The Wicked Witch, So-Called
Goodness knows, there is no shortage of imagery describing the Wicked Witch of the West in this book. But perhaps no single section of imagery quite captures her essence in an instant quite like the following:
“The Munchkinlander was in her nightgown, a drab sack without benefit of lace edging or piping. The green face above the wheat-gray fabric seemed almost to glow, and the glorious long straight black hair fell right over where breasts should be if she would ever reveal any evidence that she possessed them. Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life. There was an expectancy but no intuition, was that it?—like a child who has never remembered having a dream being told to have sweet dreams.”
The Good Witch, So-Called
The same holds true for Galinda before she becomes Glinda the witch who is, supposedly, good. A lot of imagery is also dedicated to describing her, especially her physical appearance. Because, after all, she is most definitely a looker. But this particular instance penetrates past the surface to offer imagery of the character behind the ringlets and red lips:
“Galinda didn’t see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet…Her green traveling gown with its inset panels of ochre musset suggested wealth, while the black shawl draping just so about the shoulders was a nod to her academic inclinations. She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart.”
The italics is from the book and should not be confused with indicating irony. Beautiful beyond all reason Galinda may be, but don’t for one instant presume this means she is the airhead she pretends to be.
The Wizard, So-Called
Before the Wizard arrives in Oz and changes everything, his coming is foreseen in a vision by a young Elphaba. In terms of pages actual reading time, it only takes the turn of the page for the vision to become reality, but chronologically a significant chunk of time passes between the vision and the reality. That reality is foreshadowed pretty explicitly through the imagery of the vision:
“She sees him coming,” he said thickly, “she sees him to come; he is to come from the air; is arriving. A balloon from the sky, the color of a bubble of blood: a huge crimson globe, a ruby globe: he falls from the sky. The Regent is fallen. The House of Ozma is fallen. The Clock was right. A minute to judgment.”
Behind her was a low growl. There was a beast, a felltop tiger, or some strange hybrid of tiger and dragon, with glowing orangey eyes. Elphaba was sitting in its folded forearms as if on a throne.
“Horrors,” she said again, looking without binocular vision, staring at the glass in which her parents and Nanny could make out nothing but darkness. “Horrors.”
The House with the Girl
Dorothy’s arrival is not something seen every day even in a place like Oz. One simply doesn’t watch as a house suddenly falls from the sky, landing atop a controversial political figure without striving for just the right words to describe it. Not even in the land of Oz:
Afterward, there was a lot of discussion about what people had thought it was. The noise had seemed to come from all corners of the sky at once.
Journalists, armed with the thesaurus and apocalyptic scriptures, fumbled and were defeated by it. “A gulfy deliquescence of deranged and harnessed air” . . . “A volcano of the invisible, darkly construed” . . .
To the essentialists, it seemed as if the world had suddenly found itself too crammed with life, with cells splitting by the billions, molecules uncoupling to annihilation, atoms shuddering and juggernauting in their casings.
