What happens in Part Three of Wicked?
In Part Three: City of Emeralds, the story thrusts its main characters into the dazzling, disorienting center of the Emerald City. Elphaba and Glinda arrive amidst the city's relentless show—its green-tinted glass and crowds demonstrating loyalty to the Wizard with practiced ease. When the Wizard grants them an audience, what should be a moment of victory for Elphaba quickly sours: the Wizard's true intentions are revealed to be much narrower and more cynical than the public image he projects. He seeks Elphaba's abilities to serve his political agenda, particularly in suppressing the Animals—sentient beings who are being systematically stripped of their speech and rights. Elphaba stands her ground, but her refusal costs her dearly, shattering her hopes for what the meeting might bring. Glinda, torn between her loyalty and her ambitions, opts for a quieter, more accommodating path. The chapter ends with Elphaba fleeing the palace, the city's emerald glow now feeling like a disguise instead of a marvel.
Analysis
Maguire engineers Part Three as a sustained irony machine: the City of Emeralds, which represents Oz's ultimate symbol of aspiration, acts as the chapter's main antagonist. The green palette, once full of promise in earlier sections of the novel, is reinterpreted here as a totalitarian aesthetic—a color enforced by the state that flattens diversity and demands conformity. The scene with the Wizard's audience serves as the chapter's fulcrum, and Maguire approaches it with a purposeful anticlimax: no dramatic thunder or curtain-pull revelation, just a small man with a big bureaucratic appetite. This deflation is a key artistic choice. The Wizard's language mimics progressive ideals—order, protection, the greater good—while masking oppression, and Maguire trusts readers to recognize the discrepancy without needing it pointed out.
The dynamic between Elphaba and Glinda hits its first irreversible break here. Their divergence is not shown through direct argument but through staging: Glinda moves closer to the Wizard's influence while Elphaba steps back, and this spatial choreography carries significant moral weight. Elphaba's greenness, always a sign of her outsider status, takes on explicit political meaning in this city that weaponizes color.
The tone shifts drastically in the final pages of the chapter. The prose, which has maintained a wry, ironic distance, becomes stark and dynamic as Elphaba flees—Maguire strips away embellishments to reflect her sudden sense of loss. The City of Emeralds doesn’t expel her; she simply stops belonging to it, which is a far more devastating outcome.
Key quotes from Part Three
“The Wizard was a small man with the eyes of someone who had learned, very early, that the world rewards the performance of power more than its substance.”
Elphaba's first direct impression of the Wizard during their palace audience, undercutting his mythological stature in a single observational stroke.
“Green is the color of envy, of sickness, of unripe things—and here they had built an entire city of it and called it glory.”
Elphaba's interior reflection as she moves through the Emerald City's streets, crystallizing the novel's central irony about beauty as ideological instrument.
“She had come to the city to change something. She left it changed herself, and not in any way she had wanted.”
The chapter's closing lines, marking Elphaba's departure from the palace and her recognition that the encounter has been transformative in the worst possible sense.