A Darkhold-corrupted Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) serves as the villain in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Her previous attempts to do good are pushed aside to make way for a crazed, murderous rampage motivated by her desire to get her children back. It’s jarring to see Wanda, once an Avenger, portrayed not as a troubled soul who’s made mistakes (as in WandaVision) but as the outright antagonist. It’s also disconcerting to have her motherhood be the cause of her villainy (though it’s also what motivates her redemption). It just adds to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s troubling history with motherhood.
Wanda is far from the first villainous mother, though she is the first hero to turn into one. The pre-Disney+ TV shows were full of evil moms; Hawkeye reveals Eleanor Bishop (Vera Farmiga) to be a criminal and punishes her accordingly. It’s not just these portrayals that taint the MCU: there are unfortunate patterns of moms being less important than dads, moms being killed off, moms being reduced to moms and nothing else, and women who aren’t moms being undervalued because of it.
Avengers: Endgame introduces Morgan (Lexi Rabe), the daughter of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Her relationship with Tony is portrayed in multiple scenes, but she’s only ever shown silently sitting at her mother’s side watching a hologram of her father, suggesting that Pepper is the less important parent. Maggie Paxton (Judy Greer) is sassy and enjoyable in the Ant-Man films, but she’s also a side character compared to her ex-husband Scott (Paul Rudd).
A lot of the moms in the MCU get killed off to create angst for their husbands and/or children. Maria Stark is only seen in one reconstructed memory and a video of her murder — who she was as a person is a complete mystery, but she’s a known sore spot for her son Tony. Frigga (Rene Russo) is kind and powerful, shown to be the parent that actually cared for her sons without putting undue pressure on them, but she’s killed in a fight, and the grief others feel about her has more of an impact on the plot than she ever did. Ying Li (Fala Chen) is introduced as the woman who redeemed Wenwu (Tony Leung) with love, but her murder sends him into a spiral. May Parker (Marisa Tomei) is Peter Parker’s (Tom Holland) aunt, not his mother, but she’s also killed off to add to his angst.
The main timeline’s Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) seemed like she was going to subvert these tropes. She’s introduced as a strong woman who supports herself by doing something she loves and also has a daughter. She and Monica (Akira Akbar, Teyonah Parris) have a loving, close relationship that just gets stronger as Monica gets older. Though audiences don’t see it, Maria goes on to found S.W.O.R.D., but WandaVision shows that Maria died of cancer, reducing her to a source of angst for Monica. On the other hand, Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfieffer) is thought to be dead during the entire first Ant-Man, causing angst for her husband Hank (Michael Douglas) and her daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), but with Scott’s help, they bring her back from the Quantum Zone in a triumphant anti-fridging.
There’s also an unfortunate pattern of motherhood being presented as a character’s only purpose. Laura Barton (Linda Cardellini) is introduced as Clint Barton’s (Jeremy Renner) wife, and she’s very likable, but her family and relationships are literally the only things known about her. Hawkeye reveals that she was once a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and then retired to raise her kids, and that’s fine if it was her choice, but the optics of the mother having to retire and become domestic while the father continues to go on being a secret agent and superhero aren’t great. Similarly, the finale of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. shows Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) seemingly having settled in the country to raise her daughter Alya (Harlow Happy Hexum); her husband, Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker), has also apparently retired, but the implication that someone can’t be an active S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and a mom at the same time are still there.
Marvel’s most controversial take on motherhood was introduced in Avengers: Age of Ultron, when Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) revealed that the Red Room forces hysterectomies on its “graduates” to remove the temptation of them having a child that they would prioritize. She expresses, in no uncertain terms, that this directly feeds into her feeling like a monster. When Clint and Natasha fight during Endgame about who should sacrifice themselves for the Soul Stone, Natasha’s reasoning is that Clint already has a family (specifically children) to go back to, whereas she can never have that.
Natasha grew up with her pretend parents, Melina and Alexei (Rachel Weisz, David Harbour), and sister Yelena (Florence Pugh). Melina and Yelena were also forcibly sterilized, and Yelena doesn’t desire to be a mother (though she does adopt a dog). Melina, on the other hand, is a mother but a fairly cold one.
Wanda invents her children in WandaVision, but she seems to accept that she has to give them up to allow Westview to get back to normal until she hears them calling to her while she studies the Darkhold. Doctor Strange 2 doesn’t really explain how she went from hearing them to being willing to do anything — including trying to kill another child (America [Xochitl Gomez]) — to get them back. While the Darkhold is responsible for her madness, her motherhood (or lack thereof) is her motivation.
Wanda’s motherhood-based villain arc has precedent in the comics, and a lot of the bad things that happen to/with mothers (especially on the pre-Disney+ shows, like Runaways, where every parent is evil, and that’s the point) are also inspired by comics storylines, but there were ways to write Doctor Stange 2 that didn’t involve corrupting one of the longest-standing female heroes in the MCU. There were even ways to make the corruption arc less problematic. As it is, it just adds to the MCU’s misunderstanding and misrepresentation of mothers (and female characters in general).
To see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ take on Wanda, the MCU film is in theaters now.
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