In it, we are told the following: "[Gloria] Steinem, offended that the most famous female superheroine had been depowered [in the comic book in 1968; to be restored in the January-February 1973 comic book], placed Wonder Woman (in costume) on the cover of [the first issue of] Ms. [magazine] (1972) - Warner Communications, DC Comics' owner, was an investor - which also contained an appreciative essay about the character" - which I have not read.
I see the present article as another appreciative essay about the character - and about the beautiful young Lynda Carter's portrayal of the character in the 1970s television series.
Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955).
I have taken various hints from Ong's work in my essay "Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today" in the carefully organized anthology Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (Sage Publishing, 1991, pp. 194-209).
In it, I take certain hints from Ong and discuss the brilliant Jungian Erich Neumann (1905-1960) published a marvelous synthesis of Jung's wide-ranging work in his big book The Origins and History of Consciousness, translated by R. F. C. Hull, with a "Foreword" by Jung (Pantheon Press, 1954). I first heard of Neumann's book from Dr. Raymond Benoit in a graduate course in English that I took from him at Saint Louis University. Subsequently, I read Neumann's book. I have re-read Neumann's book several times over the years.
In it, Neumann describes eight stages of psychological growth. In broad terms, I see the ten-year war in The Iliad as aligned with stages four, five, and six of ego development that Neumann describes. I see Odysseus's ten-year journey back home as aligned with stage seven in the eight stages of ego development that Neumann describes.
For Ong, the term secondary orality refers to the orality accentuated by the communications media that accentuate sound (e.g., television, telephone, radio, tape-recorders, and the like). The resonances of secondary orality register on the human psyche and resonate with memories and pattern of primary orality at the level of the collective unconscious in the human psyche.
In terms of Neumann's eight stages of consciousness, primary orality represents the historical manifestation of what Neumann refers to as stages one through three of the development of ego-consciousness. In effect, Neumann writes about these early stages in his other big book The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, translated by Ralph Manheim (Pantheon Books, 1955).
In my recent OEN article "Emily Wilson on The Iliad" (dated August 23, 2024), I discuss both Emily Wilson's 2023 translation of The Iliad (Norton) and her 2018 translation of The Odyssey (Norton) in connection with the thought of Walter J. Ong:
In Neumann's terminology, I align what Ong refers to as secondary orality with what Neumann describes as stage seven in the eight stages of ego development.
Consequently, I would also align Odysseus's ten-year journey in The Odyssey with Neumann's stage seven in the development of ego consciousness. In The Odyssey, the goddess Athena, the goddess of war, is, in effect, Odysseus's guardian angel.
However, there are other goddesses that Odysseus encounters in his ten-year journey back home - and not all of them are benign. I see Athena and the other goddesses in The Odyssey as representing the collective unconscious in our psyches - and so when I say that I see the beautiful young Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman as a wholesome sex goddess, I mean to suggest that she in this role evokes depths in our psyches involving the collective unconscious in our psyches.
Of course, the character known as Wonder Woman is not just a normal woman, and this quality aligns her with the various goddesses represented in The Odyssey - and thus with stage seven of Neumann's eight stages of consciousness.
Now, for an accessible overview account of the four masculine archetypes of maturity that are in the psyches of all boys and men and of all girls and women, see Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's 1990 book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (HarperSanFrancisco/ HarperCollins). Moore and Gillette have also published four books detailing each of the four masculine archetypes on maturity (1992a, 1992b, 1993a, 1993b).
For understandable reasons, Moore and Gillette did not write any books about the four feminine archetypes of maturity that all girls and women and all boys and men have in their psyches. But the late Jungian psychotherapist and theorist Robert Moore (1942-2016) thought that there were four feminine archetypes of maturity: the Queen, the Warrior/Knight, the Magician/Shaman, and the Lover. I agree with him about this much. But I see these four feminine archetypes of maturity as being in the psyches of all girls and women and of all boys and men.
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