Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

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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 twoW 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

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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.

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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. She wasn’t born, she did not know them, she wasn’t even on the same coast.”13 Marston’s granddaughter concludes, “Lepore has created a totally defamatory—and totally fictional—‘history’ for the sake of sell- ing a salacious tale.”14 It is beyond the remit of this review to delve into this issue in any great detail. This book has been widely publicized on television and radio, and it is likely that this will be the story most generally accepted by new scholars coming to the subject. The book also earned acclaim with the award of the New-York Historical Society’s Annual History Book Prize for its insight into early twentieth-century femi- nism.15 However, it does suggest future debate prompted by this topic, similar to the furor around Lewis Carroll’s alleged pedophilia. Carroll’s life was constructed through incorrect scholarly writings and lack of corroborating evidence. As a result, the myth of Carroll became embedded and unquestioned until the recent availability of accu- rate evidence. This has prompted a number of scholars to refute earlier writings.”16 Noah Berlatsky offers a contrasting approach in Wonder Woman: Bondage and Femi- nism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948, which “quite consciously privileges theory over comics’ specific history.”17 Berlatsky focuses on feminism, sexuality (bondage), and pacifism. Berlatsky’s analysis is based on close readings that he connects with Mar- ston, Peter, and Murchison’s cultural and philosophical ideas encoded in the stories.18 In the introduction, Berlatsky notes the neglect of the character and her paradoxical iconicity. She is “famous for being famous,” yet few people have read her comics. Ber- latsky argues that we should focus on the early comics and extrapolate Marston’s ideas

12 Comment by Christie Marston on “Jill Lepore Reveals the Secret History of Wonder Woman,” Newsarama.com, October 28, 2014, http://www.newsarama.com/22568-jill-lepore-reveals-the-secret-history-of-wonder-woman.html. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 “Press Releases: Jill Lepore Wins the New-York Historical Society’s Annual American History Book Prize for The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” New-York Historical Society, February 17, 2015, http://www.nyhistory.org/press /releases/jill-lepore-wins-new-york-historical-society%E2%80%99s-annual-american-history-book-prize-sec. 16 Karoline Leach, In the Shadow of the Dream Child: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (London: Peter Owen, 1999). 17 Berlatsky, Wonder Woman, 5. 18 Ibid., 13. Joye Hummel Murchison was employed by Marston after 1945, when Marston fell ill with polio and could not keep up the output. Peter, too, used artists for the vast amount of work required in producing up to eight comic strips per month.

190 Cinema Journal 55 | No. 1 | Fall 2015 outward: “to be truest to the historical Marston is to grant him his theoretical breadth and ambition.”19 Lepore and Berlatsky link bondage with feminism and take similar approaches that align bondage with women’s place in society. Where Lepore links bondage with the chained women of early suffrage, in chapter 1 Berlatsky argues that victimization and disempowerment are themes in traditional female genres such as romance and the Gothic, genres that reflect women’s place in culture. He explores these ideas through Wonder Woman No. 16, “In Pluto’s Kingdom” (DC Comics, 1946), in which Pluto’s abduction of Persephone, the Holliday Girls, and Steve Trevor evokes issues of rape and incest. However, horrific as rape is, Berlatsky proposes that culture allows for only two responses in women, revenge or victimization. Marston, according to Berlatsky, would argue that a third response is possible by overcoming the power of the trauma: “once the power of rape is broken, the world will be safe for rape fantasies and for dominance and submission—the normal emotions.”20 Chapter 2 examines the paradox of the heroine who fights for pacifism and connects these issues with Marston’s philosophies on domination and submission. The chapter is divided into four parts; each examines one aspect of the “Just Warrior” and shows how Marston encodes his ideas on loving submission into the warrior woman to provide an alternate model of heroism. The chapter examines the way superhero comics deal with pacifism and violence, and then shows how Wonder Woman is more effectively represented as an educator and “love leader” than warrior. A section then challenges the notion of the Just Warrior through the wounded soldier, which Berlatsky connects with the “erotic and political potential of masochism.”21 A final section deals with the importance of giving up control in submission to Christian pacifism, an ethic central to Marston’s notion of loving submission. Chapter 3 deals with the lesbian and queer aspects of Wonder Woman. In the 1950s comics were criticized for their violence and sex. Later critics have either challenged or ignored queer sex in Wonder Woman, stating that the supposed sexual content was either unintentional or overanalyzed.22 However, Berlatsky asks how much Marston and Peter knew of lesbianism and whether their queer meanings were entirely unintentional. He answers this question using Marston’s studies of sorority party rituals and his writing on human emotions, concluding that Marston regarded lesbianism as “normal, healthy, and even ideal.”23 Berlatsky has little time for later Wonder Woman stories, and to study these in the book would be impossible given the character’s long

19 Berlatsky, Wonder Woman, 5. 20 Ibid., 72. 21 Ibid., 74. 22 Berlatsky breaks down the responses of critics toward Wonder Woman as queer as follows: Marston and Peter do not know, but the audience does (Lillian S. Robinson, Wonder Women [New York: Routledge, 2004]); Marston and Peter know but their audience does not (Frederic Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent [London: Museum Press: 1955]); there is ambiguity as to whether Marston and Peter know, and there is no way for their audience to tell (Trina Robbins, “Wonder Woman: Lesbian or Dyke? Paradise Island as a Women’s Community,” Girl-Wonder.org, May 1, 2012, http://girl-wonder.org/papers/robbins.html). 23 Berlatsky, Wonder Woman, 149.

191 Cinema Journal 55 | No. 1 | Fall 2015 and complex history. What he does is provide a detailed reading of the comics that, in some cases, risks overanalysis. Berlatsky’s approach is less general than that of Lepore, and it feels more substantial. Both Lepore and Berlatsky illustrate that comics can be studied most effectively as historical and theoretical texts through different methodologies. Like many areas of comics scholarship, much of the information is fragmented, and scholars must still resort to using diverse sources, private papers, interviews, institutional documents, and comics narratives to piece together histories and meanings. Lepore’s book tends to read more like a racy novel than academic inquiry. The heavy promotion, the award, and Lepore’s position as a Harvard professor could result in this book being the standard against which all later Wonder Woman research is measured. This would be a pity, because Bertlasky’s accomplished analysis of the character’s sexuality and narrative themes also tells us much about Marston’s philosophies. ✽

Superheroes and Identities edited by Mel Gibson, David Huxley, and Joan Ormrod. Routledge. 2015. $155 hardcover. 284 pages. reviewed by Christine Atchison

el Gibson, David Huxley, and Joan Ormrod’s Superheroes and Identities prom- ises to explore “what superhero nar- ratives can reveal about our attitudes towards femininity, race, maternity, masculinity, Mand queer culture.”1 Although it doesn’t fully exhaust each of these aspects (that would be a rather lofty goal), it certainly does introduce the topics as areas ripe for further study. Gibson, Huxley, and Ormrod introduce their anthology as a col- lection of articles that were, for the most part, previously submitted to the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and, unfortunately, the book reads that way. Although the editorial organization of the articles is effective—the anthology is divided into six main categories (“Race,” “Narrative and the Development of Superhero Identities,” “Boys and Girls,” “Supermoms,” “Queer,” and “Audiences, Reception, Fan- dom”)—the included articles do not interact with one another or form a coherent whole. This is, perhaps, an inevitable pitfall of which the editors demonstrate their awareness when they share their hope that

1 Mel Gibson, David Huxley, and Joan Ormrod, eds., Superheroes and Identities (New York: Routledge, 2015), i.

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