The wicked Witch of the East.

In L. Frank Baum’s children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Dorothy Gale is swept by a cyclone from Kansas to the magical Land of Oz. Her house lands on and kills the Wicked Witch of the East, a tyrannical ruler who had enslaved the Munchkins. The phrase “the Wicked Witch of the East” is used in the early chapters as the locals and Glinda (the Good Witch of the North) explain to Dorothy what has happened and why the Munchkins are suddenly free. The Witch’s death also sets the plot in motion by transferring her silver shoes to Dorothy and provoking the hostility of the Wicked Witch of the West.

The epithet “Wicked Witch of the East” functions less as a personal name than as a moral and geographic label: she is defined by her cruelty (“wicked”) and by her dominion (“of the East”). Baum’s fairy-tale world organizes power into regions and types—good witches and wicked witches—making ethical stakes immediately legible to a child reader. The phrase also underscores how Dorothy’s accidental act has political consequences: the fall of a despot liberates an oppressed people and redistributes symbolic power (the shoes). In this way, the Witch becomes a narrative device for introducing Oz’s moral order and the theme that ordinary individuals can unwittingly change history.