The Well‐Born Superhero

The dual-identity hero-millionaire playboy by day, crime-fighting do-gooder by night-is one of the most enduring staples of American comic books, most famously embodied by Bob Kane and Bill Finger's 1939 Batman. The hybrid figure, however, originates decades earlier and encompasses a multi-generic, transatlantic array of texts unified by the central trope of controlled, individual transformation employed for social good. Early literature of the dual-identity hero spans not only comic books but plays, silent film, radio, popular novels, and pulp fiction magazines, in an expanse of genres that, in addition to superhero narratives, includes adventure, western, crime, science fiction, and romance. While these characters have no single point of origin and influence, the superhero's duality evolved within cultures that exhibited a larger preoccupation with superhuman transformation.The contemporary superhero character type is in part a product of the British and American eugenics movements of the early twentieth century. "[RJegardless of the literary form in which it is presented," write Lois A. Cuddy and Claire M. Roche in Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940, "the Darwinian way of seeing the world and human life had taken root," and science "empowered upper-class, educated, white men to enjoy the only thing'they could believe with absolute certainty: their own preeminence in a world of constant change" (47). While Bruce Wayne continues to embody that pre-eminently upper-class white man championing the status quo, the generative context of the Evolution, devoid of the protective hand of Providence, presented two assaults to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century social structure: degenerates from below, and degeneration from within. The Superman was the solution to both. Although the name is associated with the comic book creation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Superman was the central term of eugenics introduced by George Bernard Shaw in 1903 (with only a tangential reference to Nietzsche). The hybrid figure of the dual-identity hero emerged at this cultural moment when many eugenicists were popularizing Mendel's principles of hybridization. Beginning with Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel, supermen of aristocratic birth rescue the ruling class by metaphorically blending their identities with the objects of their fear. Refiguring gothic tragedies of interbreeding into narratives of triumph, the dual-identity hero-part well-born, part criminal commoner-absorbs the threat of the unfit, while simultaneously improving the well born by purging the upper class of its degenerative parasitism. By transforming the idle rich into noble adventurers, eugenic hero narratives safeguard their class' inheritance as rightful rulers. Where selective breeding promised the eventual biological transformation of the ruling class into a ruling race of supermen, fantastical supermen of genre literatures popular before comic books delivered the eugenic future in a single bound.As the first and most influential dual-identity Superman, Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel established hybridity as a paradoxically reactionary trait for the well-born hybrids to follow in the emergent genre. As eugenics widened its cultural hold, hero hybridization expanded, particularly into pulp fiction, manifesting a range of iconic characters that include Tarzan, the Gray Seal, and Zorro. When eugenics declined in the late 1920s, the hero formula mirrored that change too. As the Superman found its ultimate expression in Nazism, a race of artificially evolved superhumans shifted from societal goal to societal threat. While still maintaining cultural fascination with the figure of the Superman, 1930s pulp fiction subverted the marriage plot to isolate superhuman heroes and thwart narratives of reproduction. In their final, comic book incarnations, supermen abandoned eugenics to defend the egalitarian principles the movement opposed. …