Gregory Maguire, the author of “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” is clearing up any questions about Glinda and Elphaba’s sexuality.
If you were unaware, the musical version of Wicked (and the new big-screen adaptation) are both based on Gregory‘s books, the first of which was released in 1995.
After the blockbuster movie premiered last month, fans in the universe started speculating that Glinda and Elphaba were queer and in romantic love with one another. Actresses Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo both responded to the theories.
In a new interview, Gregory gave the final verdict about his view of the iconic characters.
Keep reading to find out more…
Speaking to Them, Gregory confirmed that any perceived “sapphic tension” between the two women was intentional. However, he also purposefully never explicitly answered the question in the novels.
“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,” he said. “I wanted to propose this possibility, but I did not want to make a declarative statement about.”
He also alluded to J.R.R. Tolkien‘s Lord of the Rings universe and the inspiration that his world Middle Earth had on the books.
“I wanted to make Oz seem as real as Middle Earth,” he explained. “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.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Gregory also responded to questions about if Elphaba was trans or intersex.
“I do sow seeds of possibility there. But I will tell you that the reason I sowed those seeds is that I wanted this book to be an examination about how we think of people as the end result of trauma, and that in fact, we are all larger than our traumas. So, 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,” he explained.
He continued, adding, “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. So I’m not going to answer the question about whether she is, but I think to ask the question is absolutely pertinent.”
Original Glinda actress Kristin Chenoweth also chimed in on the speculation about Glinda.
via Source
