What Makes Elphaba from the Book Wicked, Wicked?

Gregory Maguire's Wicked:The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West converts L. Frank Baum's novel for children into a multilayered and much darker postmodern meditation on both the nature of evil and the effect that propaganda has on how ideological perspectives are inculcated. The Oz of Baum was an attempt to impose a utopia; Maguire shows that one man's utopia is another woman's dystopia . The world of Maguire's Oz seems topsy-turvy at first as the characters the reader presupposes to be either or evil are shown to behave with little actual difference from the previous incarnation, yet have those actions reconstituted contextually to subvert expectations.

Wicked begins shortly before the actual birth of the strange green girl who will grow up to take the title of Wicked Witch of the West. Her parents are Frexspar who is a struggling clergyman and his noble-born harlot of a wife, Melena. Melena appears to be the source of much of her daughter's rebellious character, as she rebels against her parents by marrying beneath her station and she rebels against her husband by sharing the company of a string of lovers. Cast away in the lonely frontiers of Munchkinland, Melena enters the equally unknown environs of childbirth with only the aid of some strange local women who administer a drug called pinobble to alleviate her pain. The child is daughter, healthy, but with green skin. Frex and Melena expend great effort in dealing with the strange affliction of their daughter; not only does she have green skin but appears also to be allergic to water. The daughter, named Elphaba in homage to the sounds L. Frank Baum, is raised as much by the same nurse who raised Melena as she is by her parents.