Lady's Mystique

The Lady's Mystique was a small bluestone theatre perched at the edge of Goldhaven, the most fashionable district of the Emerald City. Its shallow but elegant square was decorated with white lights and green and gold spangles looped from streetlight to streetlight for the Lurlinemas holiday. On the evening of Lurlinemas Eve, a holiday oratorio was scheduled there, and the board in front read SOLD OUT. The crowd gathering before the doors included vendors selling hot chocolate in tall ceramic glasses and a group of self-approving youngsters singing a parody of an old unionist hymn of the season. The snow fell on the lights, the theatre, and the crowds, churning to mush and ice on the bricks.

The Planned Assassination

Elphaba, having spent five years underground as a member of a secret network dedicated to overthrowing the Wizard, had chosen this night and this location for her most significant act. She had told her lover Fiyero that she did not know the whole picture of the campaign, but that she would be told only her small part. On Lurlinemas Eve, she was to kill Madame Morrible, the Head of Crage Hall who had conspired with the Wizard, who had been behind the murder of Doctor Dillamond, and who had tried to recruit Elphaba, Glinda, and Nessarose as Adepts for the regime. Elphaba had swathed herself in long dark skirts and a tall wide-brimmed hat with a cone-shaped crown, with a dark scarf wound around her neck and pulled over her mouth. She wore elegant, tight-fitting gloves and big, steel-toed boots like those worn by miners in the Glikkus. She had something hidden under her cloak—explosives or some magic implement. Fiyero, who had followed her, watched from the steps of a nearby private library as she circulated through the crowd, trying to locate her target.

The Intervention of the Schoolgirls

A carriage arrived, and out stepped Madame Morrible, a huge woman in a tidal wave of black silk and silver spangles, magisterial and august. She walked four steps toward the theatre on the arm of a tiktok minion. Elphaba leaned forward from under the wool market, her chin jutting out from the scarf, her hands figuring out things beneath her cape. But then the front doors of the adjacent building—Madame Teastane's Female Seminary—were thrown open. Out swarmed a cluster of upper-class schoolgirls, six or seven years old, small creamy lumps of uncurdled femininity spooned into furry muffs and scarves and boots. They were laughing and singing, raucous and rough, and in their midst was a pantomime player dressed as the Fairy Preenella, a man in silly clownlike makeup, a mock bouncing bosom, a wig, extravagant skirts, a straw hat, and a huge basket with trinkets and treasures spilling out. The children were in the way of whatever Elphaba was supposed to do, a small unruly mob chasing around the Head, teasing Preenella, leaping up at him, grabbing for presents.

The Failure of the Mission

Fiyero saw Elphaba's face struggle with disbelief. Her hands fought with each other, to do it anyway, to keep from doing it. Madame Morrible pushed on like a huge float in a Remembrance Day parade, and the doors of the theatre opened for her. She passed grandly into safety. Outside, the children danced and sang in the snow, the crowd surged this way and that. Elphaba crumpled and sank back against a pillar, shivering with self-loathing so violently that Fiyero could see it from fifty yards away. He began to push toward her, but by the time he reached the steps she had, for the first and only time, managed to lose him. The audience filed into the theatre, and the children shrieked their song in the street, awash with greed and joy. Fiyero paused, unsure if there was a backup plan, if the theatre would explode. Then he began to worry that Elphaba had been rounded up by the Gale Force.

Consequences and Aftermath

Fiyero returned to Elphaba's room above the abandoned corn exchange, where he was attacked by members of the Gale Force. Elphaba, having failed in her mission and likely aware that her hiding place had been discovered, fled to the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows, where she was taken in by the maunts and spent the next seven years in silence and penance. The assassination attempt on Madame Morrible at the Lady's Mystique thus marked the end of Elphaba's active resistance and the beginning of her long retreat from the world. The theatre itself, as a site of this pivotal failure, became a symbol of the moment when Elphaba's will to violence was broken by the accidental presence of innocence, and when her five years of underground work collapsed into a single, unresolved act of self-loathing.