Analysis | The Scarlet Witch in the Multiverse of Misogyny

In 2021, Jac Schaeffer, creator of the Marvel streaming series “WandaVision,” told Total Film magazine that the show — in which magical heroine Wanda Maximoff, a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch, accidentally traps an entire town in her grief-fuelled fantasy after a mental breakdown — would not be a sexist portrayal of a powerful woman.

“It was extremely important to me that we not do the lazy thing of having a superpowered lady who can’t handle her powers and goes crazy,” she said.

The show won breakout success and multiple award nominations for avoiding that trope, presenting Wanda as a well-meaning but flawed person who made terrible mistakes but learned to process her trauma.

But when Schaeffer gave that interview, Marvel was already filming “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” out in theatres this weekend. The film has Wanda becoming a villain after using power she can’t handle — and while “WandaVision” ended with her accepting the loss of the family she created in that show, the movie makes her willing to hurt anyone and everyone to get them back.

It may seem strange (no pun intended) that Disney, which likes to cultivate a reputation for progressive representation, greenlit a story in which a powerful woman becomes suddenly unstable because she can’t think straight where her children are concerned. To explain it, we have to go to an even more depressing source: the comic books that inspired producer Kevin Feige and his team.

As Schaeffer’s comments hinted, the powerful heroine who becomes a menace is a familiar presence in superhero comics. The most famous is “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” a storyline from Marvel’s “X-Men” in which the team’s longest-serving heroine becomes a mass murderer due to a huge amount of power that warps her mind. Readers became so fascinated that the storyline inspired not one but two bad X-Men movies (“X-Men: The Last Stand” and “Dark Phoenix”).

But no powerful woman in comics has suffered more from the trope than the Scarlet Witch. For most of her comic book career, she was the primary heroine on the Avengers team and one of the most popular in the company’s relatively small number of heroines. True, she had a bad time for a spell. In a development that will be very familiar to viewers of “WandaVision,” she used magic to conceive twin sons with her non-human husband, the Vision; Canadian writer/artist John Byrne, best known for drawing “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” chose to kill the children off and make her suffer a brief breakdown. But she soon recovered and went back to using her powers for good.

That all changed with “Avengers Disassembled,” the 2004 Marvel comic book story by which the Doctor Strange sequel is heavily influenced. Writer Brian Michael Bendis, trying to pep up the sagging sales of the Avengers comic with some huge, attention-getting shocks, revisited the loss of Wanda’s children by revealing that her mind had snapped completely. She alternates between hallucinating her children and attacking her teammates for no clear reason, blowing up their headquarters and killing several heroes — including Vision — until Doctor Strange stops her and explains that she was brought to this moment by her trauma and her inability to tell reality from fantasy.

The story inspired a 2005 followup, “House of M,” in which Wanda has become so dangerous that the heroes — among them, Charles Xavier, the character Patrick Stewart played in the X-Men movies — discuss the idea of euthanizing her. After that, she was largely absent from comics for many years.

Even at the time, some commentators noticed that the premise was largely based on sexist clichés about women who can’t be trusted with too much power and are made irrational by their attachment to their children. Television writer John Rogers (who went on to create the show “Leverage”) wrote a blog post called “Womb Crazy!” in which he pointed out that Wanda is made to go insane for “specifically weak-ass girly reasons. Wanda kills because she wants babies.”

Rogers pinpointed a larger problem with the portrayal of women in comics. Some franchises have a habit of portraying women as strong only if they fit certain stereotypes about what a strong woman should be: Carol Danvers, the heroine of “Captain Marvel,” is in the military, while Black Widow is a spy.

Wanda, on the other hand, is a more old-fashioned type of character who wants a conventional suburban family life and often ends up being portrayed as weak-minded because of it; the fact that she wants children becomes proof enough that she would murder to get them. If a character is portrayed as heroic for doing anything to protect their family, it’s usually a man, especially if Liam Neeson is playing him.

Wanda’s transformation into a murderous mom was so obviously incongruent that comic book characters would occasionally lean on the fourth wall to point it out. In “Young Avengers,” a comic series created by Allan Heinberg (co-developer and executive producer of the upcoming Netflix comic adaptation “The Sandman”) and artist Jim Cheung, a group of young superheroes decides to search for Wanda and try to rehabilitate her. When she’s found, one of the characters, Wanda’s son Billy — because no one stays dead in comics either — wonders how she could have done something so out of character, since killing innocent people is “something the Scarlet Witch would never do.”

Why would the MCU take so much from a storyline that was called out for misogyny even at the time and which was criticized as nonsensical by the characters themselves? Some of this just may be that the entire franchise is influenced by the comics of the 2000s, when Feige and his colleagues were getting the MCU up and running. Even the idea of casting Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury comes from a 2000s comic in which the character was redesigned to look like Jackson. If you think that era of comic books is gospel, even a character’s worst story may seem definitive.

“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” may also be yet another validation of the growing conventional wisdom that an all-male creative team (the movie was directed by Sam Raimi and written by Michael Waldron) is more likely to stumble in its portrayal of women. In his post about “Avengers Disassembled,” Rogers fumed that its understanding of women’s motivations “was supposed to have died out in the 1910’s” and wondered, “are there no female editors?”

Something similar may apply to the MCU. Jac Schaeffer was able to create a nuanced portrayal of Wanda and her strengths and weaknesses in “WandaVision” where her film-world counterparts may have failed. It could be that to get inside the head of a powerful woman, you need a woman with power.

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