The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Wonder Woman! Who could have imagined that U.S. culture of the 1940s would produce a stubborn genius with the audacity to dream up a woman who could perform “sensational feats” in a “fast-moving world.” The first issue of Wonder Woman begins with an image of Diana sprinting through the air wearing boots with stiletto heels and dressed in a blue skirt emblazoned with white stars, topped by a red bustier decorated with a golden eagle. “At last,” we read, “in a world torn by the hatreds and wars of men, appears a woman to whom the problems and feats of men are mere child’s play.”67 That image and those words capture perfectly William Moulton Marston’s fantasies about the power of women to protect and to save.

  Dr. William Moulton Marston, lawyer, psychologist, screenwriter, and inventor, was possibly the only person—certainly one of the few men—possessed of the kind of imagination that could invent Wonder Woman. His radical politics, eccentric beliefs, and unorthodox marital arrangements made him something of an anomaly, and a wonder, for his own time. A member of the class of 1915 at Harvard University, Marston collected two additional degrees, one in law and one in philosophy, and, equipped with those degrees, he dreamed up a new mythology, improbably female centered at a time when the United States was preparing to enter a deadly world war, fought in the main by men, that led to the loss of seventy-five million lives. At the home front, women were drawn into the labor force in unprecedented numbers, taking on roles that were vital, if not as obviously heroic (in the conventional sense of the term) as those of the soldiers traveling overseas.

  Marston was an intellectual iconoclast, well ahead of his time in many ways. His Emotions of Normal People, published in 1928, more than a decade before America entered World War II, began as a work of psychological theorizing but moved into the mode of a political manifesto declaring that women would soon dominate men and teach them that “love (real love, not ‘sex appetite’) constitutes . . . the ultimate end of all activity.” Recruiting “Love Leaders” to reeducate men would revolutionize the world and create a more compassionate social order, one in which masculine modes of violence, aggression, and force would no longer dominate. Women could take the lead, he later declared: “Someday, I sincerely hope, women will demand and create love schools and universities.”68 Less than a decade later, in 1937 and still four years before the involvement of the United States in hostilities, Marston spoke at the Harvard Club of New York to declare that in a matter of a thousand years women would rule the country politically and economically. Quoting Marston, the Washington Post wrote that “women have twice the emotional development . . . that man has. And as they develop as much ability for worldly success as they already have the ability for love, they will clearly come to rule business and the Nation and the world.”69

  After a string of failed enterprises and adjunct academic posts, Marston finally hit upon the idea of using a comic book to promote the idea that the “blood-curdling masculinity” of the superheroes in DC Comics ought to give way to a heroine who combines the “force, strength, and power” of Superman or Batman with a woman’s capacity for love, tenderness, and generosity. And, like magic, Wonder Woman, agent of peace and justice, was born, materializing just in the nick of time, right before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: “She appears as though from nowhere to avenge an injustice or right a wrong! As lovely as Aphrodite—as wise as Athena—with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules—she is known only as Wonder Woman, but who she is, or whence she came, nobody knows!”70

  Marston invented his own mythology, constructing a backstory for Wonder Woman that begins in a utopian world called Paradise Island. “Introducing Wonder Woman” was a nine-page origin story that appeared in the fall of 1941.71 With a few swift strokes and concise word balloons, it filled readers in on the culture in which Princess Diana grew up and evolved to become Wonder Woman. “In Amazonia,” Hippolyte tells her daughter, Diana, “women ruled and all was well. Then, one day, Hercules, the strongest man in the world, stung by taunts that he couldn’t conquer the Amazon women, selected his strongest and fiercest warriors and landed on our shores. I challenged him to personal combat—because I knew that with my MAGIC GIRDLE, given to me by Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, I could not lose.” It is more than odd that what gives Hippolyte the strength to defeat Hercules is a magic girdle. I recall as a child reading the Wonder Woman comics and cringing at the idea of this superheroine wearing so constricting a garment. In fact, or rather in the Greek sources, Hippolyte wears what the Greeks called a zōstēr, or war belt.72 And defeat Hercules she does, though only to be outmaneuvered by him in ways that require more help from Aphrodite and that lead eventually to a home on Paradise Island.

  In Amazonia, women isolate themselves from the world of men, rule themselves, and “all is well” under the benevolent guidance of Aphrodite. By contrast, in the world of men, Ares serves as patron deity, and his subjects “rule with the sword.” In a word, we have a situation that mirrors the split in the United States between isolationists on the one hand, demanding that the United States avoid foreign entanglements and stay out of the war, and interventionists, who favored military support for European allies. What unfolds in Marston’s work is an impassioned plea favoring intervention even from those who are strong advocates of peace.

  Captain Steven Trevor, a U.S. Army officer, crashes his plane on the shores of Amazonia. Aphrodite urges the Amazons to take Captain Trevor back to his homeland so that he and his new allies can “help fight the forces of hate and oppression.” And Athena chimes in, with a call to send the “strongest and wisest Amazon—the finest of your wonder women!” Hippolyte’s daughter Princess Diana is sent to America to preserve “liberty and freedom,” for America is “the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women.” For a change, it is Wonder Woman and not Superman who is here to save the day.

  Once Princess Diana lands her invisible plane in America, she takes Captain Trevor to an army hospital and reunites with him at the headquarters of U.S. military intelligence. There she disguises herself as Diana Prince (get it?), a secretary with glasses and hair pulled back in a bun, prim, proper, and professional as she takes dictation (almost giving herself away when she instinctively uses Greek letters). Turning into a cartoon version of the female trickster, Wonder Woman is dedicated to bringing justice into the world. Part of her strategic plan is to use an alias and to adopt a profession that requires her to be adept at writing, if only in the form of transcription. In addition to fighting off thugs and engaging in high-speed car chases, she is also a compassionate nurse and, of course, an efficient secretary (“Diana types with the speed of lightning!”). She does all that and, remarkably, also undoes gender stereotypes in ways that were unimaginable in her time and still challenging to process today.

  Wonder Woman, 2017. Courtesy of Photofest

  Wonder Woman fights evil and injustice at all levels by organizing strikes, boycotting products, and leading political rallies. She ends the excesses of profiteering on the part of a milk trust that has been raising the price of its product and starving American children. She becomes a labor activist who works to double the salaries of underpaid clerks at Bullfinch’s Department Stores. “Blistering blazes!” Trevor Jones declares at one point. “Why will that beautiful gal always invite trouble? If she’d only married me, she’d be at home cooking my dinner right now.”

  In 1942 Marston wrote, in ways that today sound somewhat quaint but still carry real force, about the importance of providing women with opportunities for “self-expression in some constructive field: to work, not at home with cook-stove and scrubbing brush, but outside, independently, in the world of men and affairs.”73 That the two women Marston loved (one of whom he married) were suffragists explains much about the origins of Wonder Woman. His wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, and his “mistress,” Olive Byrne (a niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the pioneering figures in the women’s movement), advocated birth control and were feminists long before feminism became a dirty word
in the 1970s. Marston himself belonged to the “sufs” at Harvard College. More than likely, he attended rousing lectures at Harvard by Florence Kelley, the social and political reformer who fought against sweatshops and for a minimum wage with an eight-hour workday, and by Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the suffragette movement in the United Kingdom who helped earn women the right to vote.

  The Wonder Woman franchise was to Marston’s mind a brilliant way to harness the cultural authority of America’s “most popular mental vitamin” (comic books) to disseminate his theories about the power not just of love but also of justice. In fact, the love of justice—avenging injustices and righting wrongs—is what makes Wonder Woman so powerful a force in the pantheon of superheroes. Wonder Woman, as Marston’s biographer, Jill Lepore, tells us, is the most popular female superhero of all and has outlasted many of her male counterparts. “She had golden bracelets; she could stop bullets. She had a magic lasso; anyone she roped had to tell the truth. . . . Her gods were female, and so were her curses. ‘Great Hera!’ she cried. ‘Suffering Sappho!’ she swore. She was meant to be the strongest, smartest, bravest woman the world had ever seen.”74

  Comic-book superheroes operate in a medium that functions much like folklore, taking the pulse of a culture and tapping into its unconscious fantasies and fears. With whirlwind energy and operatic passion, they stage clashes between good and evil, heroes and villains, the virtuous and the corrupt. It is up to the superheroes to rescue, heal, restore, and make things right. Children are rarely given opportunities for adventure and high drama, and comic books can provide all the pleasures and excitement denied them, along with what psychologists who see value in reading the genre describe as cathartic release, a safe outlet for passions that might otherwise run amok.75

  Some begged to differ. On May 8, 1940, Sterling North, the literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, denounced “sex-horror serials” (by that he meant comic books) as a “national disgrace” and bemoaned their toxic effects on the coming generation, making it “even more ferocious” than the current one. By 1955, after the U.S. Congress had held three days of hearings on whether comic books were contributing to higher rates of violent crime in teens, an interim report on comic books and juvenile delinquency voiced concerns about how the medium offers “short courses in murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism, and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality, and horror.”76

  The New Republic worried that “Superman, handsome as Apollo, strong as Hercules, chivalrous as Launcelot, swift as Hermes, embodies all the traditional attributes of a Hero God,” a god that had been embraced by Nazi Germany. “Are Comics Fascist?” Time magazine fretted.77 Marston, by creating a superheroine, deftly ducked the charge of buying into Nazi ideologies about the superman, or Übermensch.

  The advisory board of DC (Detective Comics) and AA (All-American) Comics responded swiftly to the growing moral panic about superheroes with instructions on how writers and artists could clean up their act. They produced a long checklist of “thou shalt nots,” among them: “We must never show a coffin, least of all with a corpse in it.” “No blood or bloody daggers.” “No skeletons or skulls.” “We must not roast anybody alive.” “No character is permitted to say ‘What the . . . ?’” “We must not chop limbs off characters.” William Marston took a more positive approach. He argued that Superman and Wonder Woman did nothing more than pursue our two greatest national aspirations, “to develop unbeatable national might, and to use this great power, when we get it, to protect innocent, peace-loving people from destructive, ruthless evil.”78 In many ways, Wonder Woman was his stealth contribution to the war effort.

  With sales off the charts, the publisher decided to energize the readership base for comics with two questionnaires, the first listing six superheroes and asking which one ought to be a member of the Justice Society: Wonder Woman, Mr. Terrific, Little Boy Blue, the Wildcat, the Gay Ghost (later renamed the Grim Ghost), or the Black Pirate? Wonder Woman won that 1942 poll, and she triumphed in a second survey that asked, “Should WONDER WOMAN be allowed, even though a woman, to become a member of the Justice Society?” The publisher was surprised to discover the enthusiasm for what he called “the encroachment of a female into what was a strictly masculine domain.”79 Who will be surprised when Wonder Woman, who fights for democracy, justice, and equality and can perform superhuman feats, is named the society’s secretary? Recording words and performing deeds (for a change), she is—Praise Aphrodite!—to double duty bound.

  CHAPTER 6

  TO DOUBLE DUTY BOUND

  Tricksters and Other Girls on Fire

  If men see the trickster element in women at all, they limit their view to the conniving sorceress, the wily seductress.

  —MARILYN JURICH, Scheherazade’s Sisters

  “You opened Pandora’s box over there!” “Now I’m Pandora? What’d they do to her? Chain her to a rock?” “That was Prometheus.”

  —ELIZABETH AND HANK IN Madam Secretary

  New Mythologies

  Joseph Campbell fretted about the disappearance of the gods, the loss of sacred spaces, and the contraction of belief systems in the modern era. “The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe,” he lamented in conversation with Bill Moyers.1 We can no longer rely on biblical wisdom, for it is dated, belonging to the first century BCE. And we can’t go back, he insisted. He worried also about the risk that the next generation would turn inward, seeking transcendent meaning in psychedelic drugs, narcotics, and other controlled substances. How do you keep myth alive and relevant in what Campbell viewed as an era of secularization and disenchantment? For him, the new saviors would emerge from the world of art. Storytellers, filmmakers, poets, and artists, he believed, could reinvigorate the mythological universe and bring meaning and substance back into ordinary life, creating ontologically rich sites that could serve as proxies for foundational religious beliefs.

  But not just any artist would do. “There’s an old romantic idea in German, das Volk dichtet,” Campbell observed. That phrase implies that “ideas and poetry” emerge from the bottom up, from the common people. Campbell vigorously denied that particular dictum, insisting that new mythologies emerge from “an elite experience.” The gifted artist, the singular genius, may interact with the folk, “but the first impulse in the shaping of a folk tradition comes from above, not from below.”2 When it came to the sacred precincts of myth, Campbell was in favor of ensuring that the high priests of culture remained in power.

  Campbell’s disdain for the “folk” extended to popular culture in general as well as to anything that belonged to the culture of childhood. He dismissed fairy tales, for example, as pure entertainment, lacking the weightiness of myth. For that reason he was also oblivious to much of what was in the very air he breathed. How could he have missed Wonder Woman, who made it into print during the war years, just when he was starting work on The Hero with a Thousand Faces? It was right under his nose, in his very neighborhood, and it must have been part of the cultural baggage that young women were bringing with them to Sarah Lawrence when he was teaching there. To be sure, Wonder Woman was in many ways an anomaly, a comic book that was sui generis and that interested adults only insofar as it was a bad influence on the children they were raising. It was thought, at the time, that a medium we now elevate by using the term “graphic novel” rather than “comics” belonged to the domain of pure entertainment rather than to the serious business of myth and religion.

  When it came to movies, however, Campbell was willing to allow a little wiggle room. “There is something magical about films,” he stated, and movie actors can turn into “real” heroes, for they have a double presence, on the silver screen and in the flesh. (Campbell was, of course, writing well before the era of devices that stream content.) When asked whether John Wayne had become a mythical figure, he affirmed that the actor, a role model for
his fans, had moved into “the sphere of being mythologized.” Shane, Rambo, and Douglas Fairbanks were all names that came up in conversation with Bill Moyers, and Campbell was eager to affirm that all three transcend celebrity status, with features that can be found in the thousand faces of heroes. They are “educators toward life.”3

  What was playing at the movies in the 1940s when Campbell was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces? All the King’s Men, a film that traced the political fortunes of Willie Stark, a populist governor in the Deep South, had won the award for Best Picture in 1949, when Campbell’s book was published. The year before, it was Hamlet, starring Laurence Olivier. And then there was Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), about a journalist taking on a Jewish identity; The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), about veterans returning to civilian life; and The Lost Weekend (1945), about an alcoholic writer. The early 1940s featured Casablanca (1942), with its doomed romantic couple and men as heroic Resistance fighters, but there was also Rebecca (1940) and Gaslight (1944), with their homicidal husbands and terrified women. Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Madame Curie (1943) give us cinematic heroines, but they stand as exceptions in a field of nearly sixty nominated pictures that include Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Battleground, and other dramas of men beleaguered.

  How do the Academy Awards of 2020 stack up against those of the 1940s? At first glance, little has changed, with films like Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Todd Phillips’s Joker, Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes, and Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory vying for Best Picture. But Greta Gerwig’s Little Women and Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story have been squeezed in, between the war drama 1917 and Quentin Tarantino’s Once upon a Time in Hollywood, perhaps a hint that the landscape is a shade different. The Academy Awards turn out to be something of a lagging indicator, or perhaps the Academy is just a deeply conservative institution still unprepared to nominate films with female directors and leads.