Author's note: I'm into the reading phase of my research, so this blog is about to be all about essays on comics, and books on cultural theory. Don't say I didn't warn ya!
Williams, J.P. “All's Fair In Love And Journalism: Female Rivalry In Superman.” JofPC. 24:2 (Fall 1990).
Williams’ paper is somewhat predictable but quite convincing. Though she (?) employs Burke’s non-intuitive ‘dramatistic’ analytical system, her reading of Lois Lane and Lana Lang’s status as symbols of femininity in Superman comics is quite logical. Lois is a star reporter, but she constantly gets into trouble and must be rescued by a big, strong (Super)man; Lana is a conniving meddler who wants to ensnare a (Super)man through trickery. It’s a fairly standard feminist reading of Lois and Lana’s presence in Superman as, in fact, actively anti-feminist. By presenting strong women who, nevertheless, are constantly distracted by attempting to ‘keep’ Superman, Superman stories represent women as essentially interested in domestic affairs, like marriage, instead of professional ones, like journalism. This reading is perfectly logical.
The more interesting aspect of the paper, though, is Williams’ background assumptions about how popular literature functions. Between Burke and a few feminist sources, de Beauvoir mostly, she constructs a few ideas about popular narrative. First, dispensing with concerns about cause and effect, she states, unequivocally, that popular narratives coincide with the values of the time in which they are produced, regardless of whether they reflect or affect popular culture. This reasoning means that on-going narratives, such as Superman’s, must change with the times in order to continue to coincide with contemporary values. Her conclusion coincides with my own thoughts on the subject, at least in broad strokes. However, because she dispenses with cause and effect, she side-steps issues of power (such as hegemonic negotiation) within the exchange of ideas between art and audience. As a result, she ends up treating popular narrative as little more than a sociological diagnostic tool.
Second, although it’s logically required by the terms of her discussion, she doesn’t explicitly say that to perform this diagnosis, we need stories that have been told over a great deal of time, at least two generations. Superman stories are only useful diagnostics for a general cultural attitude towards women because they’ve been around since the 1940s and have survived through at least three different forms of feminism (First-Wave, Second-Wave, and Post-Feminism). It’s very important to emphasise that only certain instances of popular narrative can be used in this diagnostic way. They have to be either extremely popular, appealing to a wide cross-section of society, or told over a great deal of time, appealing to multiple generations, and in the latter case, it’s preferable that they’ve been told by a multitude of artists. Basically, the more people in society are involved, the more we can trust the narrative in question to be an accurate form of diagnosis. Lord of the Rings and Sandman might be useful because the audience is so large and/or varied, despite the fact that they are limited stories told by a singular author or small group of creators. X-Men and Fantastic Four might count because they’ve been around since the 1960s, despite the fact that the reading audience has traditionally been limited to young men and boys. With these guidelines in mind, Williams’ choice to use the Burkean ‘representative anecdote’ is a bit perplexing.
The representative anecdote is, from her description and my own reading of Burke, an attempt to find a representative example from within a narrative that can stand for the whole thing. For Burke, this is an exercise in pattern recognition. The critic is re-telling the story but only as an illustration of a pattern. That critic will choose a story amongst the many and interrogate it individually, but that interrogation can be taken for the whole group, in this case, all Superman stories, pre-1990. My critical objection to that is that, although there isn’t time within a short paper like Williams’, by using this method, we learn only about one particular issue of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane (“The Girl Atlas,” #12, ’59 October) in any depth. As critics, we must either take pains to perform surveys that cover a great deal of ground or perform close readings of individual stories. To mix the two is to run the great risk of exploding a single example out of proportion. To make that mistake would be doubly ironic given that one of the defining features of comics as popular narratives is that there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of narratives associated with a particular character. Perhaps Burkean analysis simply isn’t appropriate for a folkloric or mythic story cycle.
The central conclusion of Williams’ paper is quite reasonable, with a few exceptions, but the tools she uses when analysing comics as an on-going narrative form are perhaps inappropriate, but also hold some interesting possibilities. This paper might be useful as part of my background discussion on pre-revisionist superhero comics.
Posted by orion at January 13, 2006 3:02 PM