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Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore 7KH6HFUHW+LVWRU\RI:RQGHU:RPDQE\-LOO/HSRUH DQG:RQGHU:RPDQ%RQGDJHDQG)HPLQLVPLQWKH 0DUVWRQ3HWHU&RPLFV૱E\1RDK%HUODWVN\ UHYLHZ -RDQ2UPURG Cinema Journal, Volume 55, Number 1, Fall 2015, pp. 187-192 (Review) 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI7H[DV3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/cj.2015.0074 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cj/summary/v055/55.1.ormrod.html Access provided by Ebsco Publishing (24 Oct 2015 10:22 GMT) Cinema Journal 55 | No. 1 | Fall 2015 The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. Alfred A. Knopf. 2014. $18.71 cloth; $13.56 paper; $10.99 e-book. 432 pages. Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948 by Noah Berlatsky. Rutgers University Press. 2015. $26.95 paper; $80.00 hardcover; $15.98 e-book. 264 pages. reviewed by JOAN ORMROD onder Woman is perhaps the most rec- ognizable superheroine of all, with her Stars and Stripes– inspired costume, bracelets of submission, and golden lasso. Yet, apart from a few coffee-table books and chapters devoted to superheroines, she was the subject of little research until the past Wtwo years, which have seen the publication of several studies devoted to the character.1 This review focuses on two of these: Jill Lepore’s 1 The books published in the past two years are Joseph J. Darowski, ed., The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014); Philip Sandifer, A Golden Thread: A Critical History of Wonder Woman (n.p.: Eruditorum Press, 2013); Tim Hanley, Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014); Noah Berlatsky, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); and Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Brunswick, Australia: Scribe Publications, 2014). Much of the interest driving this influx of books on Wonder Woman is motivated by fans and developed through websites. Noah Berlatsky writes “The Hooded Utilitarian,” The Hooded Utilitarian: A Pundit in Every Panopticon, last modified April 4, 2015, http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/. Tim Hanley is a comics historian who writes a monthly column on women in comics: “Gendercrunching,” Bleeding Cool, last modified August 27, 2013, http://www.bleedingcool.com/tag/gendercrunching/, and a blog, Straitened 187 Cinema Journal 55 | No. 1 | Fall 2015 The Secret History of Wonder Woman and Noah Berlatsky’s Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948 examine the cultural and philosophical influences of the character’s creators on the stories, although from opposite method- ologies. Lepore provides a historical account of the philosophical, cultural, and femi- nist influences on her creators, William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G. Peter (artist). Early Wonder Woman comics, Lepore claims, are “the missing link in under- standing the struggle for women’s rights.”2 Conversely, Berlatsky approaches themes of bondage and feminism through close readings of the comics stories and identifies Marston's and Peter’s philosophical agendas and cultural influences. Wonder Woman appeared as America entered World War II in December 1941.3 During the early 1940s she featured in four titles: All Star Comics (DC Comics, Summer 1940–February/March 1951), Sensation Comics (DC Comics, January, 1942– June 1952), Wonder Woman (DC Comics, Summer 1942–February 1986), and Comics Cavalcade (DC Comics, Winter 1942–June/July 1954). Most were written by William Moulton Marston, later with Joye Murchison, and drawn by Harry G. Peter. In doing so, Marston controlled the ideological and philosophical presentation of the character. The stories of the 1940s include a cast of female helpers, from Amazons to sorority girls, as well as Wonder Woman’s two sidekicks, the grotesque Etta Candy and all- American hero Steve Trevor. The stories are full of bondage and rendered in lyrical yet peculiarly stilted artwork, unlike any of the more vigorous superhero art of younger creators of the 1940s. Marston was a “cultural amphibian”: part huckster, equally at home in academia and popular culture.4 He wrote scripts for films and salacious novels. He was an academic who researched and wrote psychological books. He held a law degree, and also invented a version of the lie detector that he used to develop the Domination, Influence, Submission, Compliance (DISC) model of human behavior used today in business practice.5 With the DISC model, Marston proposed that human behavior was directed principally by domination and loving submission. Related to this model were Marston’s views on female equality and his belief that women should rule the world, given their greater capacity for love. Wonder Woman became the model for Marston’s ideas concerning female power. The Secret History of Wonder Woman is based on Jill Lepore’s access to the private papers of William Moulton Marston and interviews with family and friends. Lepore reveals the influence of early suffragists and feminists on Marston, but she also dwells Circumstances, last modified April 1, 2015, https://thanley.wordpress.com/. Philip Sandifer maintains TARDIS Eruditorum, at Philip Sandifer Writer, last modified April 6, 2015, http://www.philipsandifer.com/. 2 Lepore, Secret History, back cover. 3 Wonder Woman’s first appearance was in the DC Comics anthology All-Star Comics #8, December 1941. She appeared on the front cover of DC Comics’ Sensation Comics #1, January 1942, and was published in her own comic in summer 1942. 4 Geoffrey Bunn, “The Lie Detector, Wonder Woman and Liberty: The Life and Work of William Moulton Marston,” History of the Human Sciences 10, no. 1 (1997): 91–119. 5 William Moulton Marston, Emotions of Normal People (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1928); William Moulton Marston, C. Daly King, and Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Integrative Psychology (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1931). 188 Cinema Journal 55 | No. 1 | Fall 2015 on the more salacious secrets of the Marston family’s living arrangements, and it is this aspect of her book that has caught the attention of the press. Marston was a polymath who lived with two women: his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, and his research assistant, Olive Byrne. The seemingly paradoxical themes of feminism and salacious sexual activities pervade the book from its opening pages, where Lepore describes the superheroine as “very kinky.”6 Cunningly, Lepore aligns Wonder Woman’s secret identity with the secret history of both her feminist roots and Marston’s political feminist agenda. The first part pieces together the prehistory intriguingly from “FBI files, movie scripts, the carefully typed meetings of a sex cult, and tiny diaries written in secret code.”7 Lepore makes connections between the character’s feminist roots and Mar- garet Sanger (Byrne’s aunt), Marston’s early academic career, and his family back- ground. The second part tells of how Wonder Woman came to be published and the connections between the story lines and contemporary cultural events, for instance, the influence of the Vargas pinup girl on Peter’s early design of Wonder Woman. Here Lepore notes the paradoxes of Marston’s life and character. He invented a version of the lie detector, yet lived a secret life that was hidden in plain view, for although the unconventional family arrangement was kept secret from the general public, Byrne would write articles for Family Circle in which she asked the psychological expert (Mar- ston) for advice on family problems, as if theirs were a purely professional relationship. The epilogue was, for me, most interesting: it examines Wonder Woman’s reinven- tion as a feminist icon. Wonder Woman was adopted by second-wave feminists, led by Gloria Steinem, who placed her on the cover of second-wave feminism’s flagship publication, Ms. magazine.8 Lepore, however, also illuminates the activities of the Red Stockings, radical feminists who developed their critiques of the second wave in academic discourses of the 1980s. An example of their use of Wonder Woman was in the Los Angeles Woman’s Center newsletter Sister, which depicted the character wielding a speculum as a weapon against patriarchy.9 It is this feminist adoption of the character that is the source, to a great extent, of the character’s current status in the popular imagination. Lepore’s text is not about Wonder Woman as much as William Moulton Marston and his families. It does not tell comics scholars much that is new about Marston and his background, although it fleshes out some of the connections between early twen- tieth-century feminism and Marston and Peter’s ideas for the design of the character, and it provides extensive information on manuscripts and archival materials.10 Neither does Lepore discuss the impact of the DISC model on the comics to the same extent as Philip Sandifer in A Golden Thread: A Critical History of Wonder Woman.11 Lepore’s as- sertion that Wonder Woman is the missing link in feminist history is difficult to prove 6 Lepore, Wonder Woman, xi. 7 Ibid., xiii. 8 Ms., no. 1 (1972). 9 Sister, a Monthly Publication of the Los Angeles Women’s Center, no. 5 (1973). 10 This was discussed in Les Daniels, Wonder Woman: The Complete History (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000). 11 Sandifer, Golden Thread, 39–53. 189 Cinema Journal 55 | No. 1 | Fall 2015 given the low readership of the comics, later creators’ misunderstanding or neglect of Marston’s ideas, and the lack of dissemination of the character—compared to that of other superheroes—throughout popular culture. Perhaps it is more valid to suggest that Lepore has established a hitherto unrecognized link between Wonder Woman and early feminism. Lepore’s work has, however, attracted criticism from Marston’s family—especially his granddaughter, Christie—for some of its supposed inaccuracies and problems of methodology.12 The main criticism centers on Lepore’s principal source, Margaret Sanger Marston Lampe, a distant cousin who was “removed from the events by a generation, a family, and thousands of miles.
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