Comics and Culture

Transcript of Gilman/Marston presentation, February 25 2009

7th April, 2009 - Posted by LK - 11 Comments

Transcript of Lauren Karp’s Gilman/Marston presentation and Q&A at the
Oregon State University 3rd Annual Graduate MA in English Symposium Panel
February 25, 2009

Evan Gottlieb: Okay, I want to welcome you all to the MA in English Symposium. And I want to thank the Department of English and especially Kerry Ahern for generously supplying the funds so that we can hold this and be in, uh, this elegant conference room.

[audience laughs]

Evan Gottlieb: So we have four speakers today. The first is Lauren Karp. Lauren is a second year MA in our program, Literature & Culture. She received her BA from Santa Clara University, where she majored in English with an emphasis in Shakespeare. At Oregon State, Lauren has made a point of including alternative literacies in her research—including movies, pulp novels, and comic books. She is currently writing her thesis, which is titled “Truth, Justice, and the American Way:  What Superman Teaches Us about the American Dream and Changing Values within the United States.” The paper she’s reading today is “Why You Blessed Wonder-Woman”— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Moulton Marston, and the Legacy of Herland.”

[applause]

Lauren Karp: Thank you. Okay. Well, yes, my paper concerns Herland, a novel written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—a utopian novel written in 1915 by a female author, and serialized in her own literary magazine, which was mostly aimed at women and never had a circulation of more than about a thousand copies.

The other side of this spectrum is the comic book Wonder Woman, which debuted in 1941, was written by a male psychologist, and it had a huge national and commercial audience made up almost entirely by young boys and adolescents.

When I first saw the connections, I thought that it seemed suitably ridiculous—surely I had spent too much time reading vintage comic books for my thesis (on the American Dream and how Superman comics reflect that dream). But as I looked closer, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was an odd similarity between the plots of the two works, and also a connection in both diction and purpose

So, as soon as I came to the conclusion that this was a mystery that I must look further into, I dove into newspaper archives, out-of-print books, biographies of Gilman, and vintage Wonder Woman comics. And I came to the conclusion that this connection wasn’t far-fetched at all, and it did in fact seem likely to me that Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston, was influenced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And not only that, but the closer I looked that there were stark differences—beyond the fact that one was a comic book and one was a novel—and that Marston actually went beyond, in some ways, Gilman’s novel and emerged with a far more radical feminist mythos, stance, and philosophy.

Here it is important to note that there is no formal documentation that William Moulton Marston ever read any of Gilman’s work or that he ever saw her lecture. But he certainly had the opportunity to do both.
Marston was an unusual comic book writer. In a time when most comics were written by men who “had grown up during the depression with limited access to higher learning,” Marston was a Harvard educated academic. DC Comics editor Jack Liebowitz once said in an interview, as if noting an inconsistency, that Marston “was a very well-educated person”

Now it is certainly true that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s literary audience was mostly made up of women, and specifically those who championed the same social and political causes. And while William Marston was notably a self-proclaimed feminist, he clearly does not quite fit into this category himself. But he was extremely close to two women who do.

Martson’s wife Elizabeth Holloway, was also a feminist and an academic; she studied law at Boston University while he studied at Harvard, passed the bar exam in 1918, and earned her MA degree in 1921. She had a strong educational and professional drive, and she was known for her stance on women’s need for more rights; among other issues, she loudly stated disgust that Harvard would not admit women to the main campus. (And she viewed the women’s campus at Harvard as “far beneath her.”)

Also close to Marston was a woman named Olive Bryne. In the late 1920s, Byrne entered into a life-long poly-amourous relationship with Marston and Halloway. Bryne worked at Harvard before become a staff writer for Family Circle magazine, where she wrote almost solely about women’s social and psychological issues. In a 1930s interview, Marston commented that Byrne was both keenly “inquisitive” and “intellectual”, and the two would often argue over political and literary works. Halloway and Bryne were both two strong, intelligent, political women with a willingness to break social rules—exactly the audience that Gilman’s work thrived on.

But there is also opportunity and possibility that Marston discovered Gilman’s work all on his own, perhaps even before he met Halloway or Byrne. From 1898 until just before World War II, Charlotte Perkins Gilman enjoyed substantial success as a lecturer, essayist, and critic-at-large and was known for spending years at a time “on the lecture circuit.” Marston started attending Harvard for his B.A. degree in 1911. Throughout the decade and well through the1920s, Marston worked in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, taught psychology at numerous east-coast universities (including Radcliffe, Tufts, Columbia, and NYU). So Marston’s interest and involvement in the world of academics, plus position of living in the East, gave him a unique opportunity to be aware of readings, lecture circuits, and new academic works. During Marston’s college years, Gilman lectured often in Boston and New York, making it entirely possible for him to have attended one if not several of Gilman’s appearances.

But even if Marston himself did not or could not attend Gilman’s talks in person, articles and partial transcripts of many of these lectures were published in newspapers such as The New York Tribune, the Boston Advertiser, the Boston Post and the New York Times. In one 1914 New York Times article depicting one of her February lectures, Gilman asserted that, “as a creature of sex, woman was superior to man,” which the Times reporter insists “provoked no word of protest” from the few men in the audience. At this same lecture, Gilman stressed the chasm between women’s ideal status and their actual status in modern society, saying: that “[Women] have not kept pace with the male of the human species… Civilize man can do thousands of things that the savage man could not, but can civilized woman do many more things than the savage woman?” (9). She encouraged the women of the modern age to assert themselves, saying: “Timidity is only another word for cowardice. We have every right to be as courageous as men, and we need to be”. These words, and especially that rallying final statement, parallel almost perfectly the speeches and moral messages that Wonder Woman would later give at the end of every one of Marston’s stories. Wonder Woman is often depicted rallying the female characters around her, urging them to stand up and be more powerful
And Gilman’s rhetoric and feminist message were not limited to her lectures—besides her magazine The Forerunner, she published her most popular articles and books during the time that Marston was in school or working at Harvard. With two such strong, feminist women in his life and Marston’s role in academia prospering during the exact same period that Gilman was both advocating for women in lecture and actively writing, it would seem almost more surprising if Marston did not have contact with Gilman’s ideas and the variety of her work than if he did.

However, even if there is a chance that Marston was not familiar with Gilman, the similarities in their philosophies, their literary messages, and their utopian narratives are still astounding. Both novels, or both works of fiction, begin with the same plot—an all female utopia is invaded by the presence of men, who enter their fortressed world via an airplane. After the utopian women learn of the terrors which exist in the man’s world, one of these women volunteers to leave her perfect world in order to be an ambassador to our broken one.

In Gilman’s Herland, these invading men are scientists—Vandyke, Jeff, and Terry—who set about looking for this utopia intentionally. When the men land, they are surprised to find women who are brave and unafraid and who run “as fast as wild antelopes”. The narrator of Herland, Vandyke says: “Never, anywhere before, had I seen women of precisely this quality. Fishwives and market women might show similar strength, but [those women would be] coarse and heavy. These were merely athletic—light and powerful” (24). The invading men are soon overpowered and drugged, but rather than waking to find themselves in a prison, they awake to see that they have been “stripped, washed, and put to bed like so many yearling babies” (27). After the men realize that they do not have to fear these anti-Victorian women, the rest of the story examines the exchange of knowledge between the men from “Ourland” and the women of “Herland.” The Herlanders offer an open system where knowledge is freely shared with the men. The women’s ultimate goal is to learn as much about what they call a “bi-sexual society” as possible.

Marston’s Wonder Woman also begins with men in planes, but this time they are United States Air Force pilots. One pilot—Steve Trevor—runs out of gas in his plane and crashes on the all female world of Themyscira, also known as “Paradise Island”. There he is pulled from the wreckage by two young warriors, identified as Amazons—one of whom is the story’s protagonist Diana. Diana “carr[ies] the full grown man as if he were a child”, puts him to bed and the Amazons care for him and treat his wounds—a scene strikingly similar to the mothering treatment of the men in Herland. Also similar, the Amazons of Marston’s world are shown as being powerful but light and Diana in particular is visualized in a panel as being able to outrun a deer. However, Themyscira is not the open-society that Herland appears to be; rather than engaging in the sharing of knowledge, Diana’a mother Hippolyta instructs the Amazonian women to “keep [the man’s] eyes covered so that, if he should awake, he will see nothing!”

The drive for knowledge and, in contrast, the lack of access to that knowledge is the first main divergence between Gilman’s world and Marston’s. While Vandyke, Jeff, and Terry actively seek out the knowledge about and existence of this female utopia, Trevor stumbles across it by sheer accident—essentially through his lack of knowledge. While the Herlanders offer information to their well-treated male captors, the Amazons wish to keep theirs a closed system and actively keep knowledge from this unwelcome male. However, in both cases it is clear that the female societies do have a wealth of knowledge to give. In the world of Herland, the women genetically engineer “entire species of plants and animals… drive flying cars and claim that their nation is industrially advanced” (Hudak 458). In Wonder Woman, Hippolyta states that “Amazons have been able to far surpass the inventions of the so-called man-made civilization” and it is revealed that they have advanced irrigation systems, medical healing rays, and planes that can seem invisible. This high technology is both a common trope in utopian stories and also a potential nod in both works to ancient Greek Amazonian stories, where the Amazon women often were depicted as having superior technology and weapons. But the difference is clear—while Gilman’s utopian women trust the men with their ways and knowledge, and expect to receive information in return—Marston’s women feel as if they must fight to keep their utopia and that the man is, by definition, untrustworthy and a threat to their way of life.

However, the most startling difference of all between the two tales is that of “gaze” and perspective. In an interesting inversion of sex, Gilman chooses to tell her story through the eyes of Vandyke Jennings, while Marston tells his through close-third person with a focus on Diana’s thoughts and perspective. In many ways, this is a troubling difference between the two texts. One of the main critiques of literature via feminist criticism is, to quote Craig Owen’s The Discourse of Others: that “the representational systems of the West admit only one vision—that of the constitutive male subject” (58). Through Vandyke’s perspective, the audience is forced to view the entire story and structure of Herland as “invariably position[ed]… as objects of the male gaze” (71). While at times Gilman appears to use Vandyke’s personal gender biases to perform a commentary for the reader, other perspectives go unchallenged. At one point in the novel, Vandyke describes the changing attitude of Jeff:

He had become so deeply convinced of the almost supernatural advantages of this country and people, that he took his medicine like a— I cannot say ‘like a man,’ but more as if he wasn’t one. Don’t misunderstand me for a moment. Dear old Jeff was no milksop or molly-coddle either. He was a strong, brave, efficient man, and an excellent fighter when fighting was necessary. (122)

It cannot go unnoticed that Vandyke still associates maleness with fighting, strength, bravery, and efficiency, even though he has previously commented on the Herlanders being both strong and efficient. However, because he is the medium through which we view the story, there is no opportunity for further investigation or interrogation of this concept. Van also spends most of the novel scrutinizing the women of Herland trying to pin down when they act like “boys” and when their behavior “were really that of girls” (88). Also problematic about Vandyke’s narration is that the entire novel is presented as his experience of Herland as an explorer and as a scientist. Thus, depictions of Herlanders are as specimens to be studied by an anthropologist. While we learn of the three men’s fears and hopes, the women are merely representations of Herland itself. Though the men in Herland are in a physically captured state and in a lower power position than the women, by Gilman making the choice to frame the tale from Vandyke’s male/scientist perspective, she alters the power of the story so that it is essentially the men who control the narrative.

One might assume that a similar male-gaze would appear in a comic book (a medium unapologetically targeted to a young male audience) and written by a male author. However, instead of asking the audience to identify with the American male, Steve Trevor, Marston places the tale entirely in the context of the Amazonian women and leads the reader through Diana’s thoughts and experiences—including her personal conflicts over her duty to her community and her fascination with the strange male. The reader is called to relate to and cheer for Diana, and to have nearly the same dismissal of Steve Trevor as a majority of the Amazon women—notably, Trevor only “in scene” in three of the twelve pages of Wonder Woman’s introduction story, even though he acts as our entry into the Amazon world and as a catalyst for the story to begin. Diana is in nearly every page.

Take, for example, this noticeable difference—both tales give detailed origin stories of the all-women utopias. In Herland, the tale is told entirely through Vandyke’s narration, supposedly how we was told it from his Herlandian tutor. Not only might the reader be inherently skeptical of Vandyke’s accuracy—given that the opening sentence of the novel explains that his account is written from memory and not documentation—but the result is that the female’s voice is still written over, palimpsest-like, by Vandyke’s male voice. In Wonder Woman, Marston frames the tale so that, instead of telling the origin through a male perspective or even through a genderless third person narrator, like most comic narration, Hippolyta shares the tale directly with Diana,and thus the reader. Instead of the story told by or to an outsider, Marston makes sure that the system directly connects Amazon to Amazon.
However, one notable difference between Marston’s plot narrative and Gilman’s—and one where Gilman appeals far more strongly to the feminine / feminist viewpoint—is that of motherhood. The women of Herland make Motherhood the highest social service— literally “a sacrament” and consider their strange evolution of single-sex pregnancy their greatest blessing from Maaia, their Goddess of Motherhood. Motherhood is essential to Gilman’s view of women and femininity. However, in Wonder Woman, Marston not only minimizes the role of motherhood, he completely cuts it out. The women of Paradise Island do not physically evolve to allow for single-sex pregnancy or births like in Gilman’s world, but instead stay in a constant state of eternal youth. While it is stated that Hippolyta is Diana’s mother, Marston’s stories later reveal that Diana was not born as a human at all, but instead was a clay doll of Hippolyta’s that the Goddess Aphrodite brought to life. While the relationship between feminism and motherhood has changed in different historical contexts, I do not believe it would be unfounded to say that by completely negating the physical aspect of motherhood, Marston strips Hippolyta and—as she is the only “mother” in this utopia—by proxy all of his female characters of an imperative aspect of what helps define “femaleness.”

But while Gilman and Marston chose to represent and structure their tales in different ways and both with different consequences, they both created their feminist utopias for the same reasoning: to send a message and hopefully change society.

Gilman is famous for saying that she believed it was a “poor thing to write, to talk, without a purpose.” Herland, in Gilman’s mind, was not only a utopia—with no war, advanced technology, strong and intelligent women, and a never ending and healthy food supply—but an attainable goal that America could grow into “as long as women [were] allowed to develop beyond their social imprisonment.” Gilman expresses this with the end of her novel, where Vandyke’s Herlandian wife Ellador—who he refers to as ‘you blessed Wonder Woman’— acts as an ambassador from Herland to Ourland and hopes to share Herland’s utopian ideals and “somehow translate them into action.”
Just as Gilman called her writing “with a purpose,” Marston referred to his work on Wonder Woman openly as “psychological propaganda.” Like Ellador, Diana becomes a “Wonder Woman” and travels to America in order to be an ambassador and to teach the world Amazonian values. The last pages of Marston’s comics often contained long speeches from Diana about love and respect for human rights.

Both of these works—one a novel and one a comic book—have a didactic purpose, a goal from their authors to shape the readers perspective of who women are and what they can do.

Gilman’s audience was mostly female when Herland was published in The Forerunner, and Vandyke’s seemingly scientific tale was meant to convince them that—as Gilman urged in her New York lecture in 1914—“women can be as courageous as men” and that they could do much good as leaders rather than as servants. With Marston’s younger, male audience, Diana’s story, strength, speeches, and patriotically colored costume were meant to convey a similar targeted message: sometimes women weren’t damsels in distress, they were heroes.

And perhaps it is this difference in audience—this decision of who the audience needed to be—that explains many of the differences between choices of Gilman and Marston. Who needs these messages about how much power women can have?

Gilman saw the trouble as women not realizing that they had power; throughout Herland, Vandyke and the other men marvel at how different their world’s women are from these strong, independent Herlandians. On the other hand, Martson’s Wonder Woman narrative constantly reveals a higher level of distrust for men and their desire to express power over women.

In an example in Herland, Gilman clearly condemns relationships where men have power over women, especially physical—after Terry attempts and fails to rape his new Herlandian wife, Alima, he is threatened with death and ultimately banished. But Gilman also clearly allows for an equal-power relationship, like that of Ellador and Vandyke. Marston is far more skeptical—in one comic, Diana tells Steve Trevor that she “can never love a man who’s [even slightly] stronger” than she is and that in their relationship, she must be “dominant.” Marston saw male power as the key barrier to women fulfilling their potential, and thus he hoped that sending such didactic a message to a generation of children—all wrapped up the guise of superhero—was the way to achieve this goal—the goal that, in the end, is almost identical between these two authors.

In an interview from 1941, Marston seems to channel the spirit of Gilman circa 1914: as a creature of sex, woman is superior to man—or as he put it, “Women have more emotional power than men, they have greater endurance… [hopefully] by the end of the war that traditional description ‘the weaker sex’ will be a joke-it will cease to have any meaning.”

[applause]

[panel presentations two through four occur here]

Sara Jameson: I’m sure that you all have great comments and questions for our presenters here. So, you can respond to them and offer up some thoughts for them.

Question 1: I have a question for Lauren. Um, so I haven’t read either of the texts so I may, well, reveal that shortly. But I was particularly interested in, it seemed to me, the ways that the Wonder Woman comics offer up a perspective that is in so many ways more empowering, but then on the other hand, the lack of motherhood seems so problematic. And I wondered if you had thought about that at all, about  things in that Marston’s comic could reconcile [inaudible] and still have a more feminist [inaudible] ?

Lauren Karp: This is actually in the original, longer version of my paper, yeah, that we had to severely whittle down. Painfully so.

[laughs]

And yes, less what I see in Marston’s work and more what I see as a problem in Gilman’s. I actually think that Gilman goes too far—that motherhood is so essential that without motherhood there is no womanhood. To the point where her—besides the fact that Vandyke narrated it as a scientist, her women become almost not full characters, but instead “mothers.” And that’s the end-all of their characters. With the exception, perhaps, of little bits you see of Ellador—the rest of them are basically just, um, symbols of motherhood and of femininity because of motherhood. And in that case, by removing motherhood, I think that Marston almost comes out on top, because the women are different and the women are full characters—as much, anyway, as you can have a full character in a comic book from the 1940s. But, you know, essentially there are more qualities to them than what you see in Herland. So, in that sense I think there are some positives in not having “motherhood.” You need some sort of answer to why a society of women can exist—in the case of Gilman being that women can procreate by themselves and in the case of Marston that they live forever. That choice was made, and I think that there are problems with both in some ways. But that’s how I reconcile the two.

Question 2: Do you have a reading of the invisible plane?

[laughs]

Lauren Karp: Do I have a reading for it? Um… I think that there was a lot of fantastic technology in these, well in 1940s comics in general but also in Wonder Woman specifically. I don’t have a reading specifically for the invisible plane any more than I have a reading for purple healing ray. I think that, just like the flying cars in Herland, they were examples of things that would appeal to the audiences to show that this is this great, technologically-forward utopian society. And it’s kind of neat.

[laughs]

[Questions 3 and 4 for Jeremy Jurgens]

Question 5 (Student question): Um, I don’t really have a question but I liked yours a lot—I think your name is Lauren? It was really good. I used to read all those old comics, I mean I’m not like a big nerd about them or anything, but yeah. And I, like, never would have thought about any of that. And I really liked Adam’s also. I thought I had, like, a big vocabulary until I heard you speak. So, yeah, great job.

Adam Drury: Thanks a lot.

Lauren Karp: And I thought I had a big vocabulary until I heard Adam speak as well, so [laughs] you’re not alone.

[Questions 6 and 7 for Adam Drury]

Question 8: Hi Lauren. I have read Herland and I found the narrative equally problematic. I haven’t read any of Wonder Woman—or any comics, really. [turns to student who asked Question 5] We’re sort of the opposite. But I have some assumptions about how comics work and how they look on the page and I was wondering if you thought that the women—even if they seemed overall more feminist in Wonder Woman—were limited or objectified because, I mean, they are literally on the page and put in boxes. In frames…

Lauren Karp: Hmm, I never really thought of it in exactly that way. But, interestingly enough, Marston played with the traditional comic book frames and margins too. Remember this is early comic printing history so most comics all have a similar, boxy look. But Martson had several pages where Diana is pictured in a full page with no borders, or surrounded by a curved circle rather than a traditional square or rectangle. For example, on the page where she is learning the story of the Amazons’ origin, she and her mother are drawn surrounded by text and not really any borders at all. I’m not sure that it was strictly intentional, but Marston did play with that aspect of the text as well, so in that case I suppose the characters are still less limited, literally, than most female characters—or characters in general—from other comics at the time.

[Question 9 for Ian Butcher]Sara Jameson: Well, we’re pretty much out of time. Thank you so much for coming to the symposium…

Symposium run-time: approx. 2 hrs, 10 minutes