Evyn Katherine McGraw

Artist and Fantasy Writer

An Analysis of Wicked: Part 1, the Book

Table of Contents

[Note: This is a slightly unhinged 10,000 word love letter to one of my new favorite books. Very spoiler heavy. This first essay is specifically about the novel, but I plan to write a follow-up essay on the musical as well.

Quick note on quotations: Ellipses close together mark where I’ve abridged certain quotes, while ellipses more widely spaced come from the novel itself. Block quotes are in bold.]

Introduction

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is the quintessential tragic backstory of a popular villainous character. This type of story has proliferated in recent years: the Joker, Maleficent (and lots of Disney examples, really). Many of these examples seek to create a sympathetic villain character through a psychological analysis of their past, usually involving some sort of trauma. Unlike these more contemporary examples, however, the book that predates them is not merely interested in the psychology of its titular character. In addition to having a deeper character study than any of the media potentially influenced by it (through the musical or otherwise), the novel asks more fundamental questions about the nature of evil: What is it? What perpetuates it? And what can be done about? Author Gregory Maguire said in this interview that the question of evil predated even the decision to write about the Wicked Witch of the West.

Thus, the book is as much a work of philosophy as it is psychology, as much a theological investigation of evil as it is a recontextualization of an iconic fictional villain. The book’s genius, however, is that the philosophy is firmly rooted in the psychology, the theology in the character study. It’s the rare book that makes me, as a reader, fall in love with a character while simultaneously interrogating the nature of reality.

The novel, broadly, recounts the life of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s the Wizard of Oz. It spans from her unusual infancy to her death at the hands of Dorothy. Over the course of the narrative, themes of evil are treated dialectically and circuitously. Different definitions of evil are articulated, deconstructed, redefined, renavigated, on a winding trail of philosophical thought that makes it nearly impossible to “locate” evil anywhere. This dialectic forces readers to question how they define evil because these equivocal definitions are not “evil” pure and simple. Instead, all these visions of evil both demand readers’ empathy and serve as loci of spiritual revelation. The point, Maguire seems to suggest, is not to define evil; the point is to understand how evil is perpetuated and what can be done about it. The main perpetrator of evil, the novel suggests, is “unforgiven-ness”, a term I have coined to describe the particular existential situation that crushes Elphaba and enables her to commit true acts of evil.

But my explanation of this reading will be somewhat circuitous, mirroring the novel’s dialectical nature. In order to see how Maguire defines evil, one must see how he plays with different definitions throughout the novel, beginning with the extreme moral conviction of Elphaba’s father.

First False Definition of Evil: Pagan Spectacle

Maguire introduces the first definition of evil even before Elphaba’s birth. Frexpar, Elphaba’s father, is a stern and monomaniacal minister of unionism, a religion—characterized as a sort of dis-incarnate Christianity—in service to the transcendent Unnamed God. Against the heady theology and staunch morals of unionism stands the new “pleasure faith”, various forms of spectacle involving sorcery, theatrics, and pagan revelry.

From the remote village of Rush Margins, where Frex lives with his wife Melena, Frex catches word of a great mechanical contraption currently travelling the country and seducing souls to the pleasure faith. When this contraption, the Clock of the Time Dragon, arrives in Rush Margins, Frex feels it his mission to dissuade his flock from attending its spectacle, bawdy puppet shows satirizing infidelity and hypocrisy. But his attempt to dissuade the gathering crowds result in violence, in part because the Dragon’s pageant of the evening stars a two-faced minister who gets roasted for a feast by his congregation.

All this spectacle, Frex claims, obscures true piety to the Unnamed God and only encourages vice. Later he rants comprehensively about the pleasure faith and sorcery:

To the ignorant everything is spectacle these days. The ancient unionist monks and maunts knew their place in the universe—acknowledging the life source too sublime to be named—and now we sniff up the skirts of every musty magician who comes along. Hedonists, anarchists, solipsists! Individual freedom and amusement is all! As if sorcery had any moral component! Charms, alley magic, industrial-strength sound and light displays, fake shape-changers! Charlatans, nabobs of necromancy, chemical and herbal wisdoms, humbug hedonists! Selling their bog recipes and crone aphorisms and schoolboy spells! It makes me sick. (41-42)

Frex’s problem with the pleasure faith is twofold: first, pageantry appeals to the basest nature of human beings—the propensity toward violence, the sexual instinct, the tendency toward mob mentalities. Second, such pagan revelry is built on lies. Sorcery is nothing but theatrics, and theatrics are inherently false. At best, they distract; at worst, they lead astray.

Frex’s accusations, of course, directly contradict the claims of the Time Dragon’s dwarf operator. Before the pageant begins, the dwarf exclaims to the crowd:

All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn’t we hear a voice of prophecy, or see a miracle play? Beneath the apparent sham and indignity of our ratlike lives, a humble pattern and meaning still applies! Come nearer, my good people, and watch what a little extra knowledge augurs for your lives! The Time Dragon sees before and beyond and within the truth of your sorry span of years here! Look at what it shows you! (16-17)

Though pessimistic about human nature, the dwarf still affirms the existence of some spiritual truth, claiming the Time Dragon has revelatory power. The dwarf’s speech serves as a first suggestion that Frex’s definition of evil is insufficient, perhaps rooted in some truth but ultimately wrongheaded. This theatrical paganism can be revelatory, and therefore true, and therefore good (or at least in service to goodness). However, any such revelation is too grotesque for Frex to even consider. Devoted to the cold moral truths of unionism—even the name of the religion reeks of abstraction—Frex cannot abide anything that encourages or acknowledges the brutality and particularity of the human condition.

Elphaba, born against this moral backdrop, is thematically tied to the very paganism Frex rejects. Melena, who is by no means the virtuous preacher’s wife, does not even know if Elphaba is Frex’s daughter, as she later confesses to being seduced and magically drugged by one of the many men she fraternized with during Frex’s travels. Melena’s hazy memory shrouds Elphaba’s birth in the mystery of sorcery.

Furthermore, when the nursemaids help deliver Melena’s baby, they cart an unconscious Melena from the house and end up taking shelter inside the Clock of the Time Dragon itself. Here Elphaba is born. Melena births her, symbolically, in the heart of pagan theatricality. This thematic tie suggests an ontological relationship between Elphaba herself and the evil her father opposes. They are one in the same.

This ontological tie will become increasingly important, later in the novel, as this first definition of evil is deconstructed and revealed to be a potential locus of spiritual insight.

Second False Definition of Evil: The Other

At her birth, Elphaba is also associated with another recurring definition of evil—that of the Other. The strange circumstances of her birth are coupled with the strange qualities of her person. She is born with green skin and a full set of teeth. She has a propensity to bite herself and an intense aversion to water. She breaks her toys. As one character notes, “She is herself pleased at half things” (39). She does not speak until the age of two, and her first word is “horrors.” Melena, with distaste, watches her play and thinks of her in the following way:

She is more grasshopper than girl, with those angular little thighs, those arching eyebrows, those poking fingers. She’s about the business of learning like any child, but she takes no delight in the world: She pushes and breaks and nibbles on things without any pleasure. As if she has a mission to taste and measure all the disappointments of life. (33)

Her unusual temperament strikes Melena with a sense of the uncanny. To her mother, something is off about her.

Elphaba is thus marked as this Other even before she sets out into the world. Her parents express contempt at her strangeness—her propensity toward darkness and the uncanny—and they inadvertently treat her as less than human: “For days Melena couldn’t bear to look at the thing. She held it, as a mother must. She waited for the groundwater of maternal affection to rise and overwhelm her. She did not weep. She chewed pinlobble leaves, to float away from the disaster” (22). Melena then has to remind herself that Elphaba is a “she” and not an “it”. Her strangeness encourages her own parents to dehumanize her.

And as in changeling narratives or other folkloric depictions of evil, the question of “why” arises. Why is Elphaba like this? What sort of moral mechanisms led to her arrival? As the parents ask themselves, “Was Elphaba devil’s spawn? Was she half-elf? Was she punishment for her father’s failure as a preacher, or for her mother’s sloppy morals and bad memory? Or was she merely a physical ailment, a blight like a misshapen apple or a five-legged calf?” (31). Thus they raise the question of the tragedy’s origin. Is it the result of bad behavior, a sort of karmic affliction from the universe? Or is it merely the mysterious byproduct of nature working as it ought, a natural fluke in the pattern of the cosmos?

At this point in the narrative, Elphaba’s “misshapenness” is treated as an evil, either a natural evil or the result of moral wrongdoing. Because the narrative will go on to deconstruct this definition of evil—Elphaba’s Otherness is not evil in-and-of-itself—their question could seem, at first glance, totally wrongheaded. However, the novel’s dialectical nature encourages readers to keep these questions in mind. The question of evil’s origin continues throughout the novel, even if the definition of evil shifts. Is evil natural? Is it something born in the human heart at birth? Or is it a mysterious aberration of the way things should be? Are these options mutually exclusive?

Ironically, it is Elphaba’s Otherness that will shed light on the real nature of evil. Similar to the revelatory nature of the Time Dragon, Elphaba too will serve as a mirror by which to gauge the human heart.

That’s not to say that Elphaba doesn’t do moral wrong over the course of the narrative; she definitely does. It is fascinating, however, that the roots of her moral wrongdoing reveal the previous definitions of evil as wrongheaded. It’s almost as if Elphaba is pushed toward real evil precisely because her spectacle and Otherness are falsely treated as evil. Elphaba becomes the very thing people have wrongly believed her to be.

Elphaba’s Lack of Self

The first thing that influences Elphaba’s moral devolution is her lack of a sense of self, and by extension her lack of connection to others. We begin to see this quality when she attends Shiz University. While the musical plays up everyone’s disgust at Elphaba’s presence, the book is much more subtle. She’s ostracized by neglect as much as anything, and mostly keeps to herself. She doesn’t even talk to her roommate Galinda, at least until she realizes Galinda is smarter than she presents herself to be. One evening they do finally spark up a conversation in their dorm, and Galinda makes the following observation about Elphaba:

Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal [the capital A to signify their human sentience], like something more than life but not quite Life. There was an expectancy but no intuition, was that it?—like a child who has never remembered having a dream being told to have sweet dreams. You’d almost call it unrefined, but not in a social sense—more in a sense of nature not having done its full job with Elphaba, not quite having managed to make her enough like herself. (77-78)

Galinda takes note of some inchoate quality in Elphaba that she compares to animal or plant life. Something about her personhood does not seem complete. This idea that nature has not quite made her enough like herself simultaneously affirms Elphaba’s personhood—she has an individual identity—but it also suggests the idea that this personhood has been obscured, hidden away, not come fully into being.

Galinda notices, I think, the fact that Elphaba really doesn’t have a concrete sense of selfhood, resulting from a life of being Othered. Because of the way her parents implicitly dehumanized her, an underdeveloped ego makes perfect sense. She never learned to have a full self because she was never treated as a full person. Now she exists on the periphery, sitting in the back of class or holing away in her dorm to read unionist sermons.

At the same instant, Elphaba feels trapped in herself. Admiring Galinda’s ability to forget herself in social engagements, Elphaba says, “I wouldn’t mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don’t know the way out” (109). So she both lacks a self and cannot escape from herself. This paradox is possible, I believe, because a lack of selfhood limits one’s ability to meaningfully connect with others. Love is inherently a union of disparate parts. A healthy self can reach out to the other (and the Other), while an anemic self cannot reach beyond itself. Therefore, it makes sense that Elphaba feels trapped within herself.

Only when she develops an interest in the natural sciences and a conviction about Animal rights does she begin to really connect with others. Through her research with Boq and Doctor Dillamond, she inadvertently finds herself accepted in a ragtag friend group including Boq, her sister Nessarose, and Galinda (now shortened to Glinda). For a while, this friend group constitutes a tenuous though meaningful community for Elphaba. For a while, she is treated as a person and can therefore participate in a mutual exchange of affection. She has friends; she has research; she has a purpose; she has a self.

However, because this sense of identity is tied very much to her environment, the moment she leaves her friends behind to pursue Animal rights in the Emerald City, she once again loses a coherent sense of self and is therefore vulnerable to the influence of an unnamed terrorist organization, which she later joins. In the name of Animal rights, she becomes willing to commit atrocities. Lack of self results in lack of an interpersonal moral sense, the sense of “loving one’s neighbor.” What remains is the cold conviction of an ideal. She is all moral outrage with no moral center, conviction with no meaning, goal with no purpose. She will fight for Animal rights because doing so allows her to hold onto the only shred of identity she’s managed to salvage. She will fight because she does not know what else to do. And because this goal is her last vestige of purpose, she will sacrifice anything to pursue it, even the lives of innocent bystanders.

We don’t see this change take place. After Elphaba’s disappearance, the novel has a time-skip. The next time we see her is from the perspective of college friend Fiyero, who finds her in her hideout above an abandoned corn exchange. During several visits, Fiyero tries to question Elphaba on her involvement with terrorism, and she justifies herself essentially by denying her personhood. When Fiyero says her “Lady Rebel” persona is unbecoming, she agrees, saying, “A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un” (188). Rejected by those around her, she is, symbolically, ceasing to be. With the lack of being, she’s nothing but a tool in the hands of a shadowy organization. She says, “I have no colleagues. I have no self. I never did, in fact, but that’s beside the point. I am just a muscular twitch in the larger organism” (198-199). A muscular twitch needn’t concern itself with questions of individual morality.

She is by no means a callous killer, however. Indeed, readers see a hurting young woman who does still have moral intuitions and yearns for real human connection. We see these yearnings expressed most clearly when her callous exterior cracks before Fiyero. Even as she insists that Fiyero doesn’t—and can’t—know who she really is and ushers him to the door, she cannot keep up the façade. “He grabbed her hand, and looked up into her face, which just for a second had fallen open. What he saw there made him chill and hot flash, in dizzying simultaneity, with the shape and scale of its need” (188).

In a later meeting, Fiyero tells Elphaba about his wife and her sisters, joking that he married a harem. He complains that his wife once offered her sisters as concubines, which he rejected on the basis that accepting the offer would bring him further under her control. Elphaba doesn’t understand what the problem is, and he says she wouldn’t understand because she isn’t married. Her response to this statement is quite odd. She says, “I am married, … just not to a man” (190). She refers, presumably, to her ideals, her mission. She has devoted her life not to another person but to a cause.

It is at this admission, however, that she breaks:

He raised his eyebrows. She put her hands to her face. He’d never seen her look like that—her words had shocked herself. She had to turn her head away for an instant, clear her throat, blow her nose. “Oh damn, tears, they burn like fire,” she cried, suddenly in a fury, and ran for an old blanket to dab her eyes before the salty wetness could run down her cheeks. (190-191)

When Fiyero hugs her in an attempt at comfort, she responds with an anguished outburst: “No, … no, no, I’m not a harem, I’m not a woman, I’m not a person, no” (191). And yet, even as she denies her own personhood, she suddenly turns to Fiyero for validation of that very thing, and they commence a two-month long love affair. Verbally she rejects her selfhood, but her actions speak of her deep loneliness and need for human connection. She finds in Fiyero someone who treats her like an individual, valuable and worthy, unlike anyone thus far in her life (at least, according to her mistaken perceptions, which are later revealed to be too myopic.)

These reasons, I would argue, do not make the affair either wise or morally acceptable, but they do help readers sympathize with Elphaba. Furthermore, these motivations help us understand the second question posed at the beginning of this analysis: What perpetuates evil? The answer, here, is that moral wrongdoing results, or at least can result, from the fractured identity caused by years of neglect and Othering.

Elphaba’s Sense of Failure

The second thing that influences Elphaba’s descent into evil is her sense of failure. As a student, Elphaba develops an interest in activism, specifically for the plight of Animals whose rights are slowly being stripped away. This interest is rooted in a deep-seated desire for justice. When her companions ask her to sing during a night out, her desire for justice takes on the aura of a religious conviction:

Elphaba made up a little song on the spot, a song of longing and otherness, of far aways and future days. Strangers closed their eyes to listen. … [Boq] saw the imaginary place she conjured up, a land where injustice and common cruelty and despotic rule and the beggaring fist of drought didn’t work together to hold everyone by the neck. … The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief. (151)

This song expresses a moral intuition more fundamental than any label of “evil” she’s ever been given. She who is pleased at half things also longs for healing. Her propensity for darkness and the uncanny does not signify moral degradation but instead augments the depth of her desire to understand the world even in its ugliness and to see the downtrodden uplifted, their existence affirmed as meaningful. Though Elphaba has no religious affiliation, her longings speak of some ultimate spiritual purpose. Nessarose, her hyper-religious sister, points out this fact: “’Elphaba says she’s not religious but see how feelingly she sings of the afterlife,’ said Nessarose, and for once no one was inclined to argue” (152). Whatever her spiritual views, her ideals of social justice have, in essence, become her religion, or at least have managed to answer whatever limited spiritual impulse she feels herself capable of.

If her ideals take on the import of religion, it is all the more devastating that she fails to carry them out. She and Glinda visit the Emerald City to appeal to the Wizard and are essentially laughed out of the throne room. Speaking of Animal oppression, Elphaba tries to reason with the Wizard, saying, “This is not untrammeled emotion. What’s happening is immoral—” (175). The Wizard cuts her off and says, “I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral, … In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical” (175). Thus he dismisses Elphaba’s deepest ideals with mockery. She leaves the throne room hopeless and helpless, her intentions dashed with a handwave of a much more powerful authority.

Given this disappointment, the extremity of her subsequent actions is understandable. Still holding to her ideal of justice, she must find some way to bring that ideal about. Useless as reasoning was, she must resort to action, and only actions of great power and terrible force can come up against the sheer unrivalled power of the Wizard and loosen his grip on Oz.

Once again, this explanation does not excuse Elphaba’s terrorism. Even Elphaba herself cannot ultimately bring herself to go through with her intentions. When she’s given a job to kill the headmaster of Shiz during the public celebration of Lurlinemas, she can’t do it. Waiting outside a theater, she watches her target arrive, but at the same time a group of schoolgirls arrive as well. Fiyero, watching from a distance, sees that she cannot go through with the murder in front of the children. Instead, “Elphaba crumpled and sank back against a pillar, shivering with self-loathing so violently that Fiyero could see it from fifty yards away” (219). This self-loathing no doubt arises from the sudden realization of what she was about to do.

Later, she potentially attempts suicide—the narrative is ambiguous about this—takes refuge with a group of nuns (called maunts), and falls into a year-long stupor of some sort. She spends the next seven years with the maunts in silence and solitude, trying to disappear from the world and atone for her mistakes. Clearly, even her ideals cannot let her justify her actions to herself. As the cliché goes, the ends don’t justify the means. Deluding herself into thinking otherwise nearly destroys her.

Elphaba’s Desire for Forgiveness

Even at this point in the narrative, she still tries to pursue good. She’s lost pretty much everything at this point—her friends at Shiz, her last-ditch effort to help the Animals, her final shred of identity. Worse, she catches word of Fiyero’s murder and suspects (correctly) that she is responsible for his death. With nothing left, having spent years anonymously with the maunts, she feels that her final act of good, the only good she can possibly do, is to seek forgiveness from Fiyero’s wife. Afterward, she will disappear from the world and live alone in the wasteland of the West.

This desire for forgiveness serves a curious function in the narrative, as it marks a shift not only in her character development but also in the existential tone of the novel. She is no longer on a political mission but on a spiritual quest. Unable to change the world around her, she now seeks only to do as little harm as possible. This shift from the political to the personal gives Elphaba the chance—at least the possibility—to discover a coherent sense of meaning beyond her failures and lack of selfhood.

For a while, the quest for forgiveness sustains her in life, gives her hope. It even promises some vestige of healing. It also reforges her identity through interpersonal connections, tenuous though they may be.

At first, she resists this acknowledgement of her selfhood. As a maunt, she notes, “The benefit of a uniform was that one need not struggle to be unique—how many uniquenesses could the Unnamed God or nature create? One could sink selflessly into the daily pattern, one could find one’s way without groping” (227). However, when she discovers an old college friend while caring for the dying, she is forcibly reminded of her own individuality. “He reminded her that she did think. Under the scrutiny of his tired frame she was re-created, against her will, as an individual. Or nearly” (228). Her previous bonds of friendship at Shiz now recalls her to a deep need for interpersonal connection.

Given how many people she’s hurt or abandoned, the most meaningful connection she can obtains is that of forgiveness. So she sets out from the mauntery with a ragtag group of travelers. They journey into the western region of Oz, through grasslands and mountainous regions of eerie beauty. As they travel, Elphaba remains a prickly character, but her interactions with her companions and with the world around her does seem to have a healing effect on her. Whether discussing legends of the Kumbric Witch with their guide, Oatsie Manglehand, or watching her son Liir bond with the cook’s dog Killyjoy, she finds herself ushered into a sort of detached and aching sense of human interdependence. She is hurting, lonely, desperately guilty, disgusted at the injustice of the world. And yet, one evening under the stars, she finds herself thinking, “There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love” (228). She suddenly finds herself taken with the world’s strange beauty:

As night fell, everyone seemed more alert, out of fear and excitement. The skies throbbed with turquoise, even at midnight. Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into a hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing.

If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, it might be the best way to die. (234)

One particularly vivid example of her anguished sense of goodness comes as she is led on camel to an audience with the Princess Nastoya of the Scrow tribe. She watches the landscape and compares it to the mythical ocean, which in this world does not exist:

[T]here were small grasshawks launching themselves like fish leaping out of the spume, nipping at the fireflies, pocketing them, then falling back in a dry splash. Bats passed, making a guttering, sputtering sound that ended in an extinguishing swoop. The plain itself seemed to bring forth night color: now a heliotrope, now a bronzy green, now a dun color skeined through with red and silver. The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar. Nothing more need have happened; it seemed enough to Elphaba to find herself capable of such a weird ecstatic response to soft color and safe space. But no, on—on. (236)

The beauty of the world simultaneously gives her a mysterious sense of rest while spurring her onward in the quest for expiation. Her quest, therefore, has the curious effect of reforging her identity by thrusting her forward in life. Future hope gives present meaning.

She realizes the need for her own healing most explicitly when she talks with Nastoya. Under an enchantment to appear human, Nastoya is actually an Elephant, gone into hiding because of the Wizard’s oppression of Animals. The two bond over their lack of belonging, their Otherness, but also their potential for great power and change.

Nastoya understands Elphaba’s power better than she herself does. The princess rightly points out the enchantments Elphaba unwittingly brought about during their travels. Elphaba then requests to stay with the Scrow tribe: “I would like to stay here with you, … Life has been very hard. If you can hear me when I cannot hear myself—something the Superior Maunt could never do—you could help me do no harm in this world. That’s all I want—to do no harm” (239). She wants to disengage with the world, to find rest in the beauty of the grasslands with an ancient Elephant princess who understands her sorrow. Nastoya, however, tells Elphaba she must continue on. She has a mission.

Though she hopes to return to the Scrow tribe afterward, her desire for forgiveness gives her an existential dynamism she has up to this point lacked. It is the engine that drives her forward, giving her a new sense of purpose, in spite of her own pessimism and self-loathing. Thus, it is the desire for forgiveness that keeps Elphaba in contact with goodness. As her identity comes more fully into being, so too does her sense of interdependence with the world, even as she seeks to escape it entirely. Almost in spite of her best efforts, she is brought into a sort of communion with the brokenness of the cosmos; her own wounds are the wounds of the world. This spiritual connection could, potentially, be called love, though a mysterious and elusive kind of love.

The Evil of “Unforgiven-ness”

Elphaba’s potential for love is ultimately left unfulfilled, however, when Fiyero’s wife, Sarima, refuses to hear her apology. Elphaba arrives at the castle of Kiamo Ko and is welcomed by Sarima. Hasty to get the apology off her chest, Elphaba begins to mention Fiyero’s death, but Sarima cuts her off and says she needs rest and food. Elphaba insists that she can tell Sarima how he died, but Sarima says, “Not unless I want to hear it, which is my prerogative. This is my house and I choose to hear what I want” (249). Days later, Elphaba tries again to bring up Fiyero. Sarima once again refuses to speak of him, but her reasons for doing so become much more evident. She notes:

It seems to me that you have come here to—shall we say—relieve yourself of some sad business or other. You have the look about you. Don’t be startled, my dear, if there’s a look I do recognize, it’s the look of someone carrying a burden. … You want to throw down your burden, throw it down at my feet, or across my shoulders. You want perhaps to weep a little, to say good-bye, and then to leave. And when you leave here you will walk right out of the world. (254)

It becomes evident that Sarima already knows exactly what Elphaba is going to confess, but she is entirely unwilling to offer easy forgiveness. The gravity of the confession far outweighs a simple apology. Sarima, therefore, will deprive Elphaba of any sense of resolution by simply refusing to hear what she has to say.

What follows are many years of existential suspension. Elphaba, along with Liir and her odd company of animals, stay at Kiamo Ko. Elphaba works on her enchantments; Liir is consistently bullied by Sarima’s children; no one enjoys each other’s company. And yet Elphaba stays in the hopes that, one day, Sarima will listen to her confession and forgive her. Sarima, however, remains determined to keep Elphaba in this suspended state, whether out of hurt, self-defense, spite, or a combination thereof. Spite certainly does play some role, as Sarima often makes unexpected jabs at Elphaba. One day, while discussing the afterlife, Elphaba rants about how stories of the afterlife are manipulative. The following exchange takes place.

“Don’t,” Sarima said. “For one thing, that’s where Fiyero is waiting for me. And you know it.”

Elphaba’s jaw dropped. When she least expected it, Sarima always seemed ready to rush in with a surprise attack. (272)

Sarima’s motivations seem at first motivated by a sense of fairness; easy forgiveness can’t excuse Elphaba’s actions, and an apology from Elphaba would be more therapeutic for Elphaba than it would be for Sarima and thus not a just exchange. However, as the years go by, withholding forgiveness seems more and more motivated by this spite. Though Elphaba’s motivations are, of course, self-seeking—she does indeed desire a therapeutic release form her own guilt—she is also coming to Sarima with a legitimate posture of repentance. The longer this situation continues, the crueler Sarima’s withholding of forgiveness becomes.

Sarima’s refusal places Elphaba in the existential situation I have termed “unforgiven-ness.” It is a sort of hopeless roving, a perpetuated state of woundedness that cannot be escaped. While the hope of forgiveness spurs Elphaba onward earlier in the narrative, she is now suspended, trapped in a state of desire for a forgiveness forever deferred. She has nowhere to place her mistakes, no way to let her guilt rest. She finds herself in a sort of half-existence, unable to move forward.

This state, I argue, is what ultimately drives her to full-blown evil. One day, Sarima discusses different types of anger between the sexes; there is “hot anger,” a masculine forceful exertion of fury, and “cold anger,” a feminine resentment on a cosmic scale. Elphaba later notes that she feels both, that she indeed needs both to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. Soon afterward, Sarima’s son dies mysteriously after bullying Liir. Elphaba’s enchantments are affecting the world without her even consciously conjuring them.

Unable to put her guilt to rest, her lack of identity and her sense of failure resurfaces, only this time armored with anger and a terrible purpose. Once again, Elphaba seeks to do something that will, somehow, outweigh her mistakes, but once again her desire for action is misguided toward malevolence.

She returns to central Oz to murder Madame Morrible, the headmaster of Shiz, for her involvement with the Wizard’s injustices. Morrible dies, however, five minutes before Elphaba arrives. This doesn’t stop Elphaba from bashing her skull in, then proceeding to confess the murder to an old college friend. She wants to make a statement. She wants all of Oz to know what happens to those who willingly abuse their power. Curiously, she even convinces herself that she did in fact commit the murder. Once again, she is living for a cause while unmoored from her own morals.

Unhinged from reality, she descends further into instability. When the house from Kansas falls on Nessarose and Dorothy leaves with Nessa’s enchanted shoes, Elphaba suddenly becomes obsessed with retrieving them. Her father gave them to Nessa, and their existence conjures up all of Elphaba’s suppressed resentments from childhood. Her father favored and coddled Nessa while Elphaba remained the neglected Other. Now, without proper perspective, driven by years of unhealed wounds, Elphaba gets it into her head that she can somehow achieve something of worth if she gets the shoes for herself. Her reasoning is unclear. It is as if she’s treating them as a totemic embodiment of her father’s love. Taking them for herself would mean taking for herself the love she never received. It is the twisted logic of magical thinking, but we can at least see how she got here. In her state of unforgiven-ness, she seeks some last vestige of purpose. This irrational goal is all she has left, and she has now become the Wicked Witch so ironically portrayed by Margaret Hamilton in the Wizard of Oz film, chasing after Dorothy with monomaniacal intensity.

Deconstructing False Definitions of Evil

To return to the question of how evil is perpetuated, the answer, according to Maguire, has something to do with the existential suspension of unforgiven-ness. Thus, the earlier definitions of evil are revealed to be insufficient. Indeed, precisely because those false definitions are perpetuated can Elphaba experience such a descent toward real evil. If she was not villainized as the Other, if she was not treated with the same contempt as the pagan theatricality of the pleasure faith, perhaps she never would have made the mistakes she made and ended up in a state of unforgiven-ness. Perhaps evil is a matter of nurture, that people become the evil they’re taught to be. Elphaba suggests this very idea when she reconvenes with her father after her years in the wilderness. Frex makes the observation that, growing up, she hated the look of herself, her skin and unusual features. This exchange ensues:

“Where did I learn that hate?” she asked.

“You were born knowing it,” he said. “It was a curse. You were born to curse my life.”

He patted her hand affectionately, as if he didn’t mean much by this. (339)

Obviously, such a blasé statement does hit on Elphaba’s deep wounds, but her father is too oblivious even to notice. He is too convinced about the source of evil.

And yet, Maguire is careful not to “locate” evil anywhere, even in this idea of nurture. Because he does suggest that evil is not merely a matter of upbringing. His depiction of children throughout the novel makes this fact very clear, whether toddler Elphaba is throwing rocks at other children or Sarima’s son is locking Liir in a well out of sheer malice. Sarima’s children, in general, are nasty little creatures, so it’s ironic that Sarima herself speaks of childhood innocence: “Oh, children are good at heart, … They are so innocent and gay. It cheers me up to see them dashing about the house in this game or that” (277). It’s unclear if she actually believes this or if she’s just saying it to spite Elphaba, who had complained about their vicious antics.

Whatever the case, the ironic conversation highlights the fact that evil does exist inborn in human nature, unless Maguire is suggesting that there’s something specifically wrong with these children and their upbringing, which is a possibility. Whatever Maguire’s intentions, though, he problematizes any easy definition of evil, any clear statement about where evil comes from.

After Elphaba “murders” Morrible, she has dinner with an old college friend, and the conversation shifts to just this topic. The various socialites, artists, and politicians present different definitions: “An affliction of the psyche, like vanity or greed”, “An absence of good”, “An incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It’s an other. It’s not us” (370). As Elphaba leaves the dinner party, she turns one last time to correct them all:

“The real thing about evil,” said the Witch at the doorway, “isn’t any of what you said. You figure out one side of it—the human side, say—and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It’s like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.” (371-372)

We can see the secretness of evil in Elphaba’s own life. On the human side of things, all her evil can indeed be explained away, like breaking the dragon shell to find nothing inside. Elphaba is a victim, her motivations understandable, and her descent tragic. At the same time, another perspective, perhaps the “eternal” perspective she speaks of, demands that evil does exist. We sense it; we intuit it deeply. There is a difference between moral and immoral action, and if this is the case, there must be choice. Elphaba knows there is a choice because Princess Nastoya, reading her destiny, tells her so. Elphaba remembers this conversation when she explains why she killed Madame Morrible. She says Morrible had a choice when it came to colluding with the Wizard: “But the Witch stopped herself short, hearing in her words about Madame Morrible—she had a choice—an echo of what the Elephant Princess Nastoya had once said to her: No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst—there is always choice” (369). In her hesitation, she applies her accusation of Madame Morrible to herself. Though her mistakes were unavoidable given her upbringing, on some level, perhaps some secret level of the soul, she had a choice, and she chose wrongly. Thus, the ultimate mystery: Elphaba both is and is not evil. But any evil she has chosen has nothing to do with her Otherness. Indeed, it is the tragic reality that her Otherness resulted in a lack of love that spurred her toward evil in the first place.

All these equivocated definitions, these metaphysical conundrums, these paradoxes between fate and free will, leave the reader with a somewhat blunt series of propositions: Evil exists. You cannot define it, nor can you locate its origin. It is perpetuated by unforgiveness and lack of love. Any pat definition you have for it is wrong. If you try to define it, you will inadvertently perpetuate it by Othering those who need your love. It is a mystery. It simply is.

“Evil” as Revelatory

The only question remaining, then, is, “What can be done about it?” If evil cannot be located, how can it be healed? Ironically, the false definitions of evil—spectacle and the Other—point toward an answer.

After the dinner party, Elphaba, who now thinks of herself as simply “the Witch,” symbolic of her progressive dehumanization and estrangement from her identity, decides to seek answers. Why has misfortune plagued her life? And why has her life seemingly been influenced by forces beyond her control? One of these forces is, collectively, two figures who run the Clock of the Time Dragon, the dwarf and an old woman named Yackle.

Elphaba finds the Time Dragon and meets the dwarf, who seems to know an unnerving amount about Elphaba and her fate. He describes her:

“For you”—the dwarf spoke in a bright, offhand tone—“are neither this nor that—or shall I say both this and that? Both of Oz and of the other world. Your old Frex always was wrong; you were never a punishment for his crimes. You are a half-breed, you are a new breed, you are a grafted limb, you are a dangerous anomaly. Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are.” (373-374)

He knows Elphaba is secretly the illegitimate daughter of the Wizard. He knows of Elphaba’s nature as an Other. She asks him to explain, to show her something she’s never seen before. She seeks spectacle, and revelation.

The Time Dragon then shows Elphaba a three-act play. The first act, called “The Birth of Holiness,” shows the legend of St. Aelphaba, a mystic who escaped the world by retreating into a cave under a waterfall, and Elphaba’s namesake. Elphaba had previously mocked the legend, especially the notion that the saint emerged from the waterfall hundreds of years later in good health. Interestingly, this pageant does not have the saint emerge. Goodness is born and hides from view.

Act Two, “The Birth of Evil,” offers a bawdy retelling of Elphaba’s own birth, from Melena marrying Frex, to Frex’s preaching and Melena’s loneliness, to the Wizard drugging and having his way with Melena. Evil is birthed into a broken family, a broken world.

At the final act, “The Marriage of the Sacred and the Wicked,” the play halts. The Dragon presents Elphaba with an empty stage. When Elphaba asks what this means, the dwarf says, “Who said the end was written yet?” (375). Elphaba may still find some final resolution, he suggests. Born into evil but named after a saint of hidden goodness, she must find a way for her own evil to come into contact with the sacred so that goodness will no longer be hidden. In order for her whole winding life, full of disappointments and pain, to make any sense at all, she must find some final revelation by which she can see herself. She wants to understand the truth about herself, about the world, about the nature of evil. Only then can she learn to bear herself in her woundedness.

Ironically, then, it is the pleasure faith that points her toward this need. The moral axioms of unionism, a disincarnate faith, are not enough: “For whittle away from the Unnamed God anything approximating character, and what have you got? A big hollow wind. And wind may have gale force but it may not have moral force; and a voice in a whirlwind is a carnival barker’s trick” (387-388). Elphaba needs a different face of God, a tangible face, one who can actually plunge into the evil of the world and make sense of it, heal it, give some way of navigating this terrifying and inexplicable universe.

She clearly wants a sense of spiritual cohesion. Awaiting Dorothy’s arrival to Kiamo Ko, Liir says to Elphaba, “The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?” (386-387). Her response comes as a shock:

She couldn’t say forgiveness, not to Liir. She started to say “a soldier,” to make fun of his mooning affections over the guys in uniform. But realizing even as she said it that he would be hurt, she caught herself halfway, and in the end what came out of her mouth surprised them both. She said, “A soul—” (387)

She wants to be whole. She wants meaning and love. She asks herself how she can want a soul without faith commitment of any kind, to the Unnamed God or otherwise. And yet she does.

The Clock of the Time Dragon, with its grotesque pageants, does not shirk from the gritty particularity of human nature. Thus, it points toward the fundamental truth of Elphaba’s spiritual state more fully than any abstract theologizing about evil ever could. When Frex first preaches against the Time Dragon at the beginning of the novel, he unintentionally highlights this reality. In a rant, he demands why the Clock doesn’t actually measure time but also stays a minute before midnight, then immediately supplies the answer: “The answer, of course, is that the clock isn’t meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment” (16). Though he says this merely to condemn the audience, he is more correct than he ever realizes. The Time Dragon presents the human soul in all its drama, its potential for both damnation and redemption. It is a locus of spiritual revelation, and the first step in Elphaba’s encounter with the sacred.

The Marriage of the Sacred and the Wicked

Elphaba’s encounter with the sacred will finally answer the question, “What can be done about evil?” If unforgiven-ness perpetuates evil and allows wounds to fester, then the confrontation with the real and startling possibility of forgiveness will, if not offer salve to her soul, at least suggest the possibility of healing.

Dorothy’s arrival in Oz marks the arrival of the sacred. At first, this “sacred” is presented ironically, and with much disdain on Elphaba’s part. The house’s arrival through the tornado is described as follows:

That creatures might have survived such a fall was either patently unbelievable or a clear indication of the hand of the Unnamed God in the affair. Predictably, there were a few blind people who suddenly cried “I can see!” a lame Pig that stood and danced a jig, only to be led away—that sort of thing. The alien girl—she called herself Dorothy—was by virtue of her survival elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying. (333)

Her ”sainthood” is presented as a ridiculous rumor, a laughable exaggeration. However, the more Elphaba hears about Dorothy, especially from those who’ve met her, the more seriously her virtue is treated. Boq tells Elphaba, “We adored her, … Plain and straightforward as mustard seed” (357). Boq recounts a conversation they had about the meaning of Dorothy’s name—that it possibly meant “Goddess of Gifts”—to which Elphaba asks, “Are you trying to say that you think she was a gift of God, or that she is some sort of queen or goddess? Boq, you used not to go in for superstition” (359). Boq later recalls a medieval painting he and Elphaba found in the library of either the Kumbric Witch or the Fairy Queen Lurline (archetypal figures of evil and goodness respectively) breastfeeding a beast. Boq says, “Well, there’s something in Dorothy that reminds me of that unnamed figure. You might even call it the Unnamed Goddess—is that sacrilegious or what? Dorothy has this sweet charity toward her dog, a pretty dreadful little beast. And whiffy? You wouldn’t believe how repugnant” (360). He summarizes his impression by saying, “Dorothy is a child, but she has a heaviness of bearing like an adult, and a gravity you don’t often find in the young. It’s very becoming. Elphie, I was charmed by her, to tell you the truth” (360). To which Elphaba response that she “would like to avoid her at all costs, at the sound of it” (360). Elphaba is disgusted at the idea of such goodness. She cannot imagine goodness, not really. She only imagines a sort of insipid, saccharine simulacrum of goodness.

Her reaction to actually meeting Dorothy, however, comes as a surprise. After flying on her broom and seeing the girl from some distance, she recounts, “The child reminded her of someone. It was that unquestioning directness, that gaze unblinkered by shame. She was as natural as a raccoon—or a fern—or a comet” (381). She later realizes it is herself Dorothy reminds her of, at that young age before the twists of life left her beleaguered and hollow. Complex memories of her childhood suddenly spring to mind: “The time in Ovvels. There is the green girl, shy, gawky, and humiliated. To avoid the pain of damp feet, splashing around in clammy leggings made of swampcalf hide and waterproof boots” (381). She goes on a missionary journey with her father to apologize for the death of Turtle Heart, the guest both he and Melena had fallen in love with. At the meeting, “she stands as Dorothy stood, some inborn courage making her spine straight, her eyes unblinking. Her shoulders back, her hands at her side” (382). Elphaba recalls how the matriarch of Turtle Heart’s clan simply says, “We don’t shrive, we don’t shrive, and not for Turtle Heart, no, and she strikes Papa on the face with a reed, cutting him with thin stripes” (382).

This memory prompts a consideration of the nature of forgiveness. That moment of unforgiveness, Elphaba notes, is the moment her father “began to lose his way” (382). Her father is shocked and dismayed. And as for the matriarch, Elphaba recalls, “I see her, willful, proud: Her moral system doesn’t allow for forgiveness, and she is just as incarcerated as he, but she doesn’t know it” (382). And this moment of unforgiveness, which becomes unforgiven-ness, is passed onto Elphaba, despite her belief, deep down, perhaps on some unknown metaphysical plane, that forgiveness is possible. Reconciliation is possible, and wholeness, and goodness:

Elphaba the girl does not know how to see her father as a broken man. All she knows is that he passes his brokenness on to her. Daily his habits of loathing and self-loathing cripple her. Daily she loves him back because she knows no other way.

I see myself there: the girl witness, wide-eyed as Dorothy. Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing—by dint of ignorance and innocence—that beneath this unbreakable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. A more ancient precedent of ransom, that we may not always be tormented by our shame. Neither Dorothy nor young Elphaba can speak of this, but the belief of it is in both our faces … (382-383)

Dorothy, despite her naïve insistence on goodness (or perhaps because of it) reminds Elphaba of this belief, long buried beneath the pain of failure and the pain of Sarima’s grudge and the pain of her own unforgiven wrongs. The longing for goodness and love emerges, and with it the sense that some primordial logic of expiation must exist. Forgiveness, the one thing Elphaba longs for, that always exceeded her grasp, might indeed be possible, even after Sarima’s death.

And yet this recollection comes as a torment to the Witch, so far beyond the point of her own dehumanization that she has now become the monster people always feared. When Dorothy arrives at Kiamo Ko, Elphaba says to her, “You’re my soul come scavenging for me, I can feel it, … I won’t have it, I won’t have it. I won’t have a soul; with a soul there is everlastingness, and life has tortured me enough” (401). So far past the point of enduring life, she rejects even the possibility of redemption.

However, even here a choice for the good remains, just as Nastoya had said. But the choice is not one the Witch could have anticipated. After a good deal of scuffle among the Witch’s animal familiars and Dorothy’s companions, Elphaba chases Dorothy up to highest tower of the castle and locks the door. Alone on the parapet, Elphaba prepares to kill Dorothy. Beforehand, however, she demands to know why Dorothy came to kill her at the Wizard’s command. I will quote the entire ensuing scene, as the poetic irony speaks for itself:

“I couldn’t kill you,” said the girl, weeping. “I was horror-struck to have killed your sister. How could I kill you too?”

“Very charming,” said the Witch, “very nice, very touching. Then why did you come here?”

“Yes, the Wizard said to murder you,” Dorothy said, “but I never intended to, and that’s not why I came!”

The Witch held the burning broom even higher, closer, to look in the girl’s face.

“When they said . . . when they said that it was your sister, and that we had to come here . . . it was like a prison sentence, and I never wanted to . . . but I thought, well, I would come, and my friends would come with me to help . . . and I would come . . . and I would say . . .”

“Say what,” cried the Witch, on the edge.

“I would say,” said the girl, straightening up, gritting her teeth, “I would say to you: Would you ever forgive me for that accident, for the death of your sister; would you ever ever forgive me, for I could never forgive myself!”

The Witch shrieked, in panic, in disbelief. That even now the world should twist so, offending her once again: Elphaba, who had endured Sarima’s refusal to forgive, now begged by a gibbering child for the same mercy always denied her? How could you give such a thing out of your own hollowness?

She was caught, twisting, trying, full of will, but toward what? (402)

Her will twists with the possibility of forgiveness, but also with the agony of it. Here is her choice, the choice Nastoya spoke of. Here is the chance to free herself from the cycle of unforgiven-ness in which she is trapped, which she inherited from her father, from Sarima, from a whole world fractured by pain, by lack of love, by lack of understanding. She has the opportunity to stop the self-perpetuating cycle of evil by giving out of her own hollowness.

Whether she does so, in the end, is left ambiguous, for at that moment, in her confusion, she catches herself on fire with her flaming broom, and Dorothy out of desperation throws a bucket of water on the Witch. Her dying moments speak of redemption’s possibility:

An instant of sharp pain before the numbness. The world was floods above and fire below. If there was such a thing as a soul, the soul had gambled on a sort of baptism, and had it won?

The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation. (402-403)

Then Elphaba recalls all the people she’s ever known, all the people who, in their own half-formed and often selfish ways, truly did love her, and those who did not at least gave her some sense of meaning:

A ring of expectant faces before the light dims; they move in the shadows like ghouls. There is Mama, playing with her hair; there is Nessarose, stern and bleached as weathered timber. There is Papa, lost in his reflections, looking for himself in the faces of the suspicious heathen. There is Shell, not quite yet himself despite his apparent wholeness.

They become others; they become Nanny in her prime, tart and officious; and Ama Clutch and Ama Vimp and the other Amas, lumped together now in a maternal blur. They become Boq, sweet and lithe and earnest, as yet unbowed; and Crope and Tibbett in their funny, campy anxiety to be liked; and Avaric in his superiority. And Glinda in her gowns, waiting to be good enough to deserve what she gets.

And the ones whose stories are over: Manek and Madame Morrible and Doctor Dillamond and most of all Fiyero, whose blue diamonds are the blues of water and of sulfurous fire both. And the ones whose stories are curiously unfinished—was it to be like this?—the Princess Nastoya of the Scrow, whose help could not arrive in time; and Liir, the mysterious foundling boy, pushing out of his pea pod. Sarima, who in her loving welcome and sisterliness would not forgive, and Sarima’s sisters and children and future and past . . .

And the ones who fell to the Wizard, including Killyjoy and the other resident creatures; and behind them the Wizard himself, a failure until he exiled himself from his own land; and behind him Yackle, whoever she was, if anyone, and the anonymous Adepts, if they existed, and the dwarf, who had no name to share.

And the creatures of makeshift lives, the hobbled together, the disenfranchised, disenfranchised, and the abused: the Lion, the Scarecrow, the maimed Tin Woodman. Up from the shadows for an instant, up into the light; then back.

The Goddess of Gifts the last, reaching in among flames and water, cradling her, crooning something, but the words remain unclear. (403)

Her remembrance descends (or ascends?) a hierarchy of being, from her immediate family, to her friends from Shiz, to those with whom she had ambivalent interactions, to her enemies, to characters emerging from the half-light of myth, and finally to Dorothy, undergirding it all, an archetypal figure of forgiveness, sustaining the world in its being with a mysterious embrace, and words of love, unheard, unknown.

For a brief moment, Elphaba regains contact with love, with meaning. She knows her own interdependence with all those she’s ever known, and she rests, wounded but grateful. Whether she consciously chose to forgive Dorothy is left unclear, but somewhere deep down, it sounds as though her soul forgave, because in this moment of recollection, she does not see those who hurt her with eyes of hate. She simply sees them in the fullness of their being and is grateful that they exist.

Thus, the marriage between the sacred and the wicked. And the truth of the universe shines forth, and evil is laid to rest. Evil and holiness find their unity in forgiveness, and in forgiveness, the universe is once again made whole.

Conclusion

In answer to the original three questions, Maguire says evil cannot be defined, nor should it be. As human beings, we cannot see other human beings from a divine perspective. All we can do is love each other in our woundedness. All we can do is learn to forgive. But this forgiveness is not a platitude, not an excuse to allow injustice to continue. Maguire rightly presents forgiveness as an agonizing reality that must be fought for. It is agonizing both to those who seek forgiveness and to those who must forgive, because we all know the pain of our own mistakes and the pain of unforgiven-ness, and we all hold onto our own rigid senses of justice.

The key to forgiveness, it seems, is to refuse Othering anyone, no matter how repulsive. Maguire suggests we might see ourselves in anyone. In everyone lies a Witch in need of forgiveness. In everyone lies a child who longs for the Good. In us, in our enemies. Knowing this reality might help us forge a way through the incomprehensible evil of the world.

Thus, the genius of Maguire’s contemplation of evil is not his definition of evil but his staunch presentation of what might be done about it. Real love is a hard and fraught reality, but it is worth it. It does not shirk from evil. It heals ourselves; it heals the world.

, , , , ,

Evyn Katherine McGraw