The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing TimesJoseph J.Darowski, Editor. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.

Abstract

The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times Joseph J. Darowski, Editor. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.A potential pitfall of writing about a long-running comic book character is that any broad, all-encompass-ing pronouncements risk being rendered problematic by the fact that these characters have been handled by so many artists and writers, each with his or her own sense of the character's essential qualities. So it is appropriate that The Ages of Wonder Woman, following in the footsteps of Darowski's The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times (2012), focuses less on essential characteristics and more, as the title indicates, on the way comic creators have handled the character at different periods in her history. But because the cultural role of women has changed so much since 1942, times means much more for Wonder Woman than for Superman or Batman. Although these male heroes have certainly experienced flux in their characterizations, their basic elements have been readily adaptable to the changing times, but the history of Wonder Woman is, comparatively, something of a mess, as various authors have tried to shoehorn her character into post-World War Two conception of the ideal woman or paid lip service to progressive politics of the 1960s. Indeed, Wonder Woman's treatment has been extraordinarily inconsistent compared to that of her male counterparts. Effectively, it is this consistent inconsistency which drives the collection of essays appearing in The Ages of Wonder Woman.This volume is comprised of nineteen essays, each of which focuses on a particular period of the amazon princess's existence. The early essays, of course, focus on stories by her creator William Moulton Mars ton, a psychologist who imbued his character with his theories of love leadership and the liberating power of bondage. This age of Wonder Woman is perhaps the most fully explored in previous scholarship, yet these essays provide a new depth to such study. From here, the book explores the post-World War Two problems of a strong, independent woman in an era during which women were expected to abandon their work for the war effort and return to the domestic sphere. Here lie the uncomfortable efforts to keep Wonder Woman's physical prowess while promoting a model domesticity and traditional patterns of romance fiction. A full five essays examine a relatively short period in the late 1960s and early 1970s in which she lost her powers, abandoned her traditional costume, and adopted a mod look. …