From Librarian to Batgirl to Oracle

Barbara Gordon is a relative newcomer to the Batman universe, making her first appearance in comic books in 1967 as both Batgirl and niece (later to be the adopted daughter) of police lieutenant James Gordon.⁴⁵ One of the more interesting features of the character is the fact that she has had two different super-hero identities. Famously, Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke shows Barbara Gordon being shot by the Joker.⁴⁶ The resultant paralysis effectively put an end to her career as Batgirl. Nonetheless, she re-emerges as Oracle, a highly effective information manager who uses her extraordinary computer skills to help fight crime in Gotham City. In Barbara’s unusual case, we have two “Year One” stories, a Batgirl: Year One nine-issue series,⁴⁶ and an Oracle: Year One short story, “Born of Hope.”⁴⁷ Since becoming Oracle, Barbara has also developed her own crime-fighting team consisting of Black Canary and Huntress, collectively known as the Birds of Prey.

The story of Barbara Gordon illustrates key themes in an important philosophical theory known as ‘moral perfectionism’.⁴⁸ One very interesting feature of moral perfectionism is that it can be found in the thinking of various philosophers, since the issue it foregrounds is one that works as a kind of precondition for any serious ethical reflection. Thus, it is present not only expressly in philosophical texts such as Plato’s Republic, but also in works of literature, movies, and the like. In short, wherever we find narratives that concern the moral progress of individuals, we are likely to find a story where moral perfectionism is illuminative. I want to show that a comic-book character can provide such a stable narrative.

There is, famously, or notoriously, no accepted definition of moral perfectionism. Instead, the term denotes a cluster of themes that are central to any life that can be seen as moral. The word ‘perfectionism’ suggests that ‘moral’ here is being understood in a fairly rigorous way, one that designates the “search” feature that will figure prominently in what follows. The central theme of moral perfectionism is that the self can become better, and that a truly moral life is one in which the self is always trying to improve. Other themes involve the role that exemplars or friends play in anyone’s quest for making moral progress, and at the same time the ongoing dangers of inappropriate conformity in anyone’s moral adventure. In short, what’s at stake in moral perfectionism is the development of a distinctive moral self. And that is a core issue in philosophy.

Where I Don’t Want to Be

Consider the following scene from Batgirl: Year One. We see Barbara Gordon working at her job in the Gotham City Library. She’s sitting in front of a bank of computers: books about crime are stacked around her on the shelves beside her desk; an application to the Gotham City Police Department stamped “denied” lies on her desk, as does a newspaper with a headline about “The Batman.” The desk sits in front of a large window overlooking from several floors up a central reading room. The elements of Barbara Gordon’s identity to this point in her life are splayed around for her (and the reader) to see. Of course, the significance of these elements is still unknown to her, but the comic is all about what Barbara is going to become, not just as Batgirl but also as Oracle. We are given access to her thoughts: “I want to be in on the action. Anything that will get me out of where I am. Where I don’t want to be.” (Batgirl: Year One, p. 13) I want to focus on this moment in Barbara’s life by pointing to a famous passage from the philosopher John Stuart Mill’s classic essay, On Liberty:

In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves, what do I prefer? Or, what would suit my character and disposition? Or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstance superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination except for what is customary. . . . Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature? ⁴⁹

Mill is directing our attention to two facts concerning the condition of human nature most of us experience. One fact is that the condition we experience is less than a desirable one. The other is that one way out of this unfortunate condition is by paying attention to our own desires. How is it that so many of us fail to take sufficient notice of our desires, and then fail to act on them, and as a result end up so unsatisfied?

Now, it may be the case that Mill is wrong that these pressures to conform affect everyone, though my own suspicion is that he is correct. Even if, though, such pressures were to affect only one person, we can apply his diagnosis of that situation. In the case of Barbara Gordon, she clearly feels the pressure to conform, to what her father wants, and what society in general expects of a young woman her age, and there are signs throughout the book that she finds this condition undesirable. Here the question that naturally arises for Barbara and for any of us is not so much how we know what we want—though that’s a difficult question in itself—but how we can get guidance in following our wants once we do know them.

None of us can get much guidance about how we should live our lives in the standard theories of moral philosophy. There is no help in to be found in a theory of the good as developed by classic Utilitarianism, or in the theory of right posed by traditional Kantianism. Both of these philosophical theories are pitched at a level more abstract than the very concrete question of how I should live my life, and both also cut off precisely the question of what I want. For each of them, the question of what I want is directly irrelevant to the morality of actions. At the same time, it might seem to hardly make sense to say that the issue of what kind of person I should become is tangential to morality as conceived by these two major theories. Isn’t any sort of morality all about both what we do and what we become? But actually, on the Utilitarian view, I simply should be the kind of person who maximizes good in each of my actions. From the Kantian perspective, I should be a person who does my duty. The idea of becoming, or what I am becoming, plays no real part in either theory. And these well-known theories claim that our personal wants are to be excluded rather than consulted when we seek to do the right thing. They insist that I increase the good or act from duty regardless of my feelings, wants, desires, or aspirations. And so they don’t really address any of these ingredients of human identity.

Accordingly, it might be better to say that what is at stake for Barbara Gordon as she confronts her future, and for any of us as we consider our own, is not primarily the development of any sort of a rule by which we can measure the goodness or rightness of particular actions, but rather the development of an overall sense of morality, simply speaking. Or if that sounds too strong, perhaps another way of saying the same thing is that we need to understand and prepare the conditions out of which our moral selves will develop. And one way we might make sense of that is by worrying about how it is that we make our desires more fully intelligible, or understandable, to ourselves. Indeed, it is precisely the gap between who Barbara Gordon is and who she wants to be that needs to be bridged. It is noteworthy that she does not experience this need as something extraneous to, or additional to, who she is: “I have to find another path. Divine my own future. One uniquely mine. Not a page from someone else’s book” (Batgirl: Year One, p. 12). She doesn’t just own the question and the challenge—it’s actually a part of her.

I Can Become Something More

If we can’t turn to standard moral theories for guidance in fashioning ourselves, then where can we turn for guidance? As Batgirl: Year One progresses, we see Barbara Gordon fall into the role of Batgirl seemingly by accident. She goes to a costume ball with her father, and she is dressed in a “Bat” costume. She does this mostly to tweak her father, whom she sees as wanting to thwart her ambition for a more active and exciting life, and in effect then to render her future mediocre, though he would never put it this way, or even conceive of his desires for her in such terms at all. But her costume choice is also made surely because at some level she is drawn to the particular life of Batman. While they are at the party, a villain appears and tries to kidnap Bruce Wayne, who, taking a break from his secret work as Batman, is attending the event. Barbara springs into action, rescuing Bruce and chasing the villain. At one point, the criminal calls her “Batgirl” and that, as she notes, makes it all somehow “official.”

In the course of her fight with the villain, we are granted access to her thoughts: “I can become something more. Something higher. From out of the shell I once was. I’ll emerge better. I’ll be lifted up with new wings. Like a moth. Or a bat.” It’s then that Batman appears on the scene, thanks to Barbara’s rescue of Bruce. And there’s the answer to the question of how she can get guidance in becoming her new self.

Barbara needs, as we all need, an exemplar, or a paradigm, or a mentor who will help us figure out who we are, or, more precisely, what we want. The role of exemplars in the quest for a moral life has a long history dating back at least to Socrates and his followers. These followers were mostly young men who sensed in the life of Socrates an orientation towards the good that they too were drawn towards. But there are dangers lurking about in such a relationship. The point of an exemplar is not that he or she is to be emulated, but that this person, in virtue of being farther along a path you aspire to go down, somehow understands you better than you understand yourself—at least at the beginning. This point is well made by the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay, “Schopenhauer as Educator.” The passage is so central to the philosophy of moral perfectionism that I will quote it at some length:

Anyone who believes in culture is thereby saying: ‘I see above me something higher and more human than I am; let everyone help me to attain it, as I will help everyone who knows and suffers as I do: so that at last the man may appear who feels himself perfect and boundless in knowledge and love, perception and power, and who in his completeness is at one with nature, the judge and evaluator of things.’ It is hard to create in anyone this condition of intrepid self-knowledge because it is impossible to teach love; for it is love alone that can bestow on the soul, not only a clear, discriminating and self-contemptuous view of itself, but also the desire to look beyond itself and to seek with all its might for a higher self as yet still concealed from it.⁵⁰

“Seeking a higher self still concealed” is precisely what Barbara Gordon is doing. But how is Batman going to aid her in seeking this higher self?

The opening word of Batgirl: Year One is “masks.” Masks and costumes are, obviously, tricky affairs for superheroes. We usually think of masks as concealing identities, but in the case of superheroes it’s almost always the case that in some important sense the mask reveals the identity. Yet in Barbara Gordon’s case, the metaphorical mask she wears at the beginning is precisely the one that conceals her higher self. It’s what we might call the “Barbara Gordon” mask, the “shell” around the librarian and relative of Lieutenant James Gordon. It’s only when she puts on the Batgirl mask that she begins her journey to her higher self, her future self—the one she doesn’t yet know.

At the end of the comic, Barbara is summoned to the Batcave. This is her second trip there. The first time she was brought there, she was tested by a kind of obstacle course, forced to try to stop a series of cardboard villains. She managed to run the gauntlet, but only by using “lethal force.” While no one was really killed, Batman took this as a sign that she wasn’t cut out to be part of the team. When asked what a contrary strategy would have proved, Batman replies, “That you could be one of us.” He goes on to question her own self-understanding, asking her why she wants to be one of them. Barbara is taken aback, left without an answer. For Batman, the lack of an answer, the obvious lack of self-knowledge here, is enough to rule out the possibility of her joining the team. Barbara isn’t quite finished though. It turns out she does have an answer after all: “Because I can.” This ambiguous assertion—is she saying that she possesses the ability to help or merely that somehow she sees it as a possibility—is enough to convince Batman to give her a chance. He doesn’t tell her that, but over the course of the comic, he indirectly, via his sidekick Robin, provides her with resources to continue her journey. Now she has been summoned again. She is given another test and again succeeds, but this time on Batman’s terms: no lethal force is used. At the end of the test, she asks Batman, “Do I pass? Will you finally acknowledge that I can do this?”

Consider that question. Barbara is asking for something from Batman, namely, acknowledgement. In other words, she’s asking Batman to accept her desire for a specific better self. This better self doesn’t yet exist, but she needs her desire recognized, she needs to know that it makes sense to others, as a sort of confirmation that it is truly makes sense for her. Batman does not immediately respond, instead telling her to follow him. Leading her out of the Batcave, they arrive at the graves of Bruce Wayne’s parents. He takes off his mask and they stand there. This is Batman acknowledging Barbara by letting her know who he is, letting her in on his past and his ongoing desire for a better self.

At the same time, while it is clear now that Batman will be her exemplar, this scene also makes it equally clear that Barbara’s individual path cannot be just a copy of Batman’s path. His is rooted in his unique experience just as Barbara’s must be rooted in her own experience and desire. This moment is significant to the extent that having exemplars for the path to a better self sounds initially like a kind of movement toward conformity. But this would be a misunderstanding. By seeing how Batman’s path is unique, we see that the role of an exemplar is in fact one of reflecting back the legitimacy and specificity of Barbara’s own desire for a better self. Batman will help her perform in her life the proper analogue of what he has performed, and is performing, in his life, but with all the differences appropriate to who she uniquely is, and which ultimately she alone will be in a position to know.

There Is What Could Be

There is another possible misunderstanding of moral perfectionism that Batgirl: Year One might initially be thought to suggest: namely, that there is one right self, one highest or best self that is a final goal for the quest. If that were the case, then in becoming Batgirl, Barbara Gordon presumably would have achieved her self. The life quest would be complete, the game over. But if it were that easy, relatively speaking, to find yourself, then we would naturally doubt the soundness of Mill’s insight. Why would so many people be struggling, as he suggests, with inappropriate or inauthentic forms of conformity if genuine individuality were so straightforward and comparatively simple to achieve? Things are more interesting than that. One fact about human life that makes the attainment of a self a continuing project is its fragility. After all, we as readers know that Barbara Gordon will eventually be shot and paralyzed. In fact, the closing lines of Batgirl: Year One point to this present fragility and ironically presage the future: “But despite my great and abiding respect for oracles, I’ve decided to forgo predictions and portents. There is what could be and there is the life I lead right now” (p. 213). Barbara realizes that there is the self she is on the way to becoming, illustrated in the final panel as she fights alongside Batman and Robin. At the same time, she recognizes that the self she hopes to attain, that she’s on the way to attaining, is provisional. There is still what yet could be.

In Oracle: Year One, “Born of Hope,” Barbara is starting the long process of recovery from her injury at the hands of the Joker. Recuperating at home, she finds out her father is working on a case that involves a villain laundering money by the sophisticated use of computers. Barbara decides to put her own computer expertise to work and begins to track the villain. One day when she is out getting some fresh air, this criminal pushes her wheelchair into the street. Narrowly escaping another grave injury, Barbara resolves to learn new self-defense skills. She arranges to meet with Richard Dragon, a martial-arts expert. At their first meeting, she states that she wants her life back. Dragon replies, “That’s who you were, not who you are. Who are you?” Barbara’s confused response is “I don’t know. I don’t know if I ever knew” (p. 13). Later in the story, after defeating the villain, she has another conversation with Dragon in which she tells him that she has found a start of the answer to his earlier question. As she leaves the park where they met, she thinks, “I’m me—more me than I have ever been.” She has managed to once again find her higher self, though not, obviously, a highest possible self.

It is significant that finding this new provisional, but higher, self means leaving behind her old self, Batgirl, and the friend whose acknowledgment meant so much to her. That particular path to herself—the one in which Batman played the role of exemplar—can no longer be the path that will allow her to achieve her better self. Above, I noted that in accepting Batman’s acknowledgement, Barbara managed to avoid turning herself into an image of Batman. However, it’s interesting to note that she recognizes the existence of such a danger.

Indeed, an interesting illustration of her resolve not to let that happen to her is available. For a while after becoming Oracle, Barbara continued to see and even date Dick Grayson, Batman’s former sidekick, Robin. Dick had eventually left Gotham City and moved to Blüdhaven where he took on the new identity of Nightwing.⁵¹ In a pivotal issue of Nightwing, Barbara decides she can no longer see him. She has come to understand that Dick has become just another Batman. When he explains that he’s been overextending himself because he alone provides protection for Blüdhaven, Barbara replies: “Congratulations. You’ve managed to turn into Bruce after all.”⁵² She has nicely diagnosed the possibility latent in deformed versions of moral perfectionism in which the quest for a higher self turns into becoming nothing more than a simple copy of another person’s higher self.

Barbara also notes a different reason for leaving Dick. Earlier in the story arc, he had inadvertently mentioned the Joker. Barbara starts to cry, and Dick leaps to the obvious, but wrong, conclusion. He thinks that she is still disturbed by talk of the Joker. Barbara makes it clear that the problem is a different one: “It’s not about Joker. You don’t need to walk on eggshells. What’s done is done. But that’s exactly the problem, Dick. The past. . . . But something happens when you’re with me. You get lost in these yesterdays we shared and . . .” She breaks off the thought, but comes back to it: “You can’t stop reminding me of what I once was.”⁵³ She sees Dick now, in effect, as something like a retrograde exemplar, not a morally proper one, pulling her back into the patterns of the past. Here, Barbara recognizes the way that the past itself can trap us in a sort of conformity, or what John Stuart Mill called a custom, a habitual pattern that perhaps was once right as a prior stage of the ongoing journey but is no longer proper to its present stage. This past is a constant risk for Barbara as it can hold her back from progress along the new path she now faces for becoming her higher self.

Of Like Minds

If her past is behind her, and her future is open, who is going to help Barbara along the journey? Who will be her new exemplar? Here it is important to realize that sometimes it isn’t the acknowledgement and guidance of an exemplar that we need, but someone who will just listen to our attempts to understand ourselves, to come to that measure of self-knowledge that any productive and well-directed journey will require. Sometimes what we need is just a friend. At the same time, the friend cannot block the move to a higher self, as Dick Grayson does to Barbara at this stage. Indeed, it might be better to say that the friend at any given time is precisely someone who can accompany you on your journey by listening with fresh ears, hearing you well, calling you out when you slip, and cheering you on and supporting you when that is what you need.

In Barbara Gordon’s new life as Oracle, she has developed precisely this sort of friendship with two others, Dinah Lance (Black Canary) and Helena Bertinelli (Huntress). In the series chronicling their work together, we are shown many moments where what is paramount is their friendship, precisely as it provokes them all to become better. So, for example, in one story arc, Barbara questions whether Dinah should remain part of the team. In a previous story, Dinah had come close to being killed, and Barbara has now decided that she could not face such a loss. Yet by the end of the story, Barbara has realized that the purpose of friendship is not to close off possibility. In Dinah’s words, Barbara needs “to learn how to let the small stuff go.” At the same time, provoked by Barbara’s actions, Dinah has taken up a new training regimen so she will never find herself again in the dangerous position of being a hostage. It’s the provocation between friends that pushes both Barbara and Dinah in the direction of growth.⁵⁴

Thus, friends come in various forms. The young Barbara Gordon needed the friend who could also be an exemplar. The mature Barbara Gordon, by contrast, does not need an exemplar. Rather she needs friends who are equals, but also friends who are equal to the task of demanding that her journey to a new, better self be one that she can make understandable to them, and thus one that they can in this way be sure is properly understandable to her.

In a more recent Batman story-line, Barbara was forced to blow-up her home and headquarters in Gotham City’s Clocktower building. She decides to leave Gotham City along with her friends. Everything in and around Gotham makes her sad, she explains, mentioning Batman, Nightwing, and the rubble of the Clocktower. She and her friends then embark on their new mission aboard a new airplane, named Aerie One (after the technical term for the home of birds of prey) that will serve as their new home.⁵⁵ The repetition of the term ‘new’ in the previous sentence is designed to emphasize just what Barbara has accomplished. Living in a moving home may be the ultimate in images of possibility. However, it’s not just any possibility, but a hard-won next step toward the Barbara yet to be: her unattained but attainable self. ⁵⁶

When philosophers look at ethics, we sometimes consider abstract notions like the good and the right. We often ponder theories of duty and prohibition. But it is an important part of philosophical reflection within the general boundaries of moral philosophy to ponder lives and how they improve. The categories of philosophical viewpoints such as moral perfectionism can help us to read superhero comics, and the stories in these comics, viewed through such a lens, can then help us to calibrate the progress of our own lives, as we seek to discover, and create, our own best selves.⁵⁷