Authorship and Becoming: Elphaba as a Figure of Self-Creation in Wicked
In Wicked, Elphaba is not defined primarily by goodness, rebellion, or even tragedy. She is defined by authorship—the radical insistence on writing herself—and by becoming, the ongoing, unfinished process through which identity is claimed rather than granted. Unlike traditional heroines whose arcs resolve into harmony, recognition, or redemption, Elphaba remains fundamentally in motion. Her power does not lie in arrival, but in refusal: refusal to be fixed, named, or completed by the world that seeks to explain her.
From the outset, Elphaba exists as a problem to be interpreted. Her green skin marks her as spectacle, anomaly, and symbol before she has any agency at all. Others read meaning onto her body long before she speaks: monstrosity, threat, impurity. In this way, Elphaba enters Oz already dispossessed of authorship. She is narrated about, but not yet narrating herself.
What Wicked dramatizes is not her transformation into a villain or hero, but her gradual seizure of narrative authority.
Authorship as Resistance
Elphaba’s defining struggle is epistemological. Who has the power to name reality? Who writes the story of Oz—and who is written out of it?
The Wizard’s regime is not merely political but narrative: a system that maintains power through illusion, spectacle, and myth-making. Animals are silenced not only through law but through erasure of meaning. In this context, Elphaba’s magic functions less as sorcery than as counter-authorship. Her spells rewrite the terms under which the world is understood. She does not merely act; she revises.
Crucially, Elphaba never seeks legitimacy through institutional recognition. She does not want to be included in the Wizard’s story. Instead, she rejects the premise that legitimacy must be bestowed. This is why her refusal to conform feels so threatening. She exposes authorship itself as a contested site of power.
To author oneself in Oz is to commit an unforgivable crime.
Becoming Rather Than Being
Elphaba’s tragedy is often misunderstood as the price of being different. In reality, it is the cost of refusing fixity. While Glinda moves toward legibility—beauty, popularity, social harmony—Elphaba moves toward becoming, a state that resists closure.
Becoming is unstable. It cannot be commemorated cleanly. It does not offer the comfort of a resolved identity. Elphaba’s power lies precisely here: she refuses to allow her selfhood to crystallize into a moral lesson Oz can digest.
The label “Wicked Witch” is imposed because it halts becoming. It freezes her into a symbol that can be feared, simplified, and controlled. Yet even this naming fails. Elphaba’s inner life remains inaccessible to the myth that claims her. The audience knows what Oz does not: that her so-called wickedness is not essence, but interpretation.
She becomes monstrous only within a system that cannot tolerate self-authorship.
Queer Resonances and the Politics of the Unfinished Self
Elphaba’s arc resonates deeply with queer theory not because she is coded as queer in a narrow sense, but because she embodies a queer relationship to identity itself. She refuses the teleologies offered to her: romance as salvation, goodness as reward, visibility as safety.
Her bond with Glinda is not tragic because it fails, but because it reveals an impossible choice: legibility or authorship. Glinda survives by allowing herself to be authored by the system. Elphaba survives—if survival is the right word—by refusing that bargain.
In this sense, Elphaba does not “lose.” She exits the story rather than submit to its terms. Her disappearance is not defeat but withdrawal from a narrative that cannot contain her without violence.
Conclusion: Elphaba as a Figure of Radical Authorship
Elphaba’s lasting power lies in her refusal to become a completed character. She does not end as saint or sinner, martyr or villain. She ends as a question Oz cannot answer.
Wicked thus offers a profound meditation on authorship itself: on who is allowed to tell their story, on how identities are produced through narrative power, and on the cost of remaining unfinished in a world that demands coherence.
Elphaba is not the Wicked Witch because she is evil. She is Wicked because she insists on becoming her own author—and because Oz cannot forgive a woman who will not stay inside the story written for her.
Dark Academia, Witchcraft, and the Counter-Archive
Seen through a dark-academic lens, Elphaba emerges not only as a political dissident but as a custodian of forbidden knowledge. Dark academia has always been less about nostalgia for elite institutions than about obsession with the archive: who guards it, who is excluded from it, and what kinds of knowledge are deemed illegible or dangerous. Elphaba’s exile from Oz’s sanctioned structures mirrors the historical marginalization of those whose intelligence operates outside institutional approval—women, heretics, witches, and outsiders whose learning is embodied, intuitive, and resistant to bureaucratic control.
Witchcraft, in Wicked, functions as a counter-archive. Elphaba’s spells are not mere acts of magic; they are technologies of memory and preservation. In a regime built on spectacle and forgetting, her magic records what Oz would rather erase: the suffering of Animals, the falsity of the Wizard’s authority, the violence that underwrites order. Like historical grimoires—often written, hidden, and transmitted outside universities and churches—Elphaba’s knowledge survives not through official recognition but through secrecy, rumor, and fear.
Dark academia’s fascination with candlelit libraries, marginal notes, and forbidden texts finds its ethical center here. Elphaba does not seek mastery over knowledge for prestige. She studies because knowledge is the only means of refusing lies. Her solitude, so often read as tragedy, is also the condition that allows authorship to persist when institutions collapse into propaganda.
In this way, Elphaba becomes a witch not because she rejects reason, but because she practices a form of reasoning the state cannot assimilate. She belongs to a lineage of figures who understand that true power does not come from citation or approval, but from the ability to preserve meaning when official archives fail. Her green skin marks her as other, but her true transgression is archival: she remembers what Oz works tirelessly to forget.
Dark academia, at its most serious, is not about elite belonging—it is about studying in the ruins of legitimacy. Elphaba does exactly that. She reads the world against itself. She annotates power. And when authorship becomes impossible within the system, she carries knowledge elsewhere, into shadow, myth, and whispered narrative.
Elphaba does not disappear because she is defeated.
She withdraws because the counter-archive must survive beyond the institution.
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