Open Prompt First Essay--"The Ambiguous Witch of the West"

2002. Morally ambiguous characters -- characters whose behavior discourages readers from identifying them as purely evil or purely good -- are at the heart of many works of literature. Choose a novel or play in which a morally ambiguous character plays a pivotal role. Then write an essay in which you explain how the character can be viewed as morally ambiguous and why his or her moral ambiguity is significant to the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.

When the viewer watches Hansel and Gretel or Sleeping Beauty, they know who is good, and who is evil; the witch is wicked, and the beautiful princess and the children are flawless.  Wicked, by Gregory Maguire, directly plays on that assumption through its morally ambiguous character, Elphaba, the “Wicked Witch of the West”.  Throughout the novel, Maguire tests the reader’s preconceptions of the fairy tale “wicked witch” in order to make the reader realize their own tendency to leap to judgment and conclusions, believe whatever we hear, and put our trust in sources unclear, corrupt, confusing, and untrustworthy in every sense.  Indeed, the entire novel is giving the “witch” a chance to tell her side of the story—to explain why she is “wicked”, or if she really is at all. 

In the Wizard of Oz, the book with which Wicked is actively responding to, the Wicked Witch of the West is clearly represented as being evil.  However, Maguire begins to explain this supposed villainy by backtracking to Elphaba’s childhood.  The author begins to play on the reader’s sympathies right away by giving the Wicked Witch a name, and showing the reader the events directly before her birth.  She is humanized and our prejudice is not immediately against her.  “Wicked Witch” is a pejorative which immediately causes the reader to accept without question that she is the villain, and that she will be conquered by the hero, but by having her begin with a name which does not describe her, the reader both consciously and subconsciously registers that this is no ordinary fairy tale, and Elphaba becomes a character with the possibility to be much less one-dimensional than the Wicked Witch, and to have much more psychological depth.  In addition, Elphaba’s parents (and their flaws and virtues) and her birth further humanize the character.  The reader understands that she was born just like they were, and like all the other characters in the novel.

However, Maguire doesn’t stop there.  From the moment of her birth, Elphaba is patently not born like everyone else.  She is born at a point when all of the town’s and her parents’ problems—their religious conflict, her father’s absence, her mother’s drug use and infidelity, public discontentment and frenzy—come to a climax, at a point when her father has been attacked by a rioting crowd who is fervently devoted to a mysterious mechanical device, called a Clockwork Dragon, which seems to reveal hidden truths, and against his unionist preaching.  Born under this Clockwork Dragon during a rainstorm, Elphaba comes out “green as a sin” and with shark’s teeth (she bites off a midwife’s finger with them).  Maguire begins to alert the reader to problematic contradictions as soon as she is born.  Not only is the whole town in conflict at the time of her birth, but Elphaba is born as it rains.  Rain and water symbolize cleansing, rebirth, and baptism.  Characters which undergo and rain shower typically come out purified.  When the reader sees Elphaba is born as it rains, they immediately see it as a symbol of her purity.  She is assuredly not pure in the eyes of her fellow Ozians.  She is marked from the first moment of her existence.  She is green, and “green as a sin” at that, and this physical “deformity” instantly brings the mark of Cain to mind.  The reader then associates this with the concept of original sin, and of being cursed by God.  However, Elphaba was just humanized and made to seem untainted by good or evil—she is not “the Wicked Witch” yet at all, as she was born into a baptismal shower.  But wait: there’s more.  She is born under the Clockwork Dragon—the very symbol of the religious conflict going on in her world—and also is not touching rain: in fact, she cannot touch water without dying.  One could argue this demonstrates to the reader that Elphaba cannot ever be purified or cleansed; she is the very embodiment of sin, born of infidelity and inter-species cross-breeding. 

Elphaba’s aversion to water is a very complicated symbol, which can be interpreted in many ways.  One could argue that her deadly reaction to water means she is too “evil” to be purified; she is the embodiment.  However, Maguire asks the reader also to considers another possibility—the possibility that water is not a pure purifier, so to speak.  The author brings forth this possibility when Elphaba studies the various pagan legends, in which there is considerable ambiguity and confusion regarding the role of an Ozian “great flood”.  Some versions of the legend describe the river which floods the earth as the Unnamed God’s tears as he saw the sin on Earth (a clear reference to Noah’s flood); others describe it as the intentional tears of the fairy queen Lurlina; yet another states the flood is her piss.  This flood gives Animals the ability to talk—though if they were given this ability through baptism via piss it degrades them and gives an excuse for humanoid society to look down upon them.  All of this ambiguity regarding water causes the reader to look beyond the most obvious reason (her being essentially the devil) for Elphaba’s inability to touch water.

In addition, it is difficult for the reader to imagine the reason for her allergy is her “wickedness.”  Maguire fills his narrative with such unlikeable characters that the reader cannot help but feel that Elphaba is the only innocent, pure one around.  Elphaba’s world is an ugly place of rumor, violence, drugs, and sex, especially amongst the supposedly devoutly religious.  Ironically, the one marked as “sinful” is the only one who isn’t, which causes the reader to question whether the labeling of one individual as “evil” is really a form of hypocritical ignorance.

The theme of Elphaba being a projection of society’s flaws reoccurs many times in the novel.  Elphaba is a scapegoat of all of Oz, the individual that the country turns to when it comes time to lay blame for all of its problems.  Maguire argues that society needs a Wicked Witch—they need someone to point fingers at, and this person is chosen because of initial bias: in this case, Elphaba’s skin color.  In the Bible, there is a goat which is given all of humanity’s sins, and marked with a red thread, and sent out into the desert.  Elphaba is this goat (and indeed, her professor who is assassinated is a Goat), and her red thread is her skin color.  She even goes into the desert, in a self-induced exile.

Biblical references such as the scapegoat are a reoccurring theme in Wicked and from them Elphaba emerges as the opposite of the devil incarnate: she begins to seem like a Christ figure.  The Biblical references begin with her father’s position as a unionist minister and the religious conflict with paganism, and include her “mark of Cain,” her supposed original sin, her inability to be cleansed or “baptized,” and include her conflict with the Wizard and the political system in Oz.  Like Christ, she is at odds with the head of state, endures self-chosen poverty, fights for the underdog (in this case, the Animals) and goes into the desert in a self-induced exile.  However, like the “scapegoat” of sin, undoubtedly the opposite of Christ, and Cain, she is physically marked as sinful, is seemingly representative of society’s worst functions, and goes out into the desert and lives in isolation. 

This contradictory symbolism creates ambiguity concerning Elphaba’s “wickedness.”  Maguire asks the reader to say “well, which one is she, Christ or the Devil?”  Maguire doesn’t give the reader the answer.  Certainly, she is not “perfect”.  She has an affair with a married man, is an assassin for an extended period, and is certainly not a very nice person a good deal of the time.  However, everything she does can be excused or dismissed from the “she’s a devil” category by the fact that she always had good intentions or was unsure of the forces at work.  The government she’s trying to overthrow is horrific and corrupt and murders its own citizens; the marriage of the man is arranged, and she is in love; the people toward whom she is nasty are biased against her because of her exotic appearance.  She, like everyone else in the novel, is morally ambiguous, neither wholly “good” nor wholly “bad”.

Maguire argues, however, that there is no such thing as “good” or “bad”—or, if there is, you cannot ever identify it.  Elphaba actually discusses it once, at a dinner party.  All the attendants laugh about what it is—they all offer a guess.  Elphaba, however, says that one can never know what evil is, whether it exists or not.  She argues that it is like trying to see a dragon inside its egg; once you crack open the egg, he isn’t inside it any more.  One can never isolate what “evil” really is, or whether or not it exists at all.

While originally Elphaba’s name marked her as being neither good nor bad, in the second half of the novel Maguire begins to refer to her as “the Witch”.  This change of names begins to identify her as evil; however, this was a title which was thrust upon Elphaba, and one with which she gradually began to identify herself, believing herself to be “bad”.  During this second half, the key theme of forgiveness is brought into the narrative.  Elphaba blames herself for her lover Fiyero’s death—she begs forgiveness from his wife, but before she can receive it, the wife and her children are taken away by the Wizard.  Elphaba blames herself for this too.  The denial of forgiveness reasserts Elphaba’s inability to be “pure” or to be baptized.  She is too unholy to be granted renewal. On the other hand, one could argue that it is not her supposed un-holiness which causes her to be denied purity, but the fact that purity is a state which cannot be attained. 

Maguire makes this argument: there is no such thing as being purely good, or purely evil.  All the characters associated with goodness in the novel are plainly not; all the ones associated with evil, like Elphaba, are incredibly morally ambiguous as well.  The only difference between the two is society’s perception of them.  Maguire uses the reader’s assumptions about “the Wicked Witch” to make this argument.  By using Biblical and fairy tale references, Maguire creates ambiguity and contradiction and allows the reader to see the flaws in those black-and-white stories.  Elphaba is a character which causes the reader to realize all of their preconceptions, and realize that there is no difference between their prejudice and the characters’.  Elphaba wasn’t “wicked”, but she was “the Wicked Witch” because society told her she was, and therefore was doomed from the beginning to die as the Witches of the fairy tales, because the “wicked” have no opportunity to prove they aren’t.  Proving wickedness or goodness, Maguire argues through Elphaba, is impossible, because they do not exist: only society’s projections make us a bad or a good person.