Zealand's greatest novelists. I should say, because I need to, that Frame never took medication – she lived in an age before antipsychotic medication. So if she was well it was nothing to do with pills. One wonders: how many sane men and women, men and women not lucky enough to unexpectedly win New Zealand's greatest literary prize in the nick of time, were wrongly lobotomised in this era? I suspect psychiatrists in New Zealand dislike being reminded of Janet Frame. In 2008, I mentioned Frame to my asshole psychiatrist; I believed then that Frame had probably been misdiagnosed lesbian as I felt I had been misdiagnosed homosexual. He told me patronisingly that she was 'bi-polar' (rather than schizophrenic). Where did he get this diagnosis from? He pulled it out of his arse, on the spot – even then, I knew more about Frame than he did. In 2007, after Frame had died, The New Zealand Medical Journal published an article by a medical specialist who proposed that Frame may have been on the Autistic Spectrum. Was Frame autistic? Of course not. Autistics lack verbal fluency and Frame was enraptured by the magic of language. Autistics have difficulty with theory of mind and Frame was a novelist always seeking to capture others' personalities in writing. Most importantly, Frame had a sense of humour and this is something autists lack. It seems that psychiatrists are completely unwilling to admit they fucked up with her, still regularly fuck up with others, and, even in death, they can't leave Janet alone.
I'll finish this post by saying something out that I have implied but not categorically said. Frame grew up in an ordinary poor family in a provincial New Zealand town, her pastimes being the reading of nineteenth century lyric verse, solving mathematical problems set by her teachers (something she enjoyed) and milking the family's cows. In 1945, she ended up the patient of a psychologist who was quite evidently homosexual and believed that gender was a social construct. This over forty years before homosexuality was decriminalised in New Zealand. Is it any wonder Frame went a little mad?
Saturday, 10 June 2017
A Case Study of Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman"
The following is another assignment I submitted recently for my degree in Communications. It was a little rushed but in the whole I hope still interesting, especially the section on gender. I hope if you read it you enjoy it.
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Case Study of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman
Introduction
The Sandman is a comic book series, originally published monthly from January 1989 until March 1996 by DC comics, authored by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by a number of different artists. It has since been collected into ten trade paperbacks and several anthologies. It has been highly successful and has been called “the greatest epic in comic book history” (Los Angeles Times)
The main protagonist of The Sandman is Morpheus, the anthropomorphic personification of Dream, who rules over the realm of dreams known as the Dreaming. At the beginning of the series Dream is imprisoned for seventy years in a magic sigil and in 1989 escapes; towards the end of the series Dream chooses to let himself die and the series ends with his funeral and his replacement by another incarnation. The Sandman contains a mix of extended stories and one-off stories. Sometimes Morpheus is the main character but often he is a peripheral figure and occasionally doesn’t feature at all. Morpheus is part of a family known as the Endless, the others being Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium (who was once known a Delight) and these siblings often feature in the comic.
Norman Mailer described The Sandman as “a comic book for intellectuals” (Anderson, Porter (July 30, 2001). It has won more than 26 Eisner awards, the World Fantasy Award (for the issue “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and in 2005 IGN declared it the best Vertigo comic ever. The Sandman was one of the first graphic novels to be on the New York Times Best Seller list, others being Maus, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. The Sandman is a significant text in Popular Culture which has influenced not only the comic book medium since but many other Pop Culture works.
Trends and Fads
The term ‘comic book’ is very broad encompassing, as it does, texts as diverse as Garfield, Maus Tintin and American Splendour. Conventions include the the use of sequence of frames or panels that represent chronologically ordered scenes and the employment of speech bubbles. The Sandman can be most closely related to, and grew out of, a sub-genre of comic books, superhero comics. In fact, Morpheus is a re-imagining of a superhero that first appeared in comics in 1939, a masked vigilante bearing a ‘gas gun’ that could impel criminals to tell the truth.
Fans of superhero comics can be considered a sub-culture. However this sub-culture has had a significant influence on mainstream popular culture, in the form of television and film, almost from its inception. The first of many Superman feature films, Superman and the Mole Men, was released in 1951 and a camp television series based around Batman was produced in the 1960s. Developments in comic books have influenced more widely popular media: for instance, beginning in the 1980s a much darker view of Batman in the comics, most closely associated with the four issue comic book series The Dark Knight Returns written by Frank Miler and published in 1986, influenced Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman. In the last several decades, the two main comic book publishers, DC and Marvel, have worked closely with film companies to produce very many films set in respectively the DC and Marvel universes. Although comic book readers constitute a sub-culture, developments in this sub-culture often impact on mainstream culture.
The Sandman, together with other seminal works of the 1980s such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen, were at the vanguard of a trend in comic books towards much greater sophistication. They were innovative – and by ‘innovative ‘ I do not mean that they improved comic books but rather that they performed something new, something novel. The Sandman is steeped in mythology, history and literature. For example, the issue "August", which concerns the Roman emperor Augustus, stays remarkably close to historical ‘facts’ about him, including rumours existing during his rule that he had been sexually abused or raped by his uncle Julius Caesar when young (see The Annotated Sandman, Klinger, 2012, p. 251). The sophistication of The Sandman and other works broadened the appeal of comic books, expanding an audience that had once comprised only pre-adolescent and adolescent boy to include women and mature readers. The success of The Sandman can principally be attributed to word-of-mouth recommendations; it was, to begin with, a true underground sensation.
The impact that The Sandman has had on mainstream popular culture is exampled by the fact that a television series Lucifer has recently been produced featuring a character invented by Gaiman. Lucifer features in the Sandman story "Season of Mists" in which he abdicates his position as ruler of Hell; likewise in the TV series Lucifer, Lucifer abdicates his throne and moves to Earth. The screenplay for Lucifer sometimes directly quotes passages from The Sandman. In 2013, reports that The Sandman itself was to be adapted into a film directed by Joseph Gordon–Levitt were floated but in 2016 Gordon-Levitt dropped out citing ‘creative differences’. It does not seem the series will be made into a film anytime soon.
The Sandman heralded a trend in comic books and graphic novels towards greater sophistication and widened the audience for comic books by appealing to girls, women and adults. This was a trend, not a fad – it is still evident today. It paved the way for other comics that tell supernatural, fantastical stories that are not simply battles between good and evil but are rather complex and nuanced graphic literature, examples including The Invisibles, Preacher and Transmetropolitan. The Sandman is not a superhero comic but it is important to remember that it evolved out of the superhero genre – characters from the DC Universe such as Batman villain Dr Destiny, and Superman and Batman themselves, occasionally appear in it. It was part of a revolution in comic books that forced cultural commentators to take comic books seriously.
Popular Icons
In popular culture studies, a distinction is drawn between icons and symbols. An icon is a visual representation of a real person or thing while a symbol is a sign that designates an abstract concept – for example, an image of the statue of liberty stands for the promise of American freedom. An icon resembles in key ways the person or thing it represents but a symbol’s relationship to what it signifies is arbitrary, and based on consensus convention. Icons are often but not always celebrities.
Neil Gaiman can himself be considered an icon, and the internet contain numerous images of him. Gaiman acquired his celebrity status not only for his authorship of The Sandman but also for other comics he has worked on and for the fantastical novels, such as American Gods and Stardust, that he has written since. It is rare for an author to acquire iconic status – although Joe Moran has discussed literary celebrity with respect to authors John Updike, Philip Roth and Kathy Acker (Turner, 2004). Iconic status requires some pubic familiarity with the icon’s appearance and authors can be shy. Another author apart from Gaiman who may, perhaps, have iconic status is Stephen King. James Joyce can also be considered an icon although, if we wish to draw a distinction between high culture and popular culture, Joyce would probably be regarded as a high culture icon rather than a popular culture icon.
However, the imagery most associated with The Sandman is not pictures of its author but rather pictures of characters from the comic. It is not uncommon for fans to put up posters of Dream, Death or Delirium on their bedroom walls. Can these characters perhaps be considered iconic? This question raises a problem, a long standing issue in analytic philosophy, the issue of whether it is possible to make true statements about fictional entities. Is the proposition “Othello is a Moor” (or the proposition “Dream kills his son Orpheus”) true or false? This problem bedevils literary criticism. One partial-solution is Meongiansm, the doctrine that existence is a property that objects can either have or not have. Just because Dream does not literally exist, and has never existed, does not mean that we cannot accord him, in a way, iconic status, that he cannot be represented through imagery. Most people know Marilyn Monroe solely from representations of her and the same can be said for Morpheus. And many of The Sandman’s most passionate fans probably relate to characters like Dream and Death as though they are real people.
If we allow that the central characters in The Sandman can be in a way iconic we can discuss meanings associated with their images. There is considerable variation in the way the characters are represented depending on the artist who is depicting them – Delirium in particular varies wildly. However there is some continuity in how other major characters are presented. Mopheus is always pale and skinny, almost always wears black and has an unruly shock of black hair. He closely resembles Robert Smith from The Cure as Smith appeared in the 1980s. Death, represented as a foxy young woman, is also presented solely in black and white, is first represented (in “The Sound of her Wings”) in a black singlet and black jeans and wears an ankh around her neck. Representations of Dream and Death align them closely with the Goth subculture. The relationship between The Sandman and this subculture is not just iconographical but thematic, a shared focus on death, romance and the supernatural or mystical. The Sandman can be considered a a cultural point-of-reference for this subculture.
If we can allow not only Gaiman but the characters he invented iconic status, it is permissible to wonder if we can perhaps not also grant them celebrity status. In Understanding Celebrity (Turner, 2012), Turner proposes that although celebrity is often perceived as a natural quality certain individuals posses, a kind of charism or aura perceptible when these individuals are physically present, it is in fact manufactured by the mass media. In today’s world, in particular, people can be famous simply for being famous. Turner summarises his introductory discussion of celebrity in the following way. “Celebrity, then, is a genre of representation and a discursive effect; it is a commodity traded by promotions, publicity, and media industries that produce these representations and their effects; and it is a cultural formation that has a social function we can better understand.” (p.9) Hollywood stars are known not only for the roles they play in films but for their privates lives, lives made public by mass media such as women’s magazines and newspapers. The discourse of celebrity is based on the assumption that there is a simple, unproblematic relationship between representations of a person and that person’s true self, between what is said about a person and who that person is; critics of celebrity, such as Turner, show that this relationship is neither simple nor unproblematic. We can apply this theoretical perspective to The Sandman. The characters Dream and Death are famous, to be sure, but they exist only in the form of representations, only as a discursive effect. There is no reality behind the images. It is perhaps to stretch the meaning of the terms ‘icon’ and ‘celebrity’ to say that these terms apply to the characters Gaiman invented, but it is surely true to say that fans of The Sandman often relate to them a little as though they were real people.
Gender
The issue of gender, along with issues of sexuality, feature strongly in The Sandman. Not only does the series often incorporate gay, lesbian and trans-gender characters, many of the stories feature female protagonists. Gaiman evidently believes that there are male and female stories and tried to alternate between one and the other. In an interview, Gaiman has said, “Sandman was always designed to move from male stories to female stories.” The idea that stories themselves are gendered appears explicitly, for instance, towards the end of the series "World’s End". In this collection, a group of travellers stranded in an magical Inn tell stories to each other to pass the time. A women, Charlene Mooney, comments after hearing the others’ stories, “I’ll tell you something else I noticed. There aren’t any women in these stories. Did anyone else notice that?” Jim, a girl who has cross-dressed as a boy to work on a merchant vessel, says “But, well. What about me, missie? There’s me. There was my story. That was a woman’s story.” Charlene replies, “Oh, please. Look, girl, the whole point of your story is that there wasn’t a woman in it. Just a ship full of sailors, and a giant dick thrusting out of the ocean.”
Gender seems to be of significant interest to Gaiman and this has not gone unrecognised. In “The Sand/wo/man: The Unstable Worlds of Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Series” (Brisbin and Booth, 2013) the authors relate The Sandman to Judith Butler’s theory that gender is performative.
"Of particular interest in Sandman is the way that Gaiman renegotiates the traditional notions of gender in society and presents a practical representation of the same type of theoretical gender fluidity developed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. Although it’s doubtful that Gaiman deliberately referenced Butlerian theory in his graphic novel, both authors do seem to have a similar agenda in terms of queer theory revisionism. Indeed, Gaiman’s work, written around the same time as Butler published her influential treatise on gender performativity, illustrates the notion that sex and gender are social constructs which inherently lead to ideological oppression. To overcome this oppression, society must examine and tear down these constructs, which have become basic to our identities and seem innate to the human condition. But, as both Gaiman and Butler argue, gender appearances are little more than artificial constructs." (p.21)
Towards the end of the essay, the authors make this bold claim. “Throughout Sandman, Gaiman offers a number of well-illustrated critiques of gender roles and sexual norms, and becomes an advocate for a queer lifestyle.” (p. 32) This conclusion is highly questionable.
It seems plausible to believe that Gaiman includes queer and transexual people not to present positive representations of the ‘queer lifestyle’ but for the same reason he presents serial killers and scenes of graphic horror and rape – because it disturbs and titillates, because it is edgy. Comic books of the superhero and post-superhero variety, even ones as sophisticated as The Sandman, trade on binary dualisms, on violence and sex, and representations of queer and transgender people constitute another kind of violence. It seems that the maintenance of gender and sexual boundaries require violence and The Sandman is often violent.
An important story-arc that involves gender, one that Brisbin and Booth discuss, is "A Game of You". In this story, Barbie is a girl who, in her dreams, was once the princess of a fantasy world known as the Land, but has been cut off from it for a long time. Since then she has suffered a crisis of identity. The Land, though, has continued to exist without her and has been taken over by an evil being known as the Cuckoo. One of her dream friends travels to the waking world to find Barbie and, shortly after, she returns to the Land and she and her dream companions journey to the “shining sea” where they confront the Cuckoo. This series is the closest The Sandman ever comes to a traditional fantasy story, involving as it does a quest, but is highly unusual, even disturbing, because all Barbie's companions are killed one by one and at the end the Cuckoo, the arch-enemy, actually wins, destroying the Land and flying away to lay eggs in other children’s minds.
In "A Game of You", it Gaiman suggests that not only are stories gendered but so are dream-worlds. Towards the end the Cuckoo delivers the following speech to Barbie: “Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they’re faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly the Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clark is really Hyperman. Yes? […] Now little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they’ll be happy for ever and ever. Little Cuckoos.” This passage is fascinating not only because it refers metatextually to comic book history, a history of superhero stories enjoyed solely by boys, that occurs in what is evidently a ‘girls’ story’, but also because it implies an absolute gender distinction. This is very far removed from Butler’s idea that gender is performative
Barbie has friends in the real world who live in the same apartment building as her, a lesbian couple, an immortal witch called Thessaly and pre-operative transexual who goes by the name Wanda. The three women harness the magic of the moon to travel into Barbie’s dream world to try to rescue her but Wanda, although he identities as a woman, is unable to accompany them because Thessaly’s gods do not recognise her as a female, instead seeing him as a man. Gaiman has received significant criticism in the years since for this narrative decision and replied to it in the following way:
Lots of readers assumed that that was my position too, because who
could argue with an opinion shared by an ancient witch and a
lunar god? In fact, my feeling was always that that’s an opinion
the gods can take up their sacred recta. I feel the story makes clear
that Wanda considers herself a woman; and that, at the end, Death
does too. To my mind, that’s all that matters. (Bender, 126)
Gaiman’s response requires some comment. Even while defending himself from charges of bigotry, Gaiman makes a homophobic slur, saying, in effect, that the gods can ‘take it up their arses’. Gaiman’s real position is probably more ambivalent than either his detractors or his exponents appreciate.
Those who have criticised Gaiman for this decision misunderstand what story-tellers do. In a story, a story teller presents two contradictory ideas at once and this is what Gaiman is doing. On the one hand, Gaiman is arguing for an essentialist perspective on gender; on the other he is presenting a Butlerian view that gender is performative. The first position is represented by the Cuckoo and the second is represented by Wanda. It is significant that, at the end of the story, the Cuckoo wins and Wanda dies. It is significant also that when Wanda dreams, his dreams are inspired by superhero comics not fantasy realms. Perhaps what we would like to believe about the world is not the world’s truth. However, after Barbie attends Wanda’s funeral, she crosses out the name ‘Alvin’, his/her birth name written on the tombstone and writes Wanda instead in red lipstick. Later she has a dream in which she sees Wanda, accompanied by Death, as a genuine woman. Perhaps Gaiman is saying that Wanda couldn't be a woman when alive but only when she is dead.
Brisbin and Booth discuss two of the Endless, Desire and Destruction. Desire is interesting from a gender perspective because he/she is literally androgynous, sometimes appearing as a man, sometimes as a woman. Brisbin and Booth say of Desire: “He/she is an authority, not a subordinate. When this masculine perspective is coupled with a feminine fixation on love and romance, the reader is presented not just with the physicality of an amorphous sexuality,
but also with fluid cultural characteristics of a queer gender. Desire is nothing if not a Butlerian ideal.” Brisbin and Booth imply that Desire is a kind of role model for queer or transgender people, but this misses the point entirely because, throughout the entire run of the Sandman, Desire is presented unsympathetically. S/he is not fixated on love and romance, rather s/he is spiteful, vindictive and capricious, and is continually plotting to destroy Dream. Brisbane and Booth also discuss Destruction, perhaps because he is the most masculine of the Endless, but I would like instead to focus on Death, and compare her to Desire. Death is also an authority, is older and has more power than either Dream or Desire and is even given to teasing her younger siblings, yet she is unmistakably and essentially always feminine. Death is always presented sympathetically. Through Death, Gaiman is not presenting the idea that gender is performative; rather he is broadening or redefining the term ‘female’ to make it more inclusive, to show that women can have power and remain feminine.
Then there is the Sandman himself. Morpheus takes on many guises – he can be African or even a cat– yet he is always male and always heterosexual. Early issues present him as someone quite frightening and someone absolutely committed to his responsibilities as Dream King but as the series goes on, we find he has some human qualities. Over the course of his existence, he has had a number of relationships with women. He will fall for a woman, be with her for a while, be jilted and have his heart broken and then decades or centuries later try again. In "Brief Lives", after Thessaly leaves him, Morpheus makes it rain in the dream kingdom for weeks. This quality in Dream – his need to be loved, his capacity to love and his grief when love ends – is often seen as a female quality, “a feminine fixation on love and romance” (to quote Brisbin and Boon again) but by making Dream a romantic, Gaiman is not trying to feminise Dream. Rather, just as he sought to broaden the term ‘feminine’ to show that women could be powerful, he is attempting to expand the term ‘masculine’ to show that it can encompass weakness.
The Sandman is very much concerned with gender but it does not present gender as performative, not does it subvert or deconstruct gender roles. To say that Gaiman is “an advocate for the queer lifestyle” seems patently silly. Rather Gaiman maintains and even strengthens the binary opposition while subtly redefining the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Gaiman does not espouse the idea that gender is biological or anatomical. The Sandman is steeped in mythology, magic and fantasy, and seems to present an almost Jungian conception that gender is a quality of the soul.
Conclusion
The Sandman is at once a work of high literature and an important popular culture text, leading the way in a trend in comic books towards greater sophistication. Images of Gaiman and the characters he created circulate widely and are often instantly recognisable. Thematic concerns in The Sandman have received much scholarly analysis and some of its deeper meanings are still unrecognised.. It is a truly a benchmark work.
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Case Study of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman
Introduction
The Sandman is a comic book series, originally published monthly from January 1989 until March 1996 by DC comics, authored by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by a number of different artists. It has since been collected into ten trade paperbacks and several anthologies. It has been highly successful and has been called “the greatest epic in comic book history” (Los Angeles Times)
The main protagonist of The Sandman is Morpheus, the anthropomorphic personification of Dream, who rules over the realm of dreams known as the Dreaming. At the beginning of the series Dream is imprisoned for seventy years in a magic sigil and in 1989 escapes; towards the end of the series Dream chooses to let himself die and the series ends with his funeral and his replacement by another incarnation. The Sandman contains a mix of extended stories and one-off stories. Sometimes Morpheus is the main character but often he is a peripheral figure and occasionally doesn’t feature at all. Morpheus is part of a family known as the Endless, the others being Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium (who was once known a Delight) and these siblings often feature in the comic.
Norman Mailer described The Sandman as “a comic book for intellectuals” (Anderson, Porter (July 30, 2001). It has won more than 26 Eisner awards, the World Fantasy Award (for the issue “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and in 2005 IGN declared it the best Vertigo comic ever. The Sandman was one of the first graphic novels to be on the New York Times Best Seller list, others being Maus, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. The Sandman is a significant text in Popular Culture which has influenced not only the comic book medium since but many other Pop Culture works.
Trends and Fads
The term ‘comic book’ is very broad encompassing, as it does, texts as diverse as Garfield, Maus Tintin and American Splendour. Conventions include the the use of sequence of frames or panels that represent chronologically ordered scenes and the employment of speech bubbles. The Sandman can be most closely related to, and grew out of, a sub-genre of comic books, superhero comics. In fact, Morpheus is a re-imagining of a superhero that first appeared in comics in 1939, a masked vigilante bearing a ‘gas gun’ that could impel criminals to tell the truth.
Fans of superhero comics can be considered a sub-culture. However this sub-culture has had a significant influence on mainstream popular culture, in the form of television and film, almost from its inception. The first of many Superman feature films, Superman and the Mole Men, was released in 1951 and a camp television series based around Batman was produced in the 1960s. Developments in comic books have influenced more widely popular media: for instance, beginning in the 1980s a much darker view of Batman in the comics, most closely associated with the four issue comic book series The Dark Knight Returns written by Frank Miler and published in 1986, influenced Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman. In the last several decades, the two main comic book publishers, DC and Marvel, have worked closely with film companies to produce very many films set in respectively the DC and Marvel universes. Although comic book readers constitute a sub-culture, developments in this sub-culture often impact on mainstream culture.
The Sandman, together with other seminal works of the 1980s such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen, were at the vanguard of a trend in comic books towards much greater sophistication. They were innovative – and by ‘innovative ‘ I do not mean that they improved comic books but rather that they performed something new, something novel. The Sandman is steeped in mythology, history and literature. For example, the issue "August", which concerns the Roman emperor Augustus, stays remarkably close to historical ‘facts’ about him, including rumours existing during his rule that he had been sexually abused or raped by his uncle Julius Caesar when young (see The Annotated Sandman, Klinger, 2012, p. 251). The sophistication of The Sandman and other works broadened the appeal of comic books, expanding an audience that had once comprised only pre-adolescent and adolescent boy to include women and mature readers. The success of The Sandman can principally be attributed to word-of-mouth recommendations; it was, to begin with, a true underground sensation.
The impact that The Sandman has had on mainstream popular culture is exampled by the fact that a television series Lucifer has recently been produced featuring a character invented by Gaiman. Lucifer features in the Sandman story "Season of Mists" in which he abdicates his position as ruler of Hell; likewise in the TV series Lucifer, Lucifer abdicates his throne and moves to Earth. The screenplay for Lucifer sometimes directly quotes passages from The Sandman. In 2013, reports that The Sandman itself was to be adapted into a film directed by Joseph Gordon–Levitt were floated but in 2016 Gordon-Levitt dropped out citing ‘creative differences’. It does not seem the series will be made into a film anytime soon.
The Sandman heralded a trend in comic books and graphic novels towards greater sophistication and widened the audience for comic books by appealing to girls, women and adults. This was a trend, not a fad – it is still evident today. It paved the way for other comics that tell supernatural, fantastical stories that are not simply battles between good and evil but are rather complex and nuanced graphic literature, examples including The Invisibles, Preacher and Transmetropolitan. The Sandman is not a superhero comic but it is important to remember that it evolved out of the superhero genre – characters from the DC Universe such as Batman villain Dr Destiny, and Superman and Batman themselves, occasionally appear in it. It was part of a revolution in comic books that forced cultural commentators to take comic books seriously.
Popular Icons
In popular culture studies, a distinction is drawn between icons and symbols. An icon is a visual representation of a real person or thing while a symbol is a sign that designates an abstract concept – for example, an image of the statue of liberty stands for the promise of American freedom. An icon resembles in key ways the person or thing it represents but a symbol’s relationship to what it signifies is arbitrary, and based on consensus convention. Icons are often but not always celebrities.
Neil Gaiman can himself be considered an icon, and the internet contain numerous images of him. Gaiman acquired his celebrity status not only for his authorship of The Sandman but also for other comics he has worked on and for the fantastical novels, such as American Gods and Stardust, that he has written since. It is rare for an author to acquire iconic status – although Joe Moran has discussed literary celebrity with respect to authors John Updike, Philip Roth and Kathy Acker (Turner, 2004). Iconic status requires some pubic familiarity with the icon’s appearance and authors can be shy. Another author apart from Gaiman who may, perhaps, have iconic status is Stephen King. James Joyce can also be considered an icon although, if we wish to draw a distinction between high culture and popular culture, Joyce would probably be regarded as a high culture icon rather than a popular culture icon.
However, the imagery most associated with The Sandman is not pictures of its author but rather pictures of characters from the comic. It is not uncommon for fans to put up posters of Dream, Death or Delirium on their bedroom walls. Can these characters perhaps be considered iconic? This question raises a problem, a long standing issue in analytic philosophy, the issue of whether it is possible to make true statements about fictional entities. Is the proposition “Othello is a Moor” (or the proposition “Dream kills his son Orpheus”) true or false? This problem bedevils literary criticism. One partial-solution is Meongiansm, the doctrine that existence is a property that objects can either have or not have. Just because Dream does not literally exist, and has never existed, does not mean that we cannot accord him, in a way, iconic status, that he cannot be represented through imagery. Most people know Marilyn Monroe solely from representations of her and the same can be said for Morpheus. And many of The Sandman’s most passionate fans probably relate to characters like Dream and Death as though they are real people.
If we allow that the central characters in The Sandman can be in a way iconic we can discuss meanings associated with their images. There is considerable variation in the way the characters are represented depending on the artist who is depicting them – Delirium in particular varies wildly. However there is some continuity in how other major characters are presented. Mopheus is always pale and skinny, almost always wears black and has an unruly shock of black hair. He closely resembles Robert Smith from The Cure as Smith appeared in the 1980s. Death, represented as a foxy young woman, is also presented solely in black and white, is first represented (in “The Sound of her Wings”) in a black singlet and black jeans and wears an ankh around her neck. Representations of Dream and Death align them closely with the Goth subculture. The relationship between The Sandman and this subculture is not just iconographical but thematic, a shared focus on death, romance and the supernatural or mystical. The Sandman can be considered a a cultural point-of-reference for this subculture.
If we can allow not only Gaiman but the characters he invented iconic status, it is permissible to wonder if we can perhaps not also grant them celebrity status. In Understanding Celebrity (Turner, 2012), Turner proposes that although celebrity is often perceived as a natural quality certain individuals posses, a kind of charism or aura perceptible when these individuals are physically present, it is in fact manufactured by the mass media. In today’s world, in particular, people can be famous simply for being famous. Turner summarises his introductory discussion of celebrity in the following way. “Celebrity, then, is a genre of representation and a discursive effect; it is a commodity traded by promotions, publicity, and media industries that produce these representations and their effects; and it is a cultural formation that has a social function we can better understand.” (p.9) Hollywood stars are known not only for the roles they play in films but for their privates lives, lives made public by mass media such as women’s magazines and newspapers. The discourse of celebrity is based on the assumption that there is a simple, unproblematic relationship between representations of a person and that person’s true self, between what is said about a person and who that person is; critics of celebrity, such as Turner, show that this relationship is neither simple nor unproblematic. We can apply this theoretical perspective to The Sandman. The characters Dream and Death are famous, to be sure, but they exist only in the form of representations, only as a discursive effect. There is no reality behind the images. It is perhaps to stretch the meaning of the terms ‘icon’ and ‘celebrity’ to say that these terms apply to the characters Gaiman invented, but it is surely true to say that fans of The Sandman often relate to them a little as though they were real people.
Gender
The issue of gender, along with issues of sexuality, feature strongly in The Sandman. Not only does the series often incorporate gay, lesbian and trans-gender characters, many of the stories feature female protagonists. Gaiman evidently believes that there are male and female stories and tried to alternate between one and the other. In an interview, Gaiman has said, “Sandman was always designed to move from male stories to female stories.” The idea that stories themselves are gendered appears explicitly, for instance, towards the end of the series "World’s End". In this collection, a group of travellers stranded in an magical Inn tell stories to each other to pass the time. A women, Charlene Mooney, comments after hearing the others’ stories, “I’ll tell you something else I noticed. There aren’t any women in these stories. Did anyone else notice that?” Jim, a girl who has cross-dressed as a boy to work on a merchant vessel, says “But, well. What about me, missie? There’s me. There was my story. That was a woman’s story.” Charlene replies, “Oh, please. Look, girl, the whole point of your story is that there wasn’t a woman in it. Just a ship full of sailors, and a giant dick thrusting out of the ocean.”
Gender seems to be of significant interest to Gaiman and this has not gone unrecognised. In “The Sand/wo/man: The Unstable Worlds of Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Series” (Brisbin and Booth, 2013) the authors relate The Sandman to Judith Butler’s theory that gender is performative.
"Of particular interest in Sandman is the way that Gaiman renegotiates the traditional notions of gender in society and presents a practical representation of the same type of theoretical gender fluidity developed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. Although it’s doubtful that Gaiman deliberately referenced Butlerian theory in his graphic novel, both authors do seem to have a similar agenda in terms of queer theory revisionism. Indeed, Gaiman’s work, written around the same time as Butler published her influential treatise on gender performativity, illustrates the notion that sex and gender are social constructs which inherently lead to ideological oppression. To overcome this oppression, society must examine and tear down these constructs, which have become basic to our identities and seem innate to the human condition. But, as both Gaiman and Butler argue, gender appearances are little more than artificial constructs." (p.21)
Towards the end of the essay, the authors make this bold claim. “Throughout Sandman, Gaiman offers a number of well-illustrated critiques of gender roles and sexual norms, and becomes an advocate for a queer lifestyle.” (p. 32) This conclusion is highly questionable.
It seems plausible to believe that Gaiman includes queer and transexual people not to present positive representations of the ‘queer lifestyle’ but for the same reason he presents serial killers and scenes of graphic horror and rape – because it disturbs and titillates, because it is edgy. Comic books of the superhero and post-superhero variety, even ones as sophisticated as The Sandman, trade on binary dualisms, on violence and sex, and representations of queer and transgender people constitute another kind of violence. It seems that the maintenance of gender and sexual boundaries require violence and The Sandman is often violent.
An important story-arc that involves gender, one that Brisbin and Booth discuss, is "A Game of You". In this story, Barbie is a girl who, in her dreams, was once the princess of a fantasy world known as the Land, but has been cut off from it for a long time. Since then she has suffered a crisis of identity. The Land, though, has continued to exist without her and has been taken over by an evil being known as the Cuckoo. One of her dream friends travels to the waking world to find Barbie and, shortly after, she returns to the Land and she and her dream companions journey to the “shining sea” where they confront the Cuckoo. This series is the closest The Sandman ever comes to a traditional fantasy story, involving as it does a quest, but is highly unusual, even disturbing, because all Barbie's companions are killed one by one and at the end the Cuckoo, the arch-enemy, actually wins, destroying the Land and flying away to lay eggs in other children’s minds.
In "A Game of You", it Gaiman suggests that not only are stories gendered but so are dream-worlds. Towards the end the Cuckoo delivers the following speech to Barbie: “Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they’re faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly the Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clark is really Hyperman. Yes? […] Now little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they’ll be happy for ever and ever. Little Cuckoos.” This passage is fascinating not only because it refers metatextually to comic book history, a history of superhero stories enjoyed solely by boys, that occurs in what is evidently a ‘girls’ story’, but also because it implies an absolute gender distinction. This is very far removed from Butler’s idea that gender is performative
Barbie has friends in the real world who live in the same apartment building as her, a lesbian couple, an immortal witch called Thessaly and pre-operative transexual who goes by the name Wanda. The three women harness the magic of the moon to travel into Barbie’s dream world to try to rescue her but Wanda, although he identities as a woman, is unable to accompany them because Thessaly’s gods do not recognise her as a female, instead seeing him as a man. Gaiman has received significant criticism in the years since for this narrative decision and replied to it in the following way:
Lots of readers assumed that that was my position too, because who
could argue with an opinion shared by an ancient witch and a
lunar god? In fact, my feeling was always that that’s an opinion
the gods can take up their sacred recta. I feel the story makes clear
that Wanda considers herself a woman; and that, at the end, Death
does too. To my mind, that’s all that matters. (Bender, 126)
Gaiman’s response requires some comment. Even while defending himself from charges of bigotry, Gaiman makes a homophobic slur, saying, in effect, that the gods can ‘take it up their arses’. Gaiman’s real position is probably more ambivalent than either his detractors or his exponents appreciate.
Those who have criticised Gaiman for this decision misunderstand what story-tellers do. In a story, a story teller presents two contradictory ideas at once and this is what Gaiman is doing. On the one hand, Gaiman is arguing for an essentialist perspective on gender; on the other he is presenting a Butlerian view that gender is performative. The first position is represented by the Cuckoo and the second is represented by Wanda. It is significant that, at the end of the story, the Cuckoo wins and Wanda dies. It is significant also that when Wanda dreams, his dreams are inspired by superhero comics not fantasy realms. Perhaps what we would like to believe about the world is not the world’s truth. However, after Barbie attends Wanda’s funeral, she crosses out the name ‘Alvin’, his/her birth name written on the tombstone and writes Wanda instead in red lipstick. Later she has a dream in which she sees Wanda, accompanied by Death, as a genuine woman. Perhaps Gaiman is saying that Wanda couldn't be a woman when alive but only when she is dead.
Brisbin and Booth discuss two of the Endless, Desire and Destruction. Desire is interesting from a gender perspective because he/she is literally androgynous, sometimes appearing as a man, sometimes as a woman. Brisbin and Booth say of Desire: “He/she is an authority, not a subordinate. When this masculine perspective is coupled with a feminine fixation on love and romance, the reader is presented not just with the physicality of an amorphous sexuality,
but also with fluid cultural characteristics of a queer gender. Desire is nothing if not a Butlerian ideal.” Brisbin and Booth imply that Desire is a kind of role model for queer or transgender people, but this misses the point entirely because, throughout the entire run of the Sandman, Desire is presented unsympathetically. S/he is not fixated on love and romance, rather s/he is spiteful, vindictive and capricious, and is continually plotting to destroy Dream. Brisbane and Booth also discuss Destruction, perhaps because he is the most masculine of the Endless, but I would like instead to focus on Death, and compare her to Desire. Death is also an authority, is older and has more power than either Dream or Desire and is even given to teasing her younger siblings, yet she is unmistakably and essentially always feminine. Death is always presented sympathetically. Through Death, Gaiman is not presenting the idea that gender is performative; rather he is broadening or redefining the term ‘female’ to make it more inclusive, to show that women can have power and remain feminine.
Then there is the Sandman himself. Morpheus takes on many guises – he can be African or even a cat– yet he is always male and always heterosexual. Early issues present him as someone quite frightening and someone absolutely committed to his responsibilities as Dream King but as the series goes on, we find he has some human qualities. Over the course of his existence, he has had a number of relationships with women. He will fall for a woman, be with her for a while, be jilted and have his heart broken and then decades or centuries later try again. In "Brief Lives", after Thessaly leaves him, Morpheus makes it rain in the dream kingdom for weeks. This quality in Dream – his need to be loved, his capacity to love and his grief when love ends – is often seen as a female quality, “a feminine fixation on love and romance” (to quote Brisbin and Boon again) but by making Dream a romantic, Gaiman is not trying to feminise Dream. Rather, just as he sought to broaden the term ‘feminine’ to show that women could be powerful, he is attempting to expand the term ‘masculine’ to show that it can encompass weakness.
The Sandman is very much concerned with gender but it does not present gender as performative, not does it subvert or deconstruct gender roles. To say that Gaiman is “an advocate for the queer lifestyle” seems patently silly. Rather Gaiman maintains and even strengthens the binary opposition while subtly redefining the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Gaiman does not espouse the idea that gender is biological or anatomical. The Sandman is steeped in mythology, magic and fantasy, and seems to present an almost Jungian conception that gender is a quality of the soul.
Conclusion
The Sandman is at once a work of high literature and an important popular culture text, leading the way in a trend in comic books towards greater sophistication. Images of Gaiman and the characters he created circulate widely and are often instantly recognisable. Thematic concerns in The Sandman have received much scholarly analysis and some of its deeper meanings are still unrecognised.. It is a truly a benchmark work.
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