I wrote a good portion of this between 6 and 7am in the Newark airport after a red-eye from Seattle…I’m sorry for any completely non-sensical points.
I just finished reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire. It’s the basis for the popular Broadway musical, but apparently the musical is wildly different from the book. I’d recommend the book to anyone…it is fun, serious, thoughtful, and really well written, in my opinion.
Anyway, as I was reading, I got thinking about several other parallel novels/prequels/re-imaginings of classics that I’ve read… I tend to love them. In the same way that I really enjoy seeing movie adaptations of books I like, even if the movie is horribly unsatisfying (Eragon and The Golden Compass are the two recent examples), and especially if it is satisfying and wonderful (it will be a sad day when there are no more Harry Potter movies on the way). The earliest of these types of books that I ever encountered was “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs” by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, told by the Big Bad Wolf. My aunt read this to me when I was younger (it was originally released in 1989, according to Wikipedia), and I completely fell in love with it. This particular aunt is responsible for my love of Disney and for introducing me to Jodi Picoult.
The other examples I can think of off the top of my head are Gertrude and Claudius by Updike, which is a “prequel” of sorts of Hamlet, and does a wonderful job of presenting the love between Gertrude and Claudius, and turning my favorite Shakespearean hero into something completely different. Updike didn’t just pull from Shakespeare, but also used a few other historical sources, so it isn’t completely a revision or a parallel in the way that Wicked is.
Wide Sargasso Sea is more truly a prequel and parallel novel to Jane Eyre, another of my favorite works. Drawing on the mad woman in the attic from Bronte’s original, Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, presents Bertha Mason’s past in the Caribbean. What Wide Sargasso Sea achieves most blatantly of these examples is to take a classic work from a much earlier era, and transforms its story and characters in such a way that it becomes a popular text in a new theoretical discourse…in this case, the postcolonial theory that deals with race, identity, movement, assimilation, etc. All issues that are not strongly developed or considered in Victorian literature.
All of these examples, to varying degrees, give the reader opportunities for more direct reflection than reading either the original or the parallel on its own. Wicked, pulling not just from a novel, but from a wildly well-known film, does this constantly; “One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her–is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions” (231). This portion of text is speaking directly about the Kumbric Witch, a legend within the story that is completely intertwined with the roots of Oz. However, taken separately, in the context of the original Wizard of Oz, the quotation very clearly brings the reader to Elphaeba, the main character of Wicked and her future role as the ‘Wicked Witch of the West.’ At this point in the novel, the reader is meant to be at least partially sympathetic with the green-skinned Elphie and so tied to her story that this reflection on the definition, intention, and meaning of the witch and wickedness serves to remind where her life is headed, according to the original story we are so familiar with.
One of my original questions/considerations while I was reading Wicked was how necessary a reading/viewing/understanding of the original is to a really satisfying reception of the parallel. But the more I think about it, the more I think popular and really successful parallels are going to be pulled from already widely popular, possibly canonical works…works that the target audience will at least be able to recognize, with most readers quite familiar with the original. I’m sure there are parallel novels directed towards very specific target groups, drawing on the niche market of the original to draw a smaller, but highly loyal group of readers.
As a reader familiar with the original, there is a tendency to draw comparison, to see how the parallel leaves out or changes things from the original. Further, in the case of Wicked, a parallel of a work that was both a text and a film, which original is Maguire working from? I have never read the Wizard of Oz, but this makes me want to…my urge is to find all the ways that Wicked speaks to the book that may be irrelevant to the film. Now that I know the classic story from a second perspective, I want the third pretty badly, especially since the third, Baum’s novel, is the true ‘original’.
One of the things I thought Wicked did really wonderfully was to put both itself and the original in a frame of historical variation, allowing the reader to question a little bit of everything that is going on. Towards the very end of Wicked, where you might be expecting the ‘happily ever after’ summary: “It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however…” (406). Again, the text speaks directly to a legend within the novel, while directing the reader’s attention back to the original. This time, we see Wicked’s perspective; The Wizard of Oz is a part of the apocrypha surrounding this period in history, and Wicked is presenting the true, untainted perspective we have missed out on. There is a great possibility that such a tone could be read as disloyal to a classic original, brushing a long-standing masterpiece off as myth and legend within the ‘truth’ of this new, parallel narrative. However, if these arguments come up, it’s important to remember that the worlds of fiction (especially a world like Oz), are mythological from the start, and in the same way that allusions to classical mythology work endlessly throughout literature, The Wizard of Oz is upheld by Wicked, it’s relevance, importance, and the fact that it is completely embedded in our cultural mind are all honored and emphasized by the fact that Maguire was so powerfully inspired by the original. Works that do not inspire and touch their readers (or viewers, in some cases) do not yield parallels, prequels, re-imaginings, remakes, whatever. The presence of such parallels or revisions, even if the new work is not as successful as I believe Wicked to be, proves the importance of the original. Even as years pass, we continue to think about the works that are most important to us. Provoked by powerful literature and other media, writers pull from these strong cultural pools of shared knowledge, worlds, and characters, creating not only a new perspective on a beloved narrative, but also placing a distance between the original and the parallel. This distance doesn’t push the original away to make room for the ‘truth’ of the newer narrative, but instead allows for a new view of the original in light of its receptions, development, historical and timeless relevance, and its relationship to the deep, general themes that tie it so strongly to readers.
