Since I just finished my review of the new WONDER WOMAN film this week, this week’s mythcomic will be another selection frojm the
Golden Age WONDER WOMAN mythos created by Wulliam Moulton Marston.
Though I’ve analyzed other Marston stories here and here,
both stories display a tendency seen during the first
year-and-a-half of the feature’s existence: a lack of significant villains for
the hero to battle. Prior to the 1943 story “Battle for Womanhood,” the
Amazon’s only outstanding foes were the rather tedious spy-chief Paula Von
Gunther and the evil scientist Doctor Poison, who was both the heroine’s first
costumed enemy and her first transvestite opponent. There were also an
assortment of villains from exotic cultures, outer space, and of course from
the Olympian pantheon, but these evildoers tended to lack any strong
character-traits. Nowhere is this better seen than in the otherworldly
enemy who racked up the greatest number of bouts with the Amazon: the god Mars,
who incarnated all the bad aspects of the male gender. But though Mars caused
Wonder Woman a lot of trouble, he never became anything more than an abstract
evil. However, the war-god indirectly gave rise to the heroine’s first major
foe, Doctor Psycho, and this character opened the floodgates for one of the
Golden Age’s best rogues’ galleries.
“Battle for Womanhood” commences with Mars receiving a
report from a female slave (wearing leg-irons, no less). The report concerns
the growing prominence of women lending their efforts to the Allied conflict
with the Axis powers. Mars fears that women “will achieve a horrible
independence;” further, once women are no longer considered “the spoils of
war,” they will “grow stronger than men and put an end to war.” But because Wonder
Woman has bested the war-god and his underlings in past encounters, none of
them want to face her wrath again. One of the god’s underlings, “the Duke of
Deception,” solves the problem, for he’s made contact with a mortal who hates
women as much as Mars does. So the Duke—who looks like a short, wizened man in Greek armor—descends to Earth. Emulating the gods of Homer’s Iliad, who spoke
invisibly to the Greek warriors in the field, the Duke appears at the side of
the mortal cat's-paw, whispering in the man’s ear in order to egg him on—and
that’s the last readers see of Mars or his servants in the narrative.
The cat's-paw is none other than a brilliant but embittered
scientist, Doctor Psycho. The story implies that this is his real name, not an
assumed cognomen, but it’s also probably a mild self-parody on the part of
Marston, given that he held a PhD in psychology. Psycho—a short, ugly
man with an over-sized cranium—is seen receiving an honor at a medical college. His specialty is never disclosed, though his
research involves the use of radium. Psycho’s male classmates, mostly depicted
as square-jawed swains, mock the runty fellow for his ugliness, calling him
“pumpkin head.” Even Psycho’s own fiancée, a student named Marva, doesn’t want
him to “get mushy” with her because he’s so homely, though she claims to admire
his brilliant mind. Slightly later, Psycho even sees a college athlete, Ben
Bradley, putting the moves on Marva, and it’s plain to both Psycho and the
readers that her protests are weak at best. Psycho considers letting Marva out
of her engagement, but before he has the chance, that same night someone steals
radium from Psycho’s lab. He falls under immediate suspicion, and to make
matters worse, Marva testifies that she saw Psycho leave the lab immediately
after the robbery. Marva sincerely believes Psycho
committed the crime, though the captions establish that she's simply mistaken:
that the thief she saw was merely crouched down, not actually as short as
Psycho. The scientist spends several years in prison due to Marva’s testimony,
and when Psycho receives news that his former fiancée has married Ben Bradley,
he’s convinced that the two of them framed him for the theft. As soon as Psycho
gets out of prison, he captures Bradley and forces him to confess that he was the thief. Psycho gets his revenge by forcing Bradley to swallow a chunk of
radium, knowing that it will burn holes in the man’s stomach. (Perhaps it’s an
appropriate punishment, to attack the intestines of a specimen full of
testosterone-fueled masculinity.) However, Bradley tries, without success, to
save his miserable life by claiming that Marva masterminded the frame-up.
Psycho doesn’t want to kill Marva, though. Telling her that
“death is too good for you,” the villain hypnotizes Marva, so that she agrees
to marry him, and presumably no longer discourages him from “getting mushy.”
However, Psycho’s main focus is that of using her as his own cat's-paw, to
undermine the advancement of women generally. Though Psycho has studied the
occult sciences, he apparently has no talent for channeling the ectoplasmic
powers of the spirit world. However, he can tap such energies through a female
medium. In all successive appearances of the villain when scripted by Marston,
Psycho always needs a female to make his evil magic, so it may be that Marston
was thinking of something along the lines of the legendary sorcerer Simon
Magus, whose legend includes him traveling with a female companion who
possessed mediumistic talents.
Psycho’s principal schtick is that he can, as he later
tells Wonder Woman, “materialize a body and wear it like a cloak.” Thus he
embarks upon a scheme to undermine America’s faith in its female workforce,
which is presumably the goal that Mars’ agent inspired him to seek. He makes
the public announcement that he and his medium can conjure forth the spirit of
George Washington, the country’s founding father, to counsel the nation on its
future fate. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor are both on hand when “George
Washington” appears on a stage, though it’s really just an ectoplasmic shell
inhabited by Psycho and conjured forth by Marva. (In keeping with Marston’s
affection for bondage, Marva is both bound and blindfolded during the
experiment.) “Washington” voices the fears of a patriarchal culture, claiming
that “women will betray their country through weakness,” and predicting that
feminine carelessness will bring about the destruction of a major artillery
factory. Naturally, Psycho makes this prediction come true.
Wonder Woman tries twice to expose Psycho’s tricks,
without success, and it’s hard to say what would have been her next move, if
Psycho hadn’t chosen to enact a frame-up on three female secretaries at the
same army base where Trevor works. Though the frame-up works, and the
secretaries are jailed, Trevor takes it upon himself to investigate Psycho once
more. This time Psycho, instead of playing a waiting game, decides to render
Trevor unconscious. The villain then creates an ectoplasmic double of Trevor
and uses it to summon Wonder Woman via her much-used “mental radio” device. In
short order Psycho not captures the Amazon, he splits off her astral body from
her physical form, keeping the latter in a cage and chaining the astral form to
a wall with “bands of psycho-electric magnetism.” Psycho, though he debates
killing Trevor before deciding to use him, never says what he plans to do with
Wonder Woman. Maybe he thinks death’s also too good for her as well. Or maybe he’s content to double his bondage pleasure by causing her to be literally "beside herself."
For once Wonder Woman does absolutely nothing to win free.
Psycho is only foiled because he imprisons Steve Trevor instead of simply killing him. Because of this, Trevor is able to send his own mental message to
Wonder Woman’s sidekick girl-gang, the Holliday Girls. They show up on Psycho’s
doorstep, and Psycho tries to get rid of them by assuming another disguise:
that of a handsome Latino lab assistant. Possibly Psycho’s own buried desire
for female regard betrays him in this, for his handsome disguise causes the
girls to start pestering him for dates. (Indeed, it’s not entirely clear as to
whether they still remember the mission they’re on.) Because the villain
becomes distracted, he loses mental control of the devices imprisoning the
heroine, who rejoins her body and then frees both Trevor and Marva. Psycho is
captured, and Wonder Woman addresses Marva’s general wimpiness with an
empowering homily: “the better you can fight, the less you’ll have to.”
Marston was apparently intrigued enough with his new
villain that, in addition to giving him the first of the three stories in
WONDER WOMAN #5, the evildoer also appears in the third tale, retroactively
titled “Return of Dr. Psycho.” It’s a much simpler story, in which Psycho uses
an ectoplasmic double to escape his execution in prison and to fake his death.
The only interesting aspect of “Return” is the fact that the villain once again
needs a woman to create his psychic shells, though he’s forced to choose
someone other than Marva to achieve this task. This is nearly tantamount to
saying that only the gender that possesses a womb can also create things in the
psychic realm, which seems like a rather strange dictum for a male author to propound.
Dozens of academic papers have been written on the notion
that “narratives of masculinity” in fiction always have conceptual holes in
them that allegedly prove the impossibility of the whole narrative. By this
logic, it ought to be possible to find just as many holes in “narratives of
femininity,” if one wished to play such a one-upping game. I don’t doubt for a
moment that Marston means it seriously when he foresees women becoming a
beneficial force on society through legal and cultural emancipation. However, I
find it significant that in this story about a man seeking revenge on the
female sex because of perceived wrongs, the main heroine lacks her usual
competence, and even the females who come to her aid only are brought in at the
last minute, by the agency of another man. Moreover, while a lot of Marston’s
female victims are sympathetic despite being one-dimensional characters, Marva
is both one-dimensional and unsympathetic. Marston says nothing about her
motives for remaining engaged to a man she doesn’t love, but I speculate that
the motives could have gone beyond mere admiration for his mind, into the realm
of the fortune hunter. Surely Marston was familiar in his time with women who
went to college not for their betterment, but to marry men who might earn big
bank accounts in future. Even putting that aside as sheer speculation, Marva
also seems rather stupid in her conviction that Psycho committed the radium
theft, given that she didn’t even see his face. Since she does marry
Psycho’s rival later, one might argue that on some buried PSYCHO-logical level,
she wanted to get rid of an unattractive fiancée, even if her conscious mind
wanted to marry for money. By creating a male villain who sins only because
he’s been “sinned against” by a woman, Marston pokes a sizable hole in his own anti-male rhetoric, and draws a picture of feminine fallibility that no
empowering slogans can efface.
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