Reconstruction 5.4 (Fall 2005)

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Lillian Robinson. Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes. New York: Routledge, 2004. 148 pp. Softcover. $18.95. ISBN: 0415966329

<1> Sure, we all know that one of the primary functions of comic books is to titillate the proto-patriarchal penises of 12-year-old boys. But might this all-American art form have more to offer women than wedgie-prone bikini bottoms and cleavage from the Planet of the Fembots? According to Lillian Robinson’s Wonder Women, the answer is “Yes, but ....” The “Yes” part comes primarily, and foundationally, through the original Wonder Woman comics of the 40s, which told a story that to this day remains almost unheard-of in comic books: the story of a fully-realized female protagonist. For Robinson, the biggest wonder the Wonder Woman comics of that time provide is that this female superhero actually gets to be a woman as well.

<2> Before we go any further with this review, however, it is my obligation to note Robinson can hardly be called a disinterested critic. You see, she was saved — quite literally — by Wonder Woman. As she tells the story in the preface, she hurt her knee one day, but didn’t realize the extent of the damage until she got in the tub later that night and found she couldn’t get out. There, trapped and with little recourse other than to the strength she could muster from her “aging, overweight, injured body,” she found that nothing except the childhood memory of her Amazonian-American heroine could lend her the power she needed to escape her archvillain-worthy deathtrap:

For ten or fifteen minutes, I struggled with gravity as the buoyancy afforded by a full tub proved insufficient to counteract the agony in my knee. Even the catastrophes I imagined — being stuck all night in the bath, prey to a quick death by drowning as I drifted off to sleep or a slow one to pneumonia after prolonged exposure and ignominious removal by a derrick — failed, literally, to move me. All my efforts served only to exacerbate the pain and splash water on the bathroom floor.

Finally, I asked myself, “What would Wonder Woman do?” And then, lack her superpowers or her Amazonian armory, I evoked the hero herself. “Wonder Woman, help me!” I cried, and, with a gasp and one last effort, I swung myself triumphantly up and over the rim of the tub, dried off, and limped into the bedroom. (xi)

<3> I certainly could have summarized the above, but by doing so I would be denying you perhaps the single greatest pleasure to be found in Wonder Women. Just by holding this slim volume sideways, readers will quickly realize that this is not an exhaustively researched nor densely argued treatise on the portrayal of women in comic books. It is by no means densely researched, leaving Robinson to come off at times as a dilettante straying into a subject that interests her only insofar as it blows upon the dim embers of a childhood interest. Besides Wonder Woman, she spends a little time, begrudgingly, on Marvel Girl and the Invisible Girl-cum-Woman, has some nice things to say about She-Hulk and the Scarlet Witch, and virtually ignores the rest of the pantheon of she-heroes that have appeared in comic books, largely due to Wonder Woman: Storm and Elektra and Moon Dragon and Rogue and Star Fire and Jean Gray and the half-billion others who have since sprung up; the Wonder Woman rip-offs like Glory and Promethea and Power Princess that would have made for interesting critical foils; and, really, where the hell is Cat Woman? How can anyone discuss the portrayal of women in comics without analyzing the first and most important morally-ambiguous female character in the genre? Furthermore, while often compelling and cogent, it is in the final analysis an incompletely argued book, one that at times veers as dangerously close to essentialization and a Manichean world-view as she argues DC Comics can be. And were this a different book, the above would probably be seen as shortcomings. In Wonder Women, however, those values are exchanged — and the commodity of space in this slight book forces the exchange — for a much rarer and more precious insight: an insight into where our preferences come from, and, despite the Ph.D.s we earn or the political battles we fight, how stubbornly we cling to them.

<4> To put it another way, the secret gift of Wonder Women is the window it opens into what I will term “The Decriticalized Zone,” thatoften-embarrassing place in our minds where the Marxist stashes her desire for a gleaming Lexus, where the war protester uploads his fond memories of playing Halo online, and where the celebrated feminist and cultural critic secrets away her love for the Wonder Woman comics of her girlhood. As long as we are complicit in our culture, we all have Decriticalized Zones, but rarely do these real but camouflaged parts of our psyches see the light of day in cultural/literary criticism. Robinson puts hers out there, and thereby provides an analysis that is original and unexpected, one full of fondness and endearment for a mode of cultural production that has, from its inception, been almost ferally proud of its objectification of women.

<5> To be fair, that fondness is pretty much limited to the Wonder Woman comics of the 40s — though I found her analysis of She-Hulk and, especially, the Scarlet Witch to partake of some of the same sympathetic nostalgia that Robinson slathers on the brawny-yet-brainy Amazon in the American-flag one-piece. And it’s not as if her analysis has become so deformed by her own predilections that it loses all merit. Truly, she has exhumed from history the importance of the early Wonder Woman comics to a generation of women, and, more specifically, recalled to us one of the strangest, most iconoclastic and lovable men in the history of comic books: William Moulton Marston. Marston, the brains behind Wonder Woman and a Harvard Ph.D. in psychology, had a dream of utopia that envisioned women dominating men through sex and taking over the world. You see, women, Marston believed, would act much more responsibly and magnanimously than men have; with women in charge there would be no more war. It’s an almost floridly Victorian idea of women, charming yet creepy to the modern sensibility. But as Robinson reads it, what this vision allows for is nothing less than the genesis of the most authentic female superhero in comic books. Wonder Woman posited, for Robinson at least and many more women I’m sure, a dangerous, revolutionary idea — that women could rule. It’s precisely ideas like that one that, decades later, would serve as the imaginative catalyst for the Feminist Movement.

<6> Granted. But really, one has to read quite forgivingly, with an almost childlike trust in Marston’s vision, to overlook the very male-pleasing gestures even the original series proffers. Like the Holliday Girls. Oh my. The Holliday Girls are basically Wonder Woman’s posse, a band of mischief-making, paddle-wielding, college-aged jokesters who engage in enough bondage, paddling, tickling — let’s call it what it is: foreplay — to force any heterosexual boy of age to cross his legs in public. They paddle each other; they paddle evil-doers they capture;really the only person they never get to spank is Wonder Woman herself. Robinson admits that the Holliday Girls interrupted her reading experience as a child, that they took time away from the main Wonder Woman narrative she found compelling, but then argues that, as an adult, she sees the purpose Marston was trying to achieve through them.Men would come to be dominated by women through erotic and not violent means, Marston believed, and that, once men were lovingly dominated, peace would reign. Well, okay, that’s an interesting read, but if I may invoke Occam’s Razor for a moment: no. The Holliday Girls were not trying to liberate men by enslaving them sexually. They were having about as much sex on the page as would be allowed in 1940s America, and mostly for the benefit of the boy-readership.

<7> Robinson blind-eyes several other important parts of the Wonder Woman mythos that I feel confident other readers would read as undiluted phallocentrism — lest we forget, Wonder Woman forgoes Paradise Island and her Amazonian life forever for the love of her man, Steve Trevor — but of course Robinson does. This is the Decriticalized Zone we have entered. What’s more important even than the conclusions she draws is how she gets there, and what that means for her and the rest of us. It’s not so much that she’s examining the world of the superheroine and what role that world plays in our culture, but what it means to have such a wide discrepancy in our critical capacities over the course of a lifetime. There’s real joy in her reading of Wonder Woman, real power: it literally gave her the strength to pull herself out of a hairy situation when nothing else would. The book as a whole, however, suffers from the fact that she does not feel the same way about any characters or comics that follow. In those instances, she’s forced to rely merely on her intellect and education and her lifetime of experience for her analysis: and I am here to tell you, it’s a comedown, compared to the brio with which she writes about Wonder Woman.

<8> The book is at its best when it most honestly and brazenly intertwines the girl she once was with the woman she is now. Robinson mentions that this slim study represents what will probably be the closest she ever comes to writing a memoir. I wish she would reconsider, for this book is a memoir-becoming.It’s not yet a memoir, but it’s never going to be anything else, either. Maybe she feels she’s let us leering readers too far into her Decriticalized Zone, but I find it is there that her most compelling and personal writing meets her most important critical insights: and that’s the combination that makes for her most inspired, revelatory, and — dare I say? — wondrous writing.

Carlos Hernandez

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