Review
Grief and the Housewife
WandaVision’s Bold Take on Love
Grief: n. deep sorrow, especially that caused by someone’s death.
— Oxford English DictionaryGrief is the response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or some living thing that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, grief also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, cultural, spiritual and philosophical dimensions. While the terms are often used interchangeably, bereavement refers to the state of loss, while grief is the reaction to that loss.
— Wikipedia
Content warning: in addition to the fictional deaths in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), this essay discusses the loss of a parent to ischemic stroke
Spoiler warning: contains mention of events throughout the MCU and in WandaVision in particular
Wanda Maximoff’s loss is incalculable. Certainly, it would be possible to list the people she has lost — both of her parents, her brother, Vision — but loss is not counted in numbers. No mathematics can measure the love that no longer has a place to go when someone you love dies. As Vision (Paul Bettany) said to Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) in a post–Age of Ultron (2015, in which Wanda’s brother Pietro was killed by Ultron) flashback in episode 8, “But what is grief if not love, persevering?”
The internet has lost its collective mind over that line, split between people finding it beautiful and profound and those who find it trite, corny, or…honestly, I am not sure what people object to. I found it achingly familiar: I wrote a very similar line in a story I wrote not long after my father died. Describing grief as love is an honest and powerful way of describing the pain of loss.
WandaVision is a story told out of order. We learn of Wanda’s bereavement only after we see the manifestation of her grief: a perfect television nuclear family, with Vision alive and a whole town in on the lie. But why does Wanda choose — even subconsciously — to model her ideal life after sitcom families? Why is housewife the most comforting role for a powerful witch to cast herself in? The series shows us that she grew up in war-torn Sokovia (a fictional eastern European country) watching sit-coms that gave her a peek at “normal” (white middle-class American) life, but I believe there is more to it.
Housewife: n. A woman whose main occupation is caring for her family, managing household affairs, and doing housework, while her husband or partner goes out to work.
— Oxford EnglishA woman whose work is running or managing her family’s home and who is not employed outside the home (a career woman).
— Wikipedia
My father had two strokes, the first on Christmas 2018. He was living in Mexico and I could not reasonably travel to see him — I had no passport, among other reasons. While I waited for news, then waited for his condition to improve, I focused on two things: I cooked a lot of beans (one of my favorite foods), and I knitted gnomes. I got the beans from Rancho Gordo and the gnome patterns from Imagined Landscapes.
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Why did I choose these domestic arts to channel my fears into? Why does Wanda choose to be a housewife instead of facing reality? Because there is comfort in the domestic. The mid-century image of the housewife is absolutely, positively post-WWII propaganda designed to keep women in the domestic sphere in support of capitalism and the patriarchy, but the domestic sphere is based entirely on things that are both necessary and comforting.
The home is the place of safety. It is the place of sustenance (food), of warmth (clothing, bedding, window coverings), and of comfort and love (family). It is the place of stability. Wanda has only ever had that in Vision, so when he is taken away from her by Thanos, her grief is the size of the universe (as all grief is).
Without meaning to or knowing how she accomplished it, Wanda creates the safety of home for herself, and places herself in the domestic role western society assigned to her: that of the housewife. Taking this role recreates the home she had found in Vision, as well as recreating the sitcoms she has found comfort in her entire life.
Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) creates an interesting juxtaposition to Wanda. Where Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) is her antagonist, Monica is her mirror. Returning to life after being taken by “the snap” (Avengers: Infinity War, 2018) she finds a changed world (Avengers: Endgame, 2019) and her mother, Maria Rambeau, dead. Monica does not have time to grieve Maria or the five years she lost — she is almost immediately called to New Jersey to assist FBI Agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) as he investigates the strange disappearance of the town of Westview.
Of course, by the time the audience learns all of this, we’ve already met Monica — as Geraldine, Wanda’s neighbor in Westview. When Monica goes through the magical barrier into Westview and becomes Geraldine, Dr. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) is brought in to work with Agent Woo. She is the one who figures out a way into Wanda’s creation via the television signal.
Over the course of WandaVision, Monica connects with Wanda and refuses S.W.O.R.D. director Tyler Hayward’s (Josh Stamberg) orders to stay out of Westview; instead, she tries to reach Wanda through the barrier, to help her. It is very important to note that Rambeau is a Black woman and Hayward is a white man. Hayward’s goal is not to help Wanda; it is to use what remains of Vision — the real one, not the one created by Wanda’s grief — as a weapon and make Wanda’s Scarlet Witch powers a scapegoat.
Monica defies Hayward and goes through Wanda’s magical barrier for a third time, rewriting her own DNA and developing superpowers. Wanda’s powers were there from birth, but Monica’s are a choice she makes in an effort to help Wanda in her grief and to save Westview from it. This is a powerful choice, especially given Darcy’s warning that the act could kill her. In what is perhaps my favorite moment in recent TV history, Darcy lays out the danger for Monica and then supports Monica’s choice to ignore it.
This is not a show specifically about women supporting women; Agatha wants to take Wanda’s power; Vision and Agent Woo, both men, support Wanda, albeit in different ways. But it is worth noting that women supporting women, as Darcy supports Monica and Monica supports Wanda, is still noteworthy.
My father’s second stroke killed him. I do not remember how I channeled my grief after that. It was too big to be compatible with memory. Like Wanda, my grief was (and is) the size of the universe. I do know that I have not knitted a single gnome since. When I dream of my father — which is not often — we are usually in a kitchen, cooking or eating or just sitting together, talking. If I was “a being capable of spontaneous creation,” as Agatha describes Wanda, it seems very likely that I would find myself in an imagined kitchen with him.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” We use affiliate links and Patreon to pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
