Wonder Woman

I have commenced a new family tradition. On Sundays, Zoë and I ride the bus to our local library and she gets to check out four books. On our last visit, she came running up to me and announced, 'They've got books for daddies!' Of course she had discovered ... the quite extensive comic book section. So naturally I got myself a library card. This time I checked out out a nice, fat Peanuts Omnibus (1953-1956), a volume of Plastic Man, a Bendis Daredevil and ... Belle told me to check out a complete Sherlock Holmes with my fourth pick. So, for number four, I settled on Wonder Woman, the Complete History. When she pointed out there was no Sherlock in it, I refuted her thusly: it was designed by Chip Kidd. (Today I checked her out a nice Sherlock with original Strand Illustrations from the school library.)

Somehow before reading this book I was completely unaware that the creator of Wonder Woman was a very strange and interesting fellow. Read the wikipedia entry on William Marston. Harvard Ph.D., inventor of the lie detector, lived with his wife and lover for decades, fathering children with both. The two women named their children after each other and continued to live together after Marston's death.

Here he is responding to criticism of the pervasive bondage imagery in his book:

Addressing Frank's specific charges, Marstron referred to the old magazine article that had first brought him to Gaine's [the publisher's] attention. "Sadism consists in the enjoyment of other people's actual suffering," he reiterated. "Since binding and chaining are the one harlmess, painless way of subjecting the heroine to menage and making drama of it, I have developed elaborate ways of having Wonder Woman and other characters confined." Indeed, said Marston, he was promoting the idea that "confinement to WW and the Amazons is just a sporting game, an actual enjoyment of being subdued. This, my dear friend, is the one truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound." He asserted, "Women are exciting for this one reason - it is the secret of women's allure - women enjoy submission, being bound. This I bring out in the Paradise Island sequences where the girls beg for chains and enjoy wearing them." Furthermore, he continued, "because all this is a universal truth, a fundamental subconscious feeling of normal humans, the children love it. That is why they like Wonder woman on Paradise Island better than anywhere else." In conclusion, Marston said, "I have devoted my entire life to working out psychological principles," and insisted that he deserved "free rein on fundamentals."

And:

"Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element - enjoyment of submission to others." He [Marston] also acknowledged the concerns Sones [one of the critics] raised about the danger of submitting to tyrants, and offered up his usual recommendation of a "beneficent mistress," also employing the term "love chains."

It was all part of an elaborate plan. From an earlier piece by Marston:

Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychologically propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. There isn't enough love in the male organism to run this planet peacefully. Woman's body contains twice as many love generating organs and endocrine mechanisms as the male. What woman lacks is the dominance or self assertive power to put over and enforce her love desires. I have given Wonder Woman this dominant force but have kept her loving, tender, maternal and feminine in every other way. Her bracelets, with which she repels bullets and other murderous weapons, represent the Amazon Princess' submission to Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Beauty. Her magic lasso, which compels anyone bound by it, to obey Wonder Woman and which was given to her by Aphrodite herself, represents woman's love charm and allure by which she compels man to do her bidding.

Here's a page containing typical images and the full text of a 1942 Family Circle piece, written by Olive Richard - who is pretending to be a relative stranger to her subject but was actually his lover, one of the three members of the aforementioned menage a trois. The article was a sequel to the original one, also by Olive, which landed Marston his comic-writing gig:

The war news had me down. I had just been to see a friend whose husband, a naval officer, was killed at Pearl Harbor. Going home, I bought a newspaper with a "Wake Up, America!" editorial spread all over the front page. The general drift of it seemed to be that the country is on the brink of ruin and that we'd better wake up or else. Well, I was awake to the danger, all right, but I couldn't think of anything more to do about it. I'd paid my income taxes, bought war stamps and bonds, volunteered up to my neck for every defense project, cut out sugar and all pleasure trips with the car, and made the decision that I would look awful but patriotic in my old clothes.

Then to cap it all I turned on the radio and out blared the voice of an expert war-news commentator telling us in 15 minutes of dismal prediction that we should prepare ourselves for much worse disasters than anything we had yet suffered. Women must do this and women must do that and women must be charming through it all. Usually some everyday incident comes up to stop one going through thought mazes of this kind, and it happened here. On the table where I was about to throw my hat with a Katherine Cornell gesture was a comics book with a brilliant-hand cover bearing the picture of a pretty girl in a scanty costume leaping aboard a racing motorboat.

A memory stirred; this must be the "daughter or the brain of Dr. William Moulton Marston, Family Circle psychologist" that I had seen recently in The Family Circle.

"Well," I thought, "If Marston is whipping up comics stories while Rome burns, there must be a reason." So, I clamped the hat on again and made tracks for Rye, New York.

The Doctor hadn't changed a bit. He was reading a comics magazine, which sport he relinquished with a chuckle and rose gallantly to his feet, a maneuver of major magnitude for this psychological Nero Wolfe. "Hello, hello, my Wonder Woman!" cried the mammoth heartily. "I was just reading about you in this magazine. You're prettier than your prototype in the story strip, and far more intellectual. Sit down and tell me all."

"I came to be told, and what's the idea of calling me Wonder Woman, and I don't feel like listening to any male sarcasm on account of I've heard too much already."

"Your bracelets," said the Doctor, taking up one thing at a time "-they're the original inspiration for Wonder Woman's Amazon chain bands. Wonder Woman's bracelets protect her against bullets in the wicked world of men. Here, see for yourself."

The picture was the same that I had seen at home. In the motorboat were several characters of definitely Teutonic cast shooting rifles and machine guns at the smiling girl. The bullets glanced harmlessly off the fair intruder's twin bracelets, which did closely resemble-astonishing coincidence!-the pair of ancient Arab "protective" bracelets that I have worn for years.

I opened the book to read, "This amazing girl, stronger than Hercules, more beautiful than Aphrodite," and so on, and I remembered that my sons had argued as to whether she could lick the whole Japanese army all at once or whether she'd have to take them a few thousand at a time. The Doctor beamed when I told him this and said, "Tint's right, the kids love her. Wonder Woman's quarterly magazine outsold all others"

"I know, I know. You'll be writing advertising next But I came here to ask you about the war. Women feel so helpless and depressed about it. I wish you'd answer one question for Family Circle readers: Will war ever end in this world; will men ever stop fighting?"

"Oh, yes. But not until women control men," he answered mildly.

"According to the Wonder Woman formula, I suppose?"

"That's it exactly!" The Doctor got up from his chair and began to pace the floor as he talked - a mannerism that betokens extreme interest and enthusiasm. "Wonder Woman, and the trend toward male acceptance of female love power which she represents, indicates that the first psychological step has actually been taken. Boys, young and old, satisfy their wish thoughts by reading comics. If they 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! Tell me anybody's preference in story strips and I'll tell you his subconscious desires. These simple, highly imaginative picture stories satisfy longings that ordinary daily life thwarts and denies. Superman and the army of male comics characters who resemble him satisfy the simple desire to be stronger and more powerful than anybody else. Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them." ...

You can see more early covers here. Improving stuff.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

"all this is a universal truth, a fundamental subconscious feeling of normal humans"

Wow. Didn't Adam Roberts write something about Proust recently on a similar theme? The writer's assumption that their individual eroticism must be universal. In this kind, I wonder whether it functioned for Marston as defense against criticism of his own arrangements, was just an example of his domineering tendency, or was a kind of learned aspect of the psychology of the time?

[Brian Cook]

Sounds like Marston and Joyce would have gotten along swimmingly...

[Gary Farber]

"Somehow before reading this book I was completely unaware that the creator of Wonder Woman was a very strange and interesting fellow."

No kidding.

Jeepers, I went through this with LizardBreath a few months ago.

I oughta conduct a seminar, or sumpthin'.

If only ya'd asked.

[Brendan Hogg]

The writer's assumption that their individual eroticism must be universal.

Worked out well enough for Freud, didn't it?

[Grimgrin]

Yeah, for Freud's patients and everyone else treated by him?

Not so much.

[Gary Farber]

"He asserted, 'Women are exciting for this one reason - it is the secret of women's allure - women enjoy submission, being bound. This I bring out in the Paradise Island sequences where the girls beg for chains and enjoy wearing them.'"

Speaking of stuff I assume everyone knows, but maybe doesn't, should I mention John Norman Lange here?

[Gary Farber]

We must also mention: Trina!

(Also, that Luthor/Brainiac cover is nice. 12 cents! I used to own it!)

[philippos42]

Daniels's Wonder Woman book is great, innit?

I haven't read that later article before, thanks for the link!

(Found you commenting here.)