"Wicked" by Gregory Maguire

[Constance963]

Elphaba accumulated so much good behaviour...and where does being a charitable and obedient child take you?

This is the question I think the narrator is asking.

Sarima, perceiving the pitiful lack of logic in Elphaba's conclusion, retorts:

"Then what did hurt you?".

This is a great point Ophelia. This is where I felt the author was getting to the topic of whether "goodness" or "badness" is inherent or whether it is simply people's point of view. I never felt throughout the book that Elphaba was a bad person. She had been thrown into some bad circumstances and made mistakes. But it also returns me to the thought of if she had not been born green, how different would her life have been? Would being born a "normal" color have changed her personality or changed the choices she made?

[Ophelia]

Constance wrote:

how different would her life have been? Would being born a "normal" color have changed her personality or changed the choices she made?

Of course her being green makes all the difference, but considering the warped parents, the abnormal sister... the fates were definitely against her from the beginning.


I'm thinking about good and evil/ good witch/ bad witch.
I'll write about this on the "On Elphaba" thread.

[Ophelia]

Constance wrote:

In pretty much all of my literature classes in high school and college we paralleled novels to current life and we always had to learn a little about the time period in which a book was written when we studied it. So I tend to look at books this way when I read them - I am a product of my education Very Happy

This set me thinking some more ...
I'll open a different thread called: Wicked: what's a novel?