'No one mourns the wicked': on the nature of evil and monstrosity in Gregory Maguire's The Wicked Years series

By rewriting L. Frank Baum’s early twentieth century Oz tales, Gregory Maguire in his The Wicked Years series of dystopian fantasy novels explores the characters and spaces that occupy the margins of the original tales and also, in part, the film. This shift in focus from the familiar child protagonist of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz incorporates much of the imagery of both the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz and the original Baum tales. The expanded role of the Wicked Witch of the West character leads to discourse on the nature of evil within the novel. Oz offers an alternative America in all three manifestations of the world depicted in literature and on screen. Maguire utilises the various inconsistencies in Baum’s tales and the alterations made for the 1939 film to build the landscape and inhabitants of Oz into a complex world populated by beasts and creatures that would more usually be considered monstrous. This chapter proposes to examine the way in which the appropriation of ‘wicked’ characters, such as the Witch, develops the discourse on the construction of the monstrous within a society where the line between the real and the uncanny is undefined.