Well Begun and All Done: "Wicked"

For information on this topic, please see post of February 22, 2010.

The book: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire.

Opening line:

A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind's forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air.

Closing lines:

"And there the Wicked Witch stayed for a good long time."
"And did she ever come out?"
"Not yet."


Before it was a family-friendly musical, the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, was a decidedly less family-friendly novel. Dealing with themes like comparative religion, racial (Animal) oppression, and the nature of Good and Evil--and with a steady undercurrent of suggestive sexuality--Wicked is quite the engaging little work of meta-fiction. Maguire entertainingly fleshes out Elphaba's character, developing a three-dimensional figure of a woman with noble goals (liberating Oz from the Wizard's tyranny, ensuring the rights of capital-A Animals--who walk and talk and have intelligence equal to or greater than that of most humans) if often ignoble methods (terrorism, assassination). Suffice to say, once you read this book, you will never look at Margaret Hamilton the same way again.

So what do the opening and closing lines tell us about the book? Our first image of Elphaba is as a Witch--sans adjective. She is floating, hovering, riding the air currents above the mythical land of Oz, familiar to virtually all readers from childhood memories (although probably envisioned in MGM technicolor rather than through the lens of literary imagination). She is both godlike (high above the ground) and insignificant (a "fleck. . . flung up and sent wheeling"). We are thus introduced to one of the book's central tensions, that between the atheistic and religious imagination, a tension that pulls at Elphaba throughout the novel.

The final lines are the ending lines of a fairy tale within the novel: a story of yet another Wicked Witch. The story's ending is initially presented as a dialogue between a mother and daughter. The mother recites the first line, the child provides the standard response ("And did she ever come out?"), and the mother responds with a teasing, tickling, "Not yet." In the context of Wicked, these lines suggest the nature of Maguire's novel itself: The story is over, the Wicked Witch is put away, but she is always there, waiting to resurface in our imaginations and in our world--and in the imaginative construction of novelists like Maguire.

We have reached the end, but the story can always continue.

(Image from Amazon.com)