Friday
A great review of WandaVision by the Washington Post’s Sonny Bunch has me making an unexpected comparison: Wanda as Grendel’s Mother. Hang on while I explain.
Disney’s nine-episode series, which concluded this past week, features a superhero who is so traumatized by the death of her robot husband that she creates a fantasy world in which he is still alive. To do so, she takes over an entire town, turning it into a replica of those idyllic sit-com towns from my childhood, like Leave It to Beaver’s Mayfield. All the town’s inhabitants are drafted, against their will, into Wanda’s grieving fantasy.
The show’s most interesting theme, Bunch believes, is that wallowing in grief can turn people into monsters.
This is not to deny that Wanda has many reasons to grieve. In the episode where she revisits various tragic episodes from her life, we understand why she has retreated into a fantasy world. Unfortunately, other people pay for her grief:
But in “WandaVision,” Wanda is processing this trauma by taking an entire town hostage, trapping the people there in a variety of TV sitcoms as she tries to work through her grief by using magic to resurrect Vision and give them twin sons.
It’s a genuinely monstrous act, and for a moment, the show acknowledges that. Freed from Wanda’s curse by fellow witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), one of the townspeople begs Wanda to let her see her 8-year-old daughter again: The little girl has been locked in her home for the entirety of the so-called Scarlet Witch’s reign, a grotesque act of child separation. Another confesses he’s exhausted: She doesn’t let them sleep in natural cycles, a violation of the Geneva Conventions. When they are allowed to sleep, they suffer her worst nightmares. “Please let us go,” one character begs. And, failing that?
“If you won’t let us go, just let us die,” Sharon (Debra Jo Rupp) croaks after Wanda has literally choked them into silence.
Rather than explore this further, however, the show leaves us with the line, “What is grief, if not love persevering?”, which Bunch believes sidesteps the horror:
And yet, the show feels the need to recast Wanda’s ultimate decision to give up her imaginary family, as well as her hold over the town, as an act of heroic altruism. “They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them,” says Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), a secret agent turned friend of Wanda, in the final episode.
Rambeau’s line is a moral atrocity, an effort to recast Wanda as the hero of the show, the savior of all these little people. But it’s not what she did for the people of Westview that matters. It’s what she did to them. And what she did to them is horrifying, a form of mind-rape and torture that extended for weeks, maybe months.
I’ve written a number of times about how Grendel’s Mother is one of literature’s great depictions of destructive grief. Any Anglo-Saxon warrior, unhinged by the loss of a comrade, could become a Grendel’s Mother, lashing out indiscriminately. The poet genders the anger female, I think, because warrior society could think of no anger more powerful than that of a mother who has lost her child.
We see Grendel’s Mothers all around us today. Whenever someone lashes out in grief and anger, they have become a Grendel’s Mother. Often innocent parties are killed, like Aeschere in Beowulf and Saddam Hussein following 9-11. In my book How Beowulf Can Save America (2012), I surmise that the radical right’s destructive behavior is connected with the death of their cherished dream that America can once again become Mayfield. (Of course, for people of color that image was never reality.)
Lashing out is only one of the responses to grief that we encounter in Beowulf. Another is dragon depression, where characters retreat into mental caves. At one point we see Wanda retreat into such a solitude, and in Beowulf we see a series of kings do so as well (Hrothgar for a few moments, Heremod, Hrethel, the Last Veteran). The original anger is still there, it just blows cold rather than hot. (It can blow hot is prodded, however, just as hot anger can become cold fury, as it does when Grendel’s Mother retreats into her cold underwater cave.) Neither lashing out nor withdrawing is a healthy way to grieve.
Beowulf defeats hot rage with a giant sword that he finds deep within himself. Wanda does as well, her sword being the realization that grief is “love persevering.” That part the series gets right, even if it glides too quickly over the collateral damage.
I note that Wanda has a couple of Wiglafs, Beowulf’s companion in the dragon battle, in Vision and Monica Rambeau. Both of them help her defeat her dragon self–which is to say, loving support can prevail when we are losing it.
In the end, Wanda lets go and ventures out, just as Beowulf emerges from the undersea cave. Once they have done so, both can once again begin to engage productively with the living world.
Further thought: My one disagreement with Bunch’s analysis is that he thinks that the show gets the acting direct of SWORD wrong:
The only character who has the correct response to Wanda is the acting director of SWORD (Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division), Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg), who calls in a drone strike on the monstrously wicked and dangerously powerful Wanda. Yet he is cast as a villain despite being the only person who recognizes the dangers presented by this overpowered war criminal.
Putting aside how we should deal with war criminals, the way to deal with dangerous grieving is not through force. Beowulf learns this when he tries using first his arm strength (will power) and then Unferth’s sword (conventional force) against Grendel’s Mother. Only something from the spirit works with such people. Monica Rambeau realizes this when she says she wants to understand Wanda, not take her out. Because such understanding occurs, Wanda overcomes her inner darkness.
For comparison’s sake, Wanda can be compared with another superhero that goes Grendel’s Mother after losing a loved one. In Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, lesbian witch Willow Rosenberg goes ballistic after a man rapes and kills her partner. Her anger is so large that, after skinning him alive, she threatens to take down the whole universe. She recovers only after another member of the group soothes her with tender childhood reminiscences, which remind her of her best self. The essay I wrote on the episode was one of this blog’s first posts.
