Who were the Amazons? (golden age wonder woman)

[glaurung]

The ancient Greeks had a serious fetish for Amazons. Early on, the Greeks invented myths about strong women like Atalanta. Then, as their trade network expanded, they heard of these scary Scythian peoples who lived on the east shore of the Black Sea. Scythians were feared by all their non-nomadic neighbours because of their prowess in battle (cavalry with bows and arrows trumps footsoldiers with swords and spears), and because, unnervingly for the deeply sexist Greeks, their armies consisted of both men and women. The Greeks glommed onto these warrior women, big time. I'll leave the psychoanalysis of why they found stories of warrior women so compelling that they made them the subject of endless poems and scenes on pottery, to those more qualified.

Suffice to say that while the most popular subject matter for Greek pottery is Hercules doing stuff, the second most popular theme is Amazons doing stuff. Everybody else in the vast Greek pantheon of heroic dudes whose deeds would look great on an urn had to play second fiddle to urns with Amazons on them. The earliest Amazon-themed Greek pottery shows the Amazons wearing Greek style clothing - robes and hoplite armour. Because the Greeks hadn't actually met any of these fabled warrior women yet, only heard stories about them. Later, once the Greeks had actually met the Scythians, the Amazon themed pottery started showing Amazons wearing Scythian style leather riding trousers and shirts.

But even as the pottery grew more sartorially accurate, and even as Greek historians wrote non fiction about these scary-fascinating Scythians who (gasp!) had women in their armies, other Greeks were churning out tons of mythic fiction about an all-female nation of "Amazons" who lived in the Heroic Age along with Hercules, Theseus, Jason, etc (The Heroic Age, allegedly 1200-1000 BC, is to ancient Greek literature what the Wild West was to American movies and TV in the first half of the 20th century).

Later historians saw all the stories about a nation without any men who lived alongside Hercules and company, and decided the whole warrior woman thing was a bunch of fanciful fiction.

Which brings us to Olive Byrne, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and William Marston, who, under the pen name Charles Moulton, together created the character Wonder Woman. The three of them were feminists of the old (as in 19th century) school. They deemed women different from men in ways that made them better suited to rule the household and the nation. Therefore women deserved to be given political power so that they could steer the nations of the world onto the correct course. They wanted to write comic book propaganda that would teach girls that they were powerful and worthy to run things, and teach boys that they would all be happier and better off if they allowed their sisters and (later on) girl friends to have power over them.

They needed their heroine to be an outsider, so she could show the reader how wrong and foolish American sex roles were. So, they dusted off those myths about warrior women in ancient Greece and made Wonder Woman an Amazon. Which brings me, finally, to the scans:

There are three tellings of Wonder Woman's back story - in All Star #8, in Wonder Woman #1, and in the Wonder Woman newspaper strip.

All Star #8 gives the Amazons two patron goddesses, Athene and Aphrodite. But it kind of skips over the whole question of where the Amazons came from. They just are:





Wonder Woman #1 expands on that a good deal, but whittles down the number of patron Goddesses to just Aphrodite:



These two do not get along.



I don't know which is more precious, Aphrodite's frock, covered in what I think are supposed to be tiny valentines, or the tail from the lion skin Hercules wears making him look like a big rat. As for "that for your threats (snap snap)," what can I say?



Young Hippolyte: not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Protip: if your strength depends on your having a magic item, don't be constantly telling all your enemies about it. Also, she has incredibly bad taste if she's so easily taken in by this jerk.



Just a page ago, Aphrodite was creating Amazons for the purpose of being a counterforce to Mars's bloodthirsty followers. Presumably their job was to help ordinary, non-blessed women figure out how to escape their chains and rule men with love. But one moment of hormonally fueled foolishness by their queen, and the goddess is so pissed at them she changes her mind and packs the lot of them off to an isolated island for the next 3,000 years, preventing them from being able to influence the rest of the world in any way.

Not to mention that it's kind of odd for the goddess of love to be punishing her creations for being susceptible to feelings of love. You'd think that wouldn't count as a sin in Aphrodite's playbook.

The newspaper strip redoes Wonder Woman #1, compressing some bits and expanding others. There's the added detail that Aphrodite sculpts the Amazon race from clay. And then we have this:



I've read histories of Wonder Woman that say the children on Paradise island are never explained. Those historians did not read the newspaper strip.



"After Diana, Goddess of the Moon" This. Is. Just. So. Totally. Wrong.

Little touches like Heracles's lion skin clothing show that the authors knew their mythology. They just regarded Greek and Roman myths as completely equivalent, so they figured it just plain didn't matter whether they used Greek or Roman names for characters. (this is me pounding my head against the desk). No, no, no.

Ares was a god of bloodlust and slaughter, but Mars was a god of defensive warfare, sort of like Athene, and when Rome wasn't at war, he was a god of agriculture. The "Mars vs Venus" storyline makes for a good propaganda vehicle but totally ignores how in the myths, Ares and Aphrodite were lovers and had multiple children together. And so on. I'll stop now before I start frothing at the mouth. Just remember that Golden Age wonder woman gets the mythology really, really, really wrong.

Comments

[cricharddavies]

But one moment of hormonally fueled foolishness by their queen, and the goddess is so pissed at them she changes her mind and packs the lot of them off to an isolated island for the next 3,000 years, preventing them from being able to influence the rest of the world in any way.

I don't see the exodus to Paradise Island as a punishment; it's not described as such in the text. It's more the case of an inversion of the concept of being "tried in the wilderness". By withdrawing from the outside world, ruled by Mars, Venus gives the Amazons the opportunity to develop their culture so that, when they next encounter the world beyond, they'll have more resources to draw upon than they did in their first challenge. ("Thus, we Amazons have seen and surpassed all man-made inventions ...") And so, when they finally do send their Wonder Woman forth, they find a world which, having been constantly at war, is weak and sick and in need of their help and love.

Likewise, the bracers of submission make sense in context. With the original Wonder Woman text, you have to keep in mind that submission to women (and goddesses) is holy, while submission to men (and gods) is depraved. Hippolyta submits to Hercules -- "I ought not, but I cannot resist thee." -- and so learns this lesson. Venus, in this version of events, is the feminine principle, not all romantic love, just as Mars is not just war, but the whole of masculinity.

All of this, of course, is the fantasy of someone who cannot imagine a relationship where no one is "dominant." But it's amusing to see just how much of it George Perez kept when he rewrote Diana's origins in the mid-80s, isn't it?

[alicemacher]

Thank you for this post. I'd read a few versions (Golden-Age and later) of Wonder Woman's origin but not all of them, so it's interesting to see the three Golden Age ones compared side by side. Also, I didn't know that Greek legends about Amazons were partially based on real-life women warriors from Scythia. Cool.

[glaurung]

The existence of women warriors among the Scythians was discovered when archaeologists started actually doing DNA testing of remains in graves to determine gender instead of just assuming buried with weapons = male (or just looking at the hip bones and guessing). Not all Scythian tribes had women warriors, but several did (Scythian was the Greek term, basically we're talking horse nomads who lived at the western end of the central Asian steppes).

The book to check out for more details is "The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World," by Adrienne Mayor. It's an approachable, easy read. Googling will find you various interviews and articles about the book, and also stuff about the archaeological research on which the book is based.

A couple years ago I posted about the book (and about Wonder Woman, because I am a comic book nerd) to my blog: https://glaurung.dreamwidth.org/16285.html

[lego_joker]

After all these years, Wonder Woman still strikes me as possibly the most ambitious attempt at a superhero setting. This isn't just one Great Woman being better than the rest of us; it's a whole society of them, and they've taken it upon themselves to meddle in ours.

... of course, "ambitious" in no way equals "wise" or "guaranteed to attract good, well-thought-out scripts". Never mind the dog's-ear so many subsequent writers turned Diana's mythos into, Marston himself constantly got tied into knots over why - if the Amazons are so gosh-darn great - they left Man's World to rot for 3000 years and only sent one person to deal with an army building literal murder factories over its conquests. Eventually he seemed to have settled on "Oh, every Amazon not named Diana is a softhearted scatterbrain not fit to run a lemonade stand", which kind of defeats the initial point...

But ah - are these not problems that have plagued every superhero narrative from Superman and on? There's only so much worldbuilding you can do before your world doesn't resemble a speck of the reader's, and a comic-book is, in fact, expected to tickle nine-year-olds (and bitter twenty-somethings' inner nine-year-olds) first and foremost. In that regard, with all its Space Kangaroos and Mental Muscle Amazon Training, I still think Marston's Wonder Woman reigns nonpareil.

(Tune in next time, where I dump my 500-page essay on how Heracles should be folded into the WW mythos on you poor, unsuspecting saps! Same lego_time, same lego_channel!)

[elilla]

There's Gaiman's Miracleman and the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist as stories where heroes actually try to solve the goddamn problems instead of punching criminals. But yes, if you allow superheroes to do that, the genre quickly changes into sci-fi. As David Graeber has argued, superhero stories are structurally conservative, even when the superficial politics are not; the heroes have to preserve the social status quo (and people who want to change it have to be sociopathic villains); because if not, superpowered beings would change society, the world would be unrecognizable, and we'd be reading sci-fi. (For the record, as a fan of solarpunk, I think more optimistic, radical sci-fi is a good thing at this juncture, and I'd love to see more experiments with that in comics.)

[glaurung]

Agreed that Wonder Woman really stands out as not at all like any of these other characters who were being published at the time. The great pity is that almost no writer since the original collaborators has been willing or able to embrace the weirdness and the differentness of Wonder Woman, her people and her homeland.

[bradygirl_12]

Agreed that Wonder Woman really stands out as not at all like any of these other characters who were being published at the time. The great pity is that almost no writer since the original collaborators has been willing or able to embrace the weirdness and the differentness of Wonder Woman, her people and her homeland.

They keep separating Diana from her homeland. They stick it in another dimension, destroy it, you-name-it. Paradise Island/Themyscira is so much a part of her, but DC sometimes seems determined to minimize that.

[elilla]

I'm sorry but I just read The Children of Húrin and your username disturbs me more than anything else right now…

[glaurung]

I've been going by Glaurung online since 1996.

I'm a nice dragon who happens to have the same name as an evil dragon in Tolkien, but I am nothing like that Glaurung.

[mesmiranda]

A likely story. Where were you when Nargothrond got sacked?!

[lonewolf23k]

Keep in mind that not all the Greeks had the same ideas about the gods, either. The Spartans worshipped Aphrodite as a goddess of war in her own right.

[glaurung]

Thank you for the reminder. It's hard when so many scholars make the same mistake, but just about all statements about ancient Greece are really most applicable to ancient Athens. The rest of Greece could be quite different.

[ozaline]

I think Roman names also got some preference cause a lot of greek sources were filtered through Latin translations since that was the language of the intellectual, and those names are sometimes a little easier for anglophones since though English is a Germanic/Nordic language it has a lot of Romance influence. I've seen a few translations of Homer that use roman names. Always weird is the Odyssey starring Ulysses!

Then you've got Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze where the named are a mixed bag for the names going for the roman names for people when they're more well known (although using Odysseus), and using the Greek names for the Gods (and usually the Trojans just calling for the "god of x" since in Greek Myth they worshipped the Greek gods, but in reality would have worshipped different gods).

Anyway this post is super awesome, thanks for sharing.

Personally I think George Perez did the best take on Greek myth having Diana mirror Pandora (actually BEING Pandora but that's another matter), and all.

[bradygirl_12]

I love the Snap! Snap! and "That for your threats", too. :)

Always love Golden Age Wonder Woman. She was certainly unique! :)