By: Matt Telford
so, tbs went on its annual spree of airing the wizard of oz last weekend, and as i watched it through the lenses of a “law & literature” attorney (which i’ve newly acquired during my time as a student of thane rosenbaum’s) i realized that the wicked witch of the west is truly the ultimate idiosyncratic defendant. she’s put on trial and executed without even the slightest attempt to understand the idiosyncrasies that render her disabled or the backstory that might mitigate her apparent guilt.
insofar as she’s disabled, i mean, come on – she’s green. much like tom robinson in to kill a mockingbird, her peers hate her because of her different skin color. she also has powers beyond those of your average woman, so the reasonable person cannot understand why “to satisfy an itch, [she'd go] flying on her broomstick thumbing for a hitch.” even glinda the good witch, who’s different but understandable, flies around in a bubble. why would the wicked witch fly on a broom?! and with such a potent vendetta against a seemingly innocent little girl! it’s just not reasonable!!
regarding backstory, we’re not told too much about it in either the movie or the book on which it’s based, but gregory maguire attempted to give us some insight in that area through his novel wicked, which has since been adapted into a broadway musical. we learn that the wicked witch, who isn’t even dignified with a name in the original book or movie, is named elphaba, and has lived a hard life. her parents hated her from birth because she was green and freakish. she was marginalized throughout her whole life because of her color and powers, and when she fought for good causes, society misunderstood her enthusiasm for wickedness.
just like the protagonist in camus’s the stranger, elphaba experiences the death of a close family member when a house falls on her sister, nessa rose (a.k.a. “the wicked witch of the east”). to add insult to injury, the little girl who murdered her sister steals the victim’s ruby slippers. elphaba justifiably flips out. her sister just died and the family jewels were stolen. she just wanted her sister’s shoes back! they had sentimental (and monetary) value. from maguire we learn that they were a gift from the girls’ father, and they were endowed with magical powers that gave her crippled sister the power to walk. much like shylock in the merchant of venice, she has a legal claim to property that is rightfully hers as her sister’s next of kin. when elphaba confronts dorothy as a plaintiff in a wrongful conversion case, the trial is flipped upside down just like it was with shylock, and elphaba somehow becomes the defendant! further, like melville’s protagonist, billy budd, she is tried, sentenced and executed by an incompetent judge (billy’s was so because of insanity; elphaba’s was because of age) behind closed doors. and, again like billy budd, her legacy (until maguire) was told through stories that depicted her as a bitter, mean, wicked witch that deserved the end she got.
as e.l. doctorow points out in the book of daniel, the children of executed idiosyncratic defendants are rarely left unaffected, and we also see this in the case of the wicked witch of the west; the story of her orphaned son, liir, is picked up in maguire’s sequel, son of a witch. i won’t discuss that topic here, but it is remarkable how the life, trial, execution, and legacy of elphaba, the wicked witch of the west, so perfectly parallels the many lessons that the “law & literature” attorney is trained to notice in her defendants.
