Topics: Ariana Grande, LGBTQ, TV And Film, Wicked, Books
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the plot of Wicked
Before Wicked was a movie starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, it was a beloved play. And before it was a play, it was a novel. And the author, Gregory Maguire, has cleared something very important up about the plot.
Maguire, who wrote the book back in 1995, has opened up in a new interview about his Wizard of Oz spin-off that details just how Elphaba (Erivo) came to be known as The Wicked Witch of the West, and her complicated friendship with Galinda (later known as Glinda the Good).
While there have been many fan theories about what subtexts may or may not exist in Maguire's Oz - he's certain about one thing.
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He very much intended for Elphaba and Glinda to have a non-platonic attraction to one another in Wicked. His novel even contains a scene where they kiss - though it was left out of the musical and big-screen adaptation.
Speaking about the importance of portraying sexuality within the book, Maguire told Them earlier this month: "I wanted to make Oz seem as real as Middle-Earth."
“I wanted it to have a depth of culture, a depth of history, and a depth of complexity, of experience that was more analogous to the world in which we live. And that meant it had to have varieties of sexual experience."
The interviewer then asks: "There’s a lot of talk about the sapphic tension between the two. Was that intentional?"
To which the author responds: "That was intentional, and it was modest and restrained and refined in such a way that one could imagine that one of those two young women had felt more than the other and had not wanted to say it.
"Or perhaps because a novelist can't write every scene, perhaps when the lights were out and the novelist was out having a smoke in the back alley, the girls had sex in the bed on the way to the Emerald City.
"I wanted to propose this possibility, but I did not want to make a declarative statement about."
This isn't the only part of the plot that Maguire was thinking about in reference to the queer community - and one is particularly tragic.
When asked whether the theories about the character of the tiger falling ill in the novel has any parallels to the AIDS crisis of the 1980's, he responded: "Everything was on my mind. And the answer is yes.
"When Fiyero is murdered, as far as we know, and Elphaba retreats into the monastery of nuns, she spends seven years there and her job is to take care of the dying. And that was my nod to where we had been and where we were in our community.
"And by then, by the time I wrote the book, I had been living with a man for 15 years or so. I knew that somebody would have to care for dying people, even in a magic land where troubles melt like lemon drops away above the chimney tops. Somebody has to wash the corpses and say the prayers."
Maguire also discussed the theories that Elphaba is intersex in his novel.
He explained: "I put right at the very beginning the moment she's born, there's a question, does she have both sex organs? Maybe that was just a trick of the light?
"Well, you could wonder for the rest of her life and yours whether she did or not. But whether she did or not would not change the path that she had to go on."
The author powerfully concluded: "We are all larger than the sum of the things that happen to us biologically, biochemically, emotionally, experientially, culturally; we are all larger than that.
"That's what survival is. Discovering the breadth and scope of your own soul, despite and because of what happens to you."
