Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Summary: The backstory on the Wicket Witch of the West in Oz.

I do not remember when I read Wicked the first time. My guess is that I read it after I saw the stage adaptation in 2007 or so. I have not previously written about it so it was likely before 2009 when I started blogging. After watching the recent movie, I decided to reread the book again because I really have no specific memory of the book other than the broadest strokes of the story and I suspected most of what I remembered was from the stage production not the book.

To the best of my memory, I think have seen the stage production either two or three times between 2006 and 2013 and now have read the book twice and watched the movie once. (My wife and I saw it together to see if our kids were ready for it and we will probably take them to see it over Christmas break.)

Part of what prompted me to read it again was all of the "don't let your kids read this" posts. I remember the book being for adults, but I didn't have any specific memories of it being overly crude or sexual or violent. One of my current pet peeves is classifying books with sex as "adult" instead of thinking about a wide variety of reasons why a book is written for an adult audience.

Yes, I don't think that Wicked was written for a pre-teen audience. I think putting the movie images on the cover is a bad idea because the stage musical and the movie are very different stories from the book. I hope that after the second movie is out, that there will be a movie novelization book. I think most pre-teen readers will be bored because the book is primarily concerned with adult issues, not adult as in sex (although there is sex in it) but adult as in questions of meaning, purpose and the role of naturalism and faith. Wicked is a slow story that that covers about 40 years of time.

The book is nearly 40 years old at this point so I am not going to worry too much about spoilers, but I also am not trying to ruin the book if you haven't read it. The book opens with Elphaba's parents. Her father is a fire and brimstone preacher who is calling the community to holiness. Her mother is a younger daughter who can't wait to get out of her home and marries the first man that shows an interest in her beyond her family's position and money. He travels on preaching tours and she is lonely and has many affairs and one night stands with whoever happens to come by in her rural poor community. She has a problem with drugs and alcohol, he has a problem with self indulgent navel gazing and not paying attention to anyone around him.

When Elphaba is born with green skin and razor sharp teeth, the father blames himself and leaves home even more on preaching tours as penance and her mother continues her own avoidance schemes. Eventually a refugee, Turtle Heart, from another part of Oz comes by and ends up moving in for years. He provides stability for the couple and as is hinted at in the early pages and is expressly discussed later, is sexually involved with both of Elphaba's parents separately and might be the father of Elphaba's younger sister Nessarose. The background and childhood of Elphaba is about the first quarter of the book, but isn't really even mentioned in the movie.

The stage show and movie really start with the Elphaba and Nessarose going away to school. Again, like many places the book differs in the story from the play and movie. In almost all cases, I think the play/movie are the better story arc.

The movie/play have basically no religious storyline, but in large part the book is a story of how different members of Elphaba's family use religion and religious ideas of make sense of the world. Elphaba's father is a fundamentalist who is trying to atone for his own sins through devotion. Elphaba's mother has no real faith, but she also is not opposed to faith. She just doesn't really let faith get in the way of her pleasure and self-interest. Elphaba, because of her green skin and being the child of a roving missionary (in the book) she has grown up with faith all around her but can't really believe. When she goes away to school and is allowed to explore her atheism, she becomes a naturalist who seeks to explain the world apart from faith. Nessarose is a true believer who commands faith for others as she comes into power.

I think the religious aspects of the story could be interested but largely fall flat because they are explored seriously. Faith here is largely about determinism and prophecy not a serious exploration of the supernatural. Elphaba seems to be destined to be magical even as she doesn't really believe in magic. In almost all cases, both she and the reader are not really sure if events are the result of magic or not. Toward the end of the book as Wicked has to account for meshing with the original Wizard of Oz story, Elphaba suspects she is going mad and there is bad luck and seemingly fate that drives the story.

There really are almost no aspect of the book vs musical/movie story arcs that I think are better in the book. There is more detail, but that doesn't mean better. Maguire tries to make Oz into a full economy and political system, but it feels more like satire than an actual system.

I think I like the book more on the second reading than the first. But I think it has the same problems of Lev Grossman's Magicians series and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Grossman and Pullman are good authors, but the point of the books seems to be opposing the themes and stories of Lewis and Rowling not honoring them. I am a big fan of the retelling of fairy tales. I think KB Hoyle does a great job of it in her books, but to retell a story well you have to be willing to honor the original.

Brett McCracken at The Gospel Coalition wrote a review opposing the Wicked movie as being post-Christian morality. I think that review was wrong on a number of levels. First of all, the book and the musical/movie are not excusing wickedness, but exploring how we tend to see wickedness. We showed my children (9 and 11) the Wizard of Oz the first time a few days ago. Glinda when she introduces herself to Dorothy she asks Dorothy if she is a good witch or a bad witch. Dorothy says, "I'm not a witch at all. Witches are old and ugly." And then when Glinda reveals that she is a witch Dorothy responds, "You are? Oh, I beg your pardon. But I've never heard of a beautiful witch before."

Part of what Wicked is doing is not denying wickedness as a reality, but playing with the assumptions that the original had about beauty and ugliness and the connection to morality. There seems to continue to be assumptions that we can see who is evil. That is regularly still something that people say in response to sexual abuser or murders, "but they seemed so nice."

Elphaba is treated throughout her life as if she is bad because of how she looks. Her father especially views her as his curse. While Glinda is assumed to be good inherently because of her beauty. But the movie/musical more than the book show that Glinda's character is the problem not her beauty. In the book Glinda ages and isn't really beautiful any longer when she meets Dorothy. She is all facade no depth.

My problem with the book isn't that it is trying to explore what it means to be wicked. My problem is that it doesn't do a very good job of that, everyone is really a bad character, or at least has the potential to be bad. Even the good characters like Doctor Dillamond, Ama Clutch and Nanny are not very good. While the most despicable characters are those who just are willing to be openly despicable. One of the minor characters from the group of school friends, Avaric, was rich and awful and at the end when Elphaba again runs into him, his primary feature is just not caring that people see him as as evil as he is, he is authentic in his evilness.

The only charm to the original wizard was his bumbling nature. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." In the movie, the wizard is less bumbling and more interested in his plans. He creates fear and hatred against the Animals not because he hates Animals, but because he is willing to harm for the sake of his power. Again, that is not opposed to morality as McCracken suggests, but rather emphasizes traditional warnings about power. In the book, the wizard is largely off stage. He is other and I think Maguire couldn't figure out how to make him anything other than more evil than he already was.

The tragedies of Elphaba's life, her skin and family, the death of her love, her inability to overthrow the wizard were largely outside of her control. But what was in her control wasn't handled well either. She isn't a particularly sympathetic character even if we can see more of how she came to be and that is where the book fails. Largely the opposite of McCracken's charge.

McCracken largely thinks the problem with the "post-Christian morality" is that Wicked embraces "woke" theory of ethics. But in McCracken's framing, there is no place for working for justice outside of traditional systems of morality. I don't think McCracken has read the book, because if anything the book would support his framing more than the movie/musical do. The movie/musical story is better because it is trying to tell a simpler story.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/wicked/