Female Power In The Multi-Verse.
Warning: There Be Spoilers!
Wanda Maximoff, also known as ‘The Scarlet Witch’ is a powerful female figure in the MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe]. She can light the night sky, take down entire armies with her mind, shoot magic bolts from her burnt fingertips, and create faux worlds to hide in.
Her heartbreaking motif of grief and loss in Disney’s limited show Wandavision was poignant because it showed how grief can tear at the very fabric of one’s reality if you allow it to overtake you. It also illustrated how formidable a weapon a woman’s strength can be against all odds. Wanda literally built an entire mini-universe out of her own grief and eventually even created two children out of her dark, sad magic that bound her even more strongly to her constant state of mourning.
If you appreciated this show and her character throughout the MCU, you probably felt profound sympathy for her at the end of Wandavision. I certainly did; which is why I was deeply dissapointed in how far the MCU went to villanize her power in Dr. Strange In the Multiverse of Madness.
In the film, Wanda discovers that the two sons she managed to create through her magic in Wandavision (and lost at the end of the show) still exist in other multiverses. In order to reunite with them; she must find the right vessel of power to help enable her to go to them in person.
It makes sense from a cienmatic POV to make Wanda a powerful villain and to have a fellow sorcerer like Dr. Stephen Strange have to take her down, they seem to be fairly evenly matched in terms of their magical abilities. (She becomes a dark force in the comics as well.) Still, I couldn’t help but be struck with how strongly, even if unintentionally, the message throughout the movie seemed to be: that an espcially strong woman must not be allowed to have so much power; that in moments of grief or rage, she would only destroy and that while Strange had his own grief, he was much more in command of his feelings and could manage to resist feeling the urge to use his power for ill. In other words: women are incapable of maintaining their moral compass or rationality when gripped with loss or frustration. Men can channel it in a more fruitful, benevolent manner. It played on societal stereotypes of men and women’s reactions to pain and emotion from a hero/villain perspective.
In an age where we are seeing women’s rights fall by the wayside through SCOTUS ruling to strike down Roe Vs. Wade, with voters refusing to elect a woman for President because she isn’t ‘likable’ enough, with Trans women being targeted for violence (and have hate legislated against them because people don’t think they are ‘really women’) it is hard to see such a wonderful symbol of a woman’s ultimate strength (her mind) like Wanda Maximoff be treated like an unstable wreck that must be stopped.
There is a line Wanda says twice when trying to defend herself stopping at nothing to get to her boys: “I’m not a monster, I’m a Mother.” The audience laughs at this line because it’s supposed to be ridiculous, but it also ridicules the idea of a mother using all her powers to keep her children safe, to be with them, to sate the never-ending bottomless pit that is grief. The joke is that the audience (and Dr. Strange) DOES see her as a monster: warped by sorrow, overcome with emotion, and not thinking clearly or rationally and in doing so using her gift as a weapon.
The female protagonist in the film is a teenage girl from another universe with powers who has no family left and is a lost, pure, innocent soul. She is of course, pitted against Wanda who seeks to drain the girl of her powers to strengthen her own. Why must we pit a younger, more ‘innocent’ seeming girl against a strong, intelligent, powerful older female character? Why must be keep punishing our female heroes for owning their ferocity?
Why can’t Wanda Maximoff be the mighty Sorceress she is clearly meant to be without villanizing her for it? Why can’t she team up with Dr. Strange, who is quite confident in his abilities and isn’t villainzed for it; in fact he is heralded for taking Wanda down. When Wanda admits defeat she is crushed by her own statue, and yet another emblem of female strength is eradicated with a whimper, because why would we want to see a woman shine using her mind? We already don’t want women to have control over our own bodies.
It’s small beans compared to the larger woes of women in the world right now, I know; but representation does matter. We sorely need to see unapologetically fierce, powerful, intelligent women who aren’t villanized for being more powerful and more successful than the men around them, but celebrated for it!
