Once upon a time, the many cultures of this world were all part of the gynocratic age. Paternity had not yet been discovered, and it was thought (as it still is in some tribal cultures) that women bore fruit like trees—when they were ripe. Childbirth was mysterious, it was vital and it was envied. Women were worshipped because of it, were considered superior because of it. Men prayed to female gods and, in their religious ceremonies, imitated the act of birth (as many tribesmen still do). In such a world, the only clear grouping was that of mothers and children. Men were on the periphery—an interchangeable body of workers for, and worshippers of, the female center, the principle of life.
The discovery of paternity, of sexual cause and childbirth effect, was as cataclysmic for society as, say, the discovery of fire or the shattering of the atom. Gradually, the idea of male ownership of children took hold. With it came the idea of private property that could be passed down to children. If paternity was to be unquestioned, then women had to be sexually restricted. This was the origin of marriage.
Gynocracy also suffered from the periodic invasions of nomadic tribes. Gynocracies were probably stable and peaceful agricultural societies since agriculture was somewhat more—though not totally—a female occupation. Nomadic tribes survived by hunting, which was somewhat more—though not totally—a male occupation. The conflict between the hunters and the growers was really the conflict between male-dominated and female-dominated cultures.
Restricted by new systems of marriage as well as by occasional pregnancies, women gradually lost their freedom, mystery, and superior position. For five thousand years or more, the gynocratic age had flowered in peace and productivity. Slowly, in varying stages and in different parts of the world, the social order was painfully reversed. Women became the underclass, marked by their visible differences regardless of whether they had children. Often, the patriarchal take-over of female-dominated societies was accomplished violently. Everywhere, fear of goddesses, of women’s magical procreative powers, and of the old religions caused men to suppress the old social order very cruelly indeed.
Some women resisted the patriarchal age. They banded together to protect their female-centered culture and religions from a more violent, transient, and male-centered way of life. Men were dangerous, to be tolerated only during periodic mating ceremonies. The women themselves became adept at self-defense.
These were backlash cultures, doomed by their own imbalance, but they did survive in various groupings on every continent for many thousands of years. Why don’t they turn up in history? For one reason, most of their existence was lived in those thousands of years dismissed as prehistory—that is, preliterate. The few records that are available to us were written under the patriarchal assumptions of a much later age. Even archeology and anthropology have suffered from the fundamental, almost subconscious assumption that male and female roles as we see them in the patriarchal age are “natural”; therefore, they must have been the same in the prehistoric past. Only lately have we begun to question and check out those assumptions. Large, strong, and presumably male skeletons from prehistoric sites, for instance, have turned out on closer examination to be female after all.
Mythology is a collective human memory that has, on other occasions, turned out to be accurate about invasions, great floods, and the collision of stars. The Amazon cultures may also one day be proven as fact. Meanwhile, the fascination that brings them up as fantasy again and again may itself be some psychic evidence of their existence.
If so, Wonder Woman becomes just one small, isolated outcropping of a larger human memory, and the girl children who love her are responding to one small echo of dreams and capabilities in their own forgotten past.
Invisible Girl
LILLIAN ROBINSON
Reprinted by permission from Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes (Routledge, 2004), 88–94.
WHAT MAY BE CALLED THE NEW MARVEL ATTITUDE BEGINS WITH THE CREATION in 1961 of The Fantastic Four, with mutations, internecine insults, ambivalence, and irony all over the text, but drawn in the traditional adventure or detective comics mode. The first major change in artistic style did not occur until well into the 1960s, after the success of Pop Art. I do not insist on this “post-Pop ergo propter Pop” argument, but it seems to me suggestive, not only of a seismic shift in visual approach, but of the growing importance of the visual domain that was later to mark the “Revelation” phase of comic book history in general and the female superhero experience in particular.
Marvel’s first female superhero, Invisible Girl, preceded the moment of Wonder Woman’s feminist renewal by more than a decade. Invisible Girl was subsequently—and significantly—to become Invisible Woman who, as wife, mother, and superhero, remains one of the Fantastic Four. Along with the other mutants in that group, she was “transformed by an accident in outer space into something much more than human” and has “vowed to use … [her] awesome power to help mankind chart the unknown” (#357, October 1991). And, as is the case with the other Fantastics, her particular superpower is an extension of her salient premutation qualities. Sue Storm was a distinctly—almost pathologically—shy and retiring girl. Her invisibility, along with some additional powers, enabled her to help “chart the unknown” on behalf of “mankind,” and, in the process, vanquish technologically and cybernetically sophisticated villains, who often possessed convoluted motives of their own. These included but were by no means limited to the alien Skrulls and the human Dr. Doom. Her role and powers increased with time and become most interesting in the period from 1968 on. Throughout, Sue’s visible dimension, when not in action, includes no signs of exceptional bodily powers, although, like the latter-day Wonder Woman, she evidently frequents a reputable health club.
The accident that gave the Fantastic Four their superpowers was an artifact of the Cold War mentality. Pilot Ben Grimm initially refuses to fly the rocket ship to the stars, because there has not yet been enough research on the effects of cosmic rays. “They might kill us all out in space!” he insists to the brilliant scientist Reed Richards, his former college roommate (#1, November 1961). But Sue Storm, Reed’s fiancée, insists on the political necessity of an immediate liftoff. “Ben, we’ve got to take that chance! Unless we want the Communists to beat us,” adding, “I—I never thought that you would be a coward!” As will happen throughout Ben’s subsequent career as the Thing, it is the challenge to his manliness that goads him to accept the assignment, and the four are off. There are four of them because, although only Reed and Ben are required for the mission itself, Sue comes along, explaining to Richards, “I’m your fiancée! Where you go, I go.” To which Johnny Storm appends, “and I’m taggin’ along with Sis, so it’s settled!”
In a reprise of the origins story (#11, February 1963), it is Reed who explains, “We’ve got to reach the stars before the Reds do!” while Sue chimes in, “Oh, Reed, if only the government had listened to you in time—heeded your warning!” In this version, she tells the reluctant Ben that she and her kid brother Johnny are planning to ride the starship so that Reed will see that at least they are not afraid!
It is worth noting that the U.S. moon landing—I mean, forget about the stars!—was nearly eight years in the future. Even more interesting from a political perspective, once the Four were launched as a super heroic team, the first issues contained very few references to the Cold War. The space race is mentioned a couple of times, a Russian villain addresses his simian sidekick as “Comrade Ape,” a suspicious device is said to bear “Communist insignia,” and Khrushchev himself is caricatured a couple of times yelling at his subordinates or the whole UN in a fashion reminiscent of wartime’s comic book Nazis. But, at their worst, the Soviets are never represented as being or even being in league with the real enemy, which threatens the entire planet, with no concern for national borders or identities. As in representations of World War II, the fight is nominally for “democracy,” which is constructed as being synonymous with capitalism, but is not the focus of
narrative or ideology, since the battle for world domination is being waged on an entirely different plane.
At any rate, Sue’s presence on the flight that exposed all those aboard to the cosmic rays was as an appendage of her boyfriend. In the revisionist 1963 version, she also serves an ideological function, as she and Johnny, a callow teenager who perpetually gets on the Thing’s nerves, stand in for the proverbial “women and children” that traditional heroes are pledged to defend. But the cosmic rays are an equal-opportunity mutator, so they get endowed with superpowers, too. With an irony that I assume is intentional, Ben, the only space traveler to express his reservations, is the most damaged, and, for many years, the only one of the Four whose mutated, if super-powered identity, his horrible Thing-ness, cannot be switched on and off at will. Meanwhile, openminded scientist Reed Richards, the Four’s leader, becomes Mr. Fantastic, endowed with amazing flexibility, as well as strength; hot-headed young Johnny becomes the Human Torch, and Sue becomes Invisible Girl. “Together,” announces Reed, “we have more power than humans have ever possessed!” But it is the ever-truculent Ben who gets to shout out the implications: “You don’t have to make a speech, big shot! We understand! We’ve got to use that power to help mankind, right?”
Although Sue’s nonsuperhero role is as an adjunct to Reed, only rarely do we see the shyness that was her defining trait before the accident. One such case, though, is the government’s testimonial dinner in their honor, which three of the Four are extremely reluctant to attend. Speaking last, Sue, who went on the starship voyage to show her fearless trust in her beloved, whimpers, “Oh, Reed, I—I’m afraid to go! I’m not used to meeting all those important people! I’m liable to get so flustered that before I know it, I might vanish in front of their eyes? If that ever happened, I’d simply die of embarrassment!” (#7, October 1962).
Commenting on a series of frames (Fantastic Four King Size Special #4, November 1966) in which, successively, Sue Storm serves coffee, jokes about the clothing bills she’s run up, attends a fashion show, and faints dead away, Trina Robbins observes:
Unlike the insecurities and self-doubts that afflicted male heroes, and which encouraged the reader’s identification and evoked admiration when the heroes overcame them, Sue Storm’s … flaws were almost a caricature of Victorian notions of the feminine, an invisible woman who faints when she tries to exert herself (The Great Women Superheroes, 114).
It does not seem to occur to her that, with Stan Lee’s characteristic Marvel irony already operating, the caricature may be intentional.
Yet it must be admitted that, in the early issues, Sue assumes a number of stereotyped feminine roles. It is she, for instance, who designs the group’s uniforms. When the Thing, with typical self-reflexivity about the comics themselves, fulminates, “Bah!! Costumes—tights—that’s kid stuff! Who needs ’em?” she is quick on the uptake: “We do, if we’re in the business of crime fighting for real! If we’re a team, we should look like a team!” Even more revealing is her reply when Reed, trying on his suit, praises the design: “Say! This isn’t half had, Sue! You ever think of working for Dior?” While adjusting the Thing’s mask, she answers, “I’ve got enough to do acting as nursemaid to you three!” (#3, March 1962).
In the same vein, Sue is in a “chi-chi beauty parlor on Fifth Avenue” when she spots the flaming “4” signal in the sky. Having waited months for an appointment with the exclusive Monsieur Pierre, she is as upset as the coiffeur himself that she has to rush off before he can create her new hairdo. There is a certain wit, as well as girlishness, to her thoughts as she dashes away and transforms at the same time: “Better turn invisible! I can’t run thru the streets with curlers in my hair!” (#15, June 1963). More disturbing, because apparently devoid of saving irony, is the moment when Reed finishes his special report for NASA on rocket fuel and goes looking for Sue to type it up. She hastily erases the undersea view-screen on which she has been seeking the Sub-Mariner, the other male in her life, and, once Reed says he wishes that Namor would surface again, so she could finally make up her mind, the next caption reads, “And then, after giving Sue the report to type …” while the illustration shows him reflecting sadly on his beloved’s ambivalence: “Strange how nobody is ever really master of his own fate!” (#14, May 1963). Strange, too (if you ask me), how someone whose fate is in another person’s hands thinks nothing of placing those hands on a keyboard to serve him and his work!
Much of this comes to a head in issue #11 (February 1963), in the same feature, “A Visit with the Fantastic Four,” that retold the origins story. Reed finishes his narration of the accident and the consequent mutations by saying, “We’ve come a long way since those early days—and had many almost unbelievable adventures!” His complacency about this history is shattered, however, by Sue’s retort: “But they were your adventures—the three of you—much more than mine!” It seems that readers have been sending Sue unpleasant letters, charging that she doesn’t contribute enough to the team effort and that the others would be better off without her. “She’s not exaggerating,” says Reed, when he’s read some of them. He shouts, “Well—it’s time to set the record straight—here and now!” It’s Ben, temporarily redeemed from Thing-ness, who, for a change, utters the calming note: “Take it easy, pal! The kids didn’t mean any harm—they just don’t understand!”
Setting the record straight has two interestingly contradictory parts. On the one hand, says Reed, gesturing toward a handy bust of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator famously said his mother was “the most important person in the world to him,” although she did not, as Ben adds sarcastically, “do enough” in the chronicle of his deeds. Once invoked, her role as nurturer of Abe and hence of his accomplishments is presumably self-evident enough that it needs no further elaboration, so they move on to the other half of the argument: Sue does take part in the comics’ action dimension. A couple of examples are cited, her brave leap into the middle of their battle with the Skrulls and her rescuing them all from Dr. Doom’s airless prison. Only two dramatic events occur in this Special Bonus Feature. First of all, Ben gets so angry as he admonishes Sue’s detractors (“If you readers wanna see women fightin’ all the time, then go see lady wrestlers!”) that he turns back into the Thing. And the Torch sounds an alarm bell summoning the others away from this discussion to a surprise birthday party the three males have prepared for Sue. (“You remembered!”) As she cuts the inscribed cake Johnny has “rigged up” for her, she says, “I’m so choked up I don’t know what to say.” The Thing comments that it’s the first time he’s ever heard a female make such a statement, while Reed wishes, “Many happy returns … to our favorite partner!” Once again, stereotype and innovation work together.
In the concluding frame, the editors explain that this episode without a real story—at least, not an adventure story—was produced in response to letters and queries from readers. “From time to time in future issues,” they continue, “we shall attempt to pictorially comment on other letters from you—our valued fans!” Whether it really was readers’ letters or their own bad conscience, something convinced the creators that it was worthwhile to explain Sue’s apparent failure to pull her superheroic weight. The editors and their characters make it clear that they plan to keep Invisible Girl in the series and that she’s just fine the way she is. I wonder, myself, if it occurred to any readers to propose giving her an equal part in the action sequences, rather than removing her from the tetrad. Or to any writers to attempt such a move. It certainly doesn’t look that way! After all, Sue herself expresses the official position before becoming invisible and hitching onto the evil Mr. Miracle’s truck: “One invisible girl can sometimes accomplish more than a battalion!” (#3, March 1962).
Love Will Bring You to Your Gift
JENNIFER STULLER
Reprinted by permission from Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology (I.B. Tauris, 2010), 87–104.
Empathy is really th
e most revolutionary emotion.
GLORIA STEINEM
“LOVE”–A COMPLICATED CONCEPT IF THERE EVER WAS ONE. BUFFY IS TOLD BY her spirit guide that love will bring her to her gift. William Marston’s Wonder Woman is made of love, simply because she has the body of a woman. He even wrote that “Man’s use of force without love brings evil and unhappiness. But Wonder Woman has force bound by love and with her strength, represents what every woman should be and really is.”1 In Luc Besson’s film The Fifth Element, the eponymous character finds that the only reason to save our tragic world is for love. And for a time, Xena’s companion Gabrielle follows a pacifist philosophy called “The Way of Love.”
Often with women, love is stressed again and again—making it necessary to wonder about this particular emotion, or ethic, consistently being linked to the source of a female hero’s strength. Does love constitute a reimagining of heroism? It’s certainly a different motivation from that of a quest for a prize, be it grail, fleece, dragon, or damsel. It is also a break from the “Lone Wolf” model of heroism, which is rooted in traditional uber-masculinity and isolationism.2
Does the suggestion of love as strength, or as gift, embrace innately female characteristics? Does it infuse what is “naturally” powerful about women into a liberating archetype? Or does it reinforce stereotypes about how women should behave as self-sacrificing nurturers? The assumption that love is inherent in women, but not in men, is a sticky, even sexist concept, and the idea that a female superhero’s greatest gift is her nurturing temperament or her ability to love selflessly certainly has the potential to reinforce stereotypical feminine ideals. But there’s evidence that love in the superwoman does in fact present a reimagining of heroism. Wonder Woman, Xena and Gabrielle, Buffy and the Scoobies, and Max Guevara (among others) are compelled by their values, which are in turn reinforced by love—a power greater than any of their physical skills. Their love is the impetus, but becomes integral to their strength, and thus the success of their missions. These superwomen illustrate a new form of heroism for popular culture that is based on loving compassion, and compassion itself is a heroic act.
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