Wonder
Woman is one of most popular comic
book characters. Because she is about to be featured in a film
that will bring Batman
and Superman
together in epic battle, and is expected to be featured in a film of her own,
the Internet
is already beginning to buzz with concern over how badly she may be portrayed
and hopes that the filmmakers will get her right. She has starred in some great
stories, but often the stories about her have disappointed for various reasons.
The difficulty of depicting a woman superhero has
its roots in sorting out the roles of women in society, something we’re still
working on. It is a struggle Wonder Woman was born to fight.
Jill
Lepore explores the birth of this female superhero in The Secret History of Wonder Woman. In one of her various comics
origins, the demigoddess was formed from the mud of Paradise
Island, but Lepore describes how she was formed in the suffrage and feminist
movements of the late 19th
and early 20th
centuries, and an unusual family
with strong ties to these movements.
Wonder Woman first appeared in print in 1941. When she
became the title character of her own comic, her creator came from behind his
pseudonym, with some fanfare, and revealed himself as psychologist
William
Moulton Marston.
Marston’s lifestyle is known now, but it was a closely held secret
during his lifetime. For all practical purposes, if not legally, he had two
wives. Surprisingly, both women were feminists. They both loved Marston and
found in this arrangement a way to live the lives they wanted. They had a
pragmatic, flexible feminism that
was accepting of the unconventional. I can hardly do it justice in a few words,
but Lepore explores the early days of feminism that shaped the arrangement
Marston had with these two women.
Marston met Elizabeth
Holloway while they were undergraduates, he at Harvard and she
at Mount
Holyoke. They were both advocates of women’s suffrage. They married in 1915. Marston
received a doctorate and Holloway a master’s degree. Holloway claimed to be
deeply involved in Marston’s early research.
The Marston household became full of writers and
editors, and overtime attribution became a matter of convenience or
marketing rather than identification of individual authorship.
Olive
Byrne met Marston as an undergraduate at Tufts, where she
became his research assistant. She quickly became more and moved into the
Marston household. Eventually they worked out the arrangement that Holloway
would work full-time (over time she had several jobs as an editor) while Byrne
raised the children (each had two children with Marston). Byrne eventually felt
the need to contribute the finances and in the 1930s wrote for Family Circle as Oliver Richards
(Richards from the marriage
and widowhood she faked to obscure the parentage of her children). Byrne, like
the Marstons she joined, had ties to the feminist and birth control
movements. She was the daughter of Ethel Byrne and her aunt was the more famous Margaret
Sanger.
Holloway, Byrne, and even Sanger, were to varying degrees the models
for Wonder Woman. She was to be feminist propaganda,
and under Marston’s pen she was. One would guess that this would have attracted
criticism, but it was not the feminism of Wonder Woman that most stirred up
critics.
Bondage
was depicted on almost every page of Marston’s comics. In addition, Wonder
Woman’s costume was skimpy. Lepore links the bondage in these comics to the use
of bondage as a symbol used by suffragists and feminists. Sometimes Marston
drew very consciously on images associated with these movements. In addition,
the bondage represented notions of domination
and submission
rooted in Marston’s theories of personality
and the relationship between the sexes. Bonds, and the breaking of them,
represented the misappropriation of power by men and the power of women to free
themselves and take their place as leaders in society. Similarly, Wonder
Woman’s bare limbs were emblematic of her athleticism,
strength, power and
essential equality
to make heroes. It’s hard to say that the depiction of Wonder Woman is
completely free of sexual undertone, Marston wanted her to be beautiful. Lepore
shows the clear link between the symbolism of Wonder Woman and the
symbolism of suffrage and feminism that
Marston consciously referenced.
When Marston passed away in 1947,
Wonder Woman fell into the hands of writers and editors who did not share his
vision. She hasn’t been the same since. After World War II,
the feminism she represented was not welcome in the broader culture or by the
men who wrote her comics. Even after the second wave of feminism adopted her as
an emblem in the 1970s,
she’s not been quite at home. Perhaps we’ll have trouble getting Wonder Woman
right as long as we have conflict about the roles of women in our culture.
If you’re interested in either comics or feminism, I recommend Lepore’s
book. It is thoroughly researched and thoroughly readable.
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