Doctor Strange and the Madness of Motherhood

SPOILERS!!

Before I had seen Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, I read an article about it in which the (female) critic said, “the Scarlet Witch–centered subplot idealized the purity and nobility of suburban motherhood to a degree I found both retrograde and cloying.” I understood what she meant at the time, but once I started watching the movie, I had a different thought (after my thought about how stupid the giant octopus monster was): this author is obviously not a mother. For me, the movie is not about suburban motherhood. It’s just about motherhood, and the madness it can manifest. Wanda lost her children in this universe and knows they exist in others, and she’s gone evil trying to get to them (which, as she points out to Doctor Strange, is sometimes in the eye of the usually-male beholder, the evilness). It’s just Mama Bear on a superhero scale.

I understood this so clearly when Wong asked Scarlet Witch why she didn’t simply force America Chavez to take her to another universe where her children existed rather than kill her to take her power, and she explained that she wanted the power indefinitely in case her children got sick and she needed to travel to another universe to find a cure. “Try as you might, Wanda, you can’t control everything,” he responds. As a mother who lived through the first two years of the Covid pandemic with children who were too young to get vaccinated–one of whom was still in my womb when the pandemic started–in a society that claims children as its most precious resource and yet does so little to protect them, I understood Wanda in a way only a mother could. The thing is, I know there are mothers who have a much harder time keeping their children safe than I do, but with all the people in my so-called village who refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated, support meaningful gun reform, condemn the cancers that are white supremacy and toxic masculinity, or even protect the future of our democracy from raging lunatics, hear me when I say this: suburban motherhood is not, in fact, ideal. If I had power like hers, I would probably have done some pretty unspeakable things at the height of my maternal fear and rage over the past couple years.

I don’t mean to discount the paternal instinct or to say that fathers or non-binary parents don’t love their children as much as mothers do. However, Wanda is a mother because she is a woman, and therein lies the crux. Instead of listening to, believing, and trying to help her, men just keep telling Wanda her children don’t even exist. And yet she knows in her bones they do. In her universe as in ours, women are silenced, disbelieved, gaslighted, and then--when they become “understandably angry,” as Doctor Strange puts it--feared and demonized.

So I guess I take issue with the whole “she’s just being reduced to the sexist woman-who-can’t-handle-power-and-goes-mad trope” criticism here. I’m no comic book stan (get it??), but I know that there are plenty of male characters–in the Marvel universe and in real life–who go mad with power. Hello–that’s exactly what the Doctor Strange from the universe with Captain England did!

And there are even more people of every gender who go mad simply from experiencing more excruciating trauma than anyone should ever have to bear. Thanos, anyone? No, those probably aren’t people who should have the nuclear codes (ahem). But that’s not a gender thing; that’s a human(ish) thing. So if Wanda can’t even get anyone to take her struggle seriously as the most powerful witch in the world, why wouldn't she choose to hide out in suburban motherhood with all the power in the world up her sleeve just in case? She’ll still be angry and overwhelmed and dismissed by society at large, but at least she can tuck her kids in safely at night.