By June Martin
Every story about the Wicked Witch of the West reaches the same point: the drenched green body, the smoke pouring out, the dissolution of wickedness beneath the purifying tide of water. Wicked the 2003 musical makes a fraud of this preposterous death, but the book stays true to it. In Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, Dorothy doesn’t mean to harm the Witch, in Baum’s original she throws the bucket of water out of frustration and doesn’t expect her to melt, in the original movie, she’s not even aiming at the Witch. All of these narratives are bound to this single point. In Wicked, the novel, it deforms the narrative badly, but Maguire had no choice but to allow it to happen.
First, an understanding of what Maguire was attempting to achieve is necessary. Wicked attempts to turn The Wizard of Oz on its head, not by merely causing the reader to empathize with Elphaba, the Witch, but by placing her in the political and historical context of Oz. For Maguire, this doesn’t mean reciting a list of Queens Ozma as the years go by or stories of great battles, it means establishing a history of religion, of regional tension, of oppression and exploitation. Elphaba is born to downwardly mobile parents, her mother an heir to a political dynasty who hasn’t made much of herself and her father the most recent in a line of prominent ministers, whose congregation tries to kill him because he criticizes a magic clock that, as its main feature, shows the gathered crowd a show full of clockwork puppets having sex with each other. Elphaba, then, is another generation stepping downward, green with dagger teeth and dubiously human.
Much is made of Elphaba’s green skin as a metaphor for race. There is, of course, an element of truth there. In each version of the narrative, she enters a high class university where she stands out due to her skin color. That this speaks to the experience of a racialized other in a predominantly white space is undeniable, and the movie was correct to cast a Black woman as Elphaba. However, in the 2024 movie the primary metaphor for race, in that it is a metaphor for oppressed people in general, is the talking animals subject to the Wizard’s campaign of eradication. The Wizard does it because he needs a convenient enemy to shore up his political strength and, like all uses of magical creatures to analogize real-world oppression, the critique is vague and toothless, ringing true but not ringing loudly, because it lacks the history that would make it more specific: what is the history of the animals’ social position, how have these tensions played out before, where have they fallen in the hierarchy compared to oppressed human races like the Quadlings, below or—more interestingly—above?
To provide a compelling political narrative, all of these details must have their own histories, and characters must live their lives with history flowing through them because the individual is a curious element of history: larger social and economic forces are metabolized through and enacted by the individual, but always imperfectly, leaving fingerprints of psychology all over. Maguire doesn’t fail to do this in every respect.
Galinda is first animated by anxiety over the combination of her distinguished family name and her rural origins outside the city-based high society, and later is swept up in the Wizard’s plans by the fact of performing her high society role as the Good Witch, though her personal intentions remain pure. Elphaba’s sister, Nessarose, attains the family position as governor of Munchkinland, even though her disability had previously seemed to preclude her from doing so. While in the musical and movie, she uses a wheelchair due to paraplegia, for much of the novel she is armless and needs an attendant to help keep her upright. The metaphor for armlessness here is meant to suggest that she is without capacity to enact her will on the world, but sorcery covers the gap, makes her independent, even though it contradicts her strong religious convictions born of being the disabled daughter of a downwardly mobile preacher who compensates with zealotry. She becomes ensnared in the flow of pervading demands of the moment and leads Munchkinland’s secession without ever really desiring to do so. She winds up a tyrant, her religion and her penchant for sorcery damaging the lives of her subjects, and so gains the name of The Wicked Witch of the East.
All this is undermined by the end of the portion of the novel taking place at the unfortunately-named Shiz University. The headmistress, Madame Morrible, invites Glinda, Nessarose, and Elphaba to become sorcerers, to rule in public or in secret three parts of Oz, which would assist the Wizard’s plans in some way. She casts a spell that obscures the girls’ memory of the conversation, the whole event a rare intrusion of the idea of powerful sorcery in a narrative where it’s mostly a minor force. For all that she’s called a witch, and possesses a book of allegedly tremendous power, Elphaba is never seen performing any significant magic.
Instead, in refusing Morrible’s request, Elphaba seems to lose all possibility of historical significance. For a while, she’s a member of a terrorist cell that achieves little of note, and then wanders west seeking forgiveness from the wife of her lover, rather than trying to achieve any great aim. Aside from traveling a couple times, she stays in that castle out to the west, sewing wings onto the backs of monkeys with the assistance of minor sorcery.
At this point in the narrative, Baum’s original begins to make demands of Wicked. For all of the novel’s attempts to humanize Elphaba, she must become the person who sends bees and crows and dogs after the famous foursome departing from the Emerald City. She must covet the shoes that she never seemed to care much about, and she must be important enough that the Wizard needs her dead. These demands deform the narrative of Wicked, weakening it more and more the closer Elphaba gets to melting.
The fact of Baum’s Witch, a tirelessly evil character, dooms the project of Wicked from the start. What was once expanded must again contract, all the crueler for having been expanded, and Elphaba’s actions stop ringing true. She becomes senseless, lashing out, the only alternative to evil being irrationality. Maguire tries to soften it. Dorothy melting the Witch becomes a mistake while Dorothy was trying to help, rather than murder. But it’s not enough to resolve the incoherence, and the result is an admirable failure: an expanded vision of Oz, enlivened by a measure of history and politics, a more real place than in any of Baum’s tellings, but a story compromised by the history of its narrative, unable to come up with any real answers for the end of the Witch’s story.
So, why, if this ending was so destructive to the story Maguire was trying to tell, did he bother to include it at all?
Part of what gives Wicked its charge as an intellectual project is its claim to be expanding the setting of Baum’s original story. As such, it drains a portion of its meaning parasitically from the original. While plenty of original material is added to what was drained, it doesn’t add up to as much on its own. If the Witch lives, or doesn’t become evil—or appearing to be evil— it is no longer an expansion, but an alternative, changing the orientation of every single fact presented in the book and, most likely, fatally weakening even the parts that work.
This kind of parasitism is recognizable at different levels of intensity across media. Elphaba becomes the cause of the Cowardly Lion by rescuing it, she casts a spell that turns her friend into the Tin Man, and her lover is transformed into the Scarecrow to save his life. None of this occurs in the book, but in doing this the musical invests Elphaba with more importance and uses her to explain the causes of much of the original. The endless series of IP prequels that haunt our culture exhibit the same parasitism. How did Cruella get her hairstyle? Where did C-3PO come from? How did Furiosa lose her hand? The value of the prequel in this mode isn’t in expanding the original, but in leeching off of audiences’ affection for it. Questions that have no thematic import will be answered, origin stories abound, characters will intersect beyond any probability in order to feed nostalgia to the viewer. In all cases, it deforms the narrative in which it takes place, because it corresponds to an outside point of reference.
Not every prequel is doomed from the outset. The Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, expands the original Jane Eyre and does so successfully, in a way that on its face would seem to be resonant with what Wicked is attempting to do: offering empathy to a flat character and psychologizing her by giving her a history. But The Wide Sargasso Sea is not contradicting the insanity of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, while Wicked attempts to explain why the Wicked Witch of the West is not, in fact, wicked. This could have been resolved by showing Elphaba’s transformation into a truly wicked witch, but it would have been a difficult narrative task and Maguire demurs.
Such is the danger of fiction that is subservient to an original, surrendering any license to contradict the source without losing its sustenance. It can only draw in the blank parts of the map, and no matter how well-rendered the mountains, the tributaries feeding into a furious river, the map may be unchanged.
In all, Wicked fails as much as it succeeds. Rather than bring the full weight of history upon the climax of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it is reduced to shakily holding up its predecessor. But its ambition is admirable, its approach worth engaging with, and its successes far from insubstantial. Wicked breathes life into previously flat characters. Now, thanks to its legacy through the musical and movie, Elphaba is quite likely a more beloved character than Dorothy, at least among the younger crowd. Even if Wicked didn’t completely succeed as a novel, it may have gotten the last, cackling, laugh.
June Martin is the author of the novel LOVE/AGGRESSION and short stories in X-R-A-Y, BULL, New Session and other publications. She was a 2024 Lambda Literary fellow.