THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN Jill Lepore

THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN
JILL LEPORE
Knopf, 2014, 410 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Wonder Woman can’t marry, according to Amazon law, but she doesn’t want to, either, especially if it would mean that she, the comic book superhero, disguised as a secretary, would be stuck in the kitchen cooking dinner for her would-be domesticator, Captain Steve Trevor, the US pilot she fell in love with after rescuing him from his plane crash on her woman-only, feminist island utopia.

As the Harvard history professor, Jill Lepore, writes, Wonder Woman, who became the most popular superhero in the 1940s after only Superman and Batman, had her origins in the struggle for women’s equality.

William Marston, a psychology professor, created Wonder Woman to, as he said, ‘combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement’ in fields ‘monopolised by men’.  First stirred by the women’s suffrage movement, Marston, better known for inventing the lie detector test, created a strong, politically-charged, feminist superhero for DC Comics.

Wherever women were given a raw deal by men, Wonder Woman would be there to right the injustice.  She led women’s rallies and boycotts against milk-pricing rackets and intervened with her magic lasso in a strike by female department store clerks, doubling their wages.  Despite her non-violent principles, Wonder Woman physically taught husbands who maltreated their wives a lesson by socking them on the jaw. 

Marston was also influenced by the free love philosophy of the feminists who all lived together with him under the one roof - his wife (Elizabeth Holloway), his younger mistress (Olive Byrne) and sometimes a third lover (Marjorie Huntley).  Holloway rejected domesticity to work as a book editor and Byrne, a child psychologist, raised all the household’s children.  For half of humanity, combining employment and motherhood was a two-woman job.

Unlike the mythical Amazon society of Ancient Greece which was the backstory to Wonder Woman, however, the Marston household was no matriarchy (his women brought in the real money, did the childcare and typed his books) and there were other contradictions in Marston’s feminist comic-book creation.

The long-legged, slender, pin-up-girl-quality Wonder Woman (and the former Miss America beauty pageant winner who starred in the 1960s TV series) reinforced the stereotype that, to achieve recognition or success, women had to conform to conventional male criteria of female beauty.  When Wonder Woman was used by Gloria Steinem to launch the corporate-funded, feminist magazine, Ms., in 1972, radical feminists derided the exercise for its failure to break from the importance placed on women’s physical appearance and for its middle class individualism in which only the few, well-resourced super-women can succeed.

Women as sexual objects also coloured the Wonder Woman comics.  In every episode, Wonder Woman is either “chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered or manacled” and, whilst it is true that this borrowed from earlier suffragist and Abolitionist iconography which featured chains as an allegorical representation of voteless women and slaves’ lack of liberty, there is, says Lepore, more to it than that – it is “feminism as fetish”.  Marston excused it as ‘harmless erotic fantasy’ but bondage fetishists got another message about dominance and women.

Wonder Woman was also kitted out, in what little clothing she wore, in patriotic red, white and blue because Marston saw America as the home of freedom and democracy and not just because there was a war on against fascism at the time.  There was little American freedom for Wonder Woman, however, when the White House pressured the comics industry into self-censorship in the 1950s.

Their moral code now outlawed anything under-dressed, ‘deviant’ (Wonder Woman’s latent lesbianism) or unconventional (any ‘love interest shall emphasise the value of the home and sanctity of marriage’, it declared).  The supplement on biographies of famous women which had been part of Wonder Woman’s early comic book days under Marston was now replaced by a series on weddings.  Wonder Woman continued on after Marston’s death in 1947 but she was no longer recognisable as a feminist fighter.

Although Lepore claims that Wonder Woman is the missing link between the ‘first wave’ feminism of the early suffrage campaigns  and the ‘second wave’ feminism of 1960s women’s liberation, Wonder Woman was a phenomenon and not a movement, and too ideologically conflicted, to bear such an historical crux.  Wonder Woman’s shortage of feminist clarity and political substance may explain why Lepore overpopulates her narrative history with auxiliary figures and events but her book remains a valuable addition to feminist scholarship.

THE MAN WHO LOVED DOGS, Leonardo Padura

THE MAN WHO LOVED DOGS
LEONARDO PADURA
Bitter Lemon Press, 2014, 576 pages, $27.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Leon Trotsky refused to let paranoia about his all-but-inevitable assassination cramp his political life in his Mexican refuge, even receiving Jacques Mornard, the suspicious Belgian businessman and partner of a trusted New York Trotskyist bearing his poorly-written political article in one hand and a mountaineer’s ice-pick concealed beneath his coat in the other.

In The Man Who Loved Dogs, the Cuban novelist, Leonardo Padura, artistically reconstructs Trotsky’s assassination by the Spanish Communist, Ramón Mercader, who infiltrated Trotsky’s compound in that disguise and committed the murder on one terrible August day in 1940.

Mercader, a heroic communist fighting Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War, had been tapped for darker deeds against the non-Communist left by the Stalin’s secret police.  Stalin, the ‘gravedigger of the revolution’ as Trotsky called him, feared his sole remaining Old Bolshevik rival who was the Marxist symbol of opposition to the “bureaucratic minority protecting its material interests” in Soviet Russia through brutal purges, farcical show trials and other “horrifying crimes against humanity, dignity and intelligence”.

After killing Trotsky, Mercader served twenty years in jail before returning to Moscow to a mixed reception as a Hero of the Soviet Union but also “one of the more annoying proofs of Stalinism” for a neo-Stalinist regime modernising its tools of repression.  A terminally-ill Mercader spent his last years in Cuba.

In Padura’s novel, Mercader, now remorsefully realising that he was the “puppet of a dark and miserable plan” based on cynical lies told by Stalin about Trotsky, feels compelled to tell his story which he does to Iván Cárdenas, a once-promising but now disgraced Cuban writer.  Cárdenas sits on the sensational story fearing “complications of all kinds” from writing about contraband history - in Cuba, there was “programmed ignorance” about Trotsky because of Cuba’s economic dependence on the Soviet Union.

With the downfall of Mercader’s Soviet world, however, Cárdenas picks up his pen again only to discover, against all his instincts, some compassion for Mercader as a victim of Stalin, summonsing Trotsky as witness to “the degree of perversion that Stalin’s influence had injected into the souls of men”, including once-idealistic communists who instead entered history as reviled murderers.

Mercader, however, may be just a grotesque extreme of an inevitable corruption of the socialist utopia, suggests Padura.  He has Trotsky, the iconic anti-Stalinist revolutionary, ruminate guiltily on how much responsibility he shares for Stalinist despotism, for the “excesses he himself had committed in order to defend the revolution” when, under desperate duress, Trotsky (and Lenin) forcefully ate away at democracy in the working class and the Bolshevik Party.

Are all great utopian dreams condemned to failure, ponders Cárdenas, with the authentic biographical ring of Padura himself.  Padura’s fictional alter-ego had, in his youth, cut sugarcane with “militant enthusiasm and invincible faith” in the Cuban revolution but after living through years of “sexual, religious, ideological and cultural intransigence”, and the material poverty of the post-Soviet, pre-Venezuelan 1990s, has now drifted into “skepticism and sadness”.

“My capacity to believe had been ruined forever”, laments Cárdenas, reflecting on “the great disenchantment” of failed communist dreams in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and elsewhere, all doomed by Stalin’s toxic legacy. 

Despite his loss of faith, however, Padura has not left Cuba where official cultural caution (The Man Who Loved Dogs was initially given only a limited distribution) is buffeted by the winds of political change.  Padura has recently won a national literary prize even as his detective novels, on which his international fame is based, continue to tackle government corruption and social inequality.

In his finely-wrought, if overly-long, novel, Padura’s political pessimism vies with his admiration for Trotsky, imperfect and capable of error but whose revolutionary spirit survived the assassin’s ice-pick and continues to challenge the jaded cynicism of the corrupted and disillusioned.