When Revisionism Shrinks a Heroine: The Glinda We Lost to Wicked by Mishika Bhatia

Most people think Wicked is the liberating, feminist corrective to L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. I think it does the opposite. For all its emerald-green shimmer, Wicked strips away one of the earliest feminist role models in American children’s literature: Glinda the Good, as Baum actually wrote her. And for the readers who know the Oz books beyond the 1939 film, this distortion feels less like a creative reinterpretation and more like a betrayal of a rich, self-contained lore. 

Baum built Glinda as a powerful, ethical, politically astute woman who never needed “darkness,” or moral ambiguity to be compelling. Wicked, despite borrowing Baum’s world to give itself narrative weight, rejects the meaning behind Glinda’s character and rewrites her into something fundamentally smaller. In doing so, it erases a groundbreaking moment in early children’s literature—one where a woman held immense power without being punished for it. 

Across the series, Glinda is a recurring force of competence, diplomacy, and unflappable authority. In The Marvelous Land of Oz, she spearheads a political war to restore Princess Ozma to her rightful throne after years of political usurpation. In Ozma of Oz, her Magic Book and unrivaled spellcraft make her the most informed being in all of Oz, able to track events anywhere, a narrative device Baum uses repeatedly to underscore the woman’s intelligence rather than limit it. By The Emerald City of Oz, Glinda orchestrates the protection spell that permanently seals Oz from the outside world, single-handedly saving her dimension from destruction. Baum calls her “the most powerful sorceress in Oz,” and notably, unlike Wicked, he never undercuts her power with darkness, emotions, or corruption. She is powerful and good, and those qualities reinforce rather than contradict each other, making Glinda an influential role model for a generation of young girls. 

This was beyond radical in 1900. Baum, influenced by his mother-in-law Matilda Josyln Gage—a suffragist and abolitionist—believed children deserved stories where women were leaders, heroes, strategists, and moral centers. Glinda embodied that: calm, wise, and uninterested in ruling through fear or manipulation. 

Enter Wicked, which takes Baum’s feminist architecture and flattens it into an interpersonal drama. Glinda isn’t a centuries-old monarch, but a cliquish, insecure socialite. Her moral clarity becomes vanity; her wisdom becomes ambition; her power becomes either accidental or undeserved. Where Baum used Glinda to model a woman who leads without cruelty, Wicked reframes female leadership itself as suspect. It exemplifies that if a woman is powerful, she must have either schemed for it, or must secretly be complicit in injustice.

Lovers of Wicked argue that retellings are meant to be subversive, and that the characters’ emotional complexity and humanization is inherently more interesting than the unwavering goodness of Baum’s characters. But Glinda’s complexity comes from being a woman in literature who leads without trauma, whose empathy coexists with decisiveness and cunning intelligence, and who wields great magical and political power without being undeserving of it.. 

And here is the irony: Wicked claims to critique the binary of “good” and “wicked,” but its rebranding of Glinda reinforces the exact dichotomy Baum worked to break. In Baum’s Oz, women are allowed to be good and kind without being fragile, and powerful without being 

feared. In Wicked, goodness becomes performative, and female leadership becomes either naive or corrupt. That may make for Broadway drama, but it undermines over a century of world-building that explicitly challenged sexist tropes and inspired generations. Ultimately, my issue is not that Wicked exists, but that its popularity has overwritten one of Baum’s most deliberately progressive creations. Most people will never know that Baum gave children a woman to look up to, whose power was neither punished nor problematized. They’ll never know that Glinda wasn’t meant to be an accessory to someone else’s narrative arc, but rather the moral and intellectual backbone of an entire world, who shaped what girlhood heroes could look like in the early 1900s. They’ll know only the sparkly, self-absorbed social climber. And when that version dominates the cultural memory, we lose more than a character; we lose the radical promise that Baum embedded in her. The tragedy isn’t that Wicked reimagines Glinda. It’s that it reduces her.

About the Author

Mishika Bhatia is an emerging researcher with experience in translational medicine, public health journalism, and pediatric and reproductive health. She is a current high school senior from Colorado, U.S.A., and interested in science, storytelling, and the ways culture shapes public understanding.