At Home in the World Tree: A Somaesthetic Reading of the Body at Home in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods

Abstract

<p class="p1">At its core, Neil Gaiman’s novel <em>American Gods</em> is a story about homes, lost, found and imagined. As homes and homelands are left behind, the characters in the novel must fashion new homes and homelike spaces within a new country and thus recast themselves in the territory of America through acts of creative self-fashioning. This article will focus on the concept of the characters’ bodies as represented in the homes that they occupy. To do this my argument is predicated on a somaesthetic reading of the body as the locus from which the characters begin to construct ideas of home. Somaesthetics, as conceived by Richard Shusterman, has three facets: analytic, pragmatic, and practical. This paper interrogates the diverse ideas of home in the text, from the backseat of a limo to a small midwestern town, and explores how the idea of home is portrayed via Gaiman’s use and description of his characters’ bodies. The characters within the universe of the novel (broadly divided between old gods and new gods) provide an interesting focus for investigating, via analytic somaesthetics, the use of native and non-native bodies with respect to the construction of homes or home-like spaces. Gaiman constructs a new definition of what home means for his characters and how, via these characters’ bodies, the home is a site of comfort and resistance to the events of the novel. In addition, several of the gods in this story occupy spaces that are constructed to make the reader aware of the nature of the character while preserving some qualities of their fictionalised homelands, places of power and, in the case of the old gods, their newly adopted home.