Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West Symbolism, Imagery, & Allegory

There's definitely "water, water everywhere" in Wicked (Coleridge shout-out). Well, there's water symbolism and imagery at any rate. Oz suffers a severe drought for a large part of the novel, which...

First, we'd like to note that the shoes in Wicked are not ruby slippers. Instead they are described like this:From a pile of ash shavings she withdrew a shoe, and then another. Were they silver? &#...

The mirror that Turtle Heart makes for Elphaba as a child helps to "illuminate" (pun intended) themes of sight and witnessing in this book. And themes of sight are also interestingly linked to chil...

Elphaba's familiars are like a bunch of pet-store rejects or characters in a Stephen King novel: a swarm of killer bees, a talking but taciturn monkey, some ominous crows, and an anti-social dog na...

The Grimmerie is a book of power, destruction, and mystery. We're never really sure exactly what it is or where it came from. Does its existence mean that magic exists in our own "Other World" as w...

This is one messed-up clock. It doesn't actually tell time, it puts on semi-pornographic and riot-inducing shows, and it becomes the centerpiece of a very bizarre new religion: tiktokism, which see...

It's fitting that color motifs play such a major role in the novel. After all, color is one of the hallmarks of the movie The Wizard of Oz. Who can forget the moment Dorothy steps out of her black...

Juliet once said that a "rose by any other name would smell as sweet," which was a fancy-pants way of saying that she didn't care that Romeo was a Montague. In the world of Wicked, though, names re...