Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman’s Absolute Wonder Woman channels the spirit of Wonder Woman better than any mainline Wonder Woman book has in years. Thompson and Sherman build on the foundational themes which have supported the character’s best outings.
“Love is transformative.” Diana repeats this adage in the early issues of the series, and reminds readers that Wonder Woman is best read when feminist themes are central to her stories. Readers remember in 2011 when Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang infamously substituted the character’s “made from clay” origin with the more patriarchal “daughter of Zeus” story; it’s but one example of changes made to the character which make her feel thematically divided against herself. Changes like these threaten the very integrity of the character.
A less well-known example of this is the removal of references to the Greek myth of Pygmalion from Wonder Woman’s stories; a story thread which had allowed authors to pose and answer the question, “who is allowed to author womanhood and femininity, and therefore, who is allowed to decide its value.” This had been introduced by the character’s creators, William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter, and was noted for the reader in Wonder Woman #1. In many ways its use reflected Marston’s radical politics.
As time passed and the book moved away from his influence, the character was redefined by comic book legends, such as George Perez, who removed the reference entirely. In the aforementioned Absolute Wonder Woman, readers can see why this was a poor revision, which ultimately did damage to the character, by seeing the strength of story created when the metaphor is reintroduced.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
Feminism is Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman is an explicitly feminist character for many reasons, not least of which is because her creators intended for her to be so. Marston brought his radical politics to the book, with all of their first-wave feminist influences. Readers also might be familiar with his well-documented work in psychology and his oft-discussed fascination with BDSM and polyamory. He’s quoted as saying, “Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”
Peter, her other creator, also brought his own political experience to the book as well. Early in life, he was a political cartoonist supporting the suffragette movement. When he came to work on Wonder Woman, his style was inspired by the work of Lou Rogers, one of the most prominent female cartoonists of first-wave feminism. They’d worked together at a progressive, satirical magazine called Judge.
Gloria Steinem (a prominent second-wave feminist and co-founder of Ms. magazine) even chose Wonder Woman to serve as the first cover for her magazine 30 years after the creation of the character. She said, “Wonder Woman symbolizes many of the values of the women’s culture that Feminists are now trying to introduce into the mainstream.” The United Nations even briefly appointed Wonder Woman as an “Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls” in 2016.
While this feminism is clearly a part of the DNA of the character, creators have often found its presence difficult to maintain in their interpretations. They often choose to play with the feminism that they like and throw out the rest. For example, Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette’s Wonder Woman: Earth One reintroduces the utopian sci-fi and bondage of Marston’s run, but chooses to make their ultimate reveal that Diana’s powers derive from her being the genetic daughter of her mother’s rapist, Hercules.
Admittedly, Marston and Peter themselves would also often sacrifice the thematic clarity of their feminist beliefs for one reason or another. It’s clear in hindsight that their work is hindered by the context in which they were creating, such as displaying all of the same flaws that the feminism of the times has since been criticized for. Then, like many other books of their time, Wonder Woman had a sub-function as American propaganda. It would feature the goddesses Athena and Aphrodite directing the Amazons that “American liberty and freedom must be preserved,” cartoonishly saccharine depictions of the U.S. military and virulent racism.
The choice by Marston and Peter to portray their explicitly feminist hero as a nationalist is at best questionable, and at worst deeply problematic. It’s been said that the primary victims of war are women, not least of which due to the sexual violence perpetrated in war. U.S. service-members themselves, committed large amounts of sexual violence in WWII, even against their allies. Hugo-award winning author Ursula K. Le Guin described war’s function to be, “purely as masculine displacement activity,” which exports the effects of male sexual frustration.
Art from Wonder Woman: Earth One. Courtesy of DC Comics.
The Pygmalion Myth and Wonder Woman
Marston’s depiction of Wonder Woman’s origin is a subversion of the Greek myth of Pygmalion, featured in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is the story of a sculptor who, upon witnessing women engaging in sex work supposedly begins to hate, “the faults beyond measure which nature has given to women.” He then sculpts a statue of a woman he believes to be so perfect that he falls in love and molests it. Following this, he prays to the goddess of love Aphrodite, also ironically the goddess of sex work in some interpretations, and asks for a wife who looks just like his sculpture. Aphrodite thus brings the sculpture, Galatea, to life and blesses her marriage to Pygmalion. “Happily ever after,” indeed.
The narrative here is structured to communicate specific things about the value of womanhood and femininity. In it, even the goddess only finds them valuable when they are preceded by manhood and masculinity. It’s all but stating that women are only valuable when a man has deigned to validate their existence. Man has all authority over woman here. She must be scandalized when his morality calls for it, and yet she must come to life in beauty when his sexual appetite demands it. Male authority is the transformative power.
This is an echo of the politics which were being critiqued by birth control activists and suffragists in Marston’s formative years. All across the West women were being denied education about conception and how undesired pregnancies could be prevented because the patriarchal government at the time did not wish for women to have this power.
Pygmalion’s narrative has been adopted in more modern times into the Audrey Hepburn film My Fair Lady, in which a phonetics professor creates a socialite out of a flower-seller on a bet. Here, the focus is on how man authors the practice of what is acceptable from a woman in day to day life. Even more recently, readers might’ve seen the same story played out in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, though the Galatea figure is portrayed with much more agency here.
Marston subverts the Pygmalion author’s claim regarding how womanhood and femininity are authored and assigned value. He challenges the dynamics of power, the character of love and whose agency is valuable in our stories. In choosing to center Diana’s mother Hippolyta in the narrative, he challenged assertions about where power and change originate. Then, by setting the story outside of the reach of man’s world, he allows these characters to experience interiority in a way that only considers a woman’s world. There is no man here to author the daily practice of femininity.
Marston’s depiction of divine intervention and transformation is one which is responsive to maternal, and in some interpretations romantic love that’s in sharp contrast to responding to Pygmalion’s maleness and the assumed authority it gives him.
The question of what precedes womanhood and femininity is answered differently here. Rather than being the subject of the whims of masculine authority, women are depicted as being self-possessing and deriving their value from their experience being loved.
Wonder Woman is portrayed as having lived and grown up in this experience, absent the eyes and standards of patriarchy. Marston shows us this in Sensation Comics #1, when Diana first arrives in man’s world. Each person she passes vocalizes their thoughts about what she’s wearing, some in order to shame her and others to sexualize her. This seems to either perplex her or completely avoid her notice and it is clear she isn’t familiar with the way Western society’s beauty standards imply violence to those who don’t conform.
Only a Utopia for Now
Marston’s choice to use the Pygmalion myth in this way was guided by the genre he was inspired by, early 20th-century, feminist utopian literature, such as Inez Haynes Irwin’s Angel Island and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. This genre was meant to contrast the present, with an idealized future or potential future, thus world-building and progressive political expression often dominated the work over character development and plot. Similarly, Marston’s radical politics were taking the fore of his work, shaping his use of Greek myth throughout the series.
Marston and Peter’s choice to center this question of who is allowed to author femininity and womanhood seem essential to any interpretation of Wonder Woman. Readers will soon discover that this hasn’t always been the case, and we’ll subsequently discuss what the series loses because it hasn’t included this essential thematic question. That’ll be the focus of the next installment in this series, before we discuss the reintroduction of these themes and the Pygmalion myth in Absolute Wonder Woman.
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