Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba in Wicked.
Wicked, which arrives to the big screen this November, redeems the villain who is barely a character in L. Frank Baum’s classic novel.
“And what, you may ask, are the reasons why?” Ray Bradbury asked in his foreword for the Kansas Centennial edition of L. Frank Baum’s classic novel. “The Wizard of Oz will never die?”
More than 20 years after the musical Wicked became a Broadway megahit, the first part of a big-screen adaptation, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, will arrive this November. The second film comes out next year. It might be time to pose a related question: Why won’t the Wicked Witch of the West ever die?
The character has grown in stature since she first appeared as the villain in just one chapter of Baum’s novel nearly 125 years ago. Every subsequent adaptation has made her more visible, more memorable and – in a twist – more heroic. Much like the Land of Oz’s symbolic meaning as a stand-in for the United States, her fate reflects the continuing debates about race, gender and who is and isn’t considered American.
Narratively, her evolution has been striking. Barely present in Baum’s book as an enemy of Dorothy, the young Kansan on a journey through Oz, the witch emerged as a formidable green-faced foe made famous by white actress Margaret Hamilton in MGM’s 1939 movie classic, The Wizard of Oz. In the 1970s, Mabel King played her as the cruel factory owner Evillene in the all-Black Broadway and movie versions of The Wiz. Her showstopping number, No Bad News, stole the spotlight from Dorothy and Glinda, the Good Witch. Two decades later, her transformation was complete when Gregory Maguire depicted her as the sympathetic, misunderstood, magically powerful, though still green-hued Elphaba in his 1995 novel Wicked. That’s the version in the Broadway musical and now the forthcoming two-part film.
Credited with writing the first great American fairy tale, Baum began Dorothy’s turn-of-the-century tour in the frontier state of Kansas. Though Baum was neither born nor lived there, his general interest in the region was reflected in his move from upstate New York to Aberdeen, a Dakota Territory town, in 1886. After opening a novelty store there, he started a newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, in which he wrote editorials that ranged from advocating women’s suffrage to calling for the complete extermination of Indigenous communities.
His interest in women’s rights can be seen in Dorothy’s coming of age as an assertive, independent and morally confident girl who challenges the Wizard’s authority. However, Baum’s racism has led some readers to reconsider whether or not the Wicked Witch was a proxy for his views on Native Americans and reevaluate how they understand Dorothy’s killing of the Wicked Witch. “Both in performance and embodiment,” literary critic Alissa Burger wrote in The Wizard of Oz as American Myth, the Wicked Witch is constructed “as occupying a space of Otherness which excludes her from citizenship, echoing the concerns of American identity that preoccupied Baum in his editorials as well as in the discourse surrounding westward expansion and the myth of the frontier”.
In contrast to Dorothy, whom Baum characterised as a “loving little girl” with a “merry voice,” the Wicked Witch has only one eye that is “as powerful as a telescope”. Living on rough land, she is surrounded by wolves, wears a silver whistle around her neck and rules over Winkies, whom she refers to as slaves. She is not green-faced but does turn into a brown, shapeless mass when Dorothy kills her by throwing water at her. The Witch’s geographical isolation and physical abnormalities rendered her a permanent outcast in Baum’s sphere. “As a result of her Otherness,” Burger concludes. “the Wicked Witch can – and, in fact, must – be destroyed.”
By 1939, however, her Otherness was symbolised by her odd skin colour. One of the most magical moments of the MGM movie is the use of Technicolor to indicate that Dorothy has left rural black-and-white Kansas and landed in the vibrantly surreal Oz. But even in a world populated by creatures as fantastical as a talking lion and winged monkeys, it was the Wicked Witch’s creepy cackle and ghastly green face that ensured she’d be the most hated and dehumanised character in Oz. Yet paradoxically, as a result of Hamilton’s unforgettable performance, she was the film’s most enduring icon.
Evillene looked quite different in Sidney Lumet’s 1978 adaptation, The Wiz, set in Harlem rather than Kansas, and starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and King as her nemesis. While the stage version three years earlier had been a hit, earning seven Tony Awards and running for four years, critics initially panned the movie before it became a cult classic. On screen, Evillene’s monstrosity was signalled by her elaborate costuming (her dress was made of chopped-up dog toys and pieces of salami), her imposing stature and her status as a sweatshop boss who humiliated and whipped employees into submission.
The Wiz, as a movie, originated with efforts to diversify storytelling in Hollywood in the wake of the civil rights movement. Unlike her predecessors, Evillene is not a racial Other. Instead, she is an oppressor, an adult willing to sacrifice young people like Dorothy to hold onto power. A new order is established when she dies, enabling Black citizens like Dorothy to return to, and reclaim, Harlem and by extension, the United States, as home.
It was Maguire’s novel Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, that most radically reinvented the Wicked Witch. She has a name, Elphaba, a complex backstory, a friendship with Glinda (later the Good Witch) that blurs the lines of good and evil, and is the true hero of Oz. As an inquisitive, compassionate, animal-loving college student who questions the teachings and authoritarianism of the Wizard, Elphaba is the champion of the underdog, and her hyper-green face becomes not an excuse for her expulsion, but rather proof of her empathy.
Now, Erivo, best known for her Tony-winning performance as Celie in the musical The Color Purple and her Oscar-nominated turn as Harriet Tubman in the 2019 biopic, will be Elphaba on the big screen. As a Black actress also in green face, Erivo is likely to draw attention to how Elphaba’s colour makes her more vulnerable to being ostracised, stereotyped and oppressed by the Wizard. But, in our particular political moment, Erivo as Elphaba is not just doubly tragic but also tremendously heroic. By risking her life to protect the animals of Oz, rebel against the raging sorceress Madame Morrible and challenge the Wiz’s draconian suppression of speech, she tries to save her community from complete catastrophe.
A two-part feature film is fitting for a figure who defies expectation and categorisation. Elphaba offers the most expansive vision of belonging of any character in Oz and, thus, our country.
I hope that witch lives forever.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Salamishah Tillet
Photographs by: Corey Corcoran
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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