In Oz, prettiness and virtue are conflated, and Glinda is the fairest of them all.īillie Burke, the 54-year-old actor who played Glinda, also prized beauty, and some of her opinions on the matter come across as retrograde today. And then there’s the way her character affirms old-fashioned ideas about the value of beauty: “Only bad witches are ugly,” Glinda tells Dorothy upon their meeting. “Of the two Witches, good and bad, can there be anyone who’d choose to spend five minutes with Glinda?” Salman Rushdie once asked in The New Yorker, calling her “a silly pain in the neck.” It’s true that there’s a cartoonish high femininity to Glinda: her butterfly-bedazzled pageant gown, her honeyed singing. It can be easy at first to dismiss the Good Witch as frivolous when compared with her nemesis. In all her rosy-pink goodness, Glinda was literally and figuratively a witch of a different color and an unlikely feminist force.

Though there had been two silent-film adaptations of the Oz story before MGM’s The Wizard of Oz came out in August 1939, the typical moviegoer would have been most familiar with screen witches who were creepy old crones or black-frocked fairy-tale monstresses out to get wide-eyed ingenues. She was arguably the first American pop-culture figure to prove that, despite their reputation for diabolical antics, witches could be benevolent beings.

Still, on the 80th anniversary of the movie that made the Wicked Witch famous, I find myself more drawn to her pastel counterpart, Glinda the Good Witch of the North. I sometimes say it to myself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.” Even when she meets her demise at Dorothy’s hands, she goes down in style, seething: “Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?” The filmmaker John Waters ( Pink Flamingos, Hairspray) has said, “That line inspired my life. Many fans delight in the Wicked Witch of the West’s deranged cackle and her lust for power and ruby pumps.

Whenever I introduce myself as a witch who writes about witches, the conversation often turns to The Wizard of Oz, and when it does, I’m always tempted to focus on the movie’s verdant villain.

The ok witch