Wonder Woman and Her Influence
By Michele Kennerly and Carly S. Woods
Arms akimbo, Wonder Woman stands with one well-greaved leg in the ancient world and one in ours. The imminent release of the first full-length, live-action Wonder Woman film is an occasion for classical reception work that joins dynamic efforts already underway on the classics and comics and the classics and modern fantasy. The decades of interpretive enthusiasm Wonder Woman has inspired, however, make it difficult to put a new spin on things.
So we stake our claim in the old: the story and history of Wonder Woman are suggestive of the ancient (yet enduring) habit of talking about influence, obedience, and persuasion through a gender-based idiom of power. Furthermore, the “persuasion dimension” of Wonder Woman continues to gain depth in popular and political culture, though it is not always recognized.
Before turning there, though, let’s review some vital background about the apparently ancient provenance and 20th-century emergence of Wonder Woman.
Wonder Woman’s story boasts many classical elements. She is an Amazonian princess of a matriarchal culture without men. Her given name is “Diana.” She is “as lovely as Aphrodite, as wise as Athena, with the Speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules” (All Star Comics #8); as in ancient prayer, the most powerful deity in her locality (Aphrodite) comes first, and, as indicated by their trailing position, the “masculine” traits (speed, strength) serve the “feminine” ones (loveliness, wisdom). Wonder Woman’s favorite and very serviceable exclamations include “Suffering Sappho!” and “Great Hera!” Trailers tantalizingly suggest that the film will dwell for a while on and in her native culture rather than disconnect her from it, unlike the disastrous NBC Wonder Woman pilot from 2011.
The Amazonian heritage Wonder Woman enjoys is the mythic kind. In The Amazons, her thorough study of ancient warrior women, Adrienne Mayor argues convincingly that the historical referent of “Amazons” was not a culture completely without men. Mayor claims that, within ancient Greek and Roman texts, “‘Amazons’ may have been a name for a people notorious for strong, free women” who were considered equal to men rather than dead-set against or subordinate to them. Though fascinated by this framework for sex relations, ancient Greeks and Romans never tried to imitate Amazonian sex-based egalitarianism. They did, however, tell stories about Amazon women and even procured Amazon dolls for their children (such practices continue in our time).
Another artifact brings an ancient Amazon woman and Wonder Woman into remarkable alignment: a fifth-century BCE pyxis adorned with a painting of a warring woman preparing to lasso a Greek man cowering under his shield. That the pyxis likely held jewelry, make-up, or perfume seems incongruous with the outer image of the Amazon in bellicose pursuit. But that’s the point: there are differences between the equipment for ensnaring men that different cultures make available to and permissible for women to use. Some women can use lassos, and the capture is not friendly; others can use “lassos,” and the capture is very friendly.
Of course, among Wonder Woman’s typical trappings is a lasso, originally called “The Magic Lasso of Aphrodite.” As we show below, in her earliest comics, whomever Wonder Woman lassoed had to obey her commands. This emblem and instrument of her power speaks to certain binding metaphors of verbal influence that were common to the ancient world and have proven difficult to wriggle out of; namely, metaphors of capture and domination.
Like those metaphors, Wonder Woman’s story is not limited to an ancient world. She leaves her Amazonian locale on the first possible occasion. Her emergence into the D.C. Comic universe dramatizes her divided identity and split loyalties. When Steve Trevor, an American fighter pilot battling the Nazis, crashes near Themyscira, she must decide whether to stay on the island of warrior women who train on horseback or enter the world of “man,” with its far more destructive weapons of warfare. (The film is set during World War I, and its most deadly villain seems to be a woman called “Doctor Poison.”)
Diana’s choice to join the war effort in 1941 coincided nearly exactly with the official entrance of the United States into the conflict: Wonder Woman’s first comic appearance fell in the same month as the bombs on Pearl Harbor. The growing involvement of the United States brought major cultural changes domestically, among them the movement of many women from spaces and work deemed appropriate for women to jobs and environments that had been the province of men. This movement of women into “the world of men” parallels that of Wonder Woman into “the world of man.”
That parallel accounts for the starting place of much reception work on Wonder Woman outside of Classics, which tends to fall on the circumstances of her launch by her creator, Dr. William Moulton Marston, and DC Comics in 1941. Here, it would be difficult to improve upon Jill Lepore’s definitive study. Lepore takes a deep dive into Marston’s private papers and fishes out evidence of the profound influence of suffrage activism and his unconventional relationships with two strong women on his development of Wonder Woman. Lepore orients our attention to a historical narrative beginning in the early twentieth century, decades before Wonder Woman appeared.
As historically informed as Lepore’s approach is, in the spirit of classicist Gregory A. Staley, who argues that Marston’s Wonder Woman transposed ancient history and mythology onto narratives of American identity, we must go yet further back. To inquire into Wonder Woman’s influence is to pursue both her lasso-based method of influencing others and how her greater cultural influence has registered in recent representations of fictive women endowed with what we call “superpowers of persuasion.” It is also to inquire into analogies made between Wonder Woman and real women in public life.
In the comic books, Diana receives her lasso at least twice. In the first offering, her mother, Queen Hippolyta, hands her the lasso, which contains Aphrodite’s power to gain submission from men and women alike. In the second offering, Aphrodite and Athena make a special delivery. Having prayed to them and shown herself to be “bound by love and wisdom,” she has earned the power to bind others. Wonder Woman’s lasso, then, is originally a lasso of obedience.
Outside of the ancient lariat-casting Amazon mentioned above, which Marston probably did not know about, lassos do not play a key role in ancient stories or histories. So where did the magic lasso come from? As Lepore details in her book, Marston’s use of bondage themes has ties to early feminist iconography, his theories of the psyche, and his development of a lie detector apparatus. Lepore does not write much about Wonder Woman’s lasso, referring to it exclusively as “the magic lasso; anyone she roped had to tell the truth.” Marston, however, had quite a bit to say about it, and he invoked “influence” rather than “the truth.”
Though he was never shy of publicity, Marston seems particularly at ease in an interview printed in the magazine Family Circle in 1942 and entitled “Our Women Are Our Future.” The interview was conducted by his lover, Olive Byrne (using her nom de plume Olive Richard), and appeared as part of a series of articles she published to make good press for his comics. When she ribs him that “we ordinary mortals” do not have “any such fantastic weapons such as bracelets that repel bullets or her magic lasso that compels whomever it binds to obey her commands,” Marston sharply disagrees:
Of course women have those two powers. Wonder Woman is actually a dramatized symbol of her sex. She’s true to life, true to the universal characteristics of women everywhere. Her magic lasso is merely a symbol of feminine charm, allure, oomph, attraction. Every woman uses that power on people of both sexes whom she wants to influence or control in any way. Instead of tossing a rope, the average woman tosses words, glances, gestures, laughter, and vivacious behavior. If her aim is accurate, she snares the attention of her would-be victim, man or woman, and proceeds to bind him or her with her charm.
Richard objects that “ordinary feminine charm is a link that is easily broken,” but Marston insists that a “woman’s charm is the one bond that can be made strong enough to hold a man against all logic, common sense, or counterattack. The fact that many women fail to make strong enough lassos for themselves doesn’t deprive the lasso material of its native magic. The only thing is, you have to use enough charm to overcome your captive’s resistance.” In Marston’s estimation, women are responsible for the strength of their lassos, which affords them some measure of agency. It is this overwhelming power to influence that he sees in certain women, amplifies in Wonder Woman, and attempts to activate in all women.
Seemingly unconvinced, Richard takes the conversation into geopolitics, claiming that Nazi “chains” seem inordinately stronger “than the bonds of personal charm.” Marston concedes a difference between persuasive charm and dominating force, but he points out that Hitler initially gained power by “stirring oratory and personal magnetism” — the magic lasso method stretched from interpersonal relations to mass communication — as did Mussolini, Churchill, and FDR. Many can be captivated by persuasion, but the trick is never to surrender independent judgment. Wonder Woman can be bound by the power of others, and she may want to be bound temporarily for some greater strategic purpose, but ultimately she has the power to break free from whatever contraption used to keep her down. Her bracelets, also from Aphrodite, are emblematic of her strange relationship with resistance and submission, since they repel bullets but also, when held together tightly, make her weak.
A gift from Aphrodite, Wonder Woman’s lasso makes persuasive capacity external and material rather than something internally sourced. In ancient Greek textual and material culture, and from nuptial vases to cultic spaces, Aphrodite was often accompanied by Peithō (Persuasion), also a goddess. In his Descriptions of Greece, the second-century CE historian Pausanias peered through dense mythic mist to report that when the hero Theseus united Attica, he established a shrine with two statues on the Acropolis to hold the union together: one of Aphrodite Pandēmos (all the people’s goddess of love) and the other of Peithō (1.22.3). A capacious love joined with persuasion made political unification possible.
Though peithō (persuasion) could be used to describe communication between two people, it was peithō scaled up to the magnitude of the polis that preoccupied ancient Greek writers. To theorize the art of speech directed from a single speaker to his (always his) fellow citizens in places of deliberation and judgment became the province of rhetoric. Peithō symbolized speech as a civilizing force, a distinctively human possession that bound us together in communities that resolved differences by means of language (e.g., Isocrates 3.6). It could also be said, however, that both Peithō and persuasive mortals commanded obedience — the verb peithō in the passive and middle voices means “obey” — by means of overpowering flash, charm, and power (e.g., Gorgias, Encomium of Helen 8–15). The “force” and “binds” of communicative connection take on a darker cast.
Some ancient writers, however, insisted on a difference between speech that affects others at the level of peithō and speech that affects others at the level of submission or sublimity (e.g., “Longinus” 15.9). Still, historically, persuasion cannot wholly shake the imagery of domination. In literal form, a rope runs from the body of Persuasion to the necks of creatures in early modern emblem books. Or maybe it’s a lasso.
Which brings us back to Wonder Woman.
Recent trailers of Wonder Woman contain teasing shots of the golden lasso. It is visible, vibrant, even, in the dust of battle, as she ropes German soldiers by the arms and legs. Will the lasso be a device of “persuasion” or merely of physical interference? A newer trailer shows Steve Trevor bound by a (the?) golden lasso, and he appears to be undergoing an interrogation led by Diana and Queen Hippolyta. Is he bound to obey or to tell the truth?
Since it debuted in a culture that forbade women from speaking in public, the aforementioned ancient Greek personification of persuasion in the form of a woman should give us pause. As Mary Beard observes (and as other classicists and rhetoricians have stressed), there is a very long tradition of men telling women to shut up. Women have been told routinely that their voices don’t belong, that their opinions are unwelcome, and that their acts of public persuasion are silly.
That doesn’t mean they listen, of course.
But women who speak or otherwise display their power in public do not have it easy. Even in 2017, femininity is often seen as incompatible with real power. If a woman is in a position of power, her power is often viewed as artificially or illicitly gained, through quotas or laws or seduction. Some think that those are forces that cannot be successfully resisted.
Once primed to view Wonder Woman as linked to old questions about persuasion, we can see that many women superheroes from the 2000s have a kinship with her. The common thread in the following inventory is that each character has the power to give commands that cannot be refused, while the common difference with Wonder Woman is that these characters gain their powers through accidents of genetics or neurodevelopment rather than through divine creation and gift-giving: Eden McCain in NBC’s Heroes (2006); Kira Hudson in Push (2009); Kayla Silverfox in Wolverine: Origins (2009); Nina Theroux in Syfy’s Alphas (2011–2012); Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and though we know Leia possesses the same (familial, perhaps?) flair with the Force, we never really see it on-screen and, sadly, are not likely to get that opportunity.
All of these characters must look into the eyes of or touch those they wish to verbally influence, which requires potentially dangerous proximity. These women have, as Wonder Woman does, white skin and dark hair. (Silver Fox is whitewashed in the aforementioned Wolverine film.) It’s as if deviation from this look would jeopardize the believability of a woman who wields words authoritatively. A potent persuader with, say, dark skin or blonde hair? Inconceivable.
Though the obedience-securing powers of Wonder Woman and the superheroes just listed resemble those of ancient persuasion/Persuasion in its/her irresistible form, they differ in important respects. Foremost is that their powers emerge in interpersonal encounters exclusively, meaning their influence is limited to one person at a time and their bodies are vulnerable to violence. (Kira Hudson can control up to twelve people at a time. She’d be a powerful force with juries.) Ultimately, these purportedly all-powerful persuaders offer a restricted vision of the possibilities of and for women who can influence through speech. That is a bind from which even Wonder Woman cannot escape.
Here, then, is the problem: the superpowers of persuasion possessed by these superheroes have no communal scale-up. The limits placed on their persuasive powers mean that they will never be Hitlers, but so too they will never be persuasive forces for good in mass politics, however much their daily interpersonal persuasions may serve a greater public ignorant or fearful of them.
On the matter of Wonder Woman’s influence, contemporary perspectives and ancient appraisals must be conjoined. After all, Marston, her creator, mixed ancient cultures to situate Wonder Woman within an abundantly female matrix that used names of the past to herald what he thought would or certainly should be our future. As a headline writer for The New York Times wrote to cap a column about a speech Marston had delivered the day before on November 9, 1937: “MARSTON ADVISES 3 L’S FOR SUCCESS / ‘Live, Love and Laugh’ Offered by Psychologist as Recipe for Required Happiness / PREDICTS U.S. MATRIARCHY / Thinks Bored Wives Will Start Within Next 100 Years to Take Over the Nation.” (Yes, it is tiered like that, as if its writer considered each line a punch-line.) Published four years before the appearance of Wonder Woman, the article explains that Marston saw the welfare of the United States as reliant upon the rise of “a sort of Amazonian matriarchy.” In this instance, an element of the ancient past became the future, or the future Marston thought was needed.
There are ironies to the first Wonder Woman film appearing, at long last, in 2017, the first year in which the United States could have been represented by the first woman to make it all the way to the presidential ballot. In January of 1972, Shirley Chisholm announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president, becoming the first woman to do so. A few months later, the “Wonder Woman for President” cover of the premiere issue of Ms. magazine appeared. Less well known than the iconic 1972 Ms. cover is this 1943 D.C. comic cover showing Wonder Woman campaigning for president … in the year 2943. At some moments prior to November 9, 2016, it seemed as though only the stipulated date for a woman president was far out. We hesitate to liken Hillary Clinton to Wonder Woman (though others have not), but the point still stands.
Months into 2017, even fans of Hillary Clinton and Wonder Woman may ask whether influential U.S. (and even international) institutions should still cling to white women who are representative of mainstream, early-wave feminisms. Can we not promote other representatives of power and peithō? Can we imagine Wonder Woman in other bodies?
When fans noticed the absence of women of color — especially Philippus, a prominent Black Amazonian general who guides Wonder Woman in the comics, and Nubia, Diana’s black twin — from early promotional material for the film, director Patty Jenkins promised a diverse cast. How can we ensure that these roles are prominent and meaningful? And how can diverse Wonder Women join in the fight for all that is good and just?”
Perhaps the most significant question prompted by Wonder Woman’s long overdue silver-screen debut is: what would it take for greater numbers of wise, loving, and persuasive women to come to the fore — on screens big and small, in campaigns local and national — and to fare better once they are there? We, women, wonder.
Michele Kennerly is an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University. She is the author of Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics and co-editor of Ancient Rhetorics & Digital Networks, both of which are forthcoming in 2018.
Carly S. Woods is an Assistant Professor of Communication and affiliate faculty in Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland. Her publications have appeared in venues such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Argumentation & Advocacy, and her book-length monograph is titled Debating Women: Gender and Social Change in Argument Cultures, 1835–1945.
The authors thank Eidolon’s Yung In Chae and Sarah Scullin for their editorial prowess.
