An Overview of Women Hero Through a Review of 'The Sandman: Worlds' End'

chillibreeze writer — Ahimaz Robinson

Myths are many – Greco-Roman, Indo-Chinese, Judeo-Christian, Nordic, Celtic – and they speak of universal truths and human condition. Myths and its symbols are derived from human psyche and they recur infinitely. The motifs are the same and are revisited frequently from time prehistoric to postmodern. Narrative techniques change, revisited themes may be altered or inverted to best suit the authors’ whim, but story-telling can never be put to rest.

Myths were told, then fairytales were written, and now graphic literature is illustrated. What was only referred to once, is now explored. Take a centaur out from Grecian myth, stray Charlene and Brant from a midnight ride, place them in Chesterton’s inn at the end of the world, we have Neil Gaiman’s Worlds’ End, and more.

If Alan Moore and Frank Miller gave new voice to graphic literature, it’s said that with Gaiman’s The Sandman it came of age. When an artist/writer team can find it hard to accomplish a quality work, roping in tens of artists and making it work, that is something remarkable.

The Sandman is a ten-volume, 2000-page graphic novel and Worlds’ End is its eighth volume. The Sandman narrates the adventures of the eponymous tragic hero, Lord of Dreams Morpheus, the son of Hypnos (Sleep) and the brother of Death, in many stories short and long, oftentimes in cameo appearances and none at all, that has its end in the next volume The Kindly Ones. This volume functions as a consequence to what preceded – death of a part of Dream.

Hit by a reality storm, characters from different worlds shelter in an arcane inn at the worlds’ end. Amid confusion, they pass time sharing stories in a Chaucerian fashion. The book contains five tales and tales within tales, few having Sandman appearances. Each story is illustrated by a different artist. A Tale of Two Cities, illustrated nightmarishly by Alec Stevens, gives the reader a glimpse into what if a thing that was thought to be lifeless dreamed, and the terror of being caught in it. It is a creepy classic that shows how gifted Gaiman is with his imagination. When Hob’s Leviathan is a fine story, Cluracan’s Tale is an okay fairy story, Cerements gives a few underworld, macabre insight, and The Golden Boy is a fantastic analysis of American dream.

Charlene later in the story remarks that these stories entertain but do not help you make sense of anything and that there aren’t any women in the stories. When Jim objects hers was a woman’s story, Charlene says the whole point of her story is that there wasn’t a woman in it accusing Jim of male masquerade in her globetrotting. She also responds to the leviathan in Jim’s story as a giant dick thrusting out of the ocean implying male dominion. Again Jim objects that wasn’t her story. Charlene stresses that it was and that there aren’t any real women in any of the stories and women are just pretty figures in the background to be loved or lost or avoided or whatever. So, Chiron asks her to tell her story to which she says she doesn’t have a story but ends up telling her life of plight which spans two pages with only her face in all the panels following her emotions/expressions up-close.

Renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell once said that all of the mythic story-telling of the world are from the male point of view. When he was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces and looked for female heroes in them and could not find any, he had to go to the fairy tales that were told by women to children, and they offer a different perspective. It was the men who spent time telling most of the great myths. The great myth-maker Tolkien once confessed he wouldn’t know what to do with a woman’s character. Gaiman explored the vulnerability of a woman in Calliope, the Muse, in The Sandman: Dream Country and fashioned Death as a woman in The Sandman. When talking about Death, it’s about looking ahead in life’s journey when looking backward is to be snared by the past.

Gaiman’s The Sandman: The Doll’s House and A Game of You have women protagonists and Coraline and Black Orchid too. His early influences are C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, and G. K. Chesterton to say a few. C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces has a woman protagonist and it is a beautiful retelling of the myth of Psyche and Cupid. There aren’t many male authors to have female heroes in their myths. It does not mean that Gaiman is a better writer than his predecessors, but it is rather interesting to note that how transformed modern myth-making has become and the inversion of myths such as Alan Moore’s Promethea, the feminine version of Prometheus. Certainly, if a woman author fashions a woman hero that will have a different perspective as can be found in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus. With the advent of women in the workforce, and it’s been quite a while, that was once exclusive to men, it’s a harbinger that women tell and retell myths their way.

Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in March, 2010. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

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—About our writer:

Ahimaz Robinson is a physical therapist by education and transcription quality analyst by profession. He has an experience of six years in editing and proofreading. He is a passionate reader and his interests range from mythology to psychology in nonfiction and literature to comic books in fiction. He is an aspiring writer who is laying out his work of fiction in the form of short stories in his blog. He is currently based in Hyderabad.

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