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The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times
Created in 1941 by the psychologist William Marston, Wonder Woman would go on to have one of the longest continuous runs of published comic book adventures in the history of the industry. More than 70 years after her debut, Wonder Woman remains a popular culture icon. Throughout the intervening years many comic book creators have had a hand in guiding her story, resulting in different interpretations of the Amazon Princess. In this collection of new essays, each examines a specific period or storyline from Wonder Woman comic books and analyzes that story in regard to contemporary issues in American society.
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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June 12, 2016
Draft of my review for SFRA Reviews:
There are many things to like about Darowski's Ages of Wonder Woman---it provides a serviceable overview of the various periods of Wonder Woman's publication history, from the early 1940's to DC Comics' recent rebook, "the New 52." Many of the essays are accessible and clearly written, and some are analytically and critically sophisticated in a way familiar to cultural studies scholars. There are also a few idiosyncratic approaches, such as Craig This's use of the foreign policy concept of "containment" to read Fredric Wertham's attack on Wonder Woman (and other superhero comics) in the 1950's, or Lori Maguire's reading of Wonder Woman in the context of the history of military technology. The unusual background of these contributions shows a remarkable and wonderful aspect of contemporary comics studies, a field that is still highly interdisciplinary, inclusive, and somewhat inchoate.
There is a dark side to the fact that comics studies is inchoate as a field, which is that engagement with and citations of the existing literature often leave much to be desired, and this book definitely exemplifies that problematic trend. Important work on superhero comics generally, and Wonder Woman in particular (which goes back at least forty years), goes unacknowledged throughout the volume. The essays by Finn, Bamberger, McClelland-Nugent, Johnson, and Pagoni Berns cite no works of comics studies research whatsoever, not to mention secondary sources on Wonder Woman. Les Daniels' (2004) authorized history of Wonder Woman is a common citation, as is Bradford Wright's Comic Book Nation (2001). Missing are some of the most important research on Marston and Wonder Woman, such as the work of Bunn (1997) and Rhodes (2000).
2014 was a banner year for research on Wonder Woman, so several of the most exciting new works on Wonder Woman were unavailable to the authors of Ages of Wonder Woman. These include two very different works that focus on Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, and his early stories---Jill Lepore's Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014) and Noah Berlatsky's Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics (2015). Lepore's work is a magnificent work of narrative history and archival detective work and narrative history (though it has some of the same problems vis a vis existing scholarship as the present volume). Berlatsky's is a theory-heavy close reading of the Marston/Peter comics. Another work, Tim Hanley's Wonder Woman Unbound (2014) provides a broader historical overview, though also necessarily gives prime attention to the Marston era.
My own scholarly interests in Wonder Woman are primarily on the Marston comics and their relationship to Marston's scientific and political agendas. Marston was a Harvard-trained experimental, forensic, and clinical psychologist as well as a radical (gynocentric/matriarchal) feminist, polyamorist, and bondage enthusiast. His scientific, political, and sexual interests form a coherent system of thought, which in turn became a platform for Marston's applied work and activism. Throughout the 1930s, Marston sought to publicize his message of psychological health through submission to feminine love-leadership in various pop culture media, including pulp romance fiction and film consulting, generally without much success. In the 1940s, Marston found his medium in the comic books, as the creative force behind the creation of Wonder Woman, which in turn incorporates many elements of his worldview and psychological-political message.
It is thus with great interest that I turned to the early essays in this volume. Unfortunately, these essays were generally a letdown. The best of the bunch is Finn's "Wonder Woman's Feminist Agenda," a close reading of Marston's comics, letters, popular writings, and main scientific monograph. Finn mostly gets Marston's views right, though she doesn't give a sense of the coherence and depth of Marston's views. The missing component, in my (biased) opinion is the discussion of Marston's psychological research and theories, which are given only brief treatment (though this is much better than the almost complete absence of Marston's psychology from the other essays). My one major quibble is with Finn's claim that "Wonder Woman adhered to the dominant standards of acceptable femininity"(16). While there is much that is problematic in Marston's biological essentialism and portrayal of masculinity and femininity, Marston makes it crystal clear that he is reconstructing gender norms, replacing statistical or socially-dominant standards of "normalcy" with standards grounded in psychological psycho-emotional health. Though Marston clearly endorses some elements of traditional femininity as virtuous, he rejects others, for principled if strange reasons.
Other treatments of Marston and his Wonder Woman comics are much more disappointing. Knaff's inattention to what Marston was trying to do leads to a very odd interpretation, in which Wonder Woman is generally "managed" by men and objectified by Steve Trevor. Knaff picks a rare case where Trevor rescues Wonder Woman, rather than vice versa, to suggest that Wonder Woman often succumbs to a damsel-in-distress trope, whereas familiar readers will know that Marston's Wonder Woman often flips the script on this trope. In This's essay on Wertham and Wonder Woman, Marston's focus on feminine superiority comes across as quirky and unmotivated, unconnected to any larger set of ideas. An unfortunate missed connection (explored in depth by Rhodes (1997)) for This's essay is the contrast between Marston's and Wertham's psychological views (Wertham was a Freudian psychiatrist).
Mandaville's essay on Gail Simone's run on Wonder Woman (2008-2010) has some similar issues. While Mandaville's assertion that Simone was Wonder Woman's "first regular, ongoing female writer"(205) is technically correct, this gives short shrift to the role played by women during Marston's creative direction of Wonder Woman, especially by Joye Hummel Murchison, who scripted many of the comics under Marston's direction. (Murchison was uncredited, but so was Marston; like many early comics, Wonder Woman appeared under a pen name: "Charles Moulton.") Even worse, Mandaville incorrectly claims that Wonder Woman was "originally portrayed primarily through her relationship to a man (Steve Trevor)" whereas "Simone centers women's relationships with each other"(205-6), erasing the Holliday College girls and the Amazons from Marston's run. This mistaken and insultingly reductive take on early Wonder Woman sours an otherwise valuable discussion of Simone's contribution.
It is difficult to do justice to an edited collection like this, with 19 essays and an introduction, in a brief book review. I have focused on some concerns that are particularly close to my own interests as a Wonder Woman scholar and fan. Overall, this volume can provide much value to a general audience and to certain students and scholars without much background on Wonder Woman or the field of comics studies, especially those interested in the history of pop culture and Wonder Woman's place in it. I hope, one day, to see a volume of this sort that aims at a higher level of scholarly rigor.
References
Berlatsky, Noah. Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Bunn, Geoffrey C. “The lie detector, Wonder Woman and liberty: The life and work of William Moulton Marston.” History of the Human Sciences 10 (1): 91, 1997.
Daniels, Les. Wonder Woman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004.
Hanley, Tim. Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014.
Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Rhodes, Molly. “Doctoring culture : literary intellectuals, psychology and mass culture in the twentieth-century United States.” La Jolla: University of California, San Diego, 1997.
———. “Wonder Woman and her disciplinary powers: The queer intersection of scientific authority and mass culture.” In Doing Science + Culture, ed. Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek, 95–118. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic book nation: The transformation of youth culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
There are many things to like about Darowski's Ages of Wonder Woman---it provides a serviceable overview of the various periods of Wonder Woman's publication history, from the early 1940's to DC Comics' recent rebook, "the New 52." Many of the essays are accessible and clearly written, and some are analytically and critically sophisticated in a way familiar to cultural studies scholars. There are also a few idiosyncratic approaches, such as Craig This's use of the foreign policy concept of "containment" to read Fredric Wertham's attack on Wonder Woman (and other superhero comics) in the 1950's, or Lori Maguire's reading of Wonder Woman in the context of the history of military technology. The unusual background of these contributions shows a remarkable and wonderful aspect of contemporary comics studies, a field that is still highly interdisciplinary, inclusive, and somewhat inchoate.
There is a dark side to the fact that comics studies is inchoate as a field, which is that engagement with and citations of the existing literature often leave much to be desired, and this book definitely exemplifies that problematic trend. Important work on superhero comics generally, and Wonder Woman in particular (which goes back at least forty years), goes unacknowledged throughout the volume. The essays by Finn, Bamberger, McClelland-Nugent, Johnson, and Pagoni Berns cite no works of comics studies research whatsoever, not to mention secondary sources on Wonder Woman. Les Daniels' (2004) authorized history of Wonder Woman is a common citation, as is Bradford Wright's Comic Book Nation (2001). Missing are some of the most important research on Marston and Wonder Woman, such as the work of Bunn (1997) and Rhodes (2000).
2014 was a banner year for research on Wonder Woman, so several of the most exciting new works on Wonder Woman were unavailable to the authors of Ages of Wonder Woman. These include two very different works that focus on Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, and his early stories---Jill Lepore's Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014) and Noah Berlatsky's Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics (2015). Lepore's work is a magnificent work of narrative history and archival detective work and narrative history (though it has some of the same problems vis a vis existing scholarship as the present volume). Berlatsky's is a theory-heavy close reading of the Marston/Peter comics. Another work, Tim Hanley's Wonder Woman Unbound (2014) provides a broader historical overview, though also necessarily gives prime attention to the Marston era.
My own scholarly interests in Wonder Woman are primarily on the Marston comics and their relationship to Marston's scientific and political agendas. Marston was a Harvard-trained experimental, forensic, and clinical psychologist as well as a radical (gynocentric/matriarchal) feminist, polyamorist, and bondage enthusiast. His scientific, political, and sexual interests form a coherent system of thought, which in turn became a platform for Marston's applied work and activism. Throughout the 1930s, Marston sought to publicize his message of psychological health through submission to feminine love-leadership in various pop culture media, including pulp romance fiction and film consulting, generally without much success. In the 1940s, Marston found his medium in the comic books, as the creative force behind the creation of Wonder Woman, which in turn incorporates many elements of his worldview and psychological-political message.
It is thus with great interest that I turned to the early essays in this volume. Unfortunately, these essays were generally a letdown. The best of the bunch is Finn's "Wonder Woman's Feminist Agenda," a close reading of Marston's comics, letters, popular writings, and main scientific monograph. Finn mostly gets Marston's views right, though she doesn't give a sense of the coherence and depth of Marston's views. The missing component, in my (biased) opinion is the discussion of Marston's psychological research and theories, which are given only brief treatment (though this is much better than the almost complete absence of Marston's psychology from the other essays). My one major quibble is with Finn's claim that "Wonder Woman adhered to the dominant standards of acceptable femininity"(16). While there is much that is problematic in Marston's biological essentialism and portrayal of masculinity and femininity, Marston makes it crystal clear that he is reconstructing gender norms, replacing statistical or socially-dominant standards of "normalcy" with standards grounded in psychological psycho-emotional health. Though Marston clearly endorses some elements of traditional femininity as virtuous, he rejects others, for principled if strange reasons.
Other treatments of Marston and his Wonder Woman comics are much more disappointing. Knaff's inattention to what Marston was trying to do leads to a very odd interpretation, in which Wonder Woman is generally "managed" by men and objectified by Steve Trevor. Knaff picks a rare case where Trevor rescues Wonder Woman, rather than vice versa, to suggest that Wonder Woman often succumbs to a damsel-in-distress trope, whereas familiar readers will know that Marston's Wonder Woman often flips the script on this trope. In This's essay on Wertham and Wonder Woman, Marston's focus on feminine superiority comes across as quirky and unmotivated, unconnected to any larger set of ideas. An unfortunate missed connection (explored in depth by Rhodes (1997)) for This's essay is the contrast between Marston's and Wertham's psychological views (Wertham was a Freudian psychiatrist).
Mandaville's essay on Gail Simone's run on Wonder Woman (2008-2010) has some similar issues. While Mandaville's assertion that Simone was Wonder Woman's "first regular, ongoing female writer"(205) is technically correct, this gives short shrift to the role played by women during Marston's creative direction of Wonder Woman, especially by Joye Hummel Murchison, who scripted many of the comics under Marston's direction. (Murchison was uncredited, but so was Marston; like many early comics, Wonder Woman appeared under a pen name: "Charles Moulton.") Even worse, Mandaville incorrectly claims that Wonder Woman was "originally portrayed primarily through her relationship to a man (Steve Trevor)" whereas "Simone centers women's relationships with each other"(205-6), erasing the Holliday College girls and the Amazons from Marston's run. This mistaken and insultingly reductive take on early Wonder Woman sours an otherwise valuable discussion of Simone's contribution.
It is difficult to do justice to an edited collection like this, with 19 essays and an introduction, in a brief book review. I have focused on some concerns that are particularly close to my own interests as a Wonder Woman scholar and fan. Overall, this volume can provide much value to a general audience and to certain students and scholars without much background on Wonder Woman or the field of comics studies, especially those interested in the history of pop culture and Wonder Woman's place in it. I hope, one day, to see a volume of this sort that aims at a higher level of scholarly rigor.
References
Berlatsky, Noah. Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Bunn, Geoffrey C. “The lie detector, Wonder Woman and liberty: The life and work of William Moulton Marston.” History of the Human Sciences 10 (1): 91, 1997.
Daniels, Les. Wonder Woman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004.
Hanley, Tim. Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014.
Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Rhodes, Molly. “Doctoring culture : literary intellectuals, psychology and mass culture in the twentieth-century United States.” La Jolla: University of California, San Diego, 1997.
———. “Wonder Woman and her disciplinary powers: The queer intersection of scientific authority and mass culture.” In Doing Science + Culture, ed. Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek, 95–118. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic book nation: The transformation of youth culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
July 28, 2019
This was brilliant! In perhaps the highest praise I can offer an academic text, it was a well-researched piece of scholarship but it never sacrificed readability or accessibility. I feel I have a far firmer grasp of both Wonder Woman's history as a character and her place in popular culture after reading this. And that's exactly what I hoped for when I picked this up! The essays in this volume explore Diana's history and cultural impact/importance as well as offering close readings of many key storylines and deconstructing their layers of meaning too. It includes essays from her debut up to (and including) a look at DC's "New 52" reboot.
My only complaint (and the only thing keeping this brilliant collection from a five star rating) is FIVE of the volume's twenty essays (including the introduction) focus exclusively on the "New Wonder Woman." This reinvention - running from 1968 to 1974 - is not one of the character's brighter moments as it sees her place in the comic canon awkwardly fumbled by well-intentioned authors who, I'd presume, just didn't understand feminism and the Women's Movement. It's a deep shame a quarter of this volume was giving over to examining the same low point in Wonder Woman's 70+ year career. If they wanted to focus so tightly on one era, why this one? Why not devote multiple detailed essays to her creator William Marston Moulton and his stories? Or Diana's iconic reinvention with George Perez? Or the first time in her entire history she was regularly written by a female author, Gail Simone? Marston, Perez, or Simone's runs would all have been a significantly better choice for such an expansive spotlight than the "New Wonder Woman."
That gripe aside, this volume was excellent - everything I hoped it would be an more. It's a text I'm sure I'll return to and it's one I'd highly recommend for anyone looking to explore Wonder Woman's history and significance with depth and insight.
My only complaint (and the only thing keeping this brilliant collection from a five star rating) is FIVE of the volume's twenty essays (including the introduction) focus exclusively on the "New Wonder Woman." This reinvention - running from 1968 to 1974 - is not one of the character's brighter moments as it sees her place in the comic canon awkwardly fumbled by well-intentioned authors who, I'd presume, just didn't understand feminism and the Women's Movement. It's a deep shame a quarter of this volume was giving over to examining the same low point in Wonder Woman's 70+ year career. If they wanted to focus so tightly on one era, why this one? Why not devote multiple detailed essays to her creator William Marston Moulton and his stories? Or Diana's iconic reinvention with George Perez? Or the first time in her entire history she was regularly written by a female author, Gail Simone? Marston, Perez, or Simone's runs would all have been a significantly better choice for such an expansive spotlight than the "New Wonder Woman."
That gripe aside, this volume was excellent - everything I hoped it would be an more. It's a text I'm sure I'll return to and it's one I'd highly recommend for anyone looking to explore Wonder Woman's history and significance with depth and insight.
January 9, 2016
Being a big fan of Wonder Woman, I was really interested to read this collection of essays, which examines the various incarnations of Wondy in relation to the broader cultural and political atmosphere during the time of writing.
Overall I enjoyed it and found it a worthwhile read, but it was certainly a mixed bag in terms of quality. I ripped through the essays covering the pre-Crisis period, from Wonder Woman's original conception by the colourful William Moulton Marston, through the sanitised Wonder Family of Kanigher and Denny O'Neil's problematic new-look Diana Prince. I'd known a little about these earlier days of Wonder Woman, but not a lot, and I found it fascinating to delve back into the character's history and the cultural contexts that shaped it.
But when I reached the essays on the post-Crisis era - the era of Wonder Woman I'm familiar with - I found them... well, for the most part, kind of disappointing. Heavy on retelling and light on the meaty analysis I was looking for. I had a hard time motivating myself to get through the last couple of chapters.
A large part of the problem is in the editing, which is unfortunately lacking. The periodic grammatical errors, misspelled character names and clumsy wording are all somewhat irritating, but more glaring is the need for tighter structural editing. Certain writers are allowed to get away with waffling on for pages, reiterating the same point multiple times without actually developing their argument, and as a result you get a number of essays in which writers raise an interesting issue but fail to adequately analyse it. There is a lot of repetition and a lot of very simplistic observations that require more rigorous interrogation.
There were some interesting essays in there, and I certainly learned a lot about pre-Crisis Wondy that I hadn't known before, but I'm disappointed by the lack of really meaty analysis.
Overall I enjoyed it and found it a worthwhile read, but it was certainly a mixed bag in terms of quality. I ripped through the essays covering the pre-Crisis period, from Wonder Woman's original conception by the colourful William Moulton Marston, through the sanitised Wonder Family of Kanigher and Denny O'Neil's problematic new-look Diana Prince. I'd known a little about these earlier days of Wonder Woman, but not a lot, and I found it fascinating to delve back into the character's history and the cultural contexts that shaped it.
But when I reached the essays on the post-Crisis era - the era of Wonder Woman I'm familiar with - I found them... well, for the most part, kind of disappointing. Heavy on retelling and light on the meaty analysis I was looking for. I had a hard time motivating myself to get through the last couple of chapters.
A large part of the problem is in the editing, which is unfortunately lacking. The periodic grammatical errors, misspelled character names and clumsy wording are all somewhat irritating, but more glaring is the need for tighter structural editing. Certain writers are allowed to get away with waffling on for pages, reiterating the same point multiple times without actually developing their argument, and as a result you get a number of essays in which writers raise an interesting issue but fail to adequately analyse it. There is a lot of repetition and a lot of very simplistic observations that require more rigorous interrogation.
There were some interesting essays in there, and I certainly learned a lot about pre-Crisis Wondy that I hadn't known before, but I'm disappointed by the lack of really meaty analysis.
August 7, 2015
A couple insightful observations. Mostly a little shallow.
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