Wonder Woman: The Making of a Feminist Superhero #YesAllWomen | Lecture
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Last year when Gal Gadot was cast as Wonder Woman in the forthcoming superhero mashup movie, Batman V Superman, a shocking large proportion of the online commentaries concerning the news concerned Ms. Gadot’s physical appearance. Gadot, who is best known for her role as Gisel Harabo in the Fast and the Furious movies, was particularly criticised for not exactly matching the buxom imagery of Wonder Woman’s comic book self, a critique which demeaned her as an individual and the character those same critics apparently adored. To criticise Gadot’s physical appearance in the way that happened following the casting announcement reduced her to little more than a physical object whose existence could be measured according to the subjective whims of those who took to twitter and similar online forums to express their dissatisfaction. The wave of criticism that was unleashed upon Gadot emphasised her physical appearance above all other considerations. What many of Gadot’s critics may not have realised, however, is that the nature of their criticisms were not just an affront to Gadot but an attack upon the very character they were ostensibly trying to protect. Wonder Woman has always been much more than the sum of her physical appearance and even from the earliest stages of her career, she contained more self conscious gender commentary than practically any other superhero from the Golden Age of Comics. Criticising an actress’s physical appearance is absurd at the best of times, but in the context of this character it highlights just how poorly some comic book readers understand the subtexts and history of their favourite medium and characters.
Created in 1941 by psychologist William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman probably has one of the strangest creative histories of any early comic book icon. Much of this can be traced to Marston himself who actively integrated large parts of his own world view into the Wonder Woman character. In Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth, for example, there are echoes of Martson’s invention of a key part of the polygraph lie detector but, beyond such whimsical reflections of real world achievement, lies a much more fundamental connection between creator and creation. Unusually, Marston was not only married to one woman, Elizabeth Holloway, who helped to inspire his contribution to the polygraph test, but was engaged in a relationship with a woman named Olive Byrne. Byrne was not Martson’s mistress, but was instead one part of a long term three part relationship – conventional in his thinking, Marston was not. This complicated personal situation reflected not Martson’s desire to dominate women but rather his desire to be dominated by them. In an interview he gave to Byrne in 1942, Marston made the point explicit when he said “If they [male readers] go crazy over Wonder Woman, it means they’re longing for a beautiful, exciting girl who’s stronger than they are. By their comics tastes ye shall know them!” He went on, “Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them.” According to Marston, then, men secretly wished to be made subservient to women, that they secretly longed to be mastered by them, and that the success of the Wonder Woman comic book reflected that desire. In other words, Wonder Woman was a success precisely because she bucked the trend of male superheroes, like Superman and Captain America, by presenting a strong, empowered woman that male readers wanted to look up to. The interview in which Marston expressed those views, it should be noted, was entitled “Our Women Are Our Future”.
Martson’s obsession with gender and gender relations went even deeper even than that. During the interview he gave to Byrne, in which he credited her as one of Wonder Woman’s prototypes, Marston talked about the character’s iconic wrist bracelets and how “Wonder Woman’s bracelets protect her against bullets in the wicked world of men.” Though Marston was hardly above reflecting upon the importance of Wonder Woman’s beauty to her character, it is was this broader context that seems to have concerned him the most. For Marston, his character had to navigate a “wicked” world which was dominated by one gender at the expense of the other. Marston firmly believed in the fallibility of men and their predisposition towards violence and chaos. In contrast, he believed that women, if in charge of the world, would work to avoid conflicts and violence in a way that men were unable to do as the heads of a patriarchal society. Marston believed in something that he referred to as “female love power” and it was this, probably more than anything else, which he aimed to demonstrate with his Wonder Woman character. She was to represent an ideal that was simultaneously compassionate and strong, not to mention the archetype of the natural leader of the human species. As Marston put it when Bryce asked him whether “men will ever stop fighting?”: “Oh, yes. But not until women control men.”
Marston was not only obsessed with the idea that women were the better gender, but the idea that they needed to control men through virtually any means necessary in order to solve the problems of the present. The Nazis were a particular target of this world view, the catalyst for Wonder Woman’s emergence onto her fictitious stage, but really it was man-kind, as a whole, that was identified by Marston as the problem. That doesn’t mean that Marston was somehow beyond objectification – indeed, he clearly linked the future success of womankind that he imagined with beauty. As he put it, “Wonder Woman is actually a dramatised version of her sex. She’s true to life-true to the universal characteristics of women everywhere. Her magic lasso is merely a symbol of feminine charm, allure, oomph, attraction every woman uses that power on people of both sexes whom she wants to, influence or control in any way. Instead of tossing a rope, the average woman tosses words, glances, gestures, laughter, and vivacious behavior. If her aim is accurate, she snares the attention of her would-be victim, man or woman, and proceeds to bind him or her with her charm.” Marston fetishised his character, dwelling upon or implying characteristics that were linked to his views on intimacy and, as he saw it, the core relationship between genders. The physical appearance of Wonder Woman reflected that obsession but far more important than her appearance was her general sense of empowerment.
As Marston saw it, women had, after the First World War, “emerged from a false, haremlike protection and began taking over men’s work. Greatly to their own surprise they discovered that they were potentially as strong as men-in some ways stronger. Women have more emotional power than men, they have greater endurance and more resistance to disease they live longer, and they can endure pain far better.” In fact, Wonder Woman’s appearance probably had more to do with Marston’s idea that women could and should ensnare their way to the top. By 1942 he was wallowing in the success of his comic book creation, boasting that Wonder Woman’s high sales were evidence that men and women alike were coming to recognise the importance not only of female empowerment but the superiority of women over men. This was being accomplished, Marston believed, because he had created a character which appealed simultaneously to that part of the male psyche, as he saw it, which longed to mothered and that part which, as he put it, longed to be “allured”. Wonder Woman’s form, then, was not simply sexualisation for the sake of Marston’s own idiosyncratic fetishes, but sexualisation that was designed to “allure” a male audience and make them subservient to it. Wonder Woman was not just a character, then, she was self consciously created as an exploration of Marston’s construction of femininity, on the one hand, and as a type of cultural propaganda on the other, a Trojan horse through which Marston could espouse the virtues and strength of women. As he saw it, women were, perhaps for the first time, discovering their strength in the context of war and that newly discovered power had the potential to change the world, if young men and women were prepared to heed the changes they were witnessing. As he put it, “Prior to the First World War nobody believed that women could perform these feats of physical strength. But they’re performing them now and thinking nothing of it. In this far worse war, women will develop still greater female power; by the end of the war that traditional description ‘the weaker sex’ will be a joke-it will cease to have any meaning.”
The Wonder Woman comic was not just a reflection of Marston’s complicated views on gender; they were the propagandist face of that world view. Marston was acutely aware of how widely read comic books were in their golden age and in an article he wrote for The American Scholar detailed just how much power he perceived in the medium. Marston extrapolated out from the eighteen million comic books sold each month in the United States, accounting for an average of five readers per title to arrive at a final monthly readership of 70,000,000. He added further readers through the ubiquity of comic strips in newspapers as well as listeners of comic book adaptations on the radio and was able to conclude, as a result, that “American literature has reached in ‘comics’ or adventure strip a zenith of popularity never before achieved in world history by any form of reading matter.” The article in which this analysis appeared had a little to say about gender constructs but it spent most its energy upon defending comic books as a literary form, but what it did say, and, in particular, what it chose to show about gender, was instructive. In the image which appeared next to the opening paragraph stands Wonder Woman, in a pose reminiscent of one Superman’s most iconic from the era, breaking a chain that has been wrapped around her body. Next to the breaking links are the words “prejudice”, “prudery”, and “Man’s superiority”. Marston recognised that comic books had the power to take his message to millions upon millions of readers and if evidence of the medium’s power was required, then the image of Wonder Woman breaking the chains of “prejudice”, “prudery”, and “man’s superiority”, provided it. Marston believed he had created a character that could inspire change; and he believed that he had found the medium that would allow him to export that inspiration across the country.
That Marston had some very particular ideas about the nature of gender does not mean that readers or appreciators of his work must share them but, thinking back to the criticism Gal Gadot has been subjected to, and understanding the purpose Wonder Woman was meant to serve, certainly throws some of the comments that have been drifting about online into perspective. Wonder Woman was always meant to serve as a positive role model, not as yet another means through which women could be objectified and reduced to subjective summaries of their physical forms. She was meant to challenge the gendered status quo, not enforce it and one does not need to adhere to Marston’s sometimes extreme world view in order to recognise the rightness of such a subtext. That some readers of the character seem not to recognise that is one of the greatest tragedies the character has ever faced, not least because many of those same readers believe that they are protecting the sanctity of the original comic book character. Knowing the history behind her creation, however, should throw that idea into sharp relief. Only by challenging sexism and misogyny are readers truly respecting the original character.
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