Woman of the Month: Wednesday Addams

Wednesday Addams from The Addams Family

It’s the spooky season, which requires an appropriately Halloween-y entry for Woman of the Month. And what better choice given the success of her recent Netflix show than Wednesday Addams?

That said, the character has been around a lot longer than Jenna Ortega’s take, which means this post has ended up just as much a retrospective as a spotlight on her latest interpretation. I dug a little deeper into the history of Wednesday, and the results are a fascinating look at how a character can evolve over time.

Created by cartoonist Charles Addams, she first appeared (without a name) in the August 26, 1944, issue of The New Yorker, in a comic that featured her being told to stop whining and “go tell your brother you’ll poison him right back.” In fact, none of the iconic characters had names at this point, they were simply designed to be the deliberate antithesis of the idealized American nuclear family.

It wasn’t until the comics were adapted for the 1960s television show that names were bestowed, with the daughter dubbed Wednesday, adapted from the familiar children’s nursery rhyme: “Wednesday’s child is full of woe.”

But whereas the comic iteration of the character, with her pale skin and oddly-shaped egghead, was obsessed with dark subjects such as torture, death and crazy science experiments, the Wednesday of the show (as played by Lisa Loring) was in many ways a normal little girl. She liked ballet and dolls, is well-mannered and sweet-natured, and comes across as surprisingly normal.

Okay, so her doll has no head because she’s just learned about Marie Antoinette, and she raises spiders as pets, but there’s no sign of the Deadpan Snarking that would eventually become the staple part of her characterization. In fact, her first day at school leaves her in tears after she’s read a story about a knight slaying a dragon. Poor dragon!

The 1991 film takes Wednesday back to her comic roots, but still doesn’t go too hard on the deadpanning. Yes, Christina Ricci’s take on the character is definitely our most popular rendition of the character, but she also regularly demonstrates fear, excitement and joy. It’s the second film, Addams Family Values, that really codified Wednesday as the cold, emotionless pre-teen we recognize today.

Slightly less known are the two Hanna-Barbera cartoons (one in the seventies and one in the nineties) as well as two animated movies in 2019 and 2021. These all very much depict Wednesday as she appeared in the original comics: chalk-white skin, an oval-shaped head, and dark hair in two braids. I can’t say I have much interest in watching any of them, but a quick glance over the Wikipedia and TV Tropes pages tells me Wednesday is borderline psychotic in these iterations, making – among other things – several serious attempts on her brother’s life.

Then there’s the Broadway musical and the straight-to-video releases and the webseries, the most famous of which features Wednesday confronting some cat-callers.

But to watch the three most famous adaptations of The Addams Family: the original television show, the two nineties films, and the Netflix adaptation, is to watch the character grow from child to tween to teenager. By the time we’ve reached Jenna Ortega, the emotionless deadpanning has become the very crux of her character.

Still, her introductory scene is wrecking bloody vengeance on her brother’s bullies by unleashing flesh-eating piranhas in the school swimming pool, and her subsequent investigation into the mystery of Nevermore Academy is as much to do with s sense of societal responsibility as sating her own curiosity (though she’d never admit it). There’s a heart beating somewhere deep beneath all those layers of black.

But what to actually make of Wednesday Addams? What’s the appeal given her Ensemble Darkhorse status within the franchise? For my money, it’s that subversive element, her complete refusal to conform.

In a world where teenage girls (and women in general) are meant to be bright and bubbly and cheerful, Wednesday has zero interest in following the crowd. She’s the girl we want to be when we’re tired of smiling, tired of conversation, tired of being endlessly polite. She’s our sadistic tendencies and morbid obsessions; the melancholic disposition that we’re meant to keep concealed at all costs.  

And she’s completely unapologetic about it. How freeing it must be to truly not care what other people think, to always have a devastatingly backhanded comment at the ready, to be completely unmoved and unfazed by any attempt at bullying. The character’s appeal lies in her ability to be both a projection and a fantasy – albeit a dark one.