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On the Sources for the Scarlet Witch

Jason Tondro raises some interesting points about the literary roots of Wanda Maximoff (or whatever surname she uses these days). The core of his elegant thesis is that Wanda, like Hester in the Scarlet letter, is characterised by the label society puts upon her for her "sins" and background, is driven by relationships with two very different men, and struggles to come still be a worthy person nurturing her child/gift.

However for me the core of Wanda's character concept has not been about alienation or condemnation (as it has for almost every other mutant character). In fact the origin of Wanda's powers - her mutanthood - has been almost universally ignored (except perhaps for Avengers #113 and 252), and has moved even further from the same sorts of mutations that empower the X-Men by the recent revelations of Cthon's modifications and the nature of Chaos Magic.

In Wanda's first appearances as the only sister of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants she serves three dramatic purposes. First and foremost she is there to counter the powers of the telekinetic Marvel Girl in conflicts with the X-Men. Second she is there to be the sister of Quicksilver, setting up dynamics amongst the Brotherhood based on Pietro's protectiveness (and just occasionally the opposite, where she stands up for him). Thirdly, she is the necessary (I hesitate to use the word token) female in the group, bringing a different perspective from a Magneto presented as totally evil in his early appearances and from very negative portrayals of the Toad and Mastermind. Wanda, as a Stan Lee female, feels compassion (for example for the Sub-Mariner) even though she is a villainess.

The sources for this sort of dynamic come from deep within Stan the Man's subconscious, churned up during his most fertile writing period from the hundreds of sources he must have absorbed during his reading youth. One could make a case for everything from Wanda as Trilby to Magneto's Svengali, through Wanda's Esmerelda to the Toad's Quasimodo, to the virginal Shakesperian heroine (whose name I cannot readily recall) who survives pristine in the care of a brothel, or even for Wanda and Pietro as the orphaned Babes in the Wood.

There is a different dynamic with the Scarlet Witch in the early Avengers. In Cap's cooky quartet Wanda is still the object of Pietro's protectiveness, but she is also there to be a mild object of Hawkeye's amorous attentions and to have mild stirrings herself for Cap, and lastly to play peacemeaker between the fiery temperamental males of the group. To a lesser extent her hex power is a deus et machina to get the writer out of awkward corners he may have written his team into.

One feels that first and foremost Stan Lee was now tapping into the success of his own work in the Fantastic Four, where a similar structure of four conflicting-but-family characters was proving very popular. Behind that however we have a whole range of old archetypes. There is the motif of the hero backed by subordinate but stalwart companion with love-interest sister (as in, say, Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel novels, reproduced here with cap, Pietro and Wanda of course). There is the loving woman reconciling quarrelling males theme (which probably has literary roots, but I bet Stan watched Bonanza!).

The next major development for Wanda was her attraction to the Vision. Here we have a faint stab at "star-crossed lovers", perhaps an attempt to address issues of prejudice regarding mixed marriage. Forbidden love or illicit romance are very common in diverse literary endeavours from Pyramus and Thisbe or Paulo and Francesca to the daily soap opera of your choice. Quicksilver steps into the role of jealous male relative guarding virginal female, in just the same way as Yspaddaden does Olwen in the Mabinogion tale or Tybalt does with Juliet.

I could go on but I suspect I'm getting tedious. I suppose what I'm asserting is that Wanda is something of an agglomeration of archetypes, and archetypes are recognised again and again in literature. It is therefore entirely possible to construe Wanda's history as paralleling Hester Prynne's without having to distort or interpret in any significant way; but it is equally possible to see other motifs which can be applied.

In his reply to the Scarlet Letter post Rimes brought up issues about the cultural context of Wanda as gypsy-raised. This has never played a very large factor in her characterisation until recently. Even the appearance of Django Maximoff and the subsequent Wundagore/Cthon storyline had little to say about any cultural heritage; but this is now being developed. Even Wanda's costume and casual clothing have a Romany look. Perhaps Rimes is therefore right in drawing our attention to this motif.

I was interested in the gypsy taboo about the dead. Part of Magneto's origin is that he was present in a Nazi concentration camp and escaped by being mistaken for dead and buried. Partially protected by his as-yet-unsuspected mutant powers he clawed his way to the surface, in one sense reborn, but in another sense a walking dead man. What would the gypsy culture make of this? Or of the boy and girl this unclean man came to claim from the mob? Irrelevant to the main discourse here, but traditionally gypsies were slandered as stealers of children. Wanda's experience appears to be the reverse!

I suspect that there is at least one more important strand to Wanda's heritage which has also been tapped in developing her story. Wanda-as-sorceress has recently been readdressed, opening the whole Wanda-in-tune-with-earth-forces concept up again. Someone who better understands chaos magic theory or Gaian beliefs will have to interpret how that has shaped Wanda's portrayal.

But at the heart of all this is Wanda as heroine - a word I use here in the traditional sense as the female character closely associated with the hero. Look at all the posts on this board about the Scarlet Witch. Relatively few of them are discussing Wanda's powers, her heritage, her mentor relationship with Agatha Harkness, even her rise to Vice-Chairmanship. What the fans want to talk about is who should Wanda end up with, Wonder Man or the Vision? And it is Wanda's romantic relationships which have placed her centre stage in a number of eras of the comic, including this one.

I applaud Kurt Busiek's recognition that a modern female hero needs to be more than the adjunct heroine of yesteryear and his moves to address that. But if we are looking for the real roots to the character of the Scarlet Witch we may need to go no further than the paperback romance novels in the rack next to the comics at the corner store.