Wonder Woman Questions

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released. I’ve put together a week-long roundtable to celebrate.

Earlier in the week I asked folks to ask me Wonder Woman questions and I’d answer them here. A few people responded. So here’s my answers. If you have other questions, ask in comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can. (Questions about my book would be great too, if you are one of the few who have read it!)

____________

Andrew

Is there someone that you think could channel H.G. Peter?

I love Harry Peter too! His style is very different from current mainstream superhero art. He looks back to a Victorian illustration tradition in a lot of ways; stiff figures, fluid linework, just very different than the muscles-on-muscles pin-up style you get in Marvel and DC nowadays.

So, if you were going to have someone approximate that, I think you’d need to look to alternative and indie creators probably. I’d love to see Edie Fake do a Wonder Woman story. Edie’s fascinated with gender and sexuality in a way that’s reminiscent of Marston, and he’s really into fantasy landscape as well. It would be different than Harry Peter, of course, but I think he could get some of the same sense of overripe wrongness/rightness that Peter did.

Leah

How do you think Wonder Woman has informed the portrayals of other women superheros. And why do you think there there not more leading lady superheros. Most of the well known ones these days seem to be part of teams (ex. XMen, Fantastic Four) rather than stand alones.

That’s tricky; I don’t think the original Wonder Woman comics have had much influence at all on other female superheroes, as far as I can tell. Marston’s mix of bondage and feminism isn’t something that many other mainstream creators have been all that interested in. There have been a few direct lifts, like Alan Moore’s Promethea, or Winged Victory in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, or Wonder Girl. But for example Storm, from the X-Men, whose one of the higher profile superheroes, doesn’t owe much to Wonder Woman. Buffy and Sailor Moon, two very popular female superheroes, don’t look back to her much either.

And I think that’s part of the answer to your second question. There are stand along female superheroes, like Buffy and Sailor Moon. They tend not to come from Marvel and DC (the big two superhero companies). And that’s just because Marvel and DC have historically featured male characters by male creators mostly packaged for me. That’s changing somewhat as the movies create a more diverse audience, and so maybe we’ll see more stand alone superhero films featuring female heroes from those companies in the future.

Matthew

It seems that people are clamoring for a Wonder Woman movie, but do you think an interesting film could actually be made with the character in her current state? Or are her bizarre origins, years of retcons, constantly fluctuating characterization, and general difficulty to handle by modern comics writers too much to overcome?

Anything’s possible I guess. Somebody could just go back to Marston and Peter and make a movie with gorilla bondage and space kangaroos, if they wanted. I suspect though that the movie will be boring not because anyone is confused by years of indifferent comics, but just because most superhero movies are boring and unimaginative, and there’s no reason to think this will be different. In other words, the Wonder Woman movie will be bad because the Avengers and Superman and so forth are bad, not because Wonder Woman comics are bad. They’ll write a script where she hits people and has angst and things blow up, would be my guess.

I suppose they might try to incorporate feminism in some way. That could be bad, as the animated feature showed. For an actual feature there’s too much money at stake to screw around with trying to be true to the character or the comics fanbase, though, would be my guess.

Eric

What did you think of the David Kelly pilot?

I didn’t see it!

Resuscitating Wonder Woman

Posted on January 15, 2015 by Kailyn Kent

Editor’s Note: This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released. I’ve put together a week-long roundtable to celebrate.
________

There’s long been talk about how superhero stories are getting ambitious. The histories and planetary layouts of comic book universes, once created haphazardly, are solidifying into un-breachable canon. Characters from diverse series will “cross over” and team up during climactic event episodes. Meanwhile, film adaptations attract talented, occasionally brilliant, actors, and pack in enough pseudo-philosophy and current polemics to merit thoughtful reviews, (or at least avoid outright dismissal.) Captain America fights military surveillance, dancing around his own imperial baggage. The Nolan Batman trilogy harnesses fearful imagery of mental illness and the Occupy movement to apologize for its own elitist and authoritarian nature, which it presents as perversely anti-heroic. Guardians of the Galaxy seems aware of its own ridiculousness, and so avoids stigmatization as overt camp. The cinematography, special effects, costume and set design are top-notch. The appearance of being an ambitious film counts more than the internal logic of the final work. It counts more than actual narrative ambitions, like championing a truly underdog protagonist, envisioning utterly alien societies and technologies, or portraying good and evil in an insightful way. Contemporary superhero narratives indulge in emotionally disconnected escapism, sexuality and violence, all carefully leavened with inside jokes and buddy comedy. These films, and their comic source material, feature all the bells and whistles of ambition, while being safe projects at heart. It’s a sad day when a quippy, trigger-happy raccoon (with a heart of gold) surprises audiences —he’s written exactly according to Marvel formula.

Some of this might be endemic to the superhero genre; in the words of Noah Berlatsky in a recent piece in The Atlantic,

“Tony Stark [of Iron Man] invents new magical energy sources three times before breakfast, but he uses them mostly to punch Thunder-Gods in the head, rather than, say, to completely transform the world’s technology and economy.”

It didn’t have to be this way. Noah’s recent book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948, records an alternative which had been present at the dawn of superhero comics. Unlike Superman, the original Wonder Woman comics were not a personal fantasy of power and assimilation, born already calibrated to the yearnings of depression-era, immigrant, and wartime youth. The Wonder Woman comics were an intentional manifesto, meant to instill radical concepts of femininity, masculinity, sexuality and heroism into children. Noah’s book elucidates William Marston’s radical philosophies and agendas, which informed every aspect of the forties run. If not for the kaleidoscopic visuals and zany scenarios, the barely-sublimated kinkiness and infectious fun, Wonder Woman might have been remembered as being propaganda designed to re-educate America’s youth. Instead, Marston and artist Harry Peter created one of the most original and unclassifiable comics in history. Despite its initial success, publishers didn’t know what to do with it, and America came out of the war more sexually repressed than it had entered. The Marston/Peter run hangs off comics history like a forgotten evolutionary branch. The indomitable Diana of the original comics faded away, and less interesting archetypes convergently evolved to take her girdle, to fit DC’s limited ‘heroine’ niche.

Even a casual glance at the original Wonder Woman issues elicits curiosity, if not alarm, as they depart from the standard procedure of most superhero work. The forties Wonder Woman comics featured a great deal of bondage, and a cavalcade of sexual reversals. Many villains are introduced as one gender, and then transform into or are revealed to be another. Occasionally their gender identity is never fully resolved. Wonder Woman binds enemies with her magic lasso, which makes them obedient to her will, but only after being bound and made helpless herself. The male protagonist, Steve Trevor, repeatedly injures himself, begins the series comatose, and is at points slung over the shoulder of a villain and kidnapped, yet he is never portrayed as being dithering or pathetic. Marston and Peter obsessively repeat classic melodramatic scenarios of bondage and hysterical emotion, while constantly changing who is doing what. This fetishizes the action, blends characters like a Venn diagram, and causes the linear narrative to coil in on itself, disrupting the temporal logic.

This entanglement allows all characters to participate in what Marston called the two “normal, strength-giving emotions” of inducement, or dominance, and submission, Marston’s key to a happy ending. An eminent psychologist of his time, Marston theorized that the world would be a better place if people learned to accept and practice both dominance and submission, as opposed to harshly overpowering others. Neither dominance nor submission was considered the superior state, and Marston links both in a pleasurable, loving cycle that ultimately leads to world peace.

Yet Marston and Peter don’t let the confounding cycle of bondage continue forever; Wonder Woman ultimately re-educates the villains, sometimes impressing the importance of love-leadership (and being sexually dominant,) on oppressed female characters. Marston intended Wonder Woman to be the model of female leadership. She is boisterous, positive, friendly and even-keeled– an athlete, adventure lover, caretaker, and confident romantic. Wonder Woman throws herself into the fray of battle one minute, while openly crushing on and nursing a wounded Steve Trevor the next. Marston saw no contradiction in these actions, nor in Steve’s vulnerability and strength. Wonder Woman anticipates the multi-dimensional “strong” female characters found with greater frequency today, although this chain was broken by decades, where Wonder Woman was treated like a glorified pinup.

Noah’s book resuscitates these largely forgotten, original comics by examining them as carefully and closely as they deserve, and by meeting Marston and Peter’s work on its own terms. Noah matches the recursivity of the comics with an interweaving analysis of Marston and Peter’s three major concerns: “feminism, pacifism and queerness—or, if you prefer, bondage, violence and heterosexuality.” As Noah explains, “For Marston, these topics were all inextricably intertwined… the book presents not so much a linear argument as a braided exploration, in which the same ideas and obsessions recur in slightly different formations and slightly different perspectives.” As not being strictly formal opposites, bondage and feminism may be the least intuitive pair of the bunch; fortunately, Noah starts there.

Noah argues that the comic’s sexualized fixation on disempowerment, binding, abuse, and manipulation resonates with women and girls, who have been traditionally disempowered in patriarchal society. The representation of subjugation matters as much to women as denunciation of it, (and possibly more,) an idea Noah supports through the theories of several respected literature and media scholars. The Marston/Peter comics have been criticized for eroticizing the bondage of women for a male audience, although Marston’s writings show that he deliberately geared the comics to be read by children of both genders, and at least some evidence indicates they were. Marston and Peter also turn bondage on its head, displaying male victims and female abusers. Noah makes the case that readers simultaneously desire and identify with both men and women, victims and abusers, which highlights a peculiar, and radical piece of Marston’s vision: he denounced rape and abuse as the greatest of evils, but preached the healthy pleasures of reciprocal, consensual, bondage. “Marston, [assistant writer] Murchison, and Peter want to provide these pleasures to everybody, even, or perhaps especially, to the most oppressed and the most wounded.” Noah writes, “That remains a rare ability and an extremely precious one… We can condemn child abuse or we can acknowledge children’s sexuality, but we have enormous difficulty doing both at once.”

Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism… also articulates what is problematic about Marston’s theories, often bringing dissenting voices into the mix. Noah largely supports and expands upon Marston’s ideas with a diverse range of supporting sources. This is brave, especially when Marston casually reconciles themes that many consider mutually exclusive. The chapters on pacifism and queerness contain many theoretical surprises, including alternative visions of the proper functioning of education, motherhood, and sexual orientation. Noah also contributes great ideas of his own. His exploration of gendered responsibility and heroism, and how expectations change for female characters, is both inspired and concise, and hopefully destined to enter into wider discussions of superheroism. Best of all, Noah does a great job of showing that these ideas clearly appear in the Wonder Woman comics themselves, and are not projected onto it by later minds.

Marston didn’t shy away from advocating a new world order ruled by a new order of women, and he casts the net of his imagination widely. Noah does well to bring a wide variety of scholars from many disciplines, tackling each component of Marston’s broad vision piece by piece. Occasionally, this diversity scatters the argument. Readers may question why Noah includes some voices, and not others: he extensively draws on Anne Allison, a scholar of post-war Japanese domestic life, and even then, on a very limited spectrum of her work dedicated to mother-son incest urban legends, (and a bit about lunchbox making.) Allison’s observations parallel the Wonder Woman comics in interesting ways, but an example of ‘matriarchal rule’ closer to the comic’s original context might have served better. I would have also appreciated a second, corroborating source. On the same note, is Pussy Galore the only available example of male fantasy lesbianism? Her significance to the discussion of Wonder Woman’s homosexuality feels both sketchy and undeserved. The most egregious cameo would be Luce Irigaray’s The Sex Which Is Not One. No matter how well her ideas match the argument, statements like “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere,” will seem anatomically preposterous to many, especially when left to float outside a considerate introduction to her work. Distracted by moments like this, a skeptical reader could disengage from the greater point.

My chief criticism of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is that there should have been more evidence from indisputably relevant and more general sources, and the argument should have relied less on isolated examples. Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is not a case for the application of Marston’s ideas, as much a case for their remembrance and relevance, particularly within comics and feminist scholarship. As the book stands, Marston’s ideas, freshly unearthed, may be unfairly vulnerable to re-burial, simply because of missing or dismissible evidence.

This would be tragic, considering that Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism illustrates the terrible stakes in making Wonder Woman the afterthought of DC Comic’s line. Noah details two contemporary runs of the Wonder Woman comics, one disturbingly anti-female, the other well-meaning but inane. I would have appreciated a run-down and time-line of the character’s entire development, particularly George Perez’s re-launch of the character in the mid eighties, as Noah goes against the grain in labeling it as trivializing. I would have also liked a discussion of why, after the close of WWII, Wonder Woman repeatedly targets imaginary misogynist dystopias, often on alien planets. The forties run seems equally split between war-propaganda and planetary colonization, and this schism seems rich for exploration. Most of all, I felt the book skipped over an examination of early twentieth century melodrama. Was Marston’s obsession with bondage an exaggeration of existing bondage tropes, sawmills, train tracks, and all, that filmmakers repeatedly inflicted on the female daring-doers of popular cinema? How much of Wonder Woman comes from The Hazards of Helen?

These criticisms essentially come down to a wish the book had been longer, which I realize is a backwards compliment. I wish this because I too am convinced that the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics are relevant today. People love superheroes, perhaps now more than they ever did. The current popularity of superhero entertainment has lasted longer than their initial explosion in the forties. I hope there is room in mainstream entertainment for risky visions of what it means to be a hero. Even more, I hope there is room for visions like Marston’s, who was willing to embrace paradox, and attempted to describe the wonderful, ineffable, irrationality of love.

Color Illustrations for “Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism”

Posted on January 14, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

My book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is out today! I’m doing a little roundtable to celebrate.

The book includes a number of illustrations from the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics. Alas, in the print edition, the images aren’t in color — and, of course, even in the digital version, I wasn’t able to include as many images as I wanted.

So, I figured I would try to give folks a chance to see everything I wanted to put in here. For those who have the book and want to match images to the discussion in the text, I’ve included the figure numbers (for those included in the book) and the corresponding text pages of my book for everything else.

All images are by William Marston and Harry Peter’s run on Wonder Woman, unless otherwise noted. I’ll try to give issue numbers in most cases, but their may be a few where I’ve lost them. In many cases you should be able to click on the picture for a magnified look.
_____

Figure 1, page 17, Wonder Woman #18

page 20, Wonder Woman #9

Figure 2, page 27, Wonder Woman #16

Figure 3, page 29, Wonder Woman #16

Figure 4, page 32, Wonder Woman #16

page 37, Wonder Woman #16

pages 37-38, Wonder Woman #16

Figure 5, page 47, Wonder Woman #16

pages 51-52, Wonder Woman #16

page 53, Wonder Woman #16

pages 54-55, Wonder Woman #16

Figure 6, page 56, Wonder Woman #16

Figure 7, page 61, Wonder Woman #28

Figure 8, page 67, Wonder Woman #16

Figure 9, page 72, Wonder Woman #16

page 77, Alan Davis, The Nail

pages 80-81, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Amazing Fantasy #15

page 86, Wonder Woman #1

Figure 10, page 84, Wonder Woman #4

Figure 11, page 91, Wonder Woman #4

Figure 12, page 97, Wonder Woman #4

Figure 13, page 98, Wonder Woman #7

Figure 14, page 105, Sensation Comics #1

Figure 15, page 105, Sensation Comics #1

page 110, Wonder Woman #4

Figure 16, page 113, Wonder Woman #1

page 113, Wonder Woman #1

Figure 17, page 116, Sensation Comics #31

Figure 18, page 121, Sensation Comics #1

Figure 19, page 129, Wonder Woman #1

page 130, The Rifleman (creators unkown)

page 133, Wonder Woman #18

Figure 20, pages 134-135, Wonder Woman #2

Figure 21, page 139, Sensation Comics #31

Figure 22, page 141, Wonder Woman #5

page 140, Sensation Comics #31

Figure 23, page 143, Wonder Woman #3

Figure 24, page 155, Wonder Woman #5

page 155, Wonder Woman #5

page 156, Wonder Woman #18

Figure 25, page 157, Wonder Woman #5

Figure 26, page 166, Wonder woman #5

page 167, Herbert Cole, illustration of Sleeping Beauty

Figure 27, page 168, Sensation Comics #41

Figure 28, page 171, Wonder Woman #11 (the issue number is mislabeled in the book alas)

Figure 29, page 177, Wonder Woman #23 (issue number also mislabeled in the book. Sigh.)

page 178, Wonder Woman #11

page 179, Wonder Woman #11

Figure 30, page 183, Wonder Woman #1

page 184, Courbet, The Grain Sifters

This last one is NSFW

Figure 31, page 307, Nicole Eisenman, Alice in Wonderland, 1996, ink on paper, 30 x 22.5

“I am fond of hidden agendas:” Carla Speed McNeil on Wonder Woman

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released upon a waiting and/or unsuspecting world. I’ve got a number of posts to celebrate, all of which will be posted under the “Bound to Be Released” tag.

This is the first; an interview about Marston, Peter, gender, and feminism with Carla Speed McNeil, creator of Finder.
______

Noah: Are you a Wonder Woman fan of longstanding? What did (or didn’t) attract you to the character?

Carla: I’m not. I’ve only recently become attracted to super-heroes, I never really understood them as a reader. I thought they were science fiction, and since science fiction progresses from unfolding concepts (at least, the kind I enjoy does), they didn’t seem to be very GOOD science fiction. I’m getting a better grasp on them now, and I find I like the ones that have a blasting-powder mix of realism and fantasy to them, that are weird and dreamlike in ways. The closer a look I take at Wonder Woman, the more she surprises me. She turns up everywhere. I never knew until this past summer that my older sister is a huge WW fan. She’s got the look, too, maybe I’ll use her as a model if I ever draw her.

I know you’re said you’re a fan of the Marston/Peter comics. What do you like about them? Do you have a favorite Wonder Woman comic from their run, or a favorite aspect of those comics?

I like their sheer absurdity. I like their playfulness. I like the fact that Diana is superlative in many ways but is also very, very human. She may be some breed of demigoddess, but she’s also full of passions and humor. The fact that the first thing I saw her do with her lasso was to compel a dignified older Amazon to stand on her head just delights me.

She’s not above-it-all. It’s hard to write White Knights, because our definition of what constitutes a Galahad is so narrow. They’re not allowed to just do stupid things. Labeling nearly all human characteristics “flaws” and shaving them off of your paragons is like trying to make a cake having removed every ingredient.

Also, I am fond of hidden agendas. Not pamphleteering, but deeply-held beliefs and a desire to cast them into fiction. Dickens and Poe would never have written a line without them. Spider-man wouldn’t have been what he was, then or now, without Ditko, and Wonder Woman wouldn’t have existed without Marston’s agenda. He wasn’t unlike the Futurists.

There have, of course, been many other interpretations of Wonder Woman over her years. I plan on digging into them as well. But it’s wonderful to me that she has this time-of-legends quality to her early existence.

Your comic, Finder, plays with gender and drag in ways that are at least somewhat similar to what Marston and Peter are doing. How is your work similar to or different from theirs?

Wonder Woman is a “female man,” a woman from a world of women, living in “man’s world” where she exists as a cultural ambassador as well as an active, energetic person who doesn’t just stand on a box proselytizing. Although the campus evangelists would be pretty damned entertaining with her in the mix. It’s exactly the kind of thing I like to play with. I didn’t realize, when I designed Jaeger, my usual main character, how pretty I’d made him. Not until I realized that I can’t stand using any more than the least suggestion of modeling around his bottom lip, anyway– I step on my colorist all the time. “Don’t give him LIPS! I can’t take him seriously if he’s pouty!” Similarly, I created a “world of women” in the form of an extended family, a “clan,” in which all the members look vaguely like Marlene Dietrich. There are males in this family, but they all look like women too. There is a “world-of-men” clan in which there is a fairly strict division of labor; men are soldiers and cops, women are doctors and nurses. There is still another clan in which all members are attracted to their same sex, and are accustomed to marry only in same-sex pairs, making contractual arrangements for the conception, custody, and raising of children. The permutations are endless.

from Carla Speed McNeil Finder: Voice

Marston’s idealized Themyscira was populated only by women. Given how much fun she has in man’s world, I can’t think that he thought separatism was the answer. I don’t know if other Amazons left the island to do the same, and if so, how many. I definitely need to get caught up.

A Whiff of Bat-Wake Should Arouse Her

Posted on December 7, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

The 60s Batman TV show is full of gas. Joker gas, Penguin gas; Bat gas — heroes and villains alike are constantly being knocked unconscious with colorful whiffs of floating fragrance. Guns show up occasionally, but they’re largely useless — knocked from hands instantly or (in the memorable Ma Parker episode with Shelly Winters as the bad guy) the villains aim is so bad that firearms are irrelevant. The real danger is from gas — whether its sneezing powder, a black cloud to hide an escape, or that trusty, never failing knockout draft.

So why gas? I think it may serve a similar function to Wonder Woman’s lasso in the original Marston/Peter comics. Marston used bondage as a way to have conflict without violence. Similarly, the gas allows people to be rendered quietly inert without resorting to bullets or any kind of conflict that will leave a mark. There are fights between Batman and the villains, it’s true — complete with goofy bang! kerpow! special effects. But there’s a difference between seeing the superheroes battle the villains in a goofy choreographed slapstick-fest, and watching the Penguin pistol-whip some inoffensive receptionist. Gas is colorful, flamboyant, and (as depicted here, anyway) gentle. It lets the villains be villainous while still being funny.

Wonder Woman, of course, used bondage not just because it was non-violent, but because it was sexy — violence was deliberately replaced by sexuality. Batman’s gas isn’t as directly erotic — but there’s still a whiff of something there, maybe. Batman using the bat-gas to knock out the Bookworm’s moll, for example, and render her helpless, seems to have some overtones — which are both denied and highlighted when Batman insists that Gordon accompany him and the moll ot the Batcave in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety. The gas also seems like it’s a variation on, or related to, the various mind-control potions and nostrums and techniques that float through the series — the Penguin brainwashes Alfred, Tut (thinks he) brainwashes the Batman, Catwoman flips Robin’s moral code. This kind of domination again suggests Marston’s series, with its games of top/bottom and eroticized command. For that matter, Batman and Robin are tied up an awful lot in the show — not as much as Wonder Woman, certainly, but enough to raise those painted-on Bat eyebrows.

The Batman writers weren’t ideologically committed to substituting sex for violence in the way that Marston was. But the combination of a desire to avoid too much bloodshed and the need for conflict pushes them towards some of the same solutions Marston developed — with some of the same results. The TV show looked for ways to pantomime violence — and when violence is turned into a patomime, you end up hinting at BDSM, whether intentionally or otherwise.

The Bookworm’s girl (Francine York) in bondage.

Peter Sattler on Jill Lepore’s Wonder Woman

Posted on November 22, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week Jeet Heer and I had a long conversation about Jill Lepore’s Wonder Woman and it’s strengths and weaknesses. Comics scholar Peter Sattler weighed in with a long comment, which I thought I’d highlight here.

Just finished the book, Noah, and I hope you won’t mind if I use this as a place to write a few thoughts, which I think intersect with your conversation.

1. Lepore’s lack of engagement with more current Wonder Woman scholarship, at least in her notes, is striking, especially considering her attention to far more recent writings on such figures as Wertham (e.g., Beaty, Tilley). Nonetheless, I think that Jeet’s genre-based point speaks a bit to this: Lepore is not invested in the “secrets” of today, as much as the secrets of yesterday — the past that ends mainly with her narrative, in the 1970s.

2. That said, I take Noah’s point about how the issues of queer identities — and even the practices of queer life in mid-century America — is barely a topic for this book. Lepore actually spends little time talking about sex, sexuality, or theories of same (Marston’s or otherwise). Dramatically more space is given over to issue of suffrage, to the economics and power dynamics of women’s work, to the lie detector and its place in the juridical-military system, and to the shitty way that women are treated by men. The material on sexuality is there, but hardly dwelt on or analyzed. Indeed, with its New Age and Aquarian designations, Marston’s ideas about love and submission as much an object of fun as anything else.

3. But to be clear, the lack of a “queer” history or theoretical context is certainly intentional and not an oversight. The “secret history” of Wonder Woman, for Lepore, is not a secret of sex or love or the closet; it is a secret history of politics. It is a story of the deep roots of feminism: it’s about the fight for women’s rights. (Even the discussion of chains, for example, focuses far more explicitly on its ties to feminist imagery than to kink.) And the book’s commitment is to tracing those roots as thoroughly as possible. An alternate title might have been “the political origins of Wonder Woman.”

4. Pace Noah, I don’t think Lepore does much to privilege her own or her reader’s sleuthing skills. Unlike her New Yorker article, Lepore never puts herself into this story, trying desperately to break through the walls of silence. The “secret” framing — just like the academic framing — is actually pretty thin. It’s the intersection of documents and stories in the middle that counts.

5. When it comes to the “waves of feminism,” Lepore both wants and does not want to make the argument that seems to be promised. She definitely has a passage on the forgetfulness of the radical wing of the second wave, with Shulamith Firestone visiting Alice Paul and not being able to identify portraits of the nation’s most famous feminists (and the Red Stocking’s hatred of Wonder Woman). And she then paints post-Roe feminism as a process of in-fighting, with people trying to out-radicalize each other.

At the same time, I think her heart wasn’t really in this: the real story is over, and she seems to be looking for a quick rhetorical punch. As a historian, she’s just not that invested in her New Yorker claim that Wonder Woman is “the missing link” (ha!) chaining the suffrage movement to “the troubled place of feminism a century later.”

6. A telling moment: Lepore tell us that historians have tended to use the “wave” metaphor to imply that nothing much happened in feminism between the 20s and the late 60s. Here is the totality of that argument: “In between, the thinking goes, the waters were still.” The note to this passage, oddly, only refers to writers who have challenged the “wave” metaphor — which Lepore then does herself later, saying we should call it a river. Oddly enough, it is Lepore who then makes the claim that nothing much has happened in feminism between 1973 and today, characterizing the years as a series of generation of women, all eating their own mothers.

7. The book is the most exciting and well-researched piece of scholarship related to comics I have ever read. At the same time, I hesitate to call it “comics scholarship,” per se. And this isn’t simply a matter of guarding the field’s borders, keeping it safe from poachers. THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN, in the end, just doesn’t seem particularly interested in Wonder Woman comics, Wonder Woman stories, or Wonder Woman art — except as “telling” and glittering superficialities of a much more interesting biographical and historical tale.

She does not spend much time looking at Wonder Woman as an artistic creation, giving shape to particular concepts or exploring certain obsessions. Rather, the links of the comics to history emerge in the book as series of equations, or even one-way vectors: Hugo Münsterberg => Dr Psycho; Appellate Judge Walter McCoy => the stammering Judge Friendly from the comic strip; Progressive Era fights and imagery => Wonder Woman’s fights and imagery; Marston later behavioral troubles with his children => Wonder Woman’s later stories with kids named Don and Olive.

Moreover, these claims are not so much supported as *revealed* — and very briefly revealed, in most cases — like when Lepore parenthetically discloses that Marston had written a story about Wonder Woman and rabbits after talking for a page or so about the pets at Cherry Orchard. Large passages of the book take this form: tell an exciting and detailed story about Marston or Sanger, then close the chapter or section by saying, in essence, “this happen in Wonder Woman too.”

8. This isn’t to say that the book doesn’t change the way we look at Wonder Woman. The comic, after one is done with Lepore, seems to just vibrate with historical energy: the last, unexpected explosion of Progressive Era feminism. But it is not really a book about Wonder Woman; it is a book about Marston and the world of women in which — and out of which — he made his fame.

Marston comes across, in the end, as a classic American charlatan and genius — and a genius due in no small part to his charlatanism. He is a huckster, a relentless self-promoter, an almost unending failure, and even (in my opinion) a misogynist. His heart, politically, is in the right place, but his ego and his loins are often someplace else.

9. Perhaps this makes the biggest secret of Wonder Woman the fact that she ended up existing in a such a potent and coherent form at all, coming as she did from the mind of a man who (after reading Lepore’s account) seems to have been a mass of contradictions, opportunism, and outright absurdity.

Luckily, the book seems to say, the women in his life and his world were strong enough, politically and philosophically, to counteract Marston’s personal weaknesses.

The book’s biggest secret: Women and feminism — not Marston — created Wonder Woman.

Not The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I reviewed Jill Lepore’s book The Secret History of Wonder Woman over at the Atlantic a little bit back. I had one serious issue with it which seemed like it was probably not of much interest for a mainstream venue. But I thought I’d point it out here.

That issue is…the title, and in many ways the thesis of the book, are misleading. Lepore presents the Marston family history of polyamory, and therefore the connection between Wonder Woman creator William Marston and his lover Olive Byrne’s aunt Margaret Sanger, as unknown. If this was the first book you’d ever read about Marston and Wonder Woman, I think you’d come away with the impression that Lepore is the first one to reveal that Marston and his wife Elizabeth lived in a polyamorous relationship with another woman (Olive Byrne).

This is most obvious at the very end of the book. Lepore says, “The veil of secrecy kept by the family over Wonder Woman’s past proved impossible to lift.” She then cites writers in 1972 and 1974 who apparently didn’t know about the polyamory (Joanne Edgar and Karen Walowit.) She writes “The secrecy had consequences” and argues that there was a distortion because of this in the understanding of feminism. Margaret Sanger in the 1910s through Wonder Woman in the 1940s through WW fan Gloria Steinem in the 1970s were all connected. Because people didn’t know about the Marston/Sanger connection, they saw feminism as waves rather than as a continuous whole.

The problem with that thesis is that people have in fact known about the Marston/Sanger connection for around 15 years (or at least, that was the best guess of folks on the Comix-Scholars list serve, where these matters were recently discussed.) Marston’s polyamory was written about as early as the late 90s, and it was certainly widely known after Les Daniels wrote about it in the Complete Wonder Woman at the beginning of the 2000s. Lepore could easily have said that; Les Daniels is mentioned in her notes, and this would be the place in her narrative to acknowledge him and earlier researchers. But she doesn’t. As a result, readers are likely to believe that they’re the first ones who are learning about these “secrets.”

This isn’t to say that Lepore discovered nothing. She had access to tons of archives no one else has seen, and she has numerous jaw-dropping revelations — that the Marston polyamorous relationship appears to have included another woman (Marjorie Huntley), that Marston, Elizabeth,and Olive participated in New Age feminist sex parties, that Olive and Elizabeth were bisexual (a point that seemed fairly obvious, but has been disputed.) The book is important for anyone who cares about the early Wonder Woman, and Lepore’s work is in many regards ground-breaking. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the book’s thesis seems to rest on the revelation of the one secret Lepore didn’t discover.

As a result of this confusion, the book ends up being unnecessarily ungenerous to the numerous scholars who’ve written about the Marston Wonder Woman over the last 15 to 20 years. But more than that, I don’t think it’s ideal to frame the story of Marston and his family in terms of secrets. The closet is among other things a relationship with, or lever for, power. By urging the reader to adopt the position of the knower or the revealer, Lepore makes the story of Wonder Woman about the reader’s and the author’s rush of discovery — about the revelation of truths that the Marston family wanted to hide. The point of the story becomes not what Marston and Elizabeth and Olive made of their lives and politics and sexualities, but what secrets the book can uncover. Lepore doesn’t really contextualize that in terms of the history of gay identities or marginalized sexual identities, or of the closet; she doesn’t present the secrets as part of a history of practices that have both protected and trapped queer people, nor does she discuss Marston’s work as itself engaged with, or part of a tradition of, queer theory. I think that ends up positioning the Marstons as objectified others for the book’s readers, which again sits uneasily with the history of the closet and of the marginalization of queer people and alternative sexualities, whether lesbian or polyamorous.

Not that that’s the only takeaway from the book, certainly. And I do think Lepore is right that the history she uncovers, even if it isn’t a secret exactly, demonstrates that feminist history is more varied than people tend to think. Most obviously, the Marstons show that sex-positive and queer feminisms were around long before the third wave. Hopefully Lepore’s book will make that fact better known, and the next folks to write about Marston and his meaning can take it as more common knowledge, rather than as a revelation.

Update: Peter Sattler has a great follow-up to this post here. Jeet Heer also has a bunch of thoughtful comments below; so scroll down and then click over to Peter’s post if you want to continue the conversation (I’ve closed comments here to keep the conversation easier to follow over there.)
______
If you’re interested in reading me babble on more about Wonder Woman, I have a book coming out shortly. Lots of info and links about that here.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: William Marston