By Elizabeth-Marie Helms
[Editor’s note: This article was published several weeks before the allegations against Neil Gaiman.]
Swimsuit uniforms, flowing hair in the midst of laser gun battles, and a propensity for getting captured. These were the tropes that defined American comic book femininity in 1989 when Neil Gaiman’s original 75-issue run on The Sandman began. Though published under the umbrella of super-hero giant DC, his book’s depiction of women had more in common with the realistic alternative comics of its era. One would struggle to find another comic so well represented in academic studies on the question, such as 2012’s Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman, and this reputation even meant less online grouching over the gender-swap casting of its Netflix adaptation. For trans women of a certain generation, The Sandman was similarly a touchstone case of representation, but one that left a lingering uneasiness.
The fifth volume of the series, A Game of You (1991), is about women’s inner lives in contrast with their often limiting realities. The cast includes a trans woman, Wanda, who wears this theme bodily. To serve her role as the lone transgender representation, poor Wanda must repeatedly defend her existence and autonomy, in particular her choice to not pursue gender confirmation surgery. When the lead, Barbie, is trapped in the Narnia-like dream world of her childhood fantasies, Wanda and her neighbors gather together to help. The witch Thessaly calls on the three-faced goddess of the moon to help the AFAB cast enter the land of dreams, but Thessaly (and by implication her goddess) deny Wanda passage on account of her assigned sex. Left in the waking world, where the moon’s brief proximity has supercharged a storm overtaking New York, Wanda sacrifices her body to save her unconscious friend as their tenement collapses.
As the lone member of the core cast to die, Wanda’s unfair treatment has been the subject of internet criticism since the webring era. In 1999, Valerie Tuinstra published the short essay “The Life and Death of Wanda” on her website about transgender representation in comics. Tuinstra corresponded with Rachel Pollack (comic author, tarot expert), and the two shared objections to the story. Pollack wrote:
When you see a story that seems sympathetic to a minority character, and then that character is the only one that dies, you have a clue that the writer cannot really accept the minority figure as a person, again, as a reality.
The topic has resurfaced many times since then: during the Women in Refrigerators era of online comic discourse and more recently in the wake of Rachel Pollack’s death.
Gaiman has continuously fielded questions and criticism about the character across interviews and social media platforms. In Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion (1999), Gaiman said he doesn’t agree with this moon goddess and added that the scene had other implications in his mind: “I’d noticed a movement in some neopagan circles to reinterpret historical witchcraft, making it into some completely bloodless, sweet religion about female empowerment.” Despite playing a significant part, this context and the moon goddess’s meaning have so far been incidental in analyses of Wanda’s life and death. With the casting of Pose’s Indya Moore for an as-yet unknown role in the second season of Netflix’s Sandman, the Wanda conversation is likely to resume this year. It seems a fair time to ask: who is this moon goddess, what did she mean in 1991, and how does any of this relate to transgender people?
Alternately called the Furies, the Moirai, or the Three-In-One, the triple goddess is a major recurring antagonist of The Sandman. Besides her portrayal as Thessaly’s moon goddess, she (or they) take on the form of MacBeth’s weird sisters in the first volume and later return as the Furies of Greek myth for the title role in The Kindly Ones. Gaiman cites Apuleius’s The Golden Ass as his guide to ancient magic, and that his triple goddess is associated with the moon owes much to the Roman era’s depictions of Hecate and Diana. But she also bears traces of earlier Greek sources, such as the terrifying, pre-patriarchal entities of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and The Three are feared by the other gods of the series, including the protagonist Dream.
The triple goddess of modern paganism, usually referred to as simply the Goddess, is also the synthesis of numerous sources, from the classical works above to Jane Ellen Harrison’s theories on ancient Greek religion and Robert Graves’ major work of poetic theory, The White Goddess (1948). But few had a larger impact on the worship of the Goddess than the founders of modern Wicca, Gerald Gardner and his high priestess and editor, Doreen Valiente.
In contrast to the Renaissance accounts of devil-worshiping witches, Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954) centered on a goddess of fertility whose power could be drawn down and channeled by her priestess, who spoke with her voice and authority. Gardner’s witchcraft promoted nominal sexual equality, but his contributions to neopaganism revealed many of his personal inclinations: public nudity, scourging, and supplication to a powerful woman were among the core practices. The retired Gardner also favored younger priestesses to work beside him and share his bed. This ultimately led to the dissolution of his original coven but didn’t prove to be the end of the witchcraft revival or the Goddess.
A goatish self-promoter like Gardner may seem an odd start for a religious movement which would soon be a source of female empowerment. In her classic work in pagan studies, Drawing Down the Moon (1979), journalist Margot Adler wrote that in ritualistically channeling the Goddess herself, she could feel the “last prejudices against [her] own female mind and body falling away.” The popularity among women may owe less to Gardner directly than to the revisions of Doreen Valiente, who rewrote Gardner’s book of rituals to remove text cribbed from occultist Aleister Crowley. She instead expanded Gardner’s vision with references to her wide readings in folklore and Greek religion. Valiente found affirmation in the Goddess, even pedestalled and anemic as she was in Gardner’s male gaze. As she wrote in the revised “Charge of the Goddess”: “For behold, She has been with thee from the beginning; and She is that which is attained at the end of desire.”
That sense of homecoming is common in Adler’s interviews with neopagans for Drawing Down the Moon, and it calls to mind nothing more than the experience of transgender people finally expressing themselves. But a large number of covens followed Gardner into a philosophy of strictly delimited gender roles.
Z. Budapest, founder of Dianic Wicca in the early 70s, denied her coven’s teachings to men until equality was achieved. In search of archetypes of female empowerment, she followed Valiente in using the model of the triple goddess to justify her eclectic appropriation of myths with little acknowledgement of their cultural specifics. In her Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries (1975), the virginal Artemis appears next to Tiamat, goddess of chaos and the primordial sea, and women from British and Irish legends. Purged of their individual origins, the resulting Great Goddess, as the mythical mother of womankind, was a rather conservative vision of a sex predestined by biology. Though Budapest claimed to value creativity as the Dianic’s highest ideal, that creativity was rooted not in the imagination but in the womb. Following the three-phased moon, a woman’s life was divided into maiden-mother-crone by menarche, pregnancy, and menopause.
This gender essentialist trend, in addition to the adoration of the Goddess, attracted a certain style of second-wave feminist in the 1970s. As a result, the emerging goddess-centered spirituality championed traditional feminine qualities, environmental protection, and the “mysteries” of the female body. This movement aligned and overlapped with the original trans-exclusionary radical feminists: Mary Daly, an influential author on feminist spirituality, was even the thesis advisor for Janice Raymond, author of The Transsexual Empire (1979). Daly herself would compare the existence of trans women to Shelley’s Frankenstein and decry our medicine as a “monstrous male motherhood” in Gyn/Ecology (1978). Thus in 1991, it was not only the fictional moon goddess who rejected trans women.
In the past three decades, the neopagan scene has grown a thriving and prominent LGBT culture, but how these identities relate to ritualized gender essentialism remains an ongoing negotiation. Starhawk, founder of the Dianic-inspired Reclaiming coven, revised her Spiral Dance (1979) many times to emphasize an androgynous or integrative understanding of Wicca’s Goddess and Horned God archetypes. Meanwhile the Radical Faeries engaged in their own syncretism by borrowing “third gender” identities like Native American two-spirit concepts, but as a gay male group, a policy of welcoming individuals of a non-cis-male identities was not automatic. Rachel Pollack herself would play a small but persistent part in these conversations.
Despite shifting beliefs, the participation of trans women in women-only rituals still proved controversial as late as 2011 when an incident at a Dianic ritual at Pantheacon that year generated debate and an edited volume of responses (Gender and Transgender in Modern Paganism, 2012) in addition to blog posts and academic articles. Dianic coven leader Ruth Barrett framed the incident as a question of religious liberty, but to any trans person, the implicit argument over their identity is perfectly clear even in its absence. The Great Goddess, it seems, can contain Tiamat, queen of salt and mother of monsters, because even she is still a biological mother, but the ancient transgender priestesses of Inanna and Cybele remain unfolded into this cosmology.
When The Sandman’s triple goddess returns as the main antagonist in The Kindly Ones, Gaiman suggests a metatextual reading through the character of Rose Walker, who is writing a book on television sitcoms and the maiden-mother-crone archetype. Rather than centering Dream, this volume follows multiple women in his periphery, so finding a suitable trio may reveal the meaning of this triple goddess not as a character but as a representation of womanhood.
The clearest archetypal figure is the fey maiden, Nualla. Reluctantly freed from her master, Nualla returns to her home in Faerie with an air similar to a college freshman on break, unapologetically herself against custom and her Queen’s wishes. Nuala’s naivete is reinforced when she catastrophically dooms her unrequiting lover in an attempt to save him, and much like the Lady of Shalott and other heroines of medieval romance, her desire thereby leaves her virginal maidenhood intact.
Lyta Hall, though the most prominent mother in the series, is a mother subverted. She becomes the antagonist of the book when, in pursuit of revenge, she strikes a deal with the Three in their aspect of the Furies. Though her goal was to rescue her son, the Three give her only the power to destroy. Thus, Lyta is clearly the Crone, the one who cuts the thread.
That leaves world-be author Rose Walker as the archetypal mother, but though she ends the series pregnant, Rose’s creative blockages over the series bely the generative power of the womb for which the mother is worshiped. Likewise, the mother is the archetype of woman as life-bringer, but Rose’s story is dominated by the AIDs epidemic and death.
With one mother becoming the crone, and another struggling to create, the reader is left wondering whether the search for a triad of archetypal women is missing the point.
The antagonist of A Game of You, the Cuckoo, presents a clearer picture of gender wherein little boys aspire to be powerful heroes and girls believe themselves to be lost princesses of distant lands, little cuckoos. The developed female characters of The Sandman may not all be princesses, but they do contain secrets and contradictions. Often Gaiman can be read in the romantic tradition of associating women with the moon, irrationality, inspiration, and the unknowable. His Kindly Ones are empowered to kill Dream because he killed his son, Orpheus, whom they hated and had sworn to kill themselves. It’s a cold and irrational motivation: legalistic on its surface yet enacted with spite. Frequently though, Gaiman’s women are portrayed through little human moments, in the many woman-woman asides as friends, as storytellers, as mothers and babysitters, as queens and subjects with practical knowledge. Combined, these ideas suggest the women of The Sandman seem more like real women not because they adhere to archetypal femininity but because they’re indifferent to it. They’re complex flawed individuals, no two of them alike, and their motivations and personalities are not easily defined by a single word. They are not representations of an all-consuming archetype, but refractions of it. Just as the fictional triple goddess herself shifts and changes their name and purpose and perhaps even her meaning.
The appeal of women who are not one-to-one representations of an essential feminine force stands in contrast to demands for “perfect” representation from the LGBT community in the past decade. Though a direct response to the focus on passive “visibility” in earlier decades, the call for active representation sometimes slips into a preference for the sanitized, sexless characters of weaker YA fiction or the adherence to tag-based, romance genre marketing. As if authenticity comes from a place of immaculate uniformity. As if readers and viewers could not relate to characters with flaws.
It’s there the twin interpretations of the final scene in the film Tangerine (2015), when the two trans protagonists remove their wigs: is it disrespectful to the characters or inviting the audience into a moment of intimacy few would experience otherwise?
Refraction instead asks us to acknowledge characters as different from us, as capable of defying our expectations, yet knowing the imperfections too contain some fraction of our truth. Instead of searching for the uniform and the ideal, a better approach for readers might be curation: not saying “this is womanhood” but “here are the many ways one can be a woman.” But with this style of engagement, reader beware, one must take Barthesian ownership of the vision for the product is yours and not the author’s.
What does a refracted womanhood mean for the ill-fated Wanda and her meaning? The reason that readers disliked her death may have as much to do with her relationships to other women, and how the conversation constantly returns to her otherness. That her dream sequence mirrors these interactions reveals a mental life that speaks more to the cis imagination that created her than her wholeness as a character. Pollack is right: the reader has been given a single frame of this character’s life. When we learn that Gaiman based her on a friend of a friend, this suggests the real-life Wanda’s social life was also dominated by the cis imagination, an experience the majority of us share.
Where dialog and art fail, however, the structure of the story makes clear that Wanda is its heart. Perhaps we should have been asking ourselves, who else is the better secret princess? Who, if not Wanda, escapes the prison of fulfilling an archetype, the “game of you” of the title? Despite being othered, Wanda is not an exception to the book’s themes: her conflict with the triple goddess is the inevitable consequence of trying to fold a thousand ways of being into a single vision. Her experience mirrors the experience of real life trans women, and shows that the essentializing and sanitizing process that creates such an archetype—an all-consuming, sanitized definition of womanhood—can never be truly inclusive because the practice removes what’s real and gritty and remarkable.
It’s what trans women have always known: that transmisogyny hurts cis women too. That gender is simultaneously real and a game, both equally dangerous. That an archetype does not decide its own meaning, nor does an author. That biology is not womanhood. That a single frame necessarily leaves out other views of the same individual.
This is not an argument to accept the cis imagination, transphobia, or poorly written characters wherever you find them. This is an argument to revise, rewrite, and respond. To, like Doreen Valiente, adapt another version of an archetype and find what resonates with you, specifically and personally with you. Search for your meaning in the flaws, beyond criticism of the author’s politics. Not every text will prove fruitful, but there’s a beauty there. A beauty often missing from conversations on representation. A beauty in existence as a suggestion, the implication of negative space, or a life reconstructed from multiple points of view. 