Wonder Woman is an unsettling superhero. More so than her male counterparts, she resists easy classification: she’s neither an alien or a billionaire – nor has she been exposed to some chemical to obtain her powers. The comic books cast her as a mystery to be unravelled and ultimately controlled.
When the truth of Wonder Woman’s background is finally uncovered in a 1944 comic strip, it is one of her own making. Even when revealing her past, she refuses to be narrated – and claims ownership of her own identity instead. By telling the story in her own way, she controls how the world perceives her – much like her sisters from classical and medieval literature did.
Wonder Woman’s story is presented on a sheet of parchment in the comic, just as most medieval texts were. These texts traditionally conceptualised women as blank canvases to be painted with desirable meaning, but Wonder Woman refuses to be pigeonholed simply because of her gender.
Wonder Woman’s origins, revealed in the parchment, are deeply intertwined with well-known classical mythology and its medieval afterlife. She is the daughter of Hippolyta, who, according to the ancient Greeks, was the queen of the Amazons: a utopian society of women warriors founded on sisterhood and female empowerment.
Much like Wonder Woman – who is arguably one of the goddess’s contemporary incarnations – Diana is a capacious figure. As the goddess of childbirth, virginity and hunting, she is a mix of impossibly different roles. The fluidity of her identity makes her an advocate of female empowerment. She embodies the numerous identities available to women, beyond the restrictions of traditional gender roles. As her emancipated femininity is violently stifled through military conquest, Hippolyta becomes a metaphor for the destruction of any form of female agency. She is paraded, silenced and overthrown in front of the Theban crowd, while a storm rages ominously. Bound to Theseus, she loses her power, much like Wonder Woman whose formidable potency can only be lost if she is shackled in chains by men – a feature which creator Charles Moulton took directly from ancient Greek mythology.