Gregory Maguire Quotes
Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on - or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense
Maguire, Gregory. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. ReganBooks, 1999.
This proverb doesn’t mean quite what it would appear to—that women will never be attacked in an act of revenge. It does mean that when relatives are selected for vengeance killing, or other acts of vengeance, women will not be selected. However in one tragic Pakistani case in 2003, a Muslim man had purportedly had an affair with a woman from another clan. That clan’s male relatives took revenge. A group of them gang raped a sister of the man who purportedly had committed the offense. The “logic” was that by raping the woman, they were destroying the honor of the brother’s family as they in their perception had had their family’s honor destroyed. The fact that it was the innocent woman who was brutalized didn’t enter into the equation—there was no direct intent to take vengeance on her; it was taken on her male relatives. Worse was the fact that a local “tribal court” had authorized the action as a “legal” act of “blood” or vengeance. The national government, embarrassed before the world, provided minor punishments to the rapists (death might have been a rapists penalty) and then honored the woman by naming a school after her. Unfortunately the family’s honor was destroyed and marriage for the woman was unlikely in that society. In addition to the great improvements and benefits brought to half the known world by the Islamic expansion out of Arabia, many of the less desirable Arab traditions went with them informally and formally as Sharia—Islamic Law.
Gregory Maguire is an American novelist. He is the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and several dozen other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire's adult novels are inspired by classic children's stories; Wicked transforms the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum's 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 1939 film adaptation into the misunderstood green-skinned Elphaba Thropp. The blockbuster 2003 Broadway musical Wicked was inspired by Maguire's first novel for adults. Written by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, the musical is currently Broadway's fifth longest-running show (surpassing Les Misérables on October 28, 2019), and at its peak nine companies ran simultaneously around the world.
