Tag Archives: William Marston

Alien Submission

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This is part of a series of posts on empowerment
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Lilith, the heroine of Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn, is about as thoroughly disempowered as a woman can plausibly be. When we meet her, she has just awoken after a nuclear holocaust to find herself a prisoner on (as we eventually learn) an alien spaceship. Her captives do not even initially provide her with clothes; when she refuses to speak to them, they simply ignore her until she goes insane (they fix her, luckily, so the book can go on). When she does finally meet a tentacled alien, she has a phobic reaction so severe that she can barely stand to be in the same room with it. The alien, though, refuses to leave, demanding that she accommodate herself to it with a blank insistence that smacks of both condescension and sadism.

Eventually, Lilith learns that the aliens (the Oankali) are capable of advanced genetic manipulation, and have rescued the few remaining earthlings in order to mate with them. Despite her protests, Lilith is trained to prepare other human beings to meet the Oankali. She does, and eventually, as a reward, the Oankali impregnate her without her consent. Nikanj, the creature who impregnated her, tells her that her words said she didn’t want a child, but her heart said something else; in short, it gave her a baby for her own good. Lillith is angry at first, but eventually she accepts that Nikanj was right; she really did want a child, just as it said. Over the course of the three book series, Lilith bears something like a dozen or more alien babies. Thus one of the names of the trilogy, Lilith’s Brood.

And if you thought that tale of being changed into a baby factory against your will was bad, just wait till the second book. In”Adulthood Rites,” the entire plot hinges on the evil of birth control. Furthermore, we learn that the so-called Human Contradiction is most fully embodied in males. Thus, effectively, men are more human than women. Dave Sim couldn’t have summarized misogyny any more clearly than that.

Butler isn’t a misogynist though. She’s a feminist. So what on earth (as it were) does she think she’s doing?

Things may become a little clearer if we go back and define the “human contradiction” that males appear to embody more fully than woman. This “human contradiction” is hierarchy and intelligence. According to Butler-via-the-Oankali, humans are an exceedingly intelligent species, but because they are hierarchical, their intelligence leads them inevitably to murder each other. Thus, the nuclear apocalypse is not an accident; it’s the inevitable effect of humanity’s genetic structure. Men are more human than women in that they are more hierarchical, and therefore more fully in tune with the inevitable human destiny of self-destruction. As Nikanj says to Lilith, “A male who’s Human enough to be born to a Human female could be a danger to us all.” Men, being men, are too human and too deadly.

In this context, Lilith’s disempowerment takes on a different inflection. After all, in this narrative, humans tried empowerment. They built powerful bombs and more powerful bombs, and finally they all killed each other. Clearly, it’s time to try something else.

The thing Lilith tries is adaptation — or, less charitably, submission. The Oankali choose to wake Lilith and work with her specifically because she is so adaptable. Butler never says this in so many words, but the implication is that because Lilith is a woman and an African-American — because she was marginal in terms of her culture on earth — she is more able to accept radical changes to that culture. She was also an anthropologist, accustomed to accepting and processing difference. Even given her background, though, Lilith has a remarkable talent for changing and adapting to those she meets. She is unique, in some sense, not because she stays true to herself, but because, like Bella in Twilight — or, indeed, like any mother — she is willing to be transformed by those she loves.

On the other hand, those who insist on staying true to themselves have a terrible time of it in Butler’s world. The Oankali, as I said, are genetic engineers. They are also the ultimate traders — and what they trade is their being. The Oankali travel from star to star, seeking other living creatures with whom to combine their genetic material. The perfect capitalists, they remain Oankali through constant change, losing their very genetic identity in the pleasurable rush of barter.

The pleasure is literal. The Oankali have three genders; male, female, and ooloi. The third, neuter sex combines genetic material from the other two, and from their trading partners, to produce a new life form. The male and female do not have intercourse; instead, the ooloi plugs directly into their nervous systems, and manipulates their genetic material….as well as their pleasure centers.

Nikanj focused on the intensity of their attraction, their union. It left Lilith no other sensation. It seemed, itself, to vanish. She sensed only Joseph, felt that he was aware only of her.

Now their delight in one another ignited and burned. They moved together, sustaining an impossible intensity, both of them timeless, perfectly matched, ablaze in sensation, lost in one another. They seemed to rush upward. A long time later, they seemed to drift down slowly, gradually, savoring a few more moments wholly together.

Afterwards, Joseph, Lilith and Nikanj’s male lover, interrogates Lilith.

“Why do you let them…touch you?”

“To have changes made. The strength, the fast healing — ”

He stopped in front of her, faced her. “Is that all?” he demanded.

She stared at him, seeing the accusation in his eyes, refusing to defend herself. “I liked it,” she said softly. “Didn’t you?”

As this quote mentions in passing, the Oankali actually did empower Lilith; by manipulating her genes, they gave her great strength, the ability to heal quickly, and very long life. She’s a superhero basically, like Buffy or Wonder Woman. But her main power is something she had originally — the ability to accept and submit, to difference and to pleasure.

It’s a power she has not least because she’s a woman. In her book Powers and Submissions, Christian feminist Sarah Coakley argues that Biblically it was women like Mary Magdalene who first saw the risen Christ, and that they had to convince men that what they had seen was true — a dynamic which Thomas Aquinas linked to women’s greater ability to love. Along those lines, male humans, as Joseph demonstrates, are as a group substantially more freaked out by sex with the Oankali than women are. Men who sleep with the Oankali feel that they’re being feminized. They need to be strong and autonomous — so much so that the ooloi who mate with men provide them with the mental illusion that they are able to move during interspecies sex, because they would be disturbed by the reality that the ooloi immobilize them to give them pleasure.

For Butler, then, the human (and especially male) desire for autonomy, dominance, and power is at best a whimsy to be indulged and at worst a deadly disease to be eradicated. There are echoes here of the philosophy of William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman.

It seemed to me, from a psychological angle, that the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child’s ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary powers to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing — love. It’s smart to be strong. It’s big to be generous. But it’s sissified, according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring. “Aw, that’s girl stuff!” snorts our young comics reader. “Who wants to be a girl? And that’s the point; not even girls want to girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power. Not wanting to be girls they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peaceloving, as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.

The Oankali’s solution is a little different, but the diagnosis is similar. Men (and women too) must learn that violence and empowerment are less powerful than love, peace,and tenderness. The Oankali need to teach men (and women) to submit to love and the loss of self. If men (and women) do not learn the strength of selflessness and submission, they will be destroyed.

This is, in fact, precisely the choice that the aliens give human beings. If they are willing to adapt and submit, they can breed with the Oankali, and their children will be born with tentacles and travel through space. If they are not willing to adapt and submit, then they will have no children at all. The Oankali sterilize all those who refuse to take Oankali mates. The humans will live out exceedingly extended, sterile lifespans, and finally die off. At that point, the Oankali’s living ships will consume everything living on the earth as fuel and sustenance for the long space voyage, and the Oankali/human children will leave earth forever.

This seems excessively cruel; a brutal eugenic blackmail. But Butler explains repeatedly that the Oankali are not in fact trying to force humans to breed with them against their will. Rather, the Oankali sterilize humans because they know that if they don’t sterilize humans, humans will kill themselves off. The genetic contradiction, hierarchy and intelligence, is an inevitable death sentence. Allowing humans to breed means creating a messy, extended genocide rather than a quick, relatively painless one. The Oankali’s logic is, undoubtedly deliberately, the logic of abortion — babies who would be unhappy shouldn’t be born.

The Oankali eventually reverse their decision; Akin, Lilith’s first male Oankali/human son, convinces his people to let the humans breed true on Mars. The Oankali still believe that humans will destroy themselves, but Akin insists that they should be allowed to go on; to make their own choice about how they and their children will die if they cannot choose to live. Even if the imperial conquerors bring love, long life, and peace, the conquered should have the right to cling to their benighted folkways…on a reservation, since their home has been stripped for parts.

Butler’s perfectly aware of the bitter irony there, just as Lilith is aware of the bitterness of her own submission. Though she loves her alien family — her ooloi, her male husband, her female Oankali mate, her male Oankali mate, and her ever-increasing brood — she never fully reconciles to having (as she sees it, with some justification) betrayed humankind. Despite her adaptability, her submission still leaves her feeling co-opted, manipulated, and disempowered.

Though that’s not all she’s left feeling, obviously. Butler doesn’t denigrate empowerment; she clearly believes that women (and men too) should be able to make their own choices, even if those choices include embracing traditional family structures as the Mars colonists do. Lilith herself, for all her adaptability, is hardly weak. On the contrary, she’s intelligent, determined, courageous, and resourceful. Given the task of training other humans to return to a wild and primitive earth, she works hard to give her charges the skills they need without letting them revert to savagery. Similarly, she tries to balance the humans’ need for the Oankali in the short term with the ultimate imperative to escape. Lilith isn’t always, or even often, successful, but she’s always thinking, and in the face of an impossible situation she keeps her goals clearly before her, and works towards them to the best of her ability. It’s hard to know what more one could ask of a hero than that.

But though she acknowledges the importance of empowerment, Butler clearly also hopes for something beyond the hierarchical ideals of strength and autonomy and victory. Indeed, for Butler and for Lilith, one could argue that the courage comes out of the adaptability; that the power comes from the submission. Feminist theologian Sarah Coakley (mentioned above) seems to argue for this point as well, when she argues that from passive spiritual contemplation should come not just “Love, joy, peace” but also “personal empowerment, prophetic resistance, courage in the face of oppression, and the destruction of false idolatry.”

This is worked through by Butler perhaps most clearly in the final book in the series, Imago. The central character and narrator of this volume is Jodahs, Lilith’s first ooloi child. Jodahs has superstrength, superhearing, superhealing, and can shapeshift at will — but without love, it literally de-evolves and begins to disintegrate.

This is not, however, a weakness — love isn’t kryptonite. On the contrary, lovelessness causes death not because there’s something wrong with Jodahs, but because that’s how the world works. Without love, as Butler’s nuclear catastrophe suggests, you get a holocaust.

If lack of love is death, Jodahs’ beauty, its specialness, is precisely love and empathy; all its powers and abilities are linked to the fact that it is a creature made to minister to humans. Butler emphasizes repeatedly that Jodahs needs — indeed hungers after — the experience of healing others of their wounds and genetic defects. This healing is accomplished through sex; by giving pleasure. Thus, Jodahs must seduce, love, mate, and heal or else die.

Jodahs’ superpowers, then, are dependent on its being dependent. This is especially so since those powers come not from the aliens, but from humans — and particularly from human weakness. The Oankali wanted to mate with humans because humans get cancer; they were especially interested in Lilith because she had a strong genetic predisposition to the disease. It’s the rapid cell growth of cancer that taught the Oankali to heal and shape-change; it’s Lilith’s genetic weakness that gives her ooloi child its fantastic abilities. In both its life-threatening need for others and in the genetic basis of its abilities, Jodahs can be seen as an answer to the question posed by Coakley:

what…if true divine ’empowerment’ occurs most unimpededly in the context of a special form of human ‘vulnerability?’

Coakley asks this question specifically in the light of the Christ of Philippians 2.5-11,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every other name, that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow…

In this duality of power and weakness, humility and exaltation, there’s a pretty clear parallel with Butler’s miracle-working human/alien, superhero/dependent, not-man/not-woman, healthy/sick, biracial ooloi. Queerness and kenosis come together in an identity outside identity, a self-effacement through jouissance, the fruits of which are empowerment.

Towards the end of Imago. Jodahs, the narrator, overhears a conversation between its lover, Jesusa, and its mother, Lilith. Jesusa is trying to decide whether to become Jodahs’ life partner. So she asks Lilith how she ever reconciled herself to alien sex.

“I’m afraid. This is all so different… How did you ever…? I mean…with Nikanj…. How did you decide?

My mother said nothing at all.

“You didn’t have a choice, did you?”

“I did, oh, yes. I chose to live.”

“That’s no choice. That’s just going on, letting yourself be carried along by whatever happens.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my mother said.”

Choice, life, sex, and motherhood — it’s hard to believe that Butler isn’t deliberately glancing at the abortion debate here. I don’t think the message is “pro-life”, precisely — especially since the whole debate is in the context of genetically creating tentacled human hybrids through complicated five-way intercourse with aliens, which is not exactly a stance that the Pope would endorse. Still, Butler does seem to be taking a dig at the way that pro-choice can sometimes assume (as with various critiques of Bella) that a choice can only be a choice when it is an assertion of power, or individuality, or death. Lilith didn’t choose love, but she chose to submit to it. Because of that, Jesusa, almost despite herself, turns to Lilith for wisdom and strength. So, too, do the Oankali depend upon her to bear us towards the future.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #25

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The Marston/Peter Wonder Woman #24 was mediocre enough that it’s taken me more than 6 months to pick up number 25. And…yeah.

Witness Harry Peter phoning it in. Wonder Woman sitting looking at mug shots, oblivious to the baddies behind…Marston didn’t approve that shit. In the first place, it’s boring. Wonder Woman doesn’t just sit there; she chases villains across bizarre cosmic bridges or battles Brobdinagian pirates. And, in addition, it makes WW look like a fool; the villains are tricking her.

Of course, Marston probably didn’t approve the cover; he was dead by the time this went to print. Peter’s doing the best he can…and the best he can includes drawing some delightfully expressive collar bones and some lovely black and white artwork on those mug shots. But it doesn’t include figuring out something to draw that would be fun and heroic and an inspiration to little girls and boys who wanted to be little girls everywhere. Figuring that out was, I suspect, Marston’s job. And no one else at DC, apparently, was up for it.

When I talked about issue 24 (and some of the earlier issues as well) I speculated that the stories weren’t by Marston (some possibilities include DC editor Sheldon Mayer and Marston’s assistant Joyce Murchinson.) I have some doubts about these as well. The second story especially…

is all about a mischievous little orphan boy named Teasy with a heart of gold and oh will he ever find a mother to call his own? Marston cared about mothers, of course, but he really didn’t care about orphan boys on the entirely reasonable grounds that they were not girls. It’s true that WW does get tied up by an evil villainess, which I’m sure Marston would have appreciated. But I’m convinced he would have found whole pages devoted to Teasy’s big adventure as tedious as I did (albeit perhaps for slightly different reasons.)

The other two stories seem like they might be Marston. The third features WW and the Holiday girls fighting a purple goddess who uses purple gas to control others’ wills.

Which…okay, that’s kinky. But the story as a whole doesn’t fit together; the first panels reference a backstory that we don’t get to see, as if part of the story has been left out. Moreover, at the end, the likable but not very effective indigenous male ruler…is still in charge. If this was by Marston, he must have been feeling awfully ill if he didn’t have it in him to establish a matriarchy at the story’s conclusion.

The first story is the one that is closest to having the old pizzazz:

Yeah, you’ve got that right. That’s evil alien corn. Peter is thoroughly enjoying himself drawing both the cartoon corn men and the cornfields with all those lovely undulating ears. Plus…sky kangas chasing balloons!

And there’s also some great gratuitous mother/daughter bonding:

WW wearing that giant obtrusive hat, then kissing her mother and handing over said hat as Hippolyta blesses her daughter in the name of the uber-matriarch — it’s just a nice encapsulation of Marston’s ideas about why women should rule. Power and love aren’t in competition. Instead, love is power — the point of the crown is not to wear it and rule, but to take it off and submit with a kiss.

Also…check out Hippolyta’s shoulders. That’s one tough mother!

Despite moments like those, and despite the fun of fighting corn (with a giant corn harvester, naturally), the story still feels slight, though. The evil corn is fun, but it’s never really integrated into Marston’s obsessions the way the seal men were (for example.) The corn appears to be male (not to mention phallic) but there’s no contrasting female corn to be liberated. WW’s victory, then, ends up just being a vicotry; there’s no particular feminist message to it. Nor, despite the occasional inadvertent hilarious blooper:

are Marston’s fetishes much on display. Oh, sure, the Holiday girls get tied up…but as Marston scripts go, that barely registers. This isn’t a fever dream; it’s a cartoon goof. It’s funny and weird, but no more so than, say, a good classic Flash or Plastic Man story. And good Flash and Plastic Man stories are fine in their way, but I expect more from Marston/Peter.
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So we’ve got three more now. If 26 and 27 are similar to this one I may combine them…or maybe even combine them with 28 for a final post? The issue by issue thing just seems more and more superfluous. Marston’s creative oversight is clearly gone at this point. Without him at the helm, as six decades and innumerable creators have demonstrated, WW just isn’t all that interesting

Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle: Who’s Your Daddy?

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Alyssa Rosenberg had a post yesterday about the Azzarello/Chiang Wonder Woman reboot. For those not in the know, the new (new!) WW is no longer a clay statue come to life; instead she’s the illegitimate daughter of Zeus. Alyssa expressed some skepticism:

Similarly, in their quest for specificity, I wonder if Azzarello and Chiang are reducing Wonder Woman a bit. Her original story may not be plausible, or gritty, but it is about an expression of female will and independence. Not everything needs to be grounded in social realism. Some things can just be mysterious and strange. It’s yet another reason we’re far too consumed with origin stories. Trying to come up with a psychologically plausible explanation for the divine, or near-so, is a bit of a contradiction in terms.

Several commenters though were more positive about the Azzarello/Chiang version. Joe Pettinati, for example, said:

I think this origin story sounds way better and I disagree with your assertion about trying to come up with a psychological explanation for the divine. All Greek myths, including Zeus, are about putting human faces to divine phenomena in our world. Even Wonder Woman’s original origin story (which I confess I’ve never heard) speaks about the human desire for children, presumably when natural methods are not an option. The problem I have with that origin story is that it says a lot more about Aphrodite and Hippolyta then it does about Wonder Woman. Okay, this woman is brought to life, but why does she become a super hero?

Of course, I’m in Marston/Peter’s corner:

The original Marston/Peter Wonder Woman origin story is beautiful and weird and kind of makes me tear up. I compared it to the Winter’s Tale in that link, and I’ll stand by that. And I think your argument about a psychological explanation for the divine is right on the money; Marston and Peter had a divine that was actually mysterious and powerful, not just a bunch of ultra superhumans running around bashing each other.

I haven’t read the Azzarello/Chiang issues. They’re both competent creators, and I suspect they can tell a decent pulp adventure story. But the Marston/Peter WW was one of the great artistic achievements of comics, IMO. And it was ideologically committed to feminism — in the case of the origin story, specifically to the idea of the power of female creation and mother/daughter bonds — in a way that is very, very rare, in comics or in other art forms or anywhere.

Oh…and to Joe, who asks why WW becomes a superhero. She becomes a superhero basically because she’s strong and curious and courageous and wants to help people. Marston didn’t feel that you needed a tragic or sordid backstory to make you a hero. He thought strength comes out of being loved and happy, not out of being wounded. More power to him.

I just wanted to add…the Azzarello/Chiang version is of course an improvement…if you’re demographic is mostly adult men. If that’s the case, the illegitimate-daughter-of-Zeus is clearly superior; it’s got sex, conflict, and the possibility of lots of gratuitous angsting. On the other hand, if your audience is 8-10 year old girls and boys, an origin all about who slept with whom and strained family dynamics is probably going to have less appeal. Instead, you probably want something with room for magic and courage and adventure and love and giant kangaroos.

Myself, I am old, old, and in my second childhood, so I’m all for the magic and love and giant kangaroos…though angsting and sex and strained family dynamics can be okay too, in their place. Why exactly you would want talented creators like Azzarello and Chiang to take the magic and love and kangaroos of the 8 year olds and turn them into the sex and angst and family dynamics for the thirty year olds is, of course, an open question. I’ve discussed some answers elsewhere, and won’t repeat it here except to note that Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman was by far the most popular iteration of the character, and to express my doubts that Azzarello/Chiang’s version will change that, whatever it’s other successes.

Update: The argument in the last part of this post is shredded, torn apart, and stomped upon by commenters. The Percy Jackson series and the Prydain chronicles are cited as painfully telling counter-examples.

Can Wonder Woman Be a Superdick? (Part 2)

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So for those who don’t remember…more than a year ago I had written a series of posts about gender in comics. The basic argument is that a character like Superman is a male power fantasy. That fits in with Freud and the Oedipal conflict. Clark Kent can be seen as the “child” who imagines himself supplanting the Father/lawgiver/god. You can also take this one step away from Freud and argue (via the theories of Eve Sedgwick) that what we’re talking about here is not, or not solely, an internal psychological desire, but rather a cultural/social formulation. Men turn away from femininity in order to identify with patriarchal power; or, to see it another way, to be patriarchal requires the denigration or hiding of weakness.

That’s the closet; Clark Kent is living a lie, pretending to be powerful in order to be powerful, when his truth is actually a weak, wimpy child. And, again, the closet is powered by male-male desires and fantasies, making it homoerotic (though, as I argue at some length, it’s actually a straight person’s homoerotic fantasy — we’re talking about how straight men bond or interact with the patriarchy in particular, and arguing that that interaction is structured by ideas about, and within, gayness.)

I then talked about how the early Marvel titles messed with this formula. Characters like Spider-Man and the Thing were much more ambivalent about power; the superdick in them often becomes a devouring ogre (see The Hulk). You also see this in some super-hero satire, like Chris Ware’s Superman character. I argued, though, that the basic binary remains; these stories don’t reject the superdick. Weakness is still sneered at; it’s just that the anxiety around the superdick is greater. You want it but when you have it you don’t want it, and then when you don’t have it you want it again. I also noted that the fascination with power and the denigration of weakness ends up making superhero stories essentially sadistic (as opposed to horror, which works in a more masochistic mode.) This also makes it very difficult for superhero comics to create anti-status quo storylines. However anxiously, the law is always worshipped.

I then went on to talk about the way this relates to Wonder Woman. In particular, I argued that the anxiety and bifurcation of male identity doesn’t really work for Wonder Woman. Female identity is not seen as doubled in the same way; women are not split between patriarchal power and weakness. That’s because female identity is simply identified with weakness. Male writers of Wonder Woman like Kanigher and Martin Pasko tended to create narratives which were about robbing Wonder Woman of her power. There was anxiety around WW’s superdickishness, but much less so around her weakness. As long as she wasn’t in control, everybody was happy. You often got the sense from the books that nobody could figure out what Wonder Woman was doing with superpowers in the first place.

Of course, Wonder Woman had superpowers in the first place because William Marston gave them to her. Which is where we left off, and where I’m going to try and pick up now.
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One of the things I’ve mentioned a number of times in various Wonder Woman posts is that her secret identity doesn’t really work right. It’s a gender problem; superhero identities, as I indicated above, are supposed to be split along the frightened child/superdick Oedipal fissure.

Typically, superhero origins work like this; little Melvin Microbits is toddling along minding his microstuff when suddenly — transformative trauma! He is castrated by a radioactive giant tubular marine mammal! Quickly, miraculously, he grows a thing bigger than his dad ever had and decides to serve the Law as — Walrus-Man!

Or that’s the general idea, anyway. Batman’s maybe the most paradigmatic example (small boy, dad shot, takes dad’s place while still also remaining traumatized child.) It works for Superman too, though (baby, father dies, takes dad’s place while still also remaining puny child). And for Spiderman (young man, father-figure dies, takes dad’s place while still also remaining traumatized child.) There are some variations, like Green Lantern (young man, father-figure dies, takes dad’s place while still remaining asshole); or the Hulk (wimpy guy, traumatized, takes dad’s place while still also remaining wimpy guy.) But the general outlines remain discernible. It’s a meme.

But Wonder Woman’s origin doesn’t work like that. She’s born (or magically fashioned, actually) with super-powers. Her secret identity, Diana Prince, isn’t the “real” trace of the traumatized child she was and remains. It’s just an act.

And it’s an act, moreoever, undertaken to pander to the needs of her man, as we see in Sensation Comics #1.

That’s a deeply odd sequence. Wonder Woman trades places with a nurse who looks exactly like her and has the same name. Moreover, the nurse has the same problem; she needs to find a way to get to the man she loves. The two switch places, but they’re able to do it only because they were already in each other’s places to begin with.

So a couple of points about this.

— In my first essay about WW and superdickery I speculated on the place that female/female relationships had in enforcing femininity. That is, male/male relationships (between, say, Spiderman and Uncle Ben) are often part of Oedipal drama; they’re a spur to becoming more manly, as well as a taunt for not being manly enough.

Female/female relationships, though, often seem much less fraught. In some circumstances — as with the Amazons — sisterhood can be an alternative to, or a challenge to patriarchy. But female bonds can also enforce femininity, and reinforce (subordinate?) relationships with men.

This is basically the argument of Sharon Marcus in her book Between Women. Marcus claims that close, even eroticized friendships between women were seen as an essential part of being a women in the Victorian period. Thus, close female friendships didn’t make women homosexual — it made them more heterosexual.

Marston was significantly more aware of lesbian possibilities than many Victorians were; he had a long-standing polyamorous relationship with two bisexual women. Still, I think Marcus’ analysis perhaps makes it clear why we need this bizarre scene of doubling before WW can have her sort-of-tryst with Steve. Just as male/male relationships for theorist Eve Sedgwick enforce the agonized Oedipal doubling, so female/female relationships for Marston create a stable, domesticated femininity. WW needs Diana to teach her how to be a woman.

— I’ve sort of made this point already, but…the scenario here is not, at first glance, an especially empowering vision. Marston seems to be going out of his way to disempower his heroine from the get-go. Moreover, he’s disempowering her in the name of servitude to men! WW casts off her superpowers so she can wait on Steve hand and foot. As I noted in the first part of the essay, male superheroes are constantly striving and failing to be powerful (men). The feminine, though, doesn’t need to strive; it can just be. And that’s what happens here. WW chucks her goddessness so she can go change her guy’s bedpans. Not much of a feminist message.
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There are maybe other, less invidious ways to look at this though. Here’s comics critic Chris Boesel, with a different take on WW’s decision to become Diana Prince.

First the Why. Why does the god (the teacher) give herself (the eternal, the truth) to be known by the creature (the learner)? It must be for love — not by any necessity, but a free self-giving for the sake of the possibility of the relation itself. And love has a twofold dimension here. It is not only the god’slove for the creature that the god… [gives herself]; it is also for the sake of love, so that the creature might love the god, that the god and the creature might be joined in a relation of “love’s understanding.”

Okay, that’s my little joke. Boesel isn’t a comics critic; he’s a theologian. And despite the serendipitous use of the female pronouns there, he’s not talking about Wonder Woman. He’s talking about Kierkegaard’s ideas about the incarnation of Christ.

The essay is called “The Apophasis of Divine Freedom,” and it appears in a volume edited by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller called Apophatic Bodies. For those, like me, not familiar with the terminology, apophatic theology means negative theology — the practice of describing God by talking about what he (or she, or ze) is not.

I’m going to quote a little more from Boesel, since it seems apropos to WW’s decision to shuck off her goddesshood for love. Again, Boesel is paraphrasing and sometimes quoting Kierkegaard here.

Second, the How. How is the god to create the “equality,” or “unity,” necessary in order to “make himself understood” without “destroy[ing] that which is different,” that is, the creature as creature? How does the god give herself to be known by the creature in and for love without obliterating the beloved?

Climacus [that’s Kierkegaard’s pen-name] rejects both the possibility of an “ascent,” an exaltation of the beloved creature to the heights of heaven…and of a divine “appearing” in overpowering, sacred splendor,” on the grounds that they would violate the integrity of the creature’s existence, as creature.

The “unity” of “love’s understanding,” then, must be “attempted by a descent.” And a descent, by the god, to the level of “the lowliest” of all…. Therefore, “in love [the god] wants to be the equal of the most lowly of the lowly,” and so comes to the creature “in the form of the servant.” This “form,” however, “is not something put on like the king’s plebian cloak, which just by flapping open would betray the king…but is [the god’s] true form.” The god does not deceive, but in the “omnipotence of love,” remains truly god while fully embodied as a particular human creature, just like any other human, even the lowliest of the low.

The whole analysis by Boesell/Kierkegaard fits WW almost perfectly. As a goddess, WW can’t appear to (be apprehended by?) Steve. For him to love her, and for her to love him, she has to descend and become, not just human, but a servant. She even takes over the form of a “real” human being; her double, both her and not her. The moment when Steve knows her and doesn’t know her:

is emblematic; when she is Diana (which is her real name and also her alias) Steve can recognize and love her. The angel cannot be loved as an angel, but only as a servant. From this perspective, you might argue that gender is irrelevant or secondary. Marston’s not telling a story about what women should be, or how they need to be weak and servile to attract a man. Instead he’s telling a story about the encounter with the divine, and the paradoxical manner in which one, of whatever gender, can only love the transcendent through the particular.

The thing is, though, Marston is obsessed with gender…and especially, one could argue, with the relationship between gender and Godhead. The particular divinity WW is, the transcendence she represents, is female.

Moreover, the embodiment of that transcendence is female as well. Obviously, WW and Diana are both women. But the particular formal representation of that embodiment in the comic is also, I think, coded female. I’m thinking specifically of this passage from Irigary’s essay “The Sex That Is Not One.”

Woman “touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two — but not divisible into one(s) — that caress each other.

Also this:

Whence the mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory everything as individualities. She is neither one nor two. rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person or as two. She resists all adequate definition. Further, she has no ‘proper’ name.

Following Irigary’s formulation, when WW moves from transcendence to immanence, when she becomes embodied she does not merely split — she is not bifurcated within herself into two agonized and irreconcilable halves. Instead, she becomes two who remain one — neither one nor two.

The comic form itself literally embodies the indeterminacy. Comics are built around repetition of the same figure; on a given page, Peter will draw WW over and over again. The panel borders separate these images; each is each, identity in its place. But when WW needs to cast off her transcendence, the panel borders collapse, and suddenly two images of her occupy the same delimited space.

Once they are embodied together, Diana and Diana can touch — a self-caressing which opens the way for love — and not only of one another (or of one as another). Marcus noted that affection between women was seen as aiding, not hindering, love between men and women; similarly, Irigary sees women’s duality as opening into multiplicity.

So woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural….woman has sex organs more or less everywhere.

Again, the sequence here embodies the movement from two to many. The duality of Diana and Diana is multiplied on one page as they talk from panel to panel, so that we see, not just the one Diana that is two, but doubled Diana’s multiplying profligately. And then, inevitably, in the sixth panel, the one Diana replaces the other Diana while the other Diana is replaced in the frame by Steve.

A female self-caressing self opening to love for another; that’s a metaphor for motherhood. And indeed, Diana, incarnated as a nurse, treats Steve with matriarchal affection.

“Be a good boy now and keep quiet.” Diana’s love of Steve isn’t (just) romantic love, and isn’t (just) divine love — it’s the love of a mother for a child.

Paradise Island is a matriarchal heaven, and if WW is a Christ figure — and I think she is — then she remains a female Christ figure. And what’s perhaps most interesting about that is how easily it fits into Boesel/Kierkegaard’s formulation. WW does not need to overawe Steve with her transcendent power, challenging him to become a superdick like her. Instead, she lowers herself to him, showing her transcendent power through the servitude of love. The transcendent matriarch becomes human precisely to change bedpans. That’s what divine love is. That’s the point.

In this context, too, Marston’s obsession with loving submission, his conviction that women are superior to men because they know how to submit, and his determination to show WW’s power by tying her up, starts to make more sense.

Submission is godlike, especially submission to Marston’s ultimate authority, Aphrodite, the god of love. Because, as Christ and Nietzsche and lots of superheroes agree, the alternative to worshipping love is worshipping power. Marston’s WW isn’t a bifurcated, tormented child striving for an unattainable transcendent Oedipal Uberfatherness. She is bifurcated, but the way Christ is bifurcated, between human and divine, or the way a mother is split between herself and the child that comes from her. Wonder Woman’s not a superdick, but the super sex-which-is-not-one, which opens like a wound, giving birth to love. She sets aside her power to become a servant of that love, and, as they say in the comics…to save us all!

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #24

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The Bound to Blog posts are coming very infrequently these days…and it’s in large part because these issues from late in the Marston/Peter run are, frankly, kind of depressing. Though there were signs of life in 23, it’s been clear since 22 that neither Marston nor Peter is bringing their A-game to these comics. Marston, in fact, was on his death bed at this point — he actually died before the July 1947 cover date here, but since issues were forward-dated, it’s possible he was still alive to see this cover.

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Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #23

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Wonder Woman #22 was probably the worst one of Marston/Peter’s run…so bad, in fact, that I wondered whether significant parts of it might not have been ghosted.

Issue #23 is much better. It’s not one of the series high points — and notably, like 22, it has three short stories rather than one long epic, a change which I presume must be related to Marston’s sickness (he actually died of cancer in May 1947, which is this issue’s cover date.) Still, whether Marston was writing shorter stories on his death bed, or whether these are leftover scripts that he had lying about unpublished (and they can’t be too old, because they’re post-war) the result is perfectly acceptable, if not great.

As the Holiday girl there in the lower right indicates, the first story is a paradise island adventure. All the more welcome since Harry Peter seems to be in fine form; that picture of WW sitting on the telephone wires waiting for her robot plane with the buildings slanting down vertiginously in the background is pretty fantastic.

Anyway in this story Amazons are disappearing from paradise island’s beach. This gives Hippolyta a chance to watch as her viewfinder presents her with a Perils of Pauline moment:

Anyway, the viewfinder breaks inopportunely, shattered by a bolt from Odin, whose Valkyries are flying down to Paradise Island to kidnap Amazons. Why you ask? Well….

Odin has captured heroes (i.e. veterans) and wants them to go to earth to incense others to fight. But the heroes are tuckered out; all they want to do is sleep. Since his Valkyries can’t get the men to fight, Odin tells them to kidnap Amazons so *they* can get the heroes to go to war again.

As usual with Marston, the gender politics are delightfully convoluted. Obviously, the main instigator of warfare is the sadistic male patriarch, Odin. But the male “heroes” are shown throughout as being soft, manipulable, and not especially violent — they need a strong female hand if they’re going to be effective fighters. So in some sense it’s really women who are the embodiment of military virtues.

The funniest panel here is the bottom one, where the male heroes claim to be sick of being ruled by women “who want us to fight” — the implication being that they’re perfectly happy to be ruled by women who don’t want them to fight.

The rest of the page is interesting as well, though; the Valkyries have encased WW and Amazons and Holiday Girls in energy to trap them and turn them into Valkyries themselves. The purple energy happens in this case to look like the outline of Russian dolls…and of course, standing stock still in their various outfits, the transforming women look more than a little like dolls themselves (with special wing attachments!) I talked about the connection between Wonder Woman and doll stories before. In this case, the Valkyries eroticized dominance/appreciation of the Amazons is both about enjoying femininity *and* enjoying martial virtues. In fact, there’s barely an *and* there; for Marston, the more effectively militant you are, the more feminine you are (at least if you’re a woman.)

Which is why, in the middle right pane abovel, Aphrodite emphasizes that WW and the Holiday Girls are “courageous, loving girls” — the point being that courage and loving femininity go together. The natural conclusion is shown in the bottom left panel, where Odin, the supposed wargod, just gives up and offs himself (throwing down his phallic sword) when WW robs him of his Valkyries.

That page is pretty great in other ways as well, with winged Holiday girls and winged Amazons flying about with sky kangas and that magnificently phallic spaceship that Steve is piloting. I especially like the way the spaceship in the upper left panel mirrors the motion of the sky kanga in the upper right — as if the ubermaleness is just an image of, or subsumed within, the undulating sea of femininity. Maleness seems part of the harmonious whole of femininity rather than an opposition to it.

I also love that middle left panel; the scribbly sky-kangas and the valkyries being tied up here and tied up there, with scale all off-kilter so everybody looks like paper doll cutouts. This is definitely one of Peter’s most Henry Darger moments.

And as long as I’m gushing about Peter — check out this horse.

Or this bizarre backlit Etta as femme fatale from the second story.

This weird Egyptian ghost rising from the tomb is pretty fantastic too….

And how about this ancient Egyptian headgear?

Storywise there’s not a whole lot going on here; Marston makes some noises about the evil dangers of superweapons and generally suggests he doesn’t want the world to go to war again. It’s fine…but the art is definitely the main thing here.

The third story is the most interesting of the lot. It’s a tale from WW’s childhood, explaining the origin of the giant sky kanga’s. Also, incidentally, it lets us know that before there were sky kangas, the Amazons rode on giant bunnies. What is the origin of the giant bunnies? That, alas remains a mystery….

As always, Peter’s animal drawings are something special. The lines of the giant bunny and the giant kanga flow sensuously; the whole page is filled with sensuous curves. And the sensuousness adamently includes the prepubescent Wonder Woman herself; her short frilly flared red dress placed in the center of the composition.

In Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Sharon Marcus argues that the eroticization of female children was a common iconographic trope of Victorian fashion illustration, as well as of Victorian society more broadly.

Victorian culture represented girls as epistemological paradoxes, so innocent that they could be intensively eroticized without raising comment. But unlike images and stories that eroticized girls for a mixed audience of men and women, fashion imagery displayed girls in erotic dynamics with adult women for the delctation of a female audience. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the intensification of family ties in the nineteenth century also sexualized them, and fashion plates show that in the process all cross-generational ties were eroticized, including those between adult women and girls…. Designed to be objects of an appreciative female gaze inside and outside the image, girls in fashion plates also embody a desire to look at and touch a woman, a desire figured as both self-abasing and self-important.

Marston reproduces this dynamic even more self-consciously than the fashion plates:

WW’s “childish tricks” (involving, essentially, disrobing at super-speed before her mother), lead Hippolyta to remember her daughter’s actual childhood. The eroticized affection between mother and daughter is then displayed (via film) for the delectation of an all-female audience.

In her discussion of the Victorians, Marcus follows her look at fashion illustration with an analysis of debates about corporal punishment in women’s magazines of the period. Said debates involved numerous women writing to the magazines to describe, in detail, their own experiences with corporal punishment — descriptions which dwelt on the removal of clothes, the physical sensations of whipping and being whipped, and other immodest details. All of this, according to one magazine editor “aroused…intense, not to say passionate interest.”

Here’s one letter which Marcus quotes.

I put out my hands, which she fastened together with a cord by the wrists. Then making me lie down across the foot of the bed, face downwards, she very quietly and deliberately, putting her left hand around my waist, gave me a shower of smart slaps with her open right hand…. Raising the birch, I could hear it whiz in the air, and oh, how terrible it felt as it came down, and as its repeated strokes came swish, swish, swish on me!

Marcus notes that “Corporal punishment is where pornography, usually considered a masculine affair, intersects with fashion magazines targeted at women.” She adds that “flagellation scenarios represented, interpellated, and excited women as well as men, and that the power differences inherent in scenes of discipline and punishment were erotically charged in any gender configuration.”

So here’s some scenes of the young WW being disciplined as little girls ought.

That upper right panel, in particular, eroticizes the adult mother and the child daughter in exactly the same way; both are bound side by side, with Peter’s stylized drawing and the wrappings deemphasizing the age difference; they look like different sized dolls rather than like mother and daughter.

Peter emphasizes the connection, and the parallel fetishization, of mother and daughter in other ways as well:

Mother and daughter both attack in the same way; leaping up to grab the antagonist by the neck. And in both cases, the attack is, I’d argue, fetishized; Hippolyta’s straight posed stiffness emphasizes the curves of her dress and of her breast. In the second sequence, Peter shows us, in both panels, WW’s underwear beneath that short miniskirt.

In addition, of course, any display of female power is eroticized for Marston, as is any display of female disempowerment. As with the corporal punishment fantasies Marcus describes, the woman empowered and the woman disempowered are both subjects of the fantasy. So it’s as exciting to see WW in the cage as to see her breaking out of it:

Note in the bottom left panel that we see her underwear again…and that her crotch is level with her mother’s face. The energized swoops of motion lines; the violent rescue of the damsel in distress — this is a typical erotic fantasy, not any the less so because it involves daughter/mother rather than hero/heroine.

You see it again here; the Amazon being unwrapped is decidedly butch; her shoulder-width emphasized by the narrowing of her lower body caused by the wrapping. Young WW, with her dress flaring up as always, is decidedly femme. But in this case the femme is rescuing the butch, rather than the other way around — a role reversal which I’m certain Marston appreciated.

And speaking of role reversals:

The sky riders who the Amazons initially assumed were men are, as it turns out, masked women. Thus Aphrodite’s law preventing men from setting foot on Paradise Island is not broken. Or, to put it another way, men are not the defilers of Aphrodite’s virgin soil — women are. Inevitably, the sky raiders are stripped to their underwear and bound under the watching eyes of the Amazon. In defeat, the powerful men are feminized — though, since this is Marston, the feminization is actually their triumph, as they will now (eventually) become reeducated and made Amazons (better than any man!)

Marcus notes that the Victorians created eroticized images of and narratives about women for women. The fashion plates allowed women to experience powers and pleasures around control and consumption of female bodies that were, in other areas, reserved for men. In a somewhat analagous way, it’s worth pointing out that the eroticization of children in WW is meant to be consumed primarily, not by adults, but by children. The hints of adult pleasure, power, dominance, and submission, leavened with childish adventure and playfulness — the very things that made Frederic Wertham choke up his soup — were, I’d guess, exactly the features which appealed to children of every gender.

Plus, of course, sky kangas.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #22

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As I said in our last installment, Wonder Woman #21 was great. Marston died in May 1947, but you’d never know he was on his deathbed when #21 came out in January/February of that year. One of the high points of the series, it shows Marston enthusiastically grappling with and even more enthusiastically fetishizing the latest, most up-to-date technology of atomic power. Most people would stop adding kinks to their repertoire when they were dying, but Marston is not the sort to let a little thing like cancer get his libido down. It’s an inspiration to us all, I tell you.

But that was 21. In #22, things are…well, they’re not so great. In fact, I strongly suspect that the very, very ill Marston did not have complete creative control over this issue. Marston had sometimes worked with collaborators before, I think — his sons were supposed to have given him story ideas at least — and certainly he’s had less than stellar issues before. But this is the first one that actually starts to look in spots like hackwork.

Among other problems, this is the first issue since the second or third that isn’t a single long story; instead, it’s split up into three shorter tales. The initial one of these is definitely the worst; I’d wager something of moderate value that somebody ghosted large chunks of it. Wonder Woman goes to Hollywood, where a evil mastermind is stealing the color from the faces of actresses and then forcing them to pay to have their color restored. So basically, instead of Wonder Woman saving the world, she’s helping a handful of vain actors deal with cosmetic surgery. The low stakes and the stereotypical focus on appearance is a painful forshadowing of the crappy Silver Age Robert Kanigher scripts to come…and just to drive that point home there’s a completely pointless sequence where WW is taken by the police and thrown in prison, a typical Silver Age twist which here (as in the future) serves to generate some vague suspense in a plot that is basically going nowhere. Towards the second half of the story things start to come alive a little as the Holiday girls and then Wonder Woman are tied up and the evil scientist reveals that he has a brain control ray which he uses to make a bunch of nurses his slaves (not sure I’ve seen the nurse fetish from Marston before?).

And of course WW is almost placed in his thrall too, but Steve comes in in the nick of time and rescues her…and again, having Steve as the deux ex machina just is not Marston in prime form.

The second and third stories are somewhat better — or at least more characteristic. Number two involves the Saturnians again (remember them from way back in issue 10?) They use hypnotism to prevent people from seeing them, and there’s some sort of electrical bonds which makes WW all weak and kitteny and then they can tie her up. Not really covering any new ground, but it’s okay for that.

Three has the most potential; one of the Holiday sorority girls, Gel, is jealous…and her jealousy almost destroys the planet Venus! Before it does, though, she’s punished by…well see for yourself:

That’s the stuff! The jealousy theme is pretty interesting too; it’s come up before in Marston, specifically in #6 in the battle with the Cheetah. In some ways this is actually more successful. In #6, the Cheetah’s resentment of the stuck-up Amazons and their compulsive condescension seemed a lot more sympathetic than I think Marston wanted, whereas in this one, Gel’s jealousy of her fellow students seems pettier and less rationally motivated. (Not that Gel isn’t somewhat sympathetic too.)

It’s also interesting to think about why jealousy seems important to Marston. In my post about the Cheetah, I said that it seemed to be about self-esteem — that is, woman should feel good about themselves and not inferior to anyone. But I also wonder if there’s a sense in which Marston finds jealousy especially problematic because it’s a primary source of conflict between women. Or to look at it another way; the flip side of female-female friendships or female-female desire can be jealousy — wanting to be somebody else instead of wanting to be with them (as friends or…well, you know.) On the one hand, then, jealousy is the acid that dissolves the bonds of sisterly love. On the other hand, it’s a kind of extension of that love twisted into desire. Which means that, for Marston, jealousy is exciting and fetishized — which is why jealous Gel gets placed so quickly in the cat suit. Her punishment is stimulating, but so is her rebellion.

Though not as stimulating as they might be alas. The splash page to this story promises that Gel will bring jealousy to Venus, and I had visions of her somehow spreading jealousy throughout the perfect Venusian society through some sort of ray or serum or other weirdness — which sounded pretty great. But in the end she just shows up and frees some prisoners and causes a garden variety ruckus…and then it all resolves in two really fast pages, as if everyone just ran out of script. Which is maybe what happened; Marston may just have gotten too sick to finish the thing (or they could be using an earlier ms that he abandoned or never completed.)

Along those lines, perhaps the most interesting or revealing thing about this issue is that the art isn’t very good. Not that it’s terrible; Peter still has some nice set pieces, like this weird and funny undersea clump of Holiday girls:

But in general, compared to much of the remarkably adventurous art in this run, this issue is both tame and bland. The layouts are fairly boring, and Peter makes little effort to unify pages visually (using colors, shapes, or themes as he does in many other issues.) The wordless sequences which the duo have been experimenting with are also abandoned. Costuming is less detailed, and layout and rendering are all less imaginative throughout. Peter is still Peter, and the art is still fun to look at, but he seems to have lost much of the visual spark that pushed him from being a very good illustrator to (in my mind) one of the all time greats.

So what was that visual spark? I can’t know for sure, obviously, but I really wonder if it wasn’t Marston. I’ve noted before that when Marston’s scripts aren’t so great, the art also seems to falter. Here I’m pretty sure that Marston was side-lined — and sure enough, the art suffers badly. Which makes you wonder…was it Marston who was specifying those wordless sequences? Was he involved closely in layout? How specific were his scripts?

I suppose it’s possible that Peter was just more inspired when he had good material. But the fact that so much of his more interesting stylistic choices disappear here where Marston seems out of the loop — it just makes me think that Marston (who, as I’ve mentioned before, actually hired and paid Peter himself) may have had substantial direct input into the art. How I would love to get my hands on one of his scripts….
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So…there are in theory 6 more Marston/Peter WW issues left. I know that #28 is very good…but now I’m more than a little worried that the next five are going to be a slog. Marston was supposed to have been writing scripts on his death bed, so it’s possible that he generated some more first class material. We’ll see, I suppose….