swatkat

So, HG Wells is actually a woman – she provided the ideas, her brother provided the moustache, but who wrote the books? Each of them bears Helena’s name, but we know that she was bronzed before all of HG Wells’ books were published. Her exact status – author or muse – is ultimately an ambiguous one, and I know that this is a plothole which some fans like to criticise the writers for, but I honestly think it works. Helena isn’t quite a muse, she isn’t quite an author, and she isn’t quite a character: her presence queers the narrative (many of her lovers were men; many of her characters were men; many of her authors were men) but it also deconstructs the act of narration itself. She’s introduced before she’s ever introduced – Myka read HG Wells’s novels, Pete’s seen the movies, and Myka spots ‘Edward Prendick’ in the guestbook. Pete’s Genre Savvy, he knows how this works, but he’s still thinking in terms of actors and performance and guesses; Helena can’t quite stay away and the pseudonym she uses is her real name. When she introduces herself as Helena, that’s an implicit admission of her identity as HG Wells as well as a denial. They’re looking for Charles, the one with the moustache, but they’re calling him HG – she is HG, but she isn’t, too. Identity is never that simple for her.

I think that she works brilliantly within the narrative as a sort of ghostly presence, lurking in all of the dark places and threatening to huff and puff and bring down the narrative around them – and, through that haunting, serves to shore up the narrative itself. Helena is the act of deconstruction and she is constantly deconstructed – what else is left, when the story tears itself apart, begins again, and rips that one up too?

In the 40s, in the middle of wartime, there would be scenes with General Darnell, Colonel Trevor and other high-ranking military officers standing around listening to Wonder Woman’s ideas. That in itself is amazing. What is even more amazing is when you stop to think that she is the girlfriend of one of these officers, and she is not being written off and he has no problem whatsoever with his girlfriend being better at his job than he is.

And that’s why we still need him in the narrative, because even today we have parts written out of movies because they feel an action heroine saving her husband emasculates him. With Steve we have a guy who is uniformly happy with being outmatched in the “manly ways” by not just a woman but a woman he’s involved with, and retains a traditionally masculine demeanor. This is pretty much the only character who plays this role to a heroine of iconic status, and it is a tragedy we never got to see him developed in the modern-story-telling line as we did Lois Lane.

hibernate

ladyshinkicker

For as long as Helena still exists, there is a chance that she will find the artefact, or perfect her time machine, or find some other way to save her daughter: knowing this is not hope. Knowing this is to count every passing second as another one in which Christina is in danger, waiting to be saved. Knowing this is to spend every moment without Christina cursing her failure as a parent, because Christina is still in danger, because at a point in time Helena believes she may still access, her daughter is dying, and Helena doesn’t know how to save her. And if there is the slightest chance, however remote, that she can change the rules of linear temporality itself, Helena will do so because there still exists a time in which her daughter is alive and that means she can still be saved.