Let's read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

[PontificatusRex]

Lots of us know the movie incredibly well, but how many have read the book? I haven't, and it seems like a fun project. Let's take a trip down The Yellow Brick Road! I think it's worth posting L. Frank Baum's Introduction in its entirety:

Folk lore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.

Yet the old-time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as "historical" in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer "wonder tales" in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

Having this thought in mind, the story of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was written solely to pleasure children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.




I think the hordes of children who were terrorized by The Wicked Witch of the West and the first appearance of the Wizard in the movie version will strongly dispute that this story "gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident". Is this going to be an instance of the book being sanitized and bland and the actual movie being darker and grittier? From what I remember reading about the book - no. I suspect. L. Frank Baum just had a very different idea of what "disagreeable incident" means than the modern audience does.

Trivia note: "L" stands for "Lyman", and Our Author greatly preferred Frank. Can't say I blame him.

He was born in 1856, so this is definitely someone writing with a 19th century worldview even though we tend to think of the story as a "modern" fantasy. He was born to a wealthy family and grew up on an estate in upstate New York. According to wikipedia "Frank was a sickly, dreamy child, tutored at home with his siblings. From the age of 12, he spent two miserable years at Peekskill Military Academy but, after being severely disciplined for daydreaming, he had a possibly psychogenic heart attack and was allowed to return home." He loved theater but didn't have great success at it. In 1888 he moved to South Dakota and his experiences there are said to be his inspiration for his description of Kansas in the Oz books. He later moved to Chicago and was a journalist, then began writing children's books. He collaborated with none other than Maxfield Parish (an absolute titan of illustration, if you are unfamiliar with him) on the book "Mother Goose in Prose" in 1897, which was enough of a success to allow him to become a full time fiction writer. "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" followed in 1899.

[Wintermoot]

This is a great idea. I hope, if you enjoy it, you will continue with all the follow up books. There are several.

" therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident." I think this is hilarious, knowing that the book involves a young girl agreeing to be an assassin halfway through and going off on a murderquest, lol.

[DavidSh]

" therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident." I think this is hilarious, knowing that the book involves a young girl agreeing to be an assassin halfway through and going off on a murderquest, lol.

It has probably been 40 years since I read the book. I vaguely remember the quest as being "bring me the broom of the Witch of the West". Was it really an explicit hit job, or could theft or purchase also have accomplished the task?

[hamishspence]

It has probably been 40 years since I read the book. I vaguely remember the quest as being "bring me the broom of the Witch of the West".

That's how it's phrased in the 1939 movie.

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The book is very explicit that the quest is to kill the Witch - broom doesn't get a mention. Each of the four visits the Wizard separately, makes their request, and is given the same condition.

[KillianHawkeye]

This is one of my favorite books, I hope you enjoy it! There's a lot of stuff that didn't make it into the movie version.

[pendell]

It's been a looong time since I read this book , which is considerably different from the movie adaptation, which was awesome in its own respect. Looking forward to this!

ETA: I think the 'gruesome stories' of which he speaks are stuff like Grimm's Fairy Tales, in which a number of stories are about children who met a particularly gruesome fate because they did something wrong. Much like the Oompah Loompa segments in the 60's movie version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". The Wizard of Oz, by contrast, has a cheerful American protagonist who gets a reasonably happy ending. Any moral lessons in the story are subtly woven in to the fabric of the tale, as opposed to being delivered by Anvil Express as was the case with so many of Grimm's stories.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[gbaji]

ETA: I think the 'gruesome stories' of which he speaks are stuff like Grimm's Fairy Tales, in which a number of stories are about children who met a particularly gruesome fate because they did something wrong. Much like the Oompah Loompa segments in the 60's movie version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". The Wizard of Oz, by contrast, has a cheerful American protagonist who gets a reasonably happy ending. Any moral lessons in the story are subtly woven in to the fabric of the tale, as opposed to being delivered by Anvil Express as was the case with so many of Grimm's stories.

Was going to make the same observation. Grimm's fairy tails are well named. They were "grim". The common children's stories of the time period were chock full of morality tales, where the children in the stories suffered horrendous pain/death/whatever as a result of "being bad" in some way. So yeah. By comparison Wizard of Oz is incredibly "fun" and "lighthearted". Most of the things that happen, while they may be a bit scary, all tend to work out ok in the end.

The followup books are even moreso IMO (been a really long time since I read them though). I mean. Bad things happen. But they're more or less wimsical in nature, which blunts a lot of it IMO.

[PontificatusRex]

All right, here we go. Chapter one: The Cyclone. Funny that everyone now refers to it as the Tornado.

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We are introduced to Dorothy who lives a poor, hardscrabble life with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. This is a much harsher background than the movie; they live in a small one room house - the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles - with a rusty stove, a few chairs, a table, one cupboard, and two beds - a big one for the adults and a small one on the opposite corner for Dorothy. There is a small hole to be the cyclone cellar with a trapdoor in the middle of the floor.

"When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else."

Her guardians are emotional wrecks. Henry works from dawn to dusk and never laughs. Em is flat out tragic:

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy's merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

This is seriously bleak, like Roald Dahl James and the Giant Peach bleak or Dickens's Oliver. The only bright spot in Dorothy's life is Toto.

Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly.


No farmhands to be cognates of later appearing characters. Nor is there a charlatan medicine show wizard, nor an evil woman wanting to do away with Toto. Just the four of them, when suddenly the cyclone appears out of nowhere. Em and Henry run to the "small, dark hole", but
Toto jumps under the bed. By the time Dorothy grabs Toto a strange thing has happened. The house whirls slowly into the air. It is still like the center of the storm and peaceful. Dorothy feels like she is being rocked in a cradle, though the wind is shrieking outside. There is one moment of tension when Toto is running around and almost falls through what had been the cellar door, but Dorothy catches him. They travel for hours, Dorothy stops worrying about what might happen when the house finally lands and goes to sleep.

Well, as expected, quite a bit different than the tale we're used to. All sorts of tie-ins from the beginning of the movie that connect to the end are just not there. We're flying free with no guideposts, folks.

[pendell]

All right, here we go. Chapter one: The Cyclone. Funny that everyone now refers to it as the Tornado.

Spoiler

Show

We are introduced to Dorothy who lives a poor, hardscrabble life with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. This is a much harsher background than the movie; they live in a small one room house - the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles - with a rusty stove, a few chairs, a table, one cupboard, and two beds - a big one for the adults and a small one on the opposite corner for Dorothy. There is a small hole to be the cyclone cellar with a trapdoor in the middle of the floor.

"When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else."

Her guardians are emotional wrecks. Henry works from dawn to dusk and never laughs. Em is flat out tragic:

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy's merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

This is seriously bleak, like Roald Dahl James and the Giant Peach bleak or Dickens's Oliver. The only bright spot in Dorothy's life is Toto.

Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly.


No farmhands to be cognates of later appearing characters. Nor is there a charlatan medicine show wizard, nor an evil woman wanting to do away with Toto. Just the four of them, when suddenly the cyclone appears out of nowhere. Em and Henry run to the "small, dark hole", but
Toto jumps under the bed. By the time Dorothy grabs Toto a strange thing has happened. The house whirls slowly into the air. It is still like the center of the storm and peaceful. Dorothy feels like she is being rocked in a cradle, though the wind is shrieking outside. There is one moment of tension when Toto is running around and almost falls through what had been the cellar door, but Dorothy catches him. They travel for hours, Dorothy stops worrying about what might happen when the house finally lands and goes to sleep.

Well, as expected, quite a bit different than the tale we're used to. All sorts of tie-ins from the beginning of the movie that connect to the end are just not there. We're flying free with no guideposts, folks.

The author definitely has a feel for the American frontier -- people move out there, then work from dawn to dusk, propelled by that old-school work ethic to try to carve out a better life for themselves. But it's a grim life and it ages both parent-figures prematurely. It gives me a very Grapes of Wrath vibe, though the Dust Bowl is still several decades in the future at the time the book was written. Even so, Kansas is pretty close to Oklahoma and conditions aren't all that different. My grandfather was born and grew up there -- there's a reason he and my grandmother moved to California as soon as they could.

Spare a thought for the Uncle and Aunt. To us, it's a fairy story. For them, they've just lost the child they were raising to a tornado, and that is heartbreaking. On top of that their house is gone, a house whose materials had to be painstakingly shipped many miles by wagon, and will now need to be rebuilt from scratch. Their lives and their family all wiped out in an instant by a seemingly-uncaring mother nature.

ETA: One thing to consider when reading these stories is part of the reason the other fairy tales are so gruesome is because they live in a crueler world. There is no fire or tornado insurance for the house. If you break a leg or get sick there's no 911, no hospital. There's a general practitioner in the local town, but how far away is that by wagon?

It's an unforgiving world and if you screw up, you die. So the fairy tales and the other kinds of moral teaching are equally grim and calamitous. They have to be, because if you don't learn from the fairy tales or the other moral teaching you'll learn from experience. And in this environment, experience doesn't give second lessons.



Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Willie the Duck]

[SPOILER]We are introduced to Dorothy who lives a poor, hardscrabble life with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. This is a much harsher background than the movie; they live in a small one room house - the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles - with a rusty stove, a few chairs, a table, one cupboard, and two beds - a big one for the adults and a small one on the opposite corner for Dorothy. There is a small hole to be the cyclone cellar with a trapdoor in the middle of the floor.

"When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else."

Part of this stems from the change in time and audience. In 1899 when the book was written, a lot of the people who might be purchasing the book would have been people living in rural, plains America in the horse-not-tractor and train-not-automobile era. They were living in the the 'carried by wagon many miles' world*. To indicate extreme poverty, you had to make things spartan. By the time the movie rolls around, our idea of squalor had changed. The house with wallpaper and curtains and cushioned chairs and portraits on the wall would not have disrupted the movie-going publics notion that Dorothy had a hard life. Mind you, her coming from poverty wasn't really as much of a theme as it was in the novel.

[Sapphire Guard]

Not actually read this one.

What would count as 'severely disciplined' in an 1800s school is making me wince.

Edit: It's always interesting reading the difference between period pieces written later and old stories written about the present.

[PontificatusRex]

By the time the movie rolls around, our idea of squalor had changed. The house with wallpaper and curtains and cushioned chairs and portraits on the wall would not have disrupted the movie-going publics notion that Dorothy had a hard life. Mind you, her coming from poverty wasn't really as much of a theme as it was in the novel.

In the movie version Dorothy's circumstances remind me a lot of Luke Skywalker - not poverty stricken but not wealthy, working hard and stuck in the sticks, dreaming of getting out and seeing the world/galaxy past their barren patch of ground.

It's also interesting that in the movie we got to know Dorothy quite well before the adventure starts. In the book we know her circumstances but nothing about her, except that she loves her dog and is brave enough to try to rescue him when the cyclone hits. Oh, and that she can take a nap in a house being hurled through the air...I expect that blank slate is pretty normal for children's books of that era - it allowed the readers to easily project themselves into the character.

[KillianHawkeye]

All sorts of tie-ins from the beginning of the movie that connect to the end are just not there.

The reason for this being that the book ending and the movie ending are also somewhat different, but I won't spoil the details.

[pendell]

The reason for this being that the book ending and the movie ending are also somewhat different, but I won't spoil the details.

Not to mention, I did some googling and "The Wizard of Oz" is one of a series of books of which there are ... Fourteen , published from 1900 to 1920. The famous film was created in 1939, almost a generation after the last book was published. I haven't read all of the books, but I have to wonder to what extent the movie compresses the stories of the other novels into a two hour runtime, or if it does.

ETA:

Reading the synopsis for book 2 ...

A little boy, Tip, escapes from his evil guardian, the witch Mombi, with the help of a walking wooden figure with a jack-o'-lantern head named Jack Pumpkinhead (brought to life with the magic Powder of Life Tip stole from Mombi), as well as a living Sawhorse (created from the same powder). Tip ends up on an adventure with the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman to help Scarecrow recapture his throne from General Jinjur's army of girls.

With a tagline like that, I'm surprised it hasn't been turned into an anime a la Strike Witches or Tank Girl, which also have all-female armies.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[KillianHawkeye]

Not to mention, I did some googling and "The Wizard of Oz" is one of a series of books of which there are ... Fourteen , published from 1900 to 1920. The famous film was created in 1939, almost a generation after the last book was published. I haven't read all of the books, but I have to wonder to what extent the movie compresses the stories of the other novels into a two hour runtime, or if it does.

Well I haven't read any of the other books besides the original one, and I can say that the movie doesn't even include everything from the one book. Barely more than half of it, tbh. I'm doubtful that it pulled any resources from the rest of the series.

[PontificatusRex]

Well I haven't read any of the other books besides the original one, and I can say that the movie doesn't even include everything from the one book. Barely more than half of it, tbh. I'm doubtful that it pulled any resources from the rest of the series.

I've actually read Land of Oz and TikTok of Oz and am pretty familiar with Oz-lore in general, and to the best of my knowledge nothing from the later books made it to the film.

Hopefully get to Chapter 2 tonight.

[hamishspence]

The Road To Oz does have, near the end, giant soap bubbles, which magicians can use to travel in, similar to the one Glinda uses in the movie.

[KillianHawkeye]

I've actually read Land of Oz and TikTok of Oz and am pretty familiar with Oz-lore in general, and to the best of my knowledge nothing from the later books made it to the film.

Hopefully get to Chapter 2 tonight.

Wow, L Frank Baum predicted TikTok 100 years in advance??

[theangelJean]

A little boy, Tip, escapes from his evil guardian, the witch Mombi, with the help of a walking wooden figure with a jack-o'-lantern head named Jack Pumpkinhead (brought to life with the magic Powder of Life Tip stole from Mombi), as well as a living Sawhorse (created from the same powder). Tip ends up on an adventure with the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman to help Scarecrow recapture his throne from General Jinjur's army of girls.

With a tagline like that, I'm surprised it hasn't been turned into an anime a la Strike Witches or Tank Girl, which also have all-female armies.

It was! Or at least, it was an 80s cartoon which I distinctly remember watching. It may have been in Chinese? Or maybe Japanese overdubbed with English. (Probably the latter, I didn't understand Japanese at the time, and I think I remember the dubbing not matching with the lip movements.) Let me see if I can find it...

[PontificatusRex]

The Road To Oz does have, near the end, giant soap bubbles, which magicians can use to travel in, similar to the one Glinda uses in the movie.

Interesting! I never knew about that connection. I wonder how many of us watching the film assumed that Glinda had transformed herself into a bubble, not that she was traveling in it? Pretty sure that's what I thought.

And now: Chapter 2: The Merry Old Land of Exposition The Council With the Munchkins

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As you might recall, Dorothy has taken a nap while the house is being hurled through the sky by the cyclone. Again, I am amazed at her ability to relax that much in such conditions. But she is awakened by a severe shock, enough that head she not been in bed she might have been hurt had she not been lying on the bed. Being that chill/stoic clearly has advantages. The house has stopped moving and is lit with bright sunshine. She opens the door (with Toto at here heels) and suddenly the world has switched to color film:

There were lovely patches of green sward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies.

A group of strange people approach, three men in blue with funny hats and an old woman in a sparkly white dress. The odd thing about them is that they all look like middle aged adults or older but they are her height. Yup, in the original Dorothy is definitely a little girl, not a teenager, and is seeing eye to eye with the Munchkins. Glinda is the oldest - face wrinkled, hair white, and she walks stiffly. Now that's an interesting detail - Glinda is not only not a beautiful queen-like figure, she's got bad joints.




Glinda greets Dorothy and praises her for killing the Wicked With of the East. Dorothy is confused - she is "an innocent, harmless little girl" and has never killed anything. Which I guess means she was too poor to even have chickens - my wife grew up on a farm in North Dakota and the kids were the ones killing chickens at age 4 or 5, and she was taught by her grandmother who thought it was important for the kids to learn early.

When Dorothy protests she hasn't killed anyone, Glinda just shrugs it off - "Your house did anyway, and that's the same thing." Then she points to the grisly sight of the two feet sticking out from the house, at which Dorothy quite naturally starts to freak out. Everyone is pretty blase about the little girl's emotional distress.



Now comes the infodrop - Dorothy is in the land of the Munchkins in Oz and everyone is grateful that she killed the Wicked Witch of the East. Glinda and her buddy the Witch of the South are good and there is only one Wicked Witch left, the Witch of the West (also known as the Witch Not Appearing in This Chapter). Note that Glinda says explicitly she wasn't as powerful as the With of the East or she would have freed the Munchkins herself. Then there's a bit of dialogue that I think needs to be quoted verbatim:

"But," said Dorothy, after a moment's thought, "Aunt Em has told me that the witches were all dead—years and years ago."

"Who is Aunt Em?" inquired the little old woman.

"She is my aunt who lives in Kansas, where I came from."

The Witch of the North seemed to think for a time, with her head bowed and her eyes upon the ground. Then she looked up and said,

"I do not know where Kansas is, for I have never heard that country mentioned before. But tell me, is it a civilized country?"

"Oh, yes;" replied Dorothy.

"Then that accounts for it. In the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left; nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians. But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized, for we are cut off from all the rest of the world. Therefore we still have witches and wizards amongst us."

"Who are the Wizards?" asked Dorothy.

"Oz himself is the Great Wizard," answered the Witch, sinking her voice to a whisper. "He is more powerful than all the rest of us together. He lives in the City of Emeralds."

Lot to unpack there. Dorothy wasn't taught that witches aren't real, but that they're all dead. Salem trials, anyone? And Oz is not in another world - at this point in Baum's imagination anyway - but rather cut off from the rest of it by the deadly deserts surrounding it. Much less a challenge to the willing suspension of disbelief in a world without air travel, with the wild frontier being a recent memory and still plenty of the world never explored by folks of European descent.

Back to the story: The magical Silver Shoes are discovered (nope, not Ruby, why make your McGuffin basically shiny grey in the movie where they went to so much trouble distinguishing between the world of color and the boring old black and white world?) and given to Dorothy. The Munchkins know there is some kind of charm connected to them but not much else.

Dorothy is an empathic person and is concerned that her Aunt and Uncle will be worried about her and want's to return home ASAP, but oops, surrounded by poisonous desert. Nobody know what to do, everyone is sad, and then Glinda does a neat bit of divination:

She took off her cap and balanced the point on the end of her nose, while she counted "one, two, three" in a solemn voice. At once the cap changed to a slate, on which was written in big, white chalk marks:

"Let Dorothy go to the City of Emeralds."

Then Glinda asks Dorothy if that means her, because no one has bothered to ask her name yet. Go ask Oz, maybe he'll help you. Dorothy has to walk, and Glinda can't come with her though the country is sometimes dark and terrible (I expect it's those bad joints). But Glinda gives Dorothy a magical kiss on the forehead that will act as a protective charm, and anti-Mark of Cain as it were. The Munchkins say goodbye and Glinda teleports away, which does not surprise Dorothy at all because that's how she expects witches to behave.

Toto starts barking, because he was too scared to to so when Glinda was still there.

Thinking about the idea that Oz has magic because it is not "civilized" even though it has cities and farms and all that, I am also reminded of Huckleberry Finn and his disdain for "sivilization", and how he resolves to head out for the territories as fast as he can at the end of The Adventures of. Mark Twain also later wrote a sequel of sorts which I haven't read but I remember the cover of, Tom Sawyer Abroad. The illustration on the cover featured Tom, Huck, and Jim traveling in a balloon.

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I will now be operating under the assumption that the Wizard is Tom Sawyer, regardless of how the story goes. It makes So. Much. Sense.

[hamishspence]

Actually, Glinda is the Witch of the South. The Witch of the North, who we see in this chapter, goes unnamed in this book, though the stage play version, also written by Baum, does give Locasta as her name.

[KillianHawkeye]

They changed the silver shoes for ruby sequins to make them flashier for the movie.

Also,

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wearing silver shoes to walk on the yellow brick road was supposedly some sort of commentary on adopting a silver standard rather than a gold standard for currency. Maybe.

[Gnoman]

Also,

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wearing silver shoes to walk on the yellow brick road was supposedly some sort of commentary on adopting a silver standard rather than a gold standard for currency. Maybe.

No "maybe" here. It's complete bunk. The "interpretation" debuted in the 1960s, posited by a guy who didn't really know much about the 1890s. It may be extremely popular, but it is nonsense.

[gbaji]

No "maybe" here. It's complete bunk. The "interpretation" debuted in the 1960s, posited by a guy who didn't really know much about the 1890s. It may be extremely popular, but it is nonsense.

I don't know if I'd go as far as declaring that "bunk". There are certainly a lot of images and references in the book that could certainly be allegorical references to various social/political issues of the time. Where Baum himself fell on any of those specifically is certainly subject to debate, but it's pretty silly to just discount the idea that these references were inserted as "things people of the day would recognize", since Baum clearly did make social and political commentary (in other writings, and specifically in the theatrical run of the work).

Someone trying to write a novel and make money on it, may very well include references to things that apepar to the reader to align with things going on in their own lives, or at least things they would recognize. One does not need to personally hold any given view on anything to write in a way that appeals to those who do. So we may consider any connection to Baum's own personal positions on these things "bunk", but that's not to say he didn't include them in his book to appeal to those for whom maybe those things resonated anyway.

And yes, gold/silver standard issues were a current thing. And sure, we can go further and create associations between the various characters and some current archetypes. Maybe. And we can go further afield and create correlations between other events and actions as well. I put that firmly in the category of "interpretation of the work", which is always at least a subject of interest and should not just be dismissed out of hand.

It's also interesting that you can play Dark Side of the Moon while watching the film (and the music matches up to the action). Does that interesting correlation not exist because neither Baum nor Pink Floyd intended it? Nope. Not at all.

[Gnoman]

If an idea in the book is "so obvious" that it takes over 70 years for somebody to notice it, it wasn't put in on purpose. Besides, there are times when Baum makes direct references, and they're always extremely obvious. The deep allegorical take people have retroactively applied to the book is not his style. Meanwhile the "connections" made in the theory are incredibly shallow - you could apply most of them to any children-targeted work from almost any era.


Dark Side Of The Rainbow is a perfect comparison. It is pure coincidence, the correlation isn't unusually strong (you can put almost any combination of music and visuals together and get a correlation as long as they're of similar length), and it means absolutely nothing whatsoever.

[pendell]

Interesting! I never knew about that connection. I wonder how many of us watching the film assumed that Glinda had transformed herself into a bubble, not that she was traveling in it? Pretty sure that's what I thought.

And now: Chapter 2: The Merry Old Land of Exposition The Council With the Munchkins

Spoiler

Show

As you might recall, Dorothy has taken a nap while the house is being hurled through the sky by the cyclone. Again, I am amazed at her ability to relax that much in such conditions. But she is awakened by a severe shock, enough that head she not been in bed she might have been hurt had she not been lying on the bed. Being that chill/stoic clearly has advantages. The house has stopped moving and is lit with bright sunshine. She opens the door (with Toto at here heels) and suddenly the world has switched to color film:

There were lovely patches of green sward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies.

A group of strange people approach, three men in blue with funny hats and an old woman in a sparkly white dress. The odd thing about them is that they all look like middle aged adults or older but they are her height. Yup, in the original Dorothy is definitely a little girl, not a teenager, and is seeing eye to eye with the Munchkins. Glinda is the oldest - face wrinkled, hair white, and she walks stiffly. Now that's an interesting detail - Glinda is not only not a beautiful queen-like figure, she's got bad joints.




Glinda greets Dorothy and praises her for killing the Wicked With of the East. Dorothy is confused - she is "an innocent, harmless little girl" and has never killed anything. Which I guess means she was too poor to even have chickens - my wife grew up on a farm in North Dakota and the kids were the ones killing chickens at age 4 or 5, and she was taught by her grandmother who thought it was important for the kids to learn early.

When Dorothy protests she hasn't killed anyone, Glinda just shrugs it off - "Your house did anyway, and that's the same thing." Then she points to the grisly sight of the two feet sticking out from the house, at which Dorothy quite naturally starts to freak out. Everyone is pretty blase about the little girl's emotional distress.



Now comes the infodrop - Dorothy is in the land of the Munchkins in Oz and everyone is grateful that she killed the Wicked Witch of the East. Glinda and her buddy the Witch of the South are good and there is only one Wicked Witch left, the Witch of the West (also known as the Witch Not Appearing in This Chapter). Note that Glinda says explicitly she wasn't as powerful as the With of the East or she would have freed the Munchkins herself. Then there's a bit of dialogue that I think needs to be quoted verbatim:

"But," said Dorothy, after a moment's thought, "Aunt Em has told me that the witches were all dead—years and years ago."

"Who is Aunt Em?" inquired the little old woman.

"She is my aunt who lives in Kansas, where I came from."

The Witch of the North seemed to think for a time, with her head bowed and her eyes upon the ground. Then she looked up and said,

"I do not know where Kansas is, for I have never heard that country mentioned before. But tell me, is it a civilized country?"

"Oh, yes;" replied Dorothy.

"Then that accounts for it. In the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left; nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians. But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized, for we are cut off from all the rest of the world. Therefore we still have witches and wizards amongst us."

"Who are the Wizards?" asked Dorothy.

"Oz himself is the Great Wizard," answered the Witch, sinking her voice to a whisper. "He is more powerful than all the rest of us together. He lives in the City of Emeralds."

Lot to unpack there. Dorothy wasn't taught that witches aren't real, but that they're all dead. Salem trials, anyone? And Oz is not in another world - at this point in Baum's imagination anyway - but rather cut off from the rest of it by the deadly deserts surrounding it. Much less a challenge to the willing suspension of disbelief in a world without air travel, with the wild frontier being a recent memory and still plenty of the world never explored by folks of European descent.

Back to the story: The magical Silver Shoes are discovered (nope, not Ruby, why make your McGuffin basically shiny grey in the movie where they went to so much trouble distinguishing between the world of color and the boring old black and white world?) and given to Dorothy. The Munchkins know there is some kind of charm connected to them but not much else.

Dorothy is an empathic person and is concerned that her Aunt and Uncle will be worried about her and want's to return home ASAP, but oops, surrounded by poisonous desert. Nobody know what to do, everyone is sad, and then Glinda does a neat bit of divination:

She took off her cap and balanced the point on the end of her nose, while she counted "one, two, three" in a solemn voice. At once the cap changed to a slate, on which was written in big, white chalk marks:

"Let Dorothy go to the City of Emeralds."

Then Glinda asks Dorothy if that means her, because no one has bothered to ask her name yet. Go ask Oz, maybe he'll help you. Dorothy has to walk, and Glinda can't come with her though the country is sometimes dark and terrible (I expect it's those bad joints). But Glinda gives Dorothy a magical kiss on the forehead that will act as a protective charm, and anti-Mark of Cain as it were. The Munchkins say goodbye and Glinda teleports away, which does not surprise Dorothy at all because that's how she expects witches to behave.

Toto starts barking, because he was too scared to to so when Glinda was still there.

Thinking about the idea that Oz has magic because it is not "civilized" even though it has cities and farms and all that, I am also reminded of Huckleberry Finn and his disdain for "sivilization", and how he resolves to head out for the territories as fast as he can at the end of The Adventures of. Mark Twain also later wrote a sequel of sorts which I haven't read but I remember the cover of, Tom Sawyer Abroad. The illustration on the cover featured Tom, Huck, and Jim traveling in a balloon.

Spoiler

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I will now be operating under the assumption that the Wizard is Tom Sawyer, regardless of how the story goes. It makes So. Much. Sense.

It does bring up a question -- IS Dorothy a "witch" in terms of the land of Oz? She did drop out of nowhere to land right exactly on top of the wicked witch, which implies that something was guiding that house to land just where it needed to. A cyclone carrying a house up and setting it down gently on top of a tyrant is by no means a natural occurrence, even in Baum's fiction.

The Munchkins: "What are you? Are you a witch? "
Dorothy: "Nope. A protaganist."

"Magic" in the 19th century was often used by anti-colonialist groups to throw out western armies. The Ghost Dance , for example, was supposed to make the wearer immune to bullets. Likewise, the 1900 Chinese rebellion featured martial artists who claimed their meditation and discipline made them immune to bullets, which they would "prove" to superstitious peasants by firing a rifle loaded at blanks at a member.

Real life, however, isn't an anime. It worked about as well as you would expect. So in the 19th century "magic" is the resort of stone age cultures against the science and technology of "civilized" countries, which is why the magicians and witches, figures from fear out of fairy tales, are absent from the "civilized" world.

Of course, this being 1899 it's still another 15 years before the "civilized" world will plunge into a four year nightmare that would make the most frightening tales from the middle ages seem tame by comparison.

Places like the Land of Oz have echoes of the stories of the kingdom of Prester John or the Seven Cities of Cibola which propelled the Conquistadores out on their hunt for fabled lands and treasures. A "city of emeralds" would have got the attention of a Pizarro or a Cortes without doubt. Seems interesting that Dorothy would be following in Cortes' footsteps, gathering together an army of disaffected to overthrow a king whose wealth is legend. The re-visiting of western myths from the viewpoint of the colonized will have to wait until after Big Mistake 1, which will humiliate the western powers and reconsider how much "better" they are than the colonized people they've been exploiting for decades if not centuries.

Not to mention, in 1899 hidden cities are still a thing. While it was on maps earlier, Macchu Picchu didn't really enter into the public consciousness until 1911 , more than a decade after this novel was published. So there are still hidden cities and unknown peoples in Baum's time.

Heck, in our time there are still people groups in the Amazon and in New Guinea who have never contacted the western world, often by choice. The difference is that with the advent of air and satellite surveillance we're pretty sure we haven't missed any major civilizations like an entire city constructed of emeralds.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[GloatingSwine]

Should've bought that reinforced witch hat. Guaranteed to stop 100% of known farmhouses.

[The Glyphstone]

Is it ever explained why the WWotW, who could be instantly slain by contact with water, had a bucket full of the stuff just sitting around nearby?

[hamishspence]

House-cleaning. Normally, other people will be doing the cleaning on her behalf.

[pendell]

House-cleaning. Normally, other people will be doing the cleaning on her behalf.

Indeed, this is the age before washing machines, automatic dishwashers, microwave ovens. Human labor, by contrast, was a lot cheaper. So even small homes would hire a servant or two to light the fires, do the cooking, and otherwise take care of what was too big a task for a family by themselves. 1900 house -- which attempts to emulate a middle-class living standard in the year 1900 -- is only one year off of Baum's publication date.

The wicked witch doesn't have human servants, but she does have flying monkeys, I believe.

Respectfully,

Brian P.