Expansão de narrativas e realinhamento moral: uma análise dialógica da (re)construção identitária da Bruxa Má do Oeste em Wicked (1995)

Abstract

Narrative expansions, in the most different media support, are a trend that has tended to grow in recent decades. Such expansions can occur, in relation to the time of the narrative, in three different ways: prequels, coquels, and sequels. In this research, as corpus of analysis we bring the novel Wicked (1995), prequel of the children’s narrative The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), whose premise is the return to the past of the famous plot to tell the life of the character known as the Wicked Witch of the West. Thus, we aim to carry out a dialogical analysis of the identity (re)construction of the Wicked Witch of the West in Wicked (1995). To carry out this investigation, we are based on the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Applied Linguistics (Cavalcanti, 1986; Celani, 1992; Fabrício, 2006; Menezes; Silva; Gomes, 2022; Moita Lopes, 1994, 2006a, 2006b, 2022; Pennycook, 2006; Rajagopalan, 2006; Signorini, 1998) and the Bakhtin Circle (Bakhtin, 2011a, 2011b, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2018, 2020, 2023; Medviédev, 2019; Volóchinov, 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c); besides we use theoretical contributions of authors, such as Bauman (2001, 2004, 2005), Hall (2014, 2020) and Woodward (2014), with regard to identity studies, and researchers such as Saint-Gelais (2011, 2014) and Parey (2019), who make contributions with regard to transfictionality and narrative expansions. In this research, we seek to answer to the following questions: how did the witches become antagonistic characters in aesthetics products and how the prequels refocus on antagonistic characters and contribute to the (re)construction of identity of the Wicked Witch of the West? In the analysis conducted, we noticed that the character Elphaba (who will become the Wicked Witch of the West) is discursively constructed as a subject who is the product of the chronotopes in which she lives and the dialogical relationships she maintains with the Others, making this subject go through a process of transformation that leads her to become the antagonist of The Wizard of Oz, thus refracting the idea that the evil in the antagonist characters is not born with them, but is a result of a continuous process of identity construction.