The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret

The expression "The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret" is Elphaba's concluding, bitter aphorism on the nature of wickedness, delivered near the end of her life. It comes during a dinner party at the town house of Avaric, the Margreave of Tenmeadows, in Shiz, shortly after she has attempted to murder Madame Morrible. The remark functions as a final, frustrated judgment on a night of abstract philosophical debate, and as a stark summary of her own lifelong, inconclusive struggle to locate and combat evil.

Context and Delivery

Elphaba arrives at Avaric's home seeking someone who will believe her confession that she has killed Madame Morrible. She finds herself drawn into a dinner party where the guests, including a copper magnate, an agony aunt, and an artist, engage in a spirited and self-indulgent debate about the definition of evil. One guest argues it is "an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace"; another calls it "an act, not an appetite"; a third insists it is "repressing that appetite." Avaric himself offers that "Evil isn't doing bad things, it's feeling bad about them afterward." The hostess, the Margreavess, is near tears, objecting to the discussion of an old woman's murder as an intellectual game. Elphaba, who has been playing the part of the self-confessed murderer, briefly participates, offering the sardonic suggestion that she did it "for fun" and that "maybe evil is an art form." As she wobbles toward the door, aided by her broom, she turns back to deliver her final, definitive statement, cutting through the frivolous speculation.

The Aphorism's Meaning

Elphaba's aphorism directly challenges the entire evening's conversation. The guests have treated evil as something that can be dissected, categorized, and explained—a problem of philosophy, psychology, or metaphysics. Elphaba counters that the very act of inquiry is doomed because evil's defining characteristic is its secrecy. It does not yield its nature to the investigator. This is not merely a clever retort; it is a statement born of her own experience. She has spent her life trying to understand and fight the evil she sees in the Wizard's regime, in Madame Morrible, and in the systemic oppression of Animals and Quadlings. Yet she has never been able to pin it down to a single source or formula. The Wizard is a charlatan and a despot, but also a man from another world with his own tragic history. Madame Morrible is a manipulative tyrant, but her power seems to derive from a shadowy network of "Adepts" and a mysterious book. The evil Elphaba confronts is always shifting, always hidden behind another layer of conspiracy, always refusing to be named.

Thematic Significance

The expression serves as a capstone to the novel's central philosophical inquiry. Throughout Wicked, characters from Frex to Doctor Dillamond to the Wizard himself offer competing theories about the origin and nature of evil—unionist doctrine, scientific determinism, political pragmatism, and pure nihilism. Elphaba, who has rejected all of these frameworks, arrives at a position of profound epistemological skepticism. The "real disaster" is not that evil exists, but that it cannot be known. This unknowability is what makes it so difficult to fight. It also, ironically, makes the inquiry itself a kind of trap: the more one tries to understand evil, the more it recedes into secrecy. The aphorism thus validates Elphaba's own turn away from abstract theorizing and toward direct, if ultimately futile, action—her attempt to assassinate Madame Morrible. In the end, she does not claim to have an answer; she only insists that the question itself is a disaster.