American Perspectives on Romanian Women in 'Original Sin'
Specs:
Title: Original Sin
Genre: Action, Superhero, Adventure
Series: Spider-Woman
Issue: no. 48
Artist: Marie Severin
Writer: Archie Goodwin
Publication date: February, 1983
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Country: USA
Characters: Gypsy Moth
Setting: Los Angeles; Romania.
Outline/synopsis:
After a gang of thugs commits a series of crimes in the name of the ‘Sybarite’, Spider-Woman takes action and starts looking for the culprit. After losing a fight with some smugglers, and being injected with a drug causing her to pass out, Spider-Woman wakes up at the party of the Sybarite who turns out to be Gypsy Moth. During their confrontation, Gypsy Moth’s past is revealed through various flashbacks.
Tropes:
The woman with multiple identities = Gypsy Moth;
The Oriental = Gypsy Moth;
The Beautiful Romanian Woman = Gypsy Moth;
The manipulator = Gypsy Moth because she manages to put the smuggler gangs under her spell (they do her bidding); she also has the power of controlling various materials;
The Romanian mythical land, where legends are born;
The naive woman/the rebel = Gypsy Moth.
Personal view:
As new crimes take place in Los Angeles, Jessica Drew has to put on her Spider-Woman costume once again and save the city from corruption. This time, she has to confront a gang of smugglers under the command of the Sybarite, whom she later discovers to be none other than Gypsy Moth, a mutant able to manipulate different materials whom she met at the beginning of the comics series. Upon her sudden realization, Spider-Woman tries to appeal to Gypsy Moth’s conscience and become her friend again. However, the latter refuses and declares that “I have never known friends,” and then she returns to the past, to her origins. It is thus that the reader learns her real name—Sybil Devorak, and that being “raised by Balkan Gypsies, she was left with much time alone,” which, eventually, turned her into a lonely, anti-social girl, who was “alluring and utterly naïve,” and a very sensitive girl. What is interesting to note here is Gypsy Moth's real name, which does not sound Romanian at all, but seems to rather have some Russian/Ukrainian origins.
Her memories then continue to show how one day, while wandering onto the set of a remake of the movie Dracula, an American actor fell in love with her “exotic beauty” and seduced her into accompanying him to America, where she soon became an “exotic toy (…) to be played with, then forgotten.”
From the descriptions offered by the writers of the comic book, the young Romanian girl, and in extenso, all Romanian women, is naïve and attractive, but powerless when it comes to love, reason why she can be easily manipulated and abused. Thus, Romanian women become oriental for Western men, and, since they are powerless, they also acquire, as Vesna Goldsworthy indicates in her Inventing Ruritania, voices that are not heard. As a result, following their barbaric instincts of which many critics talk about, they only manage to break free from abuse by rebelling in a violent manner, just as Sybil is shown to do when she becomes Gypsy Moth.
All in all, Americans do not only manifest a great interest in Romania due to its legends and myths, as seen via the American actor who came to film a remake of the Dracula movie, but also in the Romanian women who appear as tame, naïve and of extraordinary beauty.
