Wonder Woman Unbound (5 page)

These damsel in distress roles were very common in the 1940s. Superman had Lois Lane, Batman had Julie Madison, Captain Marvel had Beautia Sivana, the Flash had Joan Williams, and the Spirit had Ellen Dolan. These women weren’t particularly well-rounded characters. Instead, they were defined only through their male love interests, existing solely to be rescued, and had no real identities of their own.

This phenomenon wasn’t limited to comics, either. In their book
America on Film,
Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin discuss movies from this era, writing that “the perseverance of classical Hollywood narrative form […] has always worked to privilege men as the active and powerful heroes of Hollywood film, while relegating women to the role of love interest waiting to be rescued.”

Feminism and cultural studies scholar Linda K. Christian-Smith has detailed the rules of conduct that dictated how female characters behaved in 1940s teen romance novels. Tenets like “The Code of Romance” and the “Code of Beautification” present teen romance as a power relationship where the boyfriend was entirely in charge. The infatuated female lead did everything she could to make herself desirable for her boyfriend, losing herself in the process. Because “her value was acquired through affiliation with males,” she allowed herself to be entirely defined by what her boyfriend wanted her to be.

While these passive, adaptive love interests always got their fairy tale ending, the novels also included a cautionary alternative. Christian-Smith describes a good girl/bad girl binary with an assertive and independent bad girl character, usually a friend of the good girl protagonist. Bad girls refused to change for their boyfriends, and thus their relationships were doomed to failure and their lives destined for perpetual sadness.

In her famous essay “The Image of Women in Science Fiction,” Joanna Russ presents a similar good girl/bad girl framework. She claims that most female sci-fi characters were weak and ineffectual, essentially prizes won by male protagonists. Active or ambitious women were not only rare but often evil. Russ writes that “this literature was chockfull of cruel dowager empresses, sadistic matriarchs, evil ladies maddened by jealousy, domineering villainesses and so on.” Women who weren’t love interests, and who were shown to be smart and independent, were always villains.

Superhero comics had a lot in common with these two genres, sharing the younger audience of teen romance novels and the extraordinary characters and settings of science fiction. Comics continued the good girl/bad girl binary and combined the two approaches to bad girl narratives, presenting many female villains who had doomed romantic links with male heroes. Batman regularly faced off against Catwoman, the Flash battled the Star Sapphire and the Thorn, Green Lantern tangled with the Harlequin, and the Spirit came across all manner of femme fatales, such as P’Gell, Sand Saref, and Silken Floss. These women were in no way subservient love interests. Instead, they established their own identities, though this transgressing of the social order rarely ended well for them.

Wonder Woman flipped this paradigm by embodying the strength, assertiveness, and independence usually associated with bad girls and villains in a positive and heroic light. The Golden Age Wonder Woman was a blatant rejection of the good girl/bad girl binary and even offered a critique of the good girl role. Compared to Lois Lane, a typical damsel in distress, Robin, a sidekick, and Cat-woman, a villain, Marston’s unique approach to Wonder Woman stands out in stark contrast.

Wonder Woman

For Marston, it wasn’t enough to just have a female superhero. The prescribed gender roles had to be subverted even further, so he made Wonder Woman demonstrably more capable and comprehensive a superhero than her male peers.

At DC Comics, the covers of Batman and Superman comics showed daring wartime escapades. Superman rode a missile alongside fighter jets, while Batman and Robin delivered a gun to a soldier on the front lines, but the stories inside the comics had nothing to do with the war at all. While Batman and Superman used their covers to promote war bonds and stamps, they never actually fought the war themselves.

Wonder Woman supported the war effort as well, and the last panel of her comics often ended with “Wonder Woman says do your duty for Uncle Sam by buying US savings stamps and bonds!” She was a superpowered Rosie the Riveter, constantly encouraging women to join the auxiliary forces or get a wartime job. But while Superman and Batman sat out the war, Wonder Woman fought on every possible front. She regularly took on German and Japanese forces on the main lines of the war and defeated all of them with ease and often singlehandedly, with the American military only arriving afterward to cart off her captured foes.

Wonder Woman’s war adventures were extensive. She shut down Japanese bases all over the world, from Mexico to South America to China. She, by herself, seized a German U-boat, overturned a Japanese dreadnought, and captured an entire fleet of Nazi battleships. The Nazis attempted to infiltrate America several times and were stopped by Wonder Woman at every turn. Whether it was a plot to poison the water supply or disrupt American industry, or a Nazi spy impersonating an American general to find out their military plans, Wonder Woman thwarted every Axis foe.

She also wrangled with more typical superhero opponents, battling supervillains and fantastical invaders. Wonder Woman always foiled the evil plans of the Cheetah and Dr. Psycho, and saved the world from certain doom at the hands of subterranean molemen or an invading army from Saturn. She pulled off the latter in typical Wonder Woman fashion; she fought the Saturnian forces when necessary, but ended the conflict by negotiating a peace treaty and trade agreement with the king of Saturn.

Regularly saving the world didn’t distract Wonder Woman from local justice, and she worked to improve conditions for workers, stopped price-gougers, and fought small-time criminals everywhere she went. Even bullying was important to Wonder Woman, and in
Sensation Comics
#23 she stopped a gang who were picking on a young boy, showed the head bully the error of his ways and learned about his home situation, spoke to his father about his abusive tendencies, and then helped the father get a job in a wartime factory. She always took the time to get to the root of a problem.

Wonder Woman completely eschewed a damsel in distress role by instead being a superhero of unparalleled skill, and the inversion of the typical gender roles didn’t stop there. Like her superhero peers, Wonder Woman had her own damsel in distress, a fawning love interest who always got captured and had to be rescued. “Her” name was Steve Trevor. A major in the US Air Force, Steve was a highly decorated pilot who was often called on to perform important secret missions. He appeared to be the quintessential American hero and was drawn that way by H. G. Peter, with a strong jaw, muscular build, and handsome face.

However, the man was entirely inept. No matter the mission, he’d end up ambushed or captured and Wonder Woman would have to save him. When Steve was taken by Nazi gangsters, Wonder Woman raided their boat and knocked out the Nazis with a large anchor, rescuing the bound and helpless Steve. When the not-yet-reformed Baroness Paula von Gunther was about to shoot Steve at point-blank range, Wonder Woman’s lasso stopped her in her tracks. Whenever Wonder Woman was in trouble, Steve was no help. He showed up too late, was knocked out and woke up to find Wonder Woman had set herself free, or was captured as well so Wonder Woman had to free herself
and
Steve.

One of the few times Steve did anything helpful, stealing keys and freeing himself from his cage on the planet Eros, Wonder Woman took charge as soon as she was released. The panel showed Wonder Woman at the head of a large group of angry women, and the text read: “Tearing off door after door from the prisoners’ cells,
Wonder Woman
leads her army of imprisoned Eros women to freedom!” Steve just ran along behind. Wonder Woman was the undisputed star of the book, and Steve existed solely to show off her strength and skill.

He ably played the role of love-struck admirer as well. Steve often declared that “
Wonder Woman
is the most gorgeous
being
in the world!” Whenever Wonder Woman bounded off to another adventure, he was prone to call out, “
Wonder Woman
—my beautiful angel! Don’t leave me. Stay with me always!” Although flattered by Steve’s professions of love, Wonder Woman rejected his advances, as her mission was of paramount importance.

Wonder Woman was adamant in her rejection of Steve and wouldn’t even let him touch her. A panel description in
Sensation Comics
#13 read: “Steve, overjoyed at having the case solved and finding
Wonder Woman
alive, throws his arms about her and is repulsed violently!” The panel showed Wonder Woman shoving Steve to the floor while he says, “Oh, my beautiful angel, I adore you—oof—unf!” In another issue, Steve tried some smooth talking, saying, “Look, angel—this plane can fly by itself … why don’t you
let
it, and pay
me
some attention.” He was promptly rebuffed. Wonder Woman’s identity was, in short, completely independent of Steve. While Steve was madly in love with her, Wonder Woman seemed to treat Steve like she was his babysitter. Diana Prince, on the other hand, saw Steve very differently.

Wonder Woman’s secret alter ego, Diana Prince, was everything Wonder Woman was not. While Wonder Woman was strong, Diana was weak. While Wonder Woman was colorful and bold, Diana was a dull wallflower. They even looked completely different; Wonder Woman was flamboyant and agile, with long flowing hair, while Diana was reserved and bespectacled, with her hair tied up neatly in a bun. Diana’s relationship with Steve was entirely different too. She acted as Steve’s nurse after Wonder Woman returned him to America following his crash on Paradise Island, and when Steve left the hospital she cried, “Oh, Steve is going! I’ll never see him again! I can’t bear it!” and begged Steve, “Will—(sob) you—(sob)—let me be your secretary?” Diana couldn’t handle being apart from Steve and did whatever she had to do to be close to him.

Being in love with Wonder Woman, Steve wanted nothing to do with Diana. When she tried to warn Steve that he was about to be betrayed, he answered, “Ha! Ha! Diana the sleuth! You’d better go back to nursing—I know my own business!” not realizing that the secretary he treated so derisively was in fact the woman he loved.

Diana was ignored not only by Steve but by the rest of the world as well. Unlike her superhero alter ego, Diana was inept and hapless, much like a damsel in distress. During one of the rare times Diana actually tried to take a stand, she ended up bound in chains and about to drown before she transformed into Wonder Woman and escaped. Afterward, she lamented, “I’m almost jealous of myself as
Wonder Woman
—nothing I do as a normal woman, Diana Prince, ever impresses anybody—I have to become the sensational
Wonder
Woman
before any body notices me!” Diana was a far cry from her superpowered alter ego, and such a contrast suggests that Diana Prince was more than just a secret identity.

In a soliloquy in Quentin Tarantino’s
Kill Bill: Volume 2,
Bill discusses Superman and states:

Superman didn’t become Superman, Superman was born Superman. […] What Kent wears—the glasses, the business suit—that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. […] Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race.

The same can be said of Wonder Woman. Princess Diana of Paradise Island
was
Wonder Woman; it was a title and role she earned before entering man’s world. But Wonder Woman was
not
Diana Prince.
*
Diana Prince was simply a way for Wonder Woman to get inside knowledge on the war and to be close to her protectee, Steve.

Wonder Woman was the embodiment of strength, independence, and assertiveness, while Diana couldn’t accomplish anything and was hung up on a man who ignored her. Wonder Woman once stated that “[Diana] will have to go on mooning over Steve Trevor, while he goes on mooning over
Wonder Woman,
” essentially declaring that those two hapless characters could engage in typical gender roles but Wonder Woman wouldn’t be a part of such an inane system. Wonder Woman even described Steve as “the man Diana loves.” As her true self, she was fully detached from these romantic shenanigans. The personality of Diana Prince exemplified what an Amazon princess thought of American women. It was a harsh critique, and no character was the target of this analysis more than the Golden Age’s archetypical damsel in distress, Lois Lane.

Lois Lane

The modern Lois Lane is the
Daily Planet
’s top reporter, a brash and adventurous journalist who gets the stories no one else can. In the Golden Age, however, things weren’t going as well for Lois. Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, she appeared alongside Superman in his first comic,
Action Comics
#1, in June 1938. Lois Lane and Clark Kent were both reporters, but at the
Daily Star
instead of the
Daily Planet.
Clark was the top reporter while Lois was a minor writer, frequently out-scooped by Clark. Though unabashedly determined, her big plans rarely got her recognition at the
Daily Star.
Instead, she’d end up captured by a villain, trapped in a burning building, or caught in some kind of jam from which Superman would have to save her. And, of course, she adored Superman for it.