Sebastian Flock 
Ideas of Womanhood and Gender in Adrian Dingle’s ‘Nelvana of the Northern Lights’ [PDF ebook] 

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Didactics for the subject English – Literature, Works, grade: 1, 0, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: ‘Murder in a Cold Climate’ – Canadian Crime Fiction in the 20th and 21st Century, language: English, abstract: The word ‘superheroine’ is often automatically linked to one single woman that is seen as the prototype of this kind of comic book characters – Wonder Woman. Created in 1941 by the American psychologist William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman has not only become one of the most popular female comic book heroes, she has also been widely considered a feminist icon. Especially the early Wonder Woman comics from 1941 to 1947 are seen as explicitly feminist, going along with the political aims and demands of the women’s liberation
movement in the 60s and 70s. This is due to many recurrent images and themes in Marston’s comic book that crossed socially constructed gender boarders in the 1940s.
But Wonder Woman was not the first female comic hero that appeared in western popular culture. Four months before, a Canadian superheroine with the name Nelvana was introduced to her readership. This creation of the Welsh Canadian painter Adrian Dingle is seen as the first Canadian national superhero, but no research has been done yet about her attitude towards feminist ideals. This is remarkable because Nelvana of the Northern Lights was published at a time when women were still severely suppressed in society. Accordingly, a female superhero was something special that had the potential to derange the socially constructed gender boarders of this point in time, just like Wonder Woman did.
This term paper is supposed to shed some light on this topic. For this purpose, two aspects of Nelvana of the Northern Lights will be examined for potential transgressions of socially constructed gender roles. The focus on her superpowers and her weaknesses allows a closer investigation of her super hero personality and the character itself, the analysis of
Nelvana’s depiction in the context of World War II is useful to survey her attitudes in relation to the Canadian wartime society. Furthermore, both elements are suited for comparisons with Wonder Woman comics because they play an important role in Marston’s stories as well.