Essay: A Woman Of Valor.(Wonder Woman)

A Woman Of Valor

Strong, vigilant, resourceful, and submissive to no one -- the author's ideal woman first appeared to him in a comic book.

But at the age of nine I didn't get what that was all about. I still don't, come to think of it. At any rate, Wonder Woman had abandoned bondage and domination nearly a quarter of a century before, her magic golden lasso of compulsion the only surviving trace of those wild days. This lasso formed one third of Wonder Woman's essential tool kit, along with her bullet-scattering bracelets and her invisible airplane. What any of these had to do with Greek mythology, the Star-Spangled Banner, or one another, only the late Dr. William Moulton Marston, her creator, knew for sure. A lasso! An invisible airplane! Even her secret identity, Diana Prince, felt gratuitous, unlived -- she might have abandoned it at any time without cost to anyone, least of all herself. Rooted in mythology, Wonder Woman never generated any mythology of her own; she contradicted herself without struggling against or embodying those contradictions; she had, in other words, no story. Only a narrative -- only a woman with a narrative -- can truly engage the erotic imagination. Everyone else is just a pinup. 5. Supergirl, then. She was Superman's cousin, it may be recalled, Kara El, born and raised in Argo City on the planet Krypton. She was a blonde, well constructed (all superheroines must be well constructed). Always a tad on the perky side, to my way of thinking. She looked nothing like her older cousin; what she looked like, in fact, was the classic shiksa as envisioned by Jewish men of the day. She had all the classic shiksa accoutrements: a Supercat, a Superhorse. She hung out with the clean-cut, earnest teenagers of the future -- they came from all over the galaxy, and yet they were all goyim -- at the thirtieth-century headquarters of the Legion of Superheroes. She wore, one sensed, a formidable brassiere. But Supergirl had more soul than Wonder Woman. It was a sisterly, Laurie Partridge brand of soul: chipper, maybe, but tinged with parental loss. She had the tragic Superman streak, the central existential knowledge that her mighty powers derived from her greatest sorrow. At the same time, Supergirl constituted a betrayal of one of the key elements of the Superman myth -- that he was the sole survivor of a destroyed ...