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| The First Wonder Woman (in a skirt) |
Wonder Woman and I entered the world in the same year:
1941. She has aged a lot better than I
have. Her personality, appearance and origins have been reinvented and
rejuvenated over the years by various artists and writers, while I just have my
own story and ageing appearance. But
then again, she’s an Amazon and I’m merely human.
In spite of this, Wonder Woman, the fictional Amazon had a
significant influence over my childhood, and even afterwards. She came into my life when I was seven years
old, and immobilized over the summer by rheumatic fever. I recovered fine, but for the three months I
had it, I couldn’t go out or do very much.
In consequence, we had the first television set (ten inches) in the neighborhood to keep visiting
friends and myself occupied, and that’s how I discovered baseball and the
circus. But as a Both my
mother and aunt, who was a kindergarten teacher, were not thrilled at
this. They thought that anything other
than Little Lulu was bad for my naïve
and developing brain. Nevertheless,
friends smuggled in the likes of Superman and various other superheroes, and I
gobbled them up (and they never prevented me from getting a Ph.D. later).
recently minted reader,
I also discovered comic books. |
| Wonder Woman's First Very Own Comic Book |
The later 1940’s were a time when women were being rammed
back into their place after the independence they gained by necessity keeping
up the home front during World War II.
So being rescued by Superman, even if he and Batman did wear colored
long johns under swim trunks and capes to do their action work, seemed to be
the logical role for a girl. In
adventure movies, the guys got to do swordfights, while the girls just stood
around, the eventual outcome being that the winner would get her--and thank
goodness the good guy always won. But why didn’t the heroine at least throw something at the villain while
this was going on? Even at seven, I
thought this was unfair, even though this was pretty much the way it was in my
world: Mom stayed home with us, and Dad worked.
She didn’t throw anything either, not that there was much reason to. We were content.
But finding Wonder Woman was a revelation. Here was a girl with similar superpowers to
Superman and Batman. If they were hunks,
she had a gorgeous fit figure. Her
costume was much better too. It looked
like a movie star’s swimsuit, with its gold stars, its eagle on the bustier,
not over revealing, but trim enough to allow her to be an action heroine, and
no cape! She wore high-heeled boots, and
to move around in them the way she did certainly would have taken
superpowers. She wore a tiara with a
star on it, had awesome bullet-repelling bracelets, a golden truth lasso and a
personal transparent plane. She was an
Amazon, from a worthy lineage of women warriors, and a princess to boot, her
mother being Hippolyta the Amazons’ queen.
Even her Diana Prince disguise was much better, as a Lieutenant in Army
intelligence, than wimpy Clark Kent.
I also found it, at seven years old, intriguing that she
simply appeared on Paradise Island, (subsequently renamed Themyscira), but not in my time, renamed home only to females, Amazons. How was she conceived? There would be a lot
of later attempts to explain that.
It is to Wonder Woman comics that I can also look to my
initial acquaintances with the Goddesses of Greek Mythology: Hera, Aphrodite,
and Athena, though somewhat mixed with their Roman counterparts: Athena is
there, but one of the Amazons’ favorite oaths is “Merciful Minerva,” her Roman
alter ego, and the name of our heroine itself is “Diana” rather than the Greek
Artemis. But I didn’t know then about
Amazons as viewed by Greek men, I thought that the role of women in ancient
times was more egalitarian, and that was just fine with a seven-year-old.
So she was my hero, and continued to be even when I
graduated to real books, though I sort of lost track of her after age ten or
so. Except for the fact that she
remained as a superhero--my daughter wore Wonder Woman Underoos during the
Lynda Carter years--she kind of lingered in the background as a benevolent
inspiration. In this gun-toting age, I
wish I had a pair of those bracelets!
But of course, then and now, the tale of our heroine was infinitely more
complicated.
Recently, when I found out that we had debuted in the same
year, I decided to look in on Wonder Woman, find her backstory, at least the
way I remembered it, and see what she was up to. A look at Wikipedia,
for starters, brought a rich chronicle, from her debut, through fat and lean
years, to the even more active and muscular Wonder Woman that she’s become. But what an origin story--not so much the
character itself, but the characters that created her--awaited! The feminist
scholar, Jill Lepore, has thoroughly researched and analyzed this in her book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman
(2014). The principal writer and creator
was William Moulton Marston, working under the nom de plume of Charles Moulton.
Marston was an unusual mixture of charlatan and scholar: he had advanced
degrees and in his day taught at Harvard, among other things. He invented the lie detector and made a lot
of capital on this, and, most of his life, moved in progressive psychological
circles. On the other hand, he couldn’t
hold a job, and lived a life of unconventional, unofficial trigamy. He had a wife, the erudite Elizabeth Holloway,
who would be the breadwinner for his ménage
à quatre. Alco cohabiting was Olive
Byrne, niece of Margaret Sanger, who would play homemaker and nurturer to his
four children (all fathered by Marston, Holloway being mother of two and Olive
the others), and an occasional third co-habitant, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, a
sort of hippie-librarian who drifted in an out, with her crystals and incense. There were rumors of kinky sex and bondage,
but everyone concerned seemed comfortable with the arrangement, and weirdly
enough, Marston proved to be a proto-feminist.
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| Wonder Woman Being Tied Up |
Wonder Woman seems to have been his idea, but all the ladies
contributed. I recommend you read Lepore, either in her book or in a shorter
article that appeared in The New Yorker in
the September 22, 2014 issue to untangle all the complexities. Under Marston’s authorship (probably with a lot of input from Elizabeth and Olive), our super hero
gets chained up a lot (he seems to have had a fascination How nice for the girl to rescue the guy! She
stays on in the United States as a superhero, but a nurturing one, subduing,
but never killing her adversaries as she brings them to justice.
with bondage), but
always triumphs, as she successfully returns intelligence officer and blond
hunk Steve Trevor, who crash-landed on Paradise Island, to the U.S., though
giving up the immortality, but not the superpowers she had in her homeland.
Historically, the idea of Amazons was a notion of both
repulsion and fascinating to ancient Greek men.
The democratic, enlightened society of the Athenian Greeks during their
“golden age,” so often lauded by scholars over the centuries, was in reality utterly
devastating to their women. The latter
were kept at home, not educated and had no public life or voice at all; it all
sounds a lot like modern Afghan women under Taliban rule. The only females who had some leeway were the
hetaerae, the public courtesans, but that
only worked as long as they were young and attractive. So the idea of a woman warrior was fearsome
in every way (no wonder that all the sculpted narratives that survive from the
time show the Greek men always the winners).
It’s not surprising then that Marston looked to them, and various Greek
goddesses, who were not normal women, for his Wonder Women inspiration. In spite of her fabulous figure, Wonder Woman
is not sexy, rather gorgeous but fierce, as a modern goddess should be.
An Amazon made the perfect heroine for a prepubescent girl
in the mid twentieth century, in that sex doesn’t yet enter into it, but force
mixed with grace does; and when you’re a kid, that’s all you need to know. Issues of the Amazons perhaps being gay never
crossed my mind then. Lepore maintains
that once Marston died in 1947, the real Wonder Woman of that era perished too,
thereafter being somewhat watered down by subsequent writers and artists, becoming
rather nebulous until a revival, decades later with Feminism. I found her in her post-Marston decline, but
it didn’t seem to be one to me then.
Whatever Wonder Women’s psychological underpinnings were under Marston,
the outer attributes of her character and her post-Marston adventures were
enough for seven and eight year old me.
What she did do was to empower me, and gave me a positive attitude about
women that has lasted all my life. She
was the equal of any man, but different.
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| Wonder Woman the Blessed Golem |
I still don’t know how Queen Hippolytaactually conceived
her, though now it’s obvious that there are many ways to achieve motherhood; I
never could buy the later story that the queen modeled her my superhero is not a Golem! On the other hand, when I was single and
became a mom, I often thought that maybe my ideal was not Wonder Woman at all,
but Queen Hippolyta herself, and that my own daughter could this be Wonder
Woman.
initially from
clay--
Since I have kept myself ignorant of Wonder Woman’s fortunes
during the last 65 years or so, I am only superficially aware of the changes
and amplification of her legend, including a lot more grown-up aspects of her
story, her Greek divinity, and her love for Steve Trevor and how that
developed. A new consortium of writers
and illustraters--some of them women,
are taking her into the 21st century, and have redefined her for a
very different age, and a group of more mature readers of the Comicon generation--and
next year, the movie!.
But in the late 1940’s and very early 1950’s, that repressed
decade after Rosie the Riveter was long retired, she worked for me.
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| The Late Rosie the Riveter |
