Good vs Evil in Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked”

What is good and what is bad seems pretty easy to define. Good is being morally right, an action or a quality that does not cause harm to people, harm to self, nor cause sadness. Goodness benefits others, if not the self, and it causes happiness. Evil is the opposite of good, or the absence of good. But these are only the general meanings of these two concepts. In religion, good and evil are represented by different beings. In Christianity, being good means to please God, the Creator.

Jesus Christ is also good, and heaven is where good souls go to.

On the other hand, the Devil, being a fallen angel, represents evil, and hell is where bad souls are tortured for eternity. Other religious practices in the world may or may not have divine beings that people worship, but they also have concepts of good and evil. Evil is defined by goodness. If good is defined, bad is automatically defined as well, because bad is, to put simply, not good.

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For example, if good would be represented by a child who obeys his/her parents, then bad would be a child who does not obey his/her parents. The question is what if the “bad” child has a reason to not obey his/her parents?

What if the reason is besides being bad, such as what if the child disobeyed his/her parents to fulfill a promise to a friend? Good and evil only represents the black and white, but reality tells us that there are also grey areas, some things which are not exactly bad, but not exactly good either.

Gregory Maguire’s novel, “Wicked”, a sort of prequel to the classic children’s novel, L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz”, is about good and evil, and these grey areas in between, which are acts done by people which are not good but also not evil. It tells of the story of the infamous Wicked Witch of the West.

In the original “Wizard of Oz” books, the witch is not named, only given the title of The Wicked Witch of the West. Described as green-skinned, wearing black clothes with a black pointed hat, riding on a broomstick, and afraid of water, this witch character became almost a stereotype for all other witches. In “Wicked”, this witch is given the name Elphaba Thropp, with the first name take from the initials of the original author of “Wizard of Oz”. One of the first things that readers will notice and perhaps find interesting is the quotations in one of the first pages.

Maguire quotes three, one of which is from “The Wizard of Oz”, about the dialogue between the Wizard and Dorothy. The Wizard requests Dorothy to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, and in return he will help her return to Kansas. This quote may make a child think, given that the child fully understands what is morally right and wrong in the society. Killing is wrong. Why should Dorothy kill the witch? Because she is bad? But killing a bad person will not make a person good. Or does it? Does a wrong action turn into a right action if there is a good reason for committing the action?

With this quote, a person who is about to read “Wicked” will start thinking about the nature of good and evil, and will get the central idea of the book. In the first part of the “Wicked”, the birth of Elphaba is told. Readers will learn the occurrences when she was born and the background of her parents. From the time she was born, Elphaba had skin of “undeniable green” (p. 20). She also had sharp fangs that she bit off the finger of the fisherwife when she was still a baby (p. 20). These different characteristics makes her an oddity, and somehow inhuman.

For this reason, it is assumed that Elphaba grew up being a victim of prejudice. This prejudice later proved to be an important experience for her, because her intentions and motivations all came from the prejudice and cruelty that she experienced as a child, and even as an adult. Despite this, she grew up smart and curious. She also questions things that most people accept, such as the concept of evil. In a conversation with Galinda, she asks if evil does exist. “They seemed to be obsessed with locating it [evil]… an evil spring in the mountains, an evil smoke, evil blood in the veins…

“… The early unionists… argued that some invisible pocket of corruption was floating around the neighborhood, a direct descendant of the pain the world felt when Lurline left. Like a patch of cold air on a warm still night. A perfectly agreeable soul might march through it and become infected, and then go and kill a neighbor. But then was it your fault if you walked through a patch of badness? If you couldn’t see it? ” (p. 80-81) This is foreboding, because later in the story, Elphaba does “walk through a patch of badness”, though she does not mean to walk into it.