Today’s not over yet, but for the moment the biggest scandal rocking the DC company and fan community is the abrupt departure of Batwoman’s creative team, J. H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman.

A strong start

Williams and Blackman have made the series a bestseller since the New 52 reboot in 2011, and managed to snag a GLAAD award for their portrayal of Batwoman/Kate Kane’s romance with Gotham policewoman Maggie Sawyer. When Kane proposed to Sawyer in February 2013, there was little fanfare or DC-motivated press around the event. At the time, this was a surprising silence; both Marvel and DC have a tendency to announce any plots points that might attract positive press attention, especially for portrayals of homosexual characters (see: the hype around the marriage between Northstar and his boyfriend in Astonishing X-Men, and the build-up before DC’s announcement that Green Lantern protagonist Alan Scott is gay). In a cultural landscape where companies demand to be lavished with praise for achieving the bare minimum level of minority representation, the quiet engagement of Kane and Sawyer appeared to be more earnest: a natural progression of their relationship rather than a cheap publicity stunt.

Yet their romance appears to be star-crossed; Williams and Blackman attribute their departure to disruptive editorial intervention, including a decree that Kane and Sawyer will not be getting married.

A surprise proposal

While on a panel at the Baltimore Comic-Con, DC executive editor Dan DiDio was quick to clarify that the decision to erase the marriage had nothing to do with the fact that they’re lesbians. Instead, DiDio explained, heroes and heroines shouldn’t be happy or have fulfilling personal lives, suggesting that DC remains committed to the gritty, “realistic” aesthetic that has plagued comics since the 1990s.

DiDio also chided, “Name one other publisher out there who stands behind their gay characters the way we do,” leaving DC fans to wonder–what gay characters? Since DC rebooted their universe with the New 52 line, there seem to be fewer LGBTQ characters than ever. Even limited to the purview of Batman characters, there has been no mention of Catwoman sidekick Holly Robinson or sometimes-cop, sometimes-superheroine Renée Montoya. Although Robinson appears to have never existed within the rebooted universe, there is evidence to suggest that Montoya, a former lover of Kate Kane’s, has been killed off. (Notably, the outing of Alan Scott and the subsequent proposal of marriage to his boyfriend was immediately followed by the boyfriend being killed off–or put in the refrigerator, in comic parlance.)

This is not to say that LGBTQ representations are missing in Gotham; there has been considerable innuendo around Birds of Prey character Starling (although no confirmation) and Batgirl features DC’s first openly transgendered woman, Alysia Yeoh. But can a company really be considered to stand behind their gay characters when they replace them so readily? Is there a limit to the number of LGBTQ characters they’re allowed before Orson Scott Card refuses to write for them?

Hardly had the news broken when DC-appointed author and gay man Marc Andreyko to head up the book, presumably to head-off any accusations of homophobia. After a few days, artist and heterosexual Jeremy Haun was hired to do the line art. However, questions remain for fans: Are Kate and Maggie still engaged? Will Maggie survive the engagement, or will she be forced into the fridge? How will the new creative team handle their inability to get married? One thing is certain; the new team’s pliancy with DC’s editorial interventions mean Kane and Sawyer won’t be hearing wedding bells anytime soon.

Kate and Maggie re-commit

Conterminously, attention was being paid to the relationship between marital ethics and political futures in the run up to the Republication presidential primary: hopeful Newt Gingrich is a known adulterer and thrice married, and (yet unannounced candidate) Indiana governor Mitch Daniels is remarried to a woman who previously divorced him and left their four children in order to marry another man.

Finally, the same week of the Shriver/Schwarzenegger bombshell, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF and assumed frontrunner for the French presidency, was jailed after being accused of sexual assault by a housekeeper at an elite Manhattan hotel. His wife, Anne Sinclair, staked his $1 million bail and is reportedly bankrolling his expensive house arrest.

This season of The Good Wife seemingly referenced all this and more (the episode titled “VIP Treatment” literally featured a liberal Nobel Prize winner accused of assaulting a masseuse in a high end hotel), and continues to use both its cases and its characters’ private lives to articulate the myriad intersections of publicity, performance, and pain that comprise political unions. Yet, if season one of The Good Wife was patterned most blatantly after the Spitzer scandal, season two has inadvertently yet presciently refracted through the Schwarzenegger one. Consider the following coincidences between life of the fictitious Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) and the Shriver ordeal: in each, professional women “opted out” of careers in the name of their husbands’ political aspirations (Shriver abandoned a post as an NBC reporter when she became California’s first lady; Alicia previously gave up her career as a lawyer to support her husband’s job as State’s Attorney).  Revelations emerged of male misdeeds long in the past but never divulged to the wronged wife (Schwarzenegger’s affair with a household staffer allegedly occurred over a decade ago; Peter’s one night stand with Alicia’s co-worker Kalinda took place before Alicia knew her). An implied association exists between the wife and the “other woman” (Shriver allegedly lived with the female housekeeper who bore her husband’s child; Alicia recently called Kalinda her “best friend”). In the course of contentious campaigns riddled by sexual scandal, both women helped their husbands win by publicly asserting these men’s essential decency (Shriver’s “Remarkable Women Tour” began days before the governor’s recall election; Alicia’s “Hail Mary” interview was televised on the eve of Peter’s bid for reelection as State’s Attorney). Their marital meltdowns were paradoxically both years in coming and vertiginously abrupt (The announcement of the Shriver/Schwarzenegger separation and the revelation of the “love child” came in the course of one week; Alicia packed up Peter’s things and found him a new apartment in the span of one night). Finally, both narratives testify to grief that is less a wife’s than it is a mother’s (Alicia’s only real breakdown occurs when she tells her children that she and Peter have separated; Shriver’s public statement reads, “This is a painful and heartbreaking time. As a mother, my concern is for the children”).

These stories make clear truisms we have long known, particularly that marital sexuality serves as a metric of morality, and that for public figures there are myriad benefits to having a good marriage, and even (if not more) dangers in not. Related is the role that, in a still largely male dominated political arena, wives play in maintaining a requisite image for the men whose lives, campaigns, and children they support. The political stories of the last weeks also throw into relief a reality of marriage that is not unique to politics, particularly the slippery nature of love, loyalty and sexuality. Though the institution of marriage overlays these vagaries with convenient and predictable scripts of enduring fidelity, their far more untidy underlying truths reemerge at moments like these. Yet because marriage frequently registers in our national consciousness only in times of crisis, these conversations do little to furnish us with an adequate vocabulary to talk about real wives and their real world marriages. Instead, sexual scandals slot marriage’s messiness instead into tired scripts that have prevailed in American discourse since at least the nineteenth century wherein upper class women were regarded as the “angels” in the house, the gatekeepers of morality and virtue, in contrast to men corrupted by the supposedly amoral public sphere.

Tales such as the Schwarzenegger/Shriver breakup tempt us, unfortunately, back into similar binaries where “bad husbands” hurt “good wives,” simplistic schemas that tend to disempower the women cast as suffering angels. Yet, it is precisely such well meaning but ultimately damaging mythologies that The Good Wife might help us to resist. As the season finale concluded with the closing of a door to a high end hotel room, where a still-married woman entered with a man who is not her husband, but rather a longtime friend, boss and object of desire, with the promise of nothing more than one hour of “good timing” it became abundantly clear that wife Alicia is, at least, no angel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YbgfZucQ6k&feature=youtu.be