Wonder Woman: Bondage & Feminism Review

I’ve been asking for at least a few years now for someone to write a biographical study of William Marston, known as the man who created Wonder Woman. Not only did he launch one of the biggest comic book icons on the planet, but he also helped in the development of the original lie detector and he lived with both his wife and his mistress in a polyamorous relationship for years. I didn’t know much beyond that, but that strikes me as a person who must have led a very fascinating life.

Well, someone must have been listening because late October saw the release of Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman and January will see Noah Berlatsky’s Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948. While Lepore’s book is a straight history (primarily on the character, but with some information on Marston as well), Berlatsky’s delves more into who Marston was and what he was trying to do with Wonder Woman. For me, this is immensely more interesting.

Not long after I started reading Berlatsky’s book, I realized how truly unfamiliar I was with the character. I knew her primarily from The Super Friends cartoons and the Lynda Carter television show. Beyond that, I hadn’t read much more than reprints of her origin story from Sensation Comics #1. I had long heard claims of unsubtle sexual innuendo, excessive bondage scenes, and many of the other terrible things Fredric Wertham tried warning people about. But I’d also heard as many people dismiss such claims as garbage from critics who were trying to read too much into innocent children’s stories. Regardless of who was more accurate, I’d never really even looked at the books myself.

Berlatsky opens by acknowledging that many people are in that same place, and he smartly keeps that in mind throughout the entire book. All of his examples are explained in plenty of detail, with some comic page reprints to show the reader how much he’s not exaggerating. Using these examples, he walks through evidence of how Marston (and illustrator Harry Peter) were indeed promoting their ideals about feminism & bondage, pacificism & violence, and queerness & heterosexuality. That Wertham was indeed seeing what was intended to be seen in the book.

But what sets this book apart and raises it above just “Berlatsky’s interpretation of Marston’s work” is that he has brought in and references all of Marston’s other writings as well. He had one prose book of fiction—written almost a decade before Wonder Woman’s debut—plus a great number of psychology books and papers; he was an active and practicing psychologist, after all. So when some people might suggest that Marston may not have known about certain lesbian practices, or what-have-you, Berlatsky refutes that by pointing to (frequently) very specific instances of his other writing where he might go on at length about the subject. This isn’t a creator who we might have to guess or infer intent from only the story itself; Marston was often quite explicit in his non-comics writing and made no secret about what values he wanted to promote. But Berlatsky is really the first person, I believe, to really examine the totality of Martson’s work and not try to sweep any of it under the rug.

Berlatsky presents all of this in a fairly casual, straight-forward manner. His focus, obviously, is on the Marston/Peter work, but he does also reference a few other incarnations of Wonder Woman and how they largely contrast with what the original creators had intended. For any fans of a more contemporary version of the character, Berlatsky’s comparisons might come across as harsh, but I suspect most fans of the contemporary Wonder Woman have never read the source material either. Which, as Berlatsky points out, was not only unique for the time, but would be unique today if anyone were to fall back on those themes and ideas.

In the final pages of the book, Berlatsky states that one of his goals was simply to increase interest and awareness of the original Marston/Peter stories, and to try to get more people to read some of those works. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but I know I added the three Wonder Woman Chronicles books to my online shopping cart before I got through the first chapter! Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism was engaging and entertaining, and it definitely got me interested to go digging around in another corner of comics history that I hadn’t really paid attention to before.