Flying Free: Wicked's Feminist Message
(lengthy, most informative read)
Flying Free: Wicked’s Feminist Message
PUBLISHED 12/5/2024 by Janell Hobson
In times that require moral clarity, we have to look to different skies and different lenses to find a new kind of heroism.
A still from the movie Wicked, starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba.Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba in Wicked. (Universal Pictures)
Most moviegoers who went to the box-office hit Wicked can pinpoint the moment in the show-stopping tune “Defying Gravity” that sent chills down their spine. Once Cynthia Erivo, in her career-defining role as Elphaba, famed Wicked Witch of the West, belts out, “It’s meeeeeee!”—which introduces the bridge to the song—her vocals combined with the movie’s special effects have quite literally lifted us to a higher plane: sonically, visually, even spiritually. Basking in her newfound powers to “defy gravity” when she uses her magic to fly on her broomstick, Elphaba triumphantly declares: “And if I’m flying solo, at least I’m flying free … And nobody in all of Oz / no wizard that there is or was / is ever gonna bring meeeee down!”
This anthem resonated so strongly, my movie audience applauded at the end, and “Defying Gravity” is currently rising on the pop music charts, standing at number 1 on U.S. iTunes. Adapted from the Broadway musical, which debuted in 2003, and based on the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire, Wicked—which is the first of two parts—became the highest grossing movie musical when it premiered and broke records for the highest second weekend box office. Co-starring Erivo and pop singer Ariana Grande, the film came just in time to kick off the holiday season and to provide escapism from a contentious and politically divisive presidential election that concluded earlier in the month. Perhaps it is precisely against this political backdrop why Wicked has become so popular. There are many parallels to our own universe: the rise of fascism in Oz; the vilification of a powerful woman (whose laugh some incidentally described as a “cackle”) concerned about the well-being of the most marginalized among us; a media enabling propaganda to villainize said powerful woman and prop up an empty shell of a man specializing in elaborate cons; and the failure of solidarity between women. (More on this later.) Maguire had intended his novel (subtitled The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West) as a political allegory of the dangers of a fascist ruler. (The Wizard of Oz in his story banned talking animals from speaking and turned them into a common enemy against which the citizens of Oz can unite.) The Broadway musical toned down much of this allegory, with the exception of a few zingers against President George W. Bush’s unpopular war in Iraq that year. Indeed, the original children’s story, The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (1900) is often considered both an economic and sociopolitical allegory of American life during the late 19th century, with its allusions to changing values of the nation’s monetary currency and midwestern livelihoods.
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The hatred of the witch found a corollary in hatred of women—powerful women specifically.
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Margaret Hamilton as the green-skinned Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz from 1939.Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
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Indeed, between the 14th and 17th centuries, witches—who were accused of Satanic worship and harnessing supernatural powers through pacts with the devil—were routinely burned at the stake throughout Europe. The majority of those accused were women (somewhere between 75 to 85 percent of the victims). Women targeted as witches presented a threat to their society in one form or another: as property owners or widows, unmarried or queer women, or outspoken wives and adulteresses. The hatred of the witch found a corollary in hatred of women—powerful women specifically. It is no wonder the “witch” became a subversive symbol for many a feminist and has even inspired modern-day reclamations of the wicca religion. While the character of the Wicked Witch of the West continues in the long tradition of vilifying powerful women, Maguire’s novel sought to rewrite her story, giving this demonized figure a name—Elphaba (based on the initials of L. Frank Baum)—and a moral compass.
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Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande as Elphaba and Galinda in Wicked.Erivo and Grande in Wicked. (Universal Pictures)
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Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth performing a scene from Wicked on stage during the 2004 Tony Awards. Idina Menzel (left) and Kristin Chenoweth of Wicked perform on stage during the Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall on June 6, 2004, in New York City. (Frank Micelotta / Getty Images)
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Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Melissa Bode as Nessarose in Wicked.Melissa Bode as Nessarose with Erivo in Wicked. (Universal Pictures)
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L. Frank Baum had an interesting relationship to women’s power, which is why the hero of The Wizard of Oz is depicted through a young girl like Dorothy, while she encounters equally powerful women with witch-like powers. His mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a famed suffragist and radical feminist who had a direct influence on his own views on women’s suffrage. However, Baum was also anti-indigenous and believed in the manifest destiny settler colonialism that displaced Native Americans—which echoes in Dorothy’s house literally displacing and killing Elphaba’s sister Nessarose, the Wicked Witch of the East. As such, these witches “occupy spaces of Otherness,” to cite Alissa Burger’s The Wizard of Oz as American Myth (2012). However, it is in that otherness and her willingness to “fly solo, fly free” that enables Elphaba’s real transcendence beyond a morally bankrupt system.
Part 1 ends with Elphaba’s ostracism from Oz, but the cinematic pan of her ascension in the sky looks less like tragedy and more like triumph. In times that require moral clarity, a perpetual outsider coming to self-actualization, freed from systems of power because she’s found her own, highlights that we have to look to different skies and different lenses to find a new kind of heroism.
https://msmagazine.com/2024/12/05/wicked-review-feminist-witch-jewish-black-women/