The hero – Matilda Wicked Oz
Today, I went to the movie theater to watch the film adaptation of “Wicked”. I saw the musical ten years ago and loved it. I appreciate the elements from the *Wizard of Oz* book and movie that are referenced in *Wicked*, such as the Yellow Brick Road, the poppies that make people fall asleep, the silver shoes, the name Elphaba (inspired by L. Frank Baum), and the history of the flying monkeys.
However, something crossed my mind that I think many viewers may not be aware of. The original *Wizard of Oz* book was written in 1900, and in that story, Dorothy is around nine years old, while the Wicked Witch of the West, played by Margaret Hamilton in the movie, is portrayed as being in her fifties. This suggests that Elphaba is around twenty years old when she attends Shiz University, which means she was likely born in the 1850s, with events from the first part of the *Wicked* movie occurring in the 1870s.
Coincidentally, during that time, Frank Baum’s mother-in-law, Matilda Gage, was involved in the women’s rights movement. She became an expert on the subject of witch hunts and wrote an 1893 manifesto titled “Woman, Church and State”, which chronicled the five centuries between 1300 and 1800 during which tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft and executed by methods such as burning, hanging, torture, drowning, or stoning. In one gruesome scene, she described 400 women being burned at once in a French public square.
Although she passed away a few years before Baum published “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, her influence on him can be seen through the book, which later inspired Gregory Maguire to write “Wicked” in 1994. This led to the successful musical, which ran for 20 years on Broadway and has now been adapted into the new “Wicked” movie.