66 pages • 2 hours read
Gregory MaguireWicked: Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5 Summary: “The Murder and Its Afterlife”
A tornado hits Oz. Munchkinland suffers the most destruction, and Nessarose is crushed to death by a house carried by the tornado. The tornado also brings an alien girl named Dorothy and her dog Toto.
Elphaba is now known as both Eminent Thropp and the Witch of the West. Her scientific and magical experiments on Animals have proven mostly successful; her winged monkeys are sentient and active allies. Nanny, now elderly and ailing, lives with Elphaba. Liir was recovered after surviving the annihilation of Fiyero’s family because no one knows he is also Fiyero’s descendent.
When Elphaba returns to Colwen Grounds, the prime minister informs her that the role of Eminence has been abolished. Elphaba doesn’t care, as she tries to stay away from politics. She simply needs a place to stay to visit family and take care of her sister’s remains. When she next meets with her father, she asks where she learned hatred. Frex tells her that she is his curse and his blessing, that hatred was how she was born into the world. Elphaba posits that he loved Nessarose more because Nessa was a product of Melena’s moral failings, not Frex’s.
All of Oz has fundamentally changed. Elphaba had not realized the extend of this change until she witnesses the destruction of the Colwen Grounds estate by angry townspeople who considered Nessa a tyrant. She is happily surprised by Glinda, who arrives to pay her respects. Glinda has developed her marriage and career and is now a well-respected sorceress. When the Munchkins meet Dorothy, they defer to Glinda. Glinda assures Elphaba that Nessa’s death was not Dorothy’s fault; as far as Glinda can tell, Dorothy is a little lost girl in a foreign land. Glinda is secretly cowed by Elphaba’s presence; she had forgotten how intimidating she had found Elphaba’s looks and strength.
Elphaba wonders if they’ve all been living under a spell from that day when Morrible proposed to train them as agents. Glinda believes that Madame Morrible was a messy lady who foretold the future incorrectly and that life is determined by their own decisions. Glinda sent Dorothy to the Emerald City with Nessa’s sparkly slippers, which angers Elphaba; she had always coveted the shoes, which are part Frex, part Turtle Heart. Glinda admonishes her, saying that they are only shoes. Elphaba declares that she will find Dorothy and retrieve the shoes. She claims that if the Wizard gets a hold of the shoes, he’ll have powerful and dangerous access to Munchkinland.
At Nessarose’s funeral, an emissary of the Wizard approaches Elphaba to set up a meeting between them. An audience with the Wizard might provide answers about Samira and Fiyero, so she agrees to the meeting, to be held at Colwen Grounds.
Elphaba is searched ahead of the meeting, and she angrily holds on to a page from the Grimmerie that she has been studying without success. Finally, she comes face-to-face with the Wizard, who appears without his disguise of lights and smoke. In reality, he is a diminutive-looking man. He worries that if she gets the sparkling shoes, she will retake Munchkinland. But Elphaba doesn’t care for the Munchkins and only wants to ensure her father’s safety. She asks about Samira, and he shows her a young woman chained up, inhuman in her lack of dignity. It’s Nor, who was chained and spared the fate of her family, who were all executed.
The Wizard looks at the Grimmerie page that Elphaba has been unable to decipher; he says it’s a spell for the Administration of Dragons, which he can read because it comes from his world. He tells Elphaba that he came to Oz for this book, but now that he has it, he has no intention of leaving. When Elphaba accuses him of murder, he dismisses the word and shrugs off the idea that he could be held responsible for the deaths of people in an uncivilized country. Elphaba proposes giving him the Grimmerie in exchange for Nor. The Wizard refuses because Nor is his only protection against Elphaba’s violence. Instead, he proposes taking control of Munchkinland and, if Elphaba does not interfere, he may revisit her demands. Elphaba asks about Madame Morrible, and he says it was Morrible who warned him about Elphaba and inspired him to have her watched, which led to Fiyero’s murder.
As Elphaba storms out, she passes by Glinda, whom she ignores. It’s the last time they ever see each other.
Elphaba begins her search for Dorothy. The people she stops on the Yellow Brick Road are wary of revealing too much about Dorothy; they are easily charmed by the girl and worry what Elphaba will do to her. Elphaba learns that Dorothy has recently stayed at a nearby house. She visits the house and discovers that it belongs to her old friend Boq and his wife Milla. They are pleased to see each other, but Elphaba says she can’t dally. Boq confirms that Dorothy stayed with them briefly. Elphaba says she needs her sister’s shoes, and Milla accuses Elphaba of wanting to assassinate Dorothy.
The old friends muse on how far they’ve come since school. Boq tells Elphaba that Madame Morrible is still alive but unwell. He also reveals that Dorothy’s name means “Goddess of Gifts.” Elphaba scoffs at the sanctifying of children and stalks off. Boq has at least provided her with a new mission: killing Madame Morrible.
Elphaba returns to Shiz and finds Madame Morrible in bed. Elphaba bashes Morrible’s skull in with a trophy from the mantlepiece. Elphaba tracks down Avaric, hoping he’ll tell everyone that she killed Morrible. He is surprised to see her and tells her an odd story about a dwarf in the park whom he recognized from a night many years ago, when he went with Boq to the Philosophy Club to watch Yackle’s show. This mention of Yackle flummoxes Elphaba. She tells Avaric that she killed Madame Morrible, but he doesn’t seem to care. He invites her to dinner at his house, where they chat with his friends about the nature of evil. Avaric posits that there is no value to behavior, that evil comes in the thoughts that follow a bad deed.
Elphaba tracks down the dwarf, who has the Clock of the Time Dragon, hoping to learn more about Yackle. When Elphaba demands to know why her life out of all other lives was cursed by Yackle, the dwarf says that she’s not a curse. Rather, Elphaba is a gift because she is of two worlds. He operates the Clock of the Time Dragon to show Elphaba this history, the story of her genesis: While Frex was away, Melena had sex with none other than the Wizard. Elphaba’s biological father is the Wizard.
Elphaba returns to Munchkinland and visits Boq to tell him about Morrible’s murder. Boq is shocked that Elphaba, who fought so hard for Animal life, would practice the same type of violence that people like Morrible enacted against Animals. Elphaba accuses Boq of abandoning his principles, and he begs her not to harm Dorothy.
Elphaba leaves Boq in search of Dorothy. An umbrella peddler reveals that he met Dorothy, who is being accompanied to the Emerald City by a lion, a tin man, and a scarecrow. People speculate that Dorothy is the Ozma Regent reincarnated.
Elphaba returns to Nanny and Liir. Everything is fine at home, so Elphaba sets off to study her looking glass, through which she analyzes Dorothy. Elphaba realizes that Dorothy reminds her of herself at that age: wide-eyed, scared of a new world, and living through other people’s projections. Elphaba finds a disturbing sympathy for Dorothy. Elphaba experiments with elixirs to dream images that may help her understand her history and how to navigate her present. She sees images of the Wizard’s world, but the store fronts and “No Irish Need Apply” signs are beyond her interpretation. Upon waking, she resolves to find the green potion Nanny bought from Yackle.
A few weeks later, Liir comes home with a rumor about the Wizard. People are saying that a girl named Dorothy received an audience with the Wizard. Her travel companions all requested something from the Wizard: The Scarecrow wanted a brain, the Tin Man wanted a heart, and the Lion wanted courage. Dorothy asked to go home. The Wizard said he would grant their wishes if they kill Elphaba. Elphaba advises Liir to stay away, but he wants to meet Dorothy. Elphaba asks Liir what he would request of the Wizard. What Liir wants most is a father.
Liir is upset because his soldier friends joked about killing Dorothy’s friends and tying her up for their sexual amusement. When a higher-up heard about this, Liir’s young friend was castrated and hung out to die a slow and terrible death. Elphaba is impressed that Dorothy is so protected by the military. She sneaks out later that night to kill the young soldier and free him from his pain.
Elphaba tries to understand Dorothy’s friends. She figures that the Lion is an Animal and that the Tin Man is some sort of tiktok who wants to be human. The Scarecrow frightens her until she comes up with the theory that the Scarecrow is Fiyero come back to life, reincarnated as a straw man to come home to Elphaba.
One day, Elphaba sees banners raised for some procession. Suspecting it’s Dorothy and her friends, Elphaba sets up her defenses. She send crows out to pluck the eyes of her invaders. She summons her bees to push them away—but she tells all her familiars to leave the Scarecrow alone. She tells Liir his deepest wish may just come true. Every animal she sends to Dorothy gets killed. Finally, she sees that the Scarecrow is not Fiyero. She sends Chistery to fetch Dorothy and the Lion; she wants to either kill or reason with Dorothy, and she hopes that the Lion is the same one who, as a cub, was rescued from Doctor Nikidik’s lecture hall.
Chistery delivers Dorothy, Toto, and the Lion to their doorstep. Elphaba reveals herself and accuses Dorothy of killing her sister. Dorothy begs for her forgiveness, but Elphaba tells her to leave it alone. At dinner, Dorothy cries for her aunt and uncle, who she knows are worried about her. Elphaba tells Chistery to bring Toto to the well, and she attempts to drag Dorothy away from the Lion. But Liir interferes, grabbing Dorothy and kissing her.
Elphaba drags Dorothy to her room and shuts the door. She demands that Dorothy return her sister’s shoes. Dorothy, scared, thinks that Glinda put a spell on the shoes because they won’t come off. Nanny, the Lion, and Liir try to help Dorothy, but Elphaba pushes them away. Elphaba dips her broom into the fire and shuts the door again. She demands to know why Dorothy intends to kill her. Dorothy begs Elphaba to hear her out: She has no intention of killing Elphaba and only wants to apologize for accidentally killing her sister. Elphaba, tortured by her own lost apology to Samira, accidentally ignites her clothes with the fire from her broom. Dorothy douses the flames with water from a nearby bucket, unaware of Elphaba’s allergy. The incident proves fatal, and Elphaba dies in Dorothy’s arms.
As Oz celebrates the death of the Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy returns to the Emerald City. Instead of giving the Wizard her shoes, she gives him a random bottle of magical elixir she found in Elphaba’s room. The Wizard gave that same bottle to a woman many years ago in Munchkinland, thus revealing that Elphaba was his daughter. The story of Dorothy’s arrival and departure becomes the stuff of legends, and the Wicked Witch of the West becomes a fabled horror story.
Part 5 Analysis
Part 5 portrays a woman on the brink of a breakdown. Issues of free will, unfulfilled potential, rejected love, and justice are at the forefront of this final, tense chapter.
A major topic of discussion in Part 5 is the issue of free will. Glinda reappears to revive the juxtaposition between her and Elphaba. In Glinda’s privileged world, where all her actions are perceived as reflections of her good character, Glinda can feel confident that her lovely life and successful career are due to decisions that she actively made. Elphaba, meanwhile, has repeatedly run up against the cruelty of their world; for Elphaba, things happen to her. Elphaba’s belief that the world works against her, that she is cursed, is an anxiety that stems from her childhood. Frex makes it clear that he also sees her as a physical symbol of his sin. Elphaba’s existence is a mistake, at least in her mind. It is easier for Glinda, steeped in good fortune, to believe that she deserves all the good things that happen to her.
This juxtaposition is important for a couple reasons. First, Maguire uses this dichotomy to challenge his reader’s perceptions of free will. Does free will exist, or is there a puppeteer who controls our every move? The novel suggests there is a middle ground. Elphaba could not control her environment, but she did have agency in how she responded to and interacted with it. The novel recognizes that it is incredibly difficult for a person, no matter how strong and passionate, to manifest a good life when they are raised to believe they are inherently bad. However, Elphaba was not inherently doomed to a tragic destiny. Rather, she internalized her lifelong struggle with her identity and her world, which informed her sad future.
Even though Elphaba is the protagonist, her defeatist attitude at the end of the book allows her to victimize herself even while she murders and attacks other people. Had Glinda and Elphaba remained close over the years, perhaps Glinda’s positive attitude could have influenced Elphaba, encouraging her to seize her potential and let go of her complexes. But Glinda and Elphaba’s partnership is the alliance that never was, and because this partnership never manifests, their potential to be powerful together is never realized.
Elphaba’s paranoia that the world works against her is further expressed in her irrational projections onto other characters. When she sees that Dorothy travels with a Lion, she immediately believes it is the same Lion who escaped her college classroom. A coincidence is sometimes a coincidence, but Elphaba has grown so paranoid that she sees connections everywhere, even ones that have no basis in truth or reality. This is reemphasized when Elphaba, again without evidence or reason, projects her feelings about Fiyero onto the Scarecrow. Her loneliness and desire for a different, better life make her fixate on the Scarecrow, which directly endangers the animals she sends to attack Dorothy.
Of particular interest are Elphaba’s projections on Dorothy, who becomes Elphaba’s nemesis through hearsay and resentment. Though everyone she trusts insists that Dorothy is a good girl, Elphaba assumes Dorothy is an agent of the Wizard. When Elphaba investigates this possibility, she discovers that she sees herself in Dorothy despite their many differences. Elphaba’s projections onto Dorothy also create a parallel between Elphaba and her father. Frex had a savior complex, and in this final chapter, Elphaba’s own savior complex is fueled by resentment, envy, and loneliness. She sees Dorothy’s naivete as a weakness, but in truth, Elphaba is jealous that she is not as wide-eyed as Dorothy. She envies the many opportunities before Dorothy, while Elphaba herself is doomed to forever regret Fiyero’s murder and Samira’s demise.
Yet another example of Elphaba’s irrational projection is her obsession with the ruby shoes. Though Elphaba tries to make the shoes about power, it is not made clear why the shoes can be used to control Munchkinland. Furthermore, Elphaba has always had a fraught connection to these shoes. Therefore, it stands to reason that Elphaba is obsessed with the shoes because they represent the love she never got from her father. This projection motivates Elphaba to hunt Dorothy down, which positions Elphaba as the enemy and ensures that all of Oz will root for Dorothy instead of Elphaba.
In this chapter, Maguire circles back to the gendered boundaries imposed by society. Specifically, Part 5 criticizes the competition that society encourages between women. Glinda and Elphaba remain friendly but distanced because of their sense that the other woman has what she lacks. Nessarose is yet another woman who gains power but abuses it and dies in a tragic but celebrated accident. Still, Nessarose remains her father’s favorite, meaning Elphaba will always be second to her younger sister.
Nor becomes a victim of sexism; she begins to mature into her female desires at the cost of her entire family. The soldiers take advantage of Nor’s desire for their attention, and the Wizard enslaves her to make a point about oppressing women. Nor was the one who figured out the broom can fly, implying that she also had the potential to be a powerful woman. But the Wizard (who, it should be noted, acquired power by wresting it away from a girl, the Ozma Regent) interferes and cuts down this potential. Elphaba discovers that the Wizard learned how to control women through the teachings of Madame Morrible, who used her power as an older, influential woman to intimidate girls into believing they were too stupid to stand against her. Thus, Madame Morrible conditioned her students to navigate the world with a learned sense of weakness.
Because Elphaba was an uncontrollable woman, she becomes the de facto villain of the story. That Dorothy spells Elphaba’s downfall is a testament to this issue of institutionalized sexism. Because Dorothy is pretty and nice, she fits Ozians’ expectations for what a girl should be. In contrast, Elphaba is aggressive and odd, which challenges gendered norms. Dorothy’s defeat of Elphaba ostensibly proves the Wizard’s propaganda that the Wicked Witch of the West was barely a woman—barely even human.
In this chapter, Maguire also considers the source of evil. What is evil, and where does it stem from? Elphaba leans into people’s differentiated concepts of evil, labeling herself as “wicked” to wrest the power of identification away from the society that marginalizes her. But in doing so, Elphaba only confirms people’s first impressions of her. In reality, Elphaba is more complex; she has layers of good and bad. She cares very little for human life, including the life of her own son; this lack of empathy is a decidedly negative trait. She also murders Madame Morrible, who is already on her deathbed, out of hatred and a desire to accomplish something—a cruel and selfish act. But Elphaba is motivated by a traumatized psyche and a refusal to quit; she is not inspired to act because she is inherently evil. At her core lies a compassion for Animals and those who are different, and a hope for a better and more equal society. Her complexity reflects reality, as there tends to be a world of gray between the poles of “good” and “evil.”
The Wizard, however, is characterized as the stock evil character. He is a typical dictator who believes that he is better than the people he rules over and that his policies will make Oz a better place, completely disregarding its many other diverse perspectives and peoples. Elphaba’s visions of the Wizard in a city with signs that read “No Irish Need Apply” suggest that the Wizard is from the United States. This adds a new layer to his evil, as Maguire critiques the idea of American exceptionalism through the Wizard’s character. This is further emphasized by Dorothy, a typical American farm girl who arrives to save the day.
Elphaba is not evil, but she is mean. The difference is important, especially given the revelation that the Wizard is her father. It is therefore not true that Frex is responsible for bringing sin into the world. Elphaba was never a curse but a blessing, yet she is so beaten down by society that she’s never able to see past her obsessions with evil and injustice.
This final chapter is notably structured to increase tension. It is long, and each section is packed with action or difficult introspection. The reader tags along on Elphaba’s final journey, in which one paranoid idea leads to the next until Elphaba is finally defeated by the cruelty of the world. The similarities between Elphaba and Dorothy come to the fore in these final moments. In her youth, Elphaba had hopeful ideals and convictions, and she was motivated by a desire to do good. Over time, as she embraced her role as the Wicked Witch of the West, her nobler impulses were twisted and corrupted. In grabbing the water bucket to douse the flames on Elphaba’s clothes, Dorothy too is motivated by good intentions. Yet she runs up against a harsh fact outside her control: Elphaba is fatally allergic to water and dies, rendering Dorothy’s good intensions useless. This reflects the injustice and strife that characterized so much of Elphaba’s life, as her intentions were repeatedly stymied and twisted by a cruel and unfair world.
In the end, Elphaba loses everything and everyone who was important to her, and she is unable to find joy in the life she has built. Yet there is one final tragic twist of irony in the story: Elphaba always told Fiyero that she would be willing to sacrifice herself for the greater good, and she does indeed die for the greater good. Elphaba’s murder is sensationalized and used as a scapegoat for Oz’s problems. The Wizard and Dorothy both leave shortly afterward, so Elphaba’s sacrifice does indirectly contribute to positive change in the land. In sacrificing her life and her reputation, Elphaba fulfills her belief that her life is valuable in that it is expendable.
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By Gregory Maguire
