I've wanted to post something about this book since it landed in my hands just at the same time as I was exploring the nature of evil across a few different conversations with friends.
The story, written by Gregory Macguire, is a parallel, adult tale of Elphaba, who grows up to become the Wicked Witch of the West, from L Frank Baum's 'The Wizard Of Oz'. There's an oft told family story about me, watching the movie the Wizard Of Oz as a five-year-old, and promptly throwing up at 'I'm melting, I'm melting'. But I digress.
The story does much to explore the nature of non-forgiveness. I want to post a direct quote, so eyes closed if you're wanting to maintain sanctity regarding the inner workings of the story. It's taken from close to the end, pg 381:
"She thought: the Witch with her mirror. Who do we ever see but ourselves, and that's the curse- Dorothy reminds me of myself, at that age, whatever it is.......
....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. Mama, pregnant with Shell, huge as a barge. Mama praying nonstop for months that she might at last bring a healthy child into the world. Mama dumping bottles of liquor and pinlobble leaves into the mud.
Nanny tends to little Nessa, papoosing her around in the daily hunt for charfish, needle flowers, and broad bean vines. Nessa can see but she cannot touch: what a curse for a child! (No wonder she believed in things she couldn't see-nothing is provable by touch.) For his atonement, Papa takes the green girl with him on an expedition to the relatives of Turtle Heart, a many branched family living in a nest of huts and walkways suspended in a grove of broad, rotting, suppletrees. The Quadlings, who are more comfortable on their haunches, duck their heads. The smell of raw fish fills their homes, on their skin. They are frightened of the unionist minister, finding them out in their squalid hamlet. I have no firm memory of individuals, but one old matriarch, toothless and proud.
The Quadlings come up, after a period of shyness, not to the minister, but to me, the green girl. She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she, impenetrably mysterious and dense- she stands as Dorothy stood, some inborn courage making her spine straight, her eyes unblinking. Her shoulders back, her hands at her side. Submissive to the stroke of their fingers on her face. Unflinching in the cause of missionary work.
Papa asks for forgiveness of the death of Turtle Heart, maybe some five years earlier. He says it is his fault. He and his wife had both fallen in love with the Quadling glassblower. What can I give you to make up for it, he says. Elphaba the girl thinks he is mad, she thinks they are not listening, they are mesmerised by her weirdness. Please forgive me, he says.
The matriarch alone responds to these words, maybe she is the only one who actually remembers Turtle Heart. She has a look of someone caught out venturing out from beneath a rock. Well, in a people whose moral code is so lax, so little is wrong. For her this encounter is a mysterious, complicated transaction.
She says something like: 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. I was only a witness, I was not really alive then, but I saw: this was when Papa began to lose his way, it dates from this whipping.
I see him as shocked: It doesn't occur that in his conception of moral life that some sins are unforgivable. He blanches, onion white beneath the blood-pearled perforations of her attack. Maybe she has every right to do what she's done, but in Papa's life she's become old Kumbricia.
I see her wilful, proud: Her moral system doesn't allow for forgivess, and she is just as incarcerated as he, but she doesn't know it. She grins, all gums and menace, and rests the reed on her collarbone, where it's fletchling tip falls like a necklace around her own neck.
He points to me, and says - not to me, but to them all - Isn't this punishment enough?
Elphaba the girl does not know how to see her father as a broken man. All she knows is that he has passed 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......'
It hurts to read this book. It hurts with 'good is the aberration' and 'How deeply bound by the cords of family anger we all are, though the Witch. None of us breaks free'.
A really, really worthwhile, and multi-layered example of wordcraft.
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