Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years, #1)

by Gregory Maguire

“Of course, to hear them tell it, it is the surviving sister who is the crazy one,” said the Lion. “What a Witch. Psychologically warped; possessed by demons. Insane. Not a pretty picture.” “She was castrated at birth,” replied the Tin Woodman calmly. “She was born hermaphroditic, or maybe entirely male.”

“She was deprived of a mother’s love, is how I’ve heard it. She was an abused child. She was addicted to medicine for her skin condition.” “She has been unlucky in love,” said the Tin Woodman, “like the rest of us.”

“Self-control?” She laughed, inching toward the edge of the bed. “I have no self left. I’m only a host for the parasite. Where’s my self, anyway? Where’d I leave that tired old thing?”

young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it—we’re slow learners, we women—we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production. But men don’t dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death. Ah, we’re slow learners, Nanny countered. But they can’t learn at all.

All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don’t you agree?

“Brother Frexspar,” said Bfee, the mayor of Rush Margins, “could you perhaps tone down your harangue until we get a chance to see what fresh new form temptation might take?”

“You have no mettle to resist new forms,” said Frex, spitting. “Haven’t you been our able teacher these several years?” said Bfee. “We’ve hardly had such a good chance to prove ourselves against sin! We’re looking forward to—to the spiritual test of it all.”

Whatever child of either (or any) sex could dare follow in so auspicious a line? Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.

She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet.

“The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing,” she murmured, trying it out, “while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.”

It’s a systematic marginalizing of populations, Glinda, that’s what the Wizard’s all about.”

“Well that’s it, that’s all part of it. You can’t divorce your particulars from politics,”

“Nessarose is a strong-willed semi-invalid,” said Elphaba. “She’s very smart, and thinks she is holy. She has inherited my father’s taste for religion. She isn’t good at taking care of other people because she has never learned how to take care of herself. She can’t. My father required me to baby-sit her through most of my childhood. What she will do when Nanny dies I don’t know. I suppose I’ll have to take care of her again.”

“Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old.

“Gossip is instructive,” said the Wizard. “It tells which way the wind is blowing.” The wind then blew in the direction of the girls, and Elphaba danced back to avoid being spattered. “Go ahead, girls, gossip.”

“To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her—is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions.”

And the terms of Elphie’s imprisonment—as an unwilling traitor, as an exiled maunt, as a hapless mother, as a failed insurrectionist, as a Witch in disguise—remained unchanged.

“I had thought you might join your sister in her seat of authority,” he said, with the simple-minded hope of one whose family has been too long apart. “I know who you are, Fabala. I doubt you have much changed over the years. I know your cunning and your conviction. I also know that Nessie is at the mercy of her religious voices, and she could slip and undo the terrible good she is helping to create right now by being a focal figure for resistance. If that happens, it will not go well for her.” So I am to be a whipping girl, thought Elphaba, I am to be a first line of defense. Her pleasure evaporated.

You’re the only effective one here, everyone knows that. They all think you’re a Witch.

In the wake of the destruction it caused, no one had the hubris or courage (or the prior experience) to lie and claim to have known the act of terror for what it was: a wind twisted up in a vortical braid. In short: a tornado.

There were a great many jokes about the disaster, naturally. “You can’t hide from destiny,” some said, “that house had her name on it.” “That Nessarose, she was giving such a good speech about religious lessons, she really brought down the house!” “Everybody needs to grow up and leave home sometimes, but sometimes HOME DOESN’T LIKE IT.” “What’s the difference between a shooting star and a falling house?” “One which is propitious grants delicious wishes, the other which is vicious squishes witches.” “What’s big, thick, makes the earth move, and wants to have its way with you?” “I don’t know, but can you introduce me?”

The alien girl—she called herself Dorothy—was by virtue of her survival elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying.

And the Witch realized, sinkingly, that this was of course true; the ugly skill at snobbery had returned to Glinda in her middle years.

“I do,” he said. “This is an ancient manuscript of magic, generated in a world far away from this one. It was long thought to be merely legendary, or else destroyed in the dark onslaughts of the northern invaders. It had been removed from our world for safety by a wizard more capable than I. It is why I came to Oz in the first place,” he continued, almost talking to himself, as old men are prone to do. “Madame Blavatsky located it in a crystal ball, and I made the appropriate sacrifices and—arrangements—to travel here forty years ago. I was a young man, full of ardor and failure. I had not intended to rule a country here, but just to find this document and return it to its own world, and to study its secrets there.”

“Murder is a word used by the sanctimonious,” he said. “It is an expedient expression with which they condemn any courageous action beyond their ken. What I did, what I do, cannot be murder. For, coming from another world, I cannot be held accountable to the silly conventions of a naive civilization. I am beyond that lisping childish recital of wrongs and rights.” His eyes did not burn as he spoke; they were sunk behind veils of cold blue detachment.

People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

Both of Oz and of the other world. Your old Frex always was wrong; you were never a punishment for his crimes. You are a half-breed, you are a new breed, you are a grafted limb, you are a dangerous anomaly. Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are. Can you be so dull that you have not figured this out?”

“It isn’t hard to find evil in this world,” said the Witch. “Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.”

The disappearance of the Witch at novel’s end was meant to be read as a tragedy. So how does one write sequels to a novel whose main character dies or goes underground?

The room quieted down. Elphaba made up a little song on the spot, a song of longing and otherness, of far aways and future days. Strangers closed their eyes to listen. Elphaba had an okay voice. Boq saw the imaginary place she conjured up, a land where injustice and common cruelty and despotic rule and the beggaring fist of drought didn’t work together to hold everyone by the neck. No, he wasn’t giving her credit: Elphaba had a good voice. . . . Later he thought: The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last, and what was left was calm . . . possibility . . . relief. Some readers will realize that, copyright considerations aside, it’s clear that what Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, is singing at this funeral is “Over the Rainbow.” From her point of view, anyplace else would be better than Oz. She needed her own “once upon a time.”