"Confess. Unburden your soul."
Alright, I confess. I'm a theatre major and I've never seen Wicked. Go ahead, lock me up.
Up until recently, I hadn't read Wicked, either. A friend of mine, fascinated by the world-building in my writing, loaned it to me and I just finished.
First, I would like to say that, while I appreciate that she finds my writing to be good, my world-building is not on par with Gregory Maguire. (Though, admittedly, I am not very familiar with the original L. Frank Baum Oz books, so I don't know how much Maguire is inventing, and how much he's expanding upon.)
Interestingly, the day before I finished reading Wicked, Jason and I watched a film called The Reckoning, which was about a woman in 1665 who is accused of being a witch and the torture she endures as the authorities try to get her to confess.
How things change! In 1939, in a film based on a book published in 1900, Glinda famously (even cutely) asks Dorothy, "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" Dorothy, aghast, responds, "I'm not a witch at all," more in line with what we'd expect from someone accused of witchcraft in the 17th century. "I am innocent to a witch - I know not what a witch is," proclaims a character in The Crucible, based on events from the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93.
This was supposed to be a review of Wicked. It seems to be turning into a review of accusations of witchcraft.
It doesn't spoil anything to say that Elphaba in Wicked chooses to become a witch. Or rather, she chooses to pose as one and things kind of fall together for that persona. She and her sister don't balk when people start - jokingly, at first - to refer to them as the Wicked Witch of the East and the Wicked Witch of the West (based on where each of them lives).
In the film I referred to, Grace obviously does not chose to pose as a witch, and the amount of torture she endures is in hopes to save her infant daughter.
Interestingly enough, we watch both women slide along the slippery edge of insanity. The scale is different, to be sure: Elphaba's story spans approximately 40 years, Grace's merely a few days.
Elphaba slowly endures parental neglect, hardships, friendlessness, sudden personal loss, and denial of the forgiveness she desperately seeks. When her sister, Nessarose, is unexpectedly killed by the falling house, and her old school friend Glinda gives away Nessa's shoes - shoes that her father made for the favored sister, shoes that Nessa had promised would be Elphaba's some day - Elphaba finally allows the cloak of "Wicked Witch" to slip around her and goes off the rails trying to get the shoes back from her sister's unwitting killer. (And I mean, really, if my old college roommate gave a prized family heirloom to the person who killed my sister, I'd be pissed, too.)
Grace, on the other hand, has physical hardships and, arguably, more psychological hardships thrust upon her within a very short period (we aren't given a timeline of events prior to her arrest, but from arrest to the end of the film is four days). She maintains her innocence, refuses to give in even as she sees visions of both her dead husband and Lucifer himself.
In drastically different endings, Grace is saved by water, while Elphaba, famously, is destroyed by it. Though, reading Wicked while having seen The Wizard of Oz, Maguire handles Dorothy's (and Elphaba's) motive differently than the source material. Both Grace and Elphaba have a moment of peace as their trials finally end.