In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [11]
But these are sinister doubles. For the weak or frivolous alter ego acting as a front for the strong, virtuous hero—more like Clark Kent and Superman—we should most likely be looking at the Scarlet Pimpernel—dithering fop by day, steel-nerved rescuer by night—and possibly even Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, in which the hero assumes several aliases—including that of an eccentric English lord—in order to reward virtue and punish crime. Sherlock Holmes, that supreme intellect, clue-tracker, and criminal-hunter, was a master of disguise, often posing as someone less than he really was: a feeble, kindly old clergyman, for instance, or an out-of-work groom.
In addition to his disguising “normal” alter ego, the superhero of the 1940s was required to have a powerful enemy or two. Carl Jung made no secret of the fact that he based much of his mapping of the psyche on literature and art. For instance, his theory of the “Shadow”—that dark double of the Self—has a great deal in common with, for instance, The Tales of Hoffmann, or indeed any of the “double” narratives I’ve already mentioned. A comic-book character leading a split life and engaged in a battle between Good and Evil might well be expected to show Jungian characteristics, and in fact Batman is an almost perfect case study.
Batman has three main enemies, who to a Jungian would obviously be projections of Bruce Wayne that Wayne himself has not come to terms with. (In Blakean terms, the two male enemies would be called his Spectres and the female one might be his Emanation.) For Bruce, the female element is conflicted—he’s a confirmed bachelor, and has no nice-girl Lois Lane sentimental figure in his life. But the sinuous and desirable Catwoman with whom he frequently skirmishes must be his Jungian “dark anima” figure: even a child could recognize that there was a lot of unresolved electricity going on between those two.
The sadistic card-playing Joker, with his sinister-clown appearance, is Batman’s Jungian Shadow—his own interest in dress-ups and jokes turned malicious. There’s another Shadow villain—the Penguin—who wears an outfit reminiscent of period cartoons of capitalists, with spats, cigarette holder, and top hat. His civilian alias even has a three-barrelled, pretentious, old-plutocrat faux-English name: Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot. The Penguin is the “rich” side of playboy Bruce Wayne gone rancid.
Then there’s Robin, the Boy Wonder, who is Bruce’s ward. Is Bruce gay? Don’t even think about it. From the point of view of we mythosophists, Robin is an elemental spirit, like Shakespeare’s Puck and Ariel—note the bird name, which links him to air. His function in the plot is to aid the benevolent master trickster, Batman, with his plans. From the point of view of we Jungians, however, Robin is a Peter Pan figure—he never grows up—and he represents the repressed child within Bruce Wayne, whose parents, you’ll recall, were murdered when he was very young, thus stunting Bruce’s emotional growth.
This is the kind of hay, or perhaps hash, that can be made of such comic-book superheroes once you really get going. Both they and Jung himself can be viewed through Hoffmannesque magic spectacles and seen to be part of the same mythology.
But from the point of view of we kids—the primary readers—Robin was simply ourselves—what we would be if we, too, had masks and capes and could go running around in them under the delusion that nobody would know who we were, and—better still—stay up long after our