Wonder Woman Unbound (11 page)

A brank, also known as a scold’s bridle, was an iron mask that resembled a Hannibal Lecter-style muzzle. The goal was to cover the mouth, not the whole head. Inside the mask was a long bridle bit that went in the mouth so that the wearer’s voice was muffled. Sometimes this bit had spikes on the bottom, to discourage any attempt at talking. Basically, it was a torture device, and it was used mainly on women to silence them.

In certain areas of Europe from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, if a woman was suspected of being a witch, wearing the brank was one of the punishments she might receive. It was also used on wives who were gossips or nagged or talked back to their husbands. If a wife was considered impertinent, her husband could drag her to the local judge where she’d be sentenced to wear the brank. Usually a chain and a bell were attached and she would be paraded through the streets where people could throw things at her and beat her. It was a degrading and humiliating punishment.

An interpretation of the brank, neck collar, leg manacles, chains, and interwoven lasso on a female form. KATE LETH

However, the brank in
Wonder Woman
was slightly different. It was a leather mask that covered the entire head and was unique to St. Lazare’s prison, an actual place. Formerly a hospital, St. Lazare’s became a prison during the French Revolution, then exclusively a women’s prison in 1896 that housed mainly murderers and prostitutes before it was closed down in 1935. The leather brank was used on dangerous female prisoners when they had visitors. The mask prevented the guest from transferring notes, poisons, or small metal files to the prisoner via a kiss. The brank was used at St. Lazare’s as late as the 1920s. Interestingly, one of the prison’s most famous inmates during the French Revolution was the Marquis de Sade, the libertine torture enthusiast from whom we get the term “sadism.”

Marston made a very specific, and very accurate, reference with his use of the brank. The specificity alone is peculiar enough, suggesting he might have been more into bondage then he let on publicly. How did Marston know about St. Lazare’s prison and its unique use of the brank? There’s an interesting lead.

In the early twentieth century, newspapers regularly bought ready-made articles from large syndicates to fill up their page counts. The International Feature Service included a Europe-based writer named Carl De Vidal Hunt, who wrote a six-part series entitled “As the Fabulous French Women’s Prison Falls After 14 Years, Comes the First Look-in on Its Million Secrets,” a thorough history of St. Lazare’s prison published in American newspapers in 1932. One of the article’s most shocking revelations was the prison’s use of the leather brank. We can’t know if Marston ever read this series, but there aren’t many other references to St. Lazare’s and the brank elsewhere. Also, two of the six parts of the article were dedicated to white slavery, in which naïve girls were duped and forced to do all sorts of unpleasant work for cruel men, much like every Marston Wonder Woman story written.

If Marston didn’t read the article, he still knew a lot about the prison and the brank. But if he did, it affected him so strongly that he remembered it for a decade. Either way, he ultimately referenced a bleak prison known for holding the father of sadism and put his heroine in a ridiculously degrading device in a comic book for children.

This doesn’t sound like a man who was just using bondage as a metaphor. This sounds like a man who knew his bondage very well, a connoisseur who sporadically slipped in meticulous details about his fetish. There were curiously precise things like the brank, but there were creative things as well, like embedding Wonder Woman in a three-inch-thick statue of herself or freezing her in a block of ice or turning her into a being of pure color and shackling her inside a tube of boiling water meant to melt her like a crayon. The bondage was elaborate and detailed, and knowing that Marston thought it was acceptable to be sexually aroused by sadistically bound women casts his comics in a new light.

Yet Wonder Woman escaped. Every single time. As much as we can call Marston a bondage fetishist, that Wonder Woman freed herself from every predicament redeems him on some level. Consider the brank: historically it was meant to silence women, to render them helpless. Both the scold’s bridle and the St. Lazare’s leather mask rendered a woman’s mouth ineffective. So what was the first thing Wonder Woman did when she was thrown in the tank and realized she was trapped in her lasso? She bit through the mouth of the brank, ripping it apart. She then used her teeth to undo the lasso, smashed her other bonds, and escaped. Wonder Woman literally tore apart the source of the brank’s power, straight away.

Marston’s bondage fixation was fetishistic, even sometimes sadistic. Wonder Woman escaping these bondage scenarios was undoubtedly feminist, empowering, and redemptive. It seems that Marston created, and was himself, quite a paradox.

The Interconnectedness of All Things

When scholars and writers talk about the bondage in
Wonder Woman,
they usually do one of two things. They either call Marston a quack or a pervert and dismiss everything he wrote entirely, or they pretend that the bondage is inconsequential and focus on his progressive, feminist theories.

Both the feminist and fetishist aspects of Wonder Woman came from the same place: Marston’s focus on submission, which surfaced in everything he wrote. On the one hand, he believed that women were the superior sex and would soon rule the world, leading him to create a strong female character who could defeat any foe and escape any predicament. On the other hand, the way Marston depicted submission led down a crooked road that resulted in the sadistic, sexual objectification of his heroine. Complicated and contradictory, the two sides cannot be separated.

Dismissing the bondage imagery to focus on the positive, feminist aspects of Wonder Woman means that one would have to dismiss the theory of submission that’s at the root of bondage. By cutting away those roots, you lose the foundation of Wonder Woman’s feminism as well. To state that this fetishism invalidated Wonder Woman’s feminism, one would have to ignore the undeniably unique and progressive elements of the character. Both approaches are wrong; Wonder Woman was feminist
and
fetishist.

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The Golden Age Wonder Woman would certainly have a thing or two to say to Bella Swan about that vampire fellow and her complete and total inability to do anything for herself.

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For an article about how women should take over the world, Byrne went out of her way to make Marston sound big and powerful. She referred to him as “the mammoth,” “the big man,” “the psychological giant,” and a wise “oracle” who responded with “rumbling whoops of laughter.”

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Seabrook was an author who was particularly interested in Satanism and voodoo, sadistic bondage, and cannibalism, and participated in all of these activities. He was also an alcoholic and a drug addict. The sergeant called Seabrook his “idol.”

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At the time, in many countries it was illegal for nonmedical professionals to purchase or sometimes even read medical texts about sex, so translating these scientific ideas into more practical marriage manuals was how this new approach to sex was disseminated.

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Usually when people talk about sex, it is about the man penetrating the woman. Marston totally flipped that around, seeing sex as a woman literally capturing a man’s penis with her vagina. To Marston, that’s why men have erections. Women use their feminine wiles on men to get them erect, making their penises easier to capture.

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These numbers don’t add up to 100 percent because there were a few panels that featured both men and women in some sort of bondage scene, so there’s a slight overlap.

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This all sounds a lot like the penis capturing discussed earlier.

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This was the favorite issue of the army sergeant who had written the fan letter to Marston.

INTERLUDE 1

Wonder Woman’s Extra Features

T
hese days, the contents of most comic books are very basic, consisting of the story and some ads. However, from the 1940s through the 1960s, comics were filled with a variety of extra features. They usually included an essay or a prose story, some funny or informative short comic strips, and sometimes games or puzzles.
Wonder Woman
had many of these supplementary materials until the 1968 revamp, although most of them are now long forgotten because they rarely get reprinted in modern collections. This is unfortunate, because the changes to these features perfectly mirrored the changes to Wonder Woman herself as she moved from the Golden to the Silver Age. The progressive, feminist features during Marston’s tenure gave way to strips about marriage and romance in the 1950s as our quirky, feminist heroine became much more interested in settling down as a housewife.

The Golden Age

Reviewing the contents of
Wonder Woman
#1, we get a sense of what was included in a Golden Age issue of
Wonder Woman:

• It started with a “Wonder Women of History” strip about Florence Nightingale that covered all of Nightingale’s life; it showed how her caring for injured animals when she was a child led to her serving in war hospitals when she grew up, and how this then led to her founding schools for nursing. It’s her entire biography jam-packed into four pages.
  
• There was a two-page prose story by Jay Marr titled “A Message from Phil.” In the story, a girl named Phillys saved a submarine by communicating telepathically with her injured engineer twin brother, Phil.
  
• After the story came a two-page comic strip called “Sweet Adeline: Songs Without Music” by Art Helfant. A hapless family frustrated with running a hotel decided to dig for oil instead, and were overjoyed to find a geyser of black gold until a maintenance man told them they’d just hit the building’s oil tank.
  
• On the back inside cover was “Good Books Worth Reading,” a book recommendation from editorial advisory board member Josette Frank. She suggested
  Little Oscar’s First Air Raid
  by Lydia Mead, with art by Oscar Fabres, a timely choice.
  
• Below the book recommendation was “Superman’s Secret Message (Code Pluto No. 8),” an encoded message that could be deciphered by readers who had the key. Take a crack at this impenetrable cipher: GWCZ NQZAB TQVM WN LMNMVAM QA BPM TQVM IB BPM EQVLWE AMTTQVO ABIUXA IVL JWVLA!
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There was quite a range of features in the Golden Age, along with over fifty pages of Wonder Woman stories. It was a lot of material for ten cents!

The comic strips changed nearly every issue but were a regular component of the series, though Phillys and Phil were never heard from again. Soon
Wonder Woman
was host to the adventure stories of Jon L. Blummer’s heroic aviator Hop Harrigan, which tied into the popular Hop Harrigan radio show. While there were various extra features in
Wonder Woman,
they were dwarfed by “Wonder Women of History”; its four pages often equaled or topped the page count of every other feature combined.

“Wonder Women of History” was the pet project of
Wonder Woman’s
celebrity associate editor, Alice Marble, the tennis star who became involved in comics after she retired from her stellar sports career. The first issue of
Wonder Woman
included an announcement of Marble as the book’s associate editor and a message from Marble herself. She wrote that in her travels around the country she had realized “what a large part comics and comic books play in the life of the average American boy and girl!” and added, “Wonder Woman being my favorite comic character, I am very happy, indeed, to become associated with it!” Marble’s editorial role was fairly ceremonial, but she wrote “Wonder Women of History” every issue, and she eagerly looked for ideas for which women to profile.