William Moulton Marston

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William Moulton Marston (born May 9, 1893 in Cliftondale , Essex County , Massachusetts , †  May 2, 1947 in Rye , New York ) was an American psychologist , feminist theorist and writer of comics . He was, among others, with his wife, Elizabeth (Sadie) Holloway Marston , creator of the character Wonder Woman .

Life

Marston studied at Harvard University , which he graduated in 1921 with a doctorate in psychology. He initially taught at the American University in Washington . In 1929 Marston went to Universal Studios in California for a year . In 1940, through his comments on the educational potential of comics, the comic editor Max Gaines became aware of Marston and hired him as an educational advisor for Detective Comics (now DC Comics ). For the last six years of his life he wrote Wonder Woman comics. Marston died of cancer. His wife Elisabeth continued to live with Olive Byrne (who worked as a writer under the pseudonym Olive Richard), a former student of Marston who had been in a polyamorous relationship with the couple . Olive died in the late 1980s; Elizabeth died at the age of 100 in 1993.

In 1928 Marston published the DISC theory ( dominance, inducement, submission, compliance ) and propagated male submission to a matriarchy . In practice he lived out his secret bondage fantasies with Sadie Marston, Olive Byrne and others and wrote many bondage and fetish scenes in the early Wonder Woman comics as an author . Professionally, Marston's success was limited, as he hardly earned any money “because of a lack of work ethic”: his polygraph was a commercial flop, and he wrote erotic literature without success . From today's point of view, his polyamorous relationship appears questionable because, according to Wonder Woman chronicler Jill Lepore, he practically forced the three-way relationship with Byrne on his wife and threatened to divorce, which would have meant the end of her scientific career in prudish prewar USA. In addition, Sadie Marston had to finance the marriage of three with her meager secretary's salary and publish her research under the name of her husband, since women were not worthy of publication at the time. Olive Byrne had to claim all her life to be Sadie's young widowed relatives and that her two children with Marston came from an "early deceased husband". In addition, as an unmarried mother, Byrne sacrificed all job opportunities and was the unpaid nurse of the three-way relationship for many years. For decades she withheld her true fatherhood from her biological children, who were later legally adopted by the Marstons.

The fact that Marston was on the one hand the inventor of the lie detector, but concealed his polyamorous biography and lived at the expense of his two partners and his children, was viewed critically in retrospect. The Guardian rated him a "good-looking, useless, lustful peddler," adding that J. Edgar Hoover , the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation , saw Marston as a charlatan because of his unreliable polygraph.

psychology

Marston and his wife developed an early form of the lie detector , the so-called polygraph , in which he assumed that the blood pressure would increase if you told the untruth. The device also served as a model for Wonder Woman's “magic lasso”.

He also wrote essays and books on popular psychological topics. His best-known book is "Emotions of Normal People", in which Marston deals with the question of which emotions normal people show and how they can be differentiated. The term “normal person” should ensure the demarcation from the mentally ill. He found that people differ fundamentally in two ways:

  • They consider themselves stronger than their surroundings (their environment) or weaker.
  • They view their surroundings as either friendly or hostile.

In his investigations, he found recurring basic behavioral patterns, which he substantiated with the four terms dominance (dominance), inducement (causing), submission (submission) and compliance (obeying, observing). From these basic patterns of behavior, which he himself referred to as "phenomena", the psychologist Dr. Thomas Hendrickson learned the basics of behavior profile analysis (VPA, English PPI) and carried out extensive series of tests in the following 20 years. In 1980 Ray Reed took over the further development and began selling the product he called the Thomas system . At the same time, in the 1960s, Prof. Dr. John G. Geier at the University of Minnesota developed the now recognized DISC model. In the course of his research, Geier also further developed the terminology as the behavioral dimensions are known today: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance (DISC), also known in Germany as dominant, initiative, steady, conscientious ( DISG ).

His best-known thesis was that a male striving for independence is absolutely archaic and violent and that the opposing feminine tactic of seducing men (in order to keep them) is a submission to a loving power. He expressed his concerns about the stereotypes of gender roles in popular culture in an article in The American Scholar in 1944:

"Not even girls want to be girls as long as our female stereotypes are not connected with power, strength and power ... The obvious solution is to create a female character with the strengths of Superman and the charm of the good and beautiful woman."

- Marston, 1944, pp. 42-43

Development of Wonder Woman

In an interview that Marston gave to his partner Olive Byrne (aka Olive Richard) on October 25, 1940 and which was later published under the author's pseudonym "Olive Richard" in "The Family Circle", Marston described the great educational potential of comics. Marston was already a prominent figure at the time through his popular science book "The Lie Detector Test" from 1938. The interview piqued the interest of "Detective Comics" publisher Max Charles Gaines. When Marston asked why there were no female superheroes in his comics, Gaines is said to have encouraged Marston to design such a character.

Marston used the publisher's middle name as the pseudonym "Charles Marston" and developed the unconventional and self-confident Diana Prince alias Wonder Woman together with his wife Elizabeth, who also served as a model. The figure should first be christened “Suprema”. On the one hand, she should be "tender, submissive, peaceful like all good women" and "combine the full strength of Superman with the charm of the good and beautiful woman". His character was the native of a female utopia who became a US government agent and fights crime. Wonder Woman got her opponents to talk with the "Magic Lasso of Truth". The lasso was understood as an allusion to the lie detector .

In December 1941, Wonder Woman first appeared in All Star Comics # 8. She then reappeared in Sensation Comics # 1 in January 1942, and six months later the comics with her as the main character were published regularly. The stories were originally written by Marston and illustrated by newspaper illustrator Harry G. Peter.

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Bondage motifs

According to Max Steller , the popular psychological marketing attempts of Marston's scientific findings are ideal for defaming the entire area. Fredric Wertham , child and youth psychiatrist and author of Seduction of the Innocent, claimed that comic book reading promotes delinquency and sexual dysfunction in young people. The amazon-like figure with the golden lasso, who tied her opponents, was tied up herself and who appears together with her amazon friends, subsequently led to various interpretations and sexualized reinterpretations. In addition, Marston declared subservience to be a female virtue and described subservience by men to women as a noble and possibly world-saving practice that ultimately led to the establishment of a matriarchy . The sexualization of the “Wonder Woman” theme was boosted not least by Marston's own lifestyle. He lived in domestic partnership with his former student Olive Byrne and his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston. Both women gave birth to two children, Olive Richard's children were adopted by his wife. Whether Marston intended this bondage association himself or whether he realized his own sexual fantasies in the figure is pure guesswork.

In addition to this certainly involuntary role as a supplier of sexual fantasies, Marston could also be seen as a pioneer of the “ gender mainstreaming ” debate, which got its big boost in the 1980s. He is also often mentioned as a leading figure for a polyamorous lifestyle.

Rights to the Wonder Woman comics

Due to skillful negotiation tactics, Marston was possibly the first comic book writer to get a significant share of money from sales from a major publisher. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster , the creators of Superman , had to lead a lawsuit with DC Comics in 1975 . Marston's heirs, on the other hand, received small portions of all sales of all Wonder Woman-related items. There was even a clause that if a comic book with Wonder Woman is not published for more than a month, all rights will go to Marston's family.

Publications (selection)

  • (1930) Walter B. Pitkin , William M. Marston, The Art of Sound Pictures . Appleton, New York.
  • (1931) Integrative psychology; a study of unit response (with C. D. King, E. H. Marston). Harcourt, Brace, London, England.
  • (c. 1932) Venus with us; a tale of the Caesar. Sears, New York.
  • (1936) You can be popular. Home Institute, New York.
  • (1937) Try living. Crowell, New York.
  • (1938) The lie detector test. Smith, New York.
  • (1941) March on! Facing life with courage . Doubleday, Doran, New York.
  • (1943) F. F. Proctor, vaudeville pioneer. (with J. H. Feller). Smith, New York.
  • (1999; first published in 1928) Emotions of Normal People . Taylor & Francis Ltd, ISBN 0-415-21076-3 .

literature

  • William Moulton Marston: Emotions of Normal People . Kegan Paul Trench Trubner And Company, sl 1928, (Also: Routledge, London 2003, ISBN 0-415-21076-3 , ( The international library of psychology. 1589, ( Physiological psychology 5)).
  • Geoffrey C. Bunn: The Lie Detector, Wonder Woman and Liberty. The life and works of William Moulton Marston . In: History of the Human Sciences. 10, 1997, ISSN  0952-6951 , pp. 91-119. (English)
  • Les Daniels, Chip Kidd: Wonder Woman. The life and times of the Amazon Princess . Chronicle Books, San Francisco CA 2000, ISBN 0-8118-2913-8 .
  • The polygraph and lie detection. Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph (National Research Council (US)), ISBN 0-309-08436-9 , p. 295.
  • David T. Lykken: A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector. 2nd Edition. Perseus Books, US, 1998, ISBN 0-306-45782-2 .

Movies

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Free-Love Experiment That Created Wonder Woman , The Atlantic
  2. ↑ a b The Secret History of Wonder Woman review - is this what a feminist looks like? , Guardian
  3. ^ The Last Amazon , The New Yorker
  4. ↑ The Man Behind Wonder Woman Was Inspired By Both Suffragists And Centerfolds , npr.org
  5. ↑ Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics. June 8, 2017, accessed January 31, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Max Steller: Psychophysiological statement assessment. Hogrefe Verlag, 1987, p. 26.
  7. ^ Fredric Wertham: Seduction of the Innocent. Rinehart & Company, New York 1954.
  8. ↑ Nick Gillespie: William Marston's Secret Identity, The strange private life of Wonder Woman's creator. In: Reason magazine. May 2001.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Marston, William Moulton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychologist and cartoonist
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Cliftondale , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH May 2, 1947
Place of death Rye , New York