One might almost think, from my
title up there, that I'm not taking this topic seriously. But I am! I recently blogged, at some length and involution,
about the 1939 movie version of L Frank Baum's story; and from there I have revisited, or in many cases read for the first time, the original novels.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is what
Farah Mendelsohn calls a ‘portal fantasy’, a phrase she coins to distinguish it and its sort (Narnia, Cherryh’s gates of Ivriel, Mr Benn’s changing room, Gene Wolfe’s
There Are Doors and the like) from ‘immersive fantasy’ such as
Lord of the Rings or Westeros, which posits its own separated imaginative space. In a ‘portal fantasy’ characters from our world pass into the magical fantasyland and back again.
The portal that links our world and Oz is: the air. Which is to say distance. In
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Dorothy Gale, a young girl living on a farm in Kansas, is carried through the air by a tornado, and deposited in the fantasyland of Oz. The story is too well-known to need summary here: Dorothy experiences a series of adventures in Oz making friends with various people—a talking lion, an ur-robotic tin man and a living straw-filled scarecrow as she processes towards the titular wizard, whom she believes can magic her back home to Kansas. Her antagonist is a wicked witch, whose sister Dorothy has inadvertently killed, and who places various obstacles in her way. The titular wizard turns out not to possess magical powers, and is in fact a con-man from Nebraska masquerading as a mighty sorcerer in order to rule over Oz. Dorothy eventually makes her way home, but in subsequent novels she returns to Oz and settles there permanently.
The sequels
The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) and
Ozma of Oz (1907) introduce the ruler who succeeds the Wizard, princess Ozma. I'll come back to her. In
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908) Dorothy, shaken out of her mundane world by an earthquake, passes through an underground adventure—Ozma eventually rescues her by means of a magic emerald belt that teleports her and her companions to Oz.
The Road to Oz (1909) follows broadly the same narrative pattern: Dorothy trekking from our world to Oz, this time along a magic road that passes through a dimension of talking animals, rainbow beings, Scoodlers (who fight by pulling off their own heads and throwing them at others) and other things. Passage from here into Oz requires crossing the ‘Deadly Desert’, which journey in this novel is effected by a ‘sand-boat’.
At the end of the next volume,
The Emerald City of Oz (1910) the portal is, in effect, shut down. An army of ‘Nomes’ attempts to invade Oz, and though they are repelled a magic spell is cast to prevent any future invasion, making Oz unreachable to everyone except those within the land itself. ‘We must not hesitate to separate ourselves forever from all the rest of the world,’ declares the good witch Glinda. The spell she casts ‘won't affect us at all’ but ‘those who fly through the air over our country will look down and see nothing at all. Those who come to the edge of the desert, or try to cross it, will catch no glimpse of Oz, or know in what direction it lies.’ The novel’s last chapter includes a ‘note’ from Dorothy Gale, ‘written on a broad, white feather from a stork's wing’:
YOU WILL NEVER HEAR ANYTHING MORE ABOUT OZ, BECAUSE WE ARE NOW CUT OFF FOREVER FROM ALL THE REST OF THE WORLD. BUT TOTO AND I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU AND ALL THE OTHER CHILDREN WHO LOVE US. DOROTHY GALE. [Baum, Emerald City of Oz, ch 30]
Baum, tired of writing Oz books and wanting to concentrate on other things, planned to make
Emerald City the last; but demand and financial exigency soon brought him back to the series.
The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) opens with a prologue in which Baum explains how he was able to write the story despite Oz’s magical isolation: wireless telegraphy (the novel, Baum says in a prologue, ‘would not have been possible had not some clever man invented the “wireless” and an equally clever child suggested the idea of reaching the mysterious Land of Oz by its means’). The story itself is set entirely within Oz, although what was, in 1913, high tech replicates the original portal: rapid passage through the air, now of radio waves rather than storm-tossed houses and balloons.
Seven further novels followed (
seven! so much for quitting the series in 1910):
Tik-Tok of Oz (1914),
The Scarecrow of Oz (1915),
Rinkitink in Oz (1916),
The Lost Princess of Oz (1917),
The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918),
The Magic of Oz (1919) and
Glinda of Oz (1920). In some of these the ‘portal’, as it were, reopens: for instance, in
Scarecrow of Oz the Scarecrow travels from Oz to help two Californians who have gotten themselves in trouble, and in
The Magic of Oz two characters are able to slip past Glinda’s magic embargo by transforming themselves into animals, the implication being that Oz is only forbidden to human beings. But the later novels suffer from an increasing sense of imaginative exhaustion, repeating story-shapes, characters and moments from the earlier books.
In the early novels Oz is reachable from the mid-west USA, but is, presumably, too far away to walk. Passage is facilitated by aerial speed of the tornado that whisks Dorothy from Kansas, and the hot air balloon that carries the ‘wizard’ himself (whose actual name is Oscar Diggs) from Omaha, Nebraska: moved, we can intuit, in an austral direction—hence ‘Oz’—across a wide desert and to this fantastical land. An exchange between the Wizard and Dorothy in chapter 15 of the original novel tells us that Nebraska is further north of Oz than Kansas: “I was born in Omaha—” “Why, that isn’t very far from Kansas!” cried Dorothy. “No, but it’s farther from here”’). It is not usual to identify Oz with Mexico—a country like and unlike the USA, exotic and familiar—although it may be relevant that the Mexican national name derives from the Nahuatl
mētztli, ‘moon’. A human carried through the air in a storm, or travelling by balloon, and ending up in a fantastical-satirical version of the moon is one of the oldest premises in fantastika. Lucian’s 2nd century AD novel Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα (‘A True Story’) sweeps up its protagonists in a whirlwind and deposits them on the moon—where a variety of fantastical exaggerations and inventions, peoples and creatures refract satirically back upon Lucian’s own society. Edgar Allan Poe’s satire ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’ (1835) carries its hero to the moon in a balloon.
In terms of in-story logic, Oz is so named its ruler, the fairy princess Ozma, first introduced in
The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904). That novel starts with a boy called ‘Tip’, but we discover that the wicked witch of the North, Mombi, has swapped Ozma’s gender and wiped her memory to stop her claiming her inheritance. Turned back into a girl by Glinda the Good Sorceress, Ozma takes the Throne of Oz. In later Oz books Baum specifies that Ozma is an immortal fairy, who will forever remain a beautiful fourteen-year-old and so will always rule Oz: ‘born of a long line of Fairy Queens, as nearly perfect as any fairy may be’ [
The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), ch 21].
But in
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908) we get a different story. Here the ‘Wizard’ reveals his name to be Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, an ungainly set of monikers chosen by his scornful father to spell out Oz-PINHEAD—that is, Oscar ‘stupidhead’—which Diggs, as an adult, shortened. He explains
“Surely no one could blame you for cutting your name short,” said Ozma, sympathetically. “But didn't you cut it almost too short?”
“Perhaps so,” replied the Wizard. “When a young man I ran away from home and joined a circus. I used to call myself a Wizard, and do tricks of ventriloquism … Also I began to make balloon ascensions. On my balloon and on all the other articles I used in the circus I painted the two initials: ‘O. Z.’, to show that those things belonged to me. One day my balloon ran away with me and brought me across the deserts to this beautiful country. When the people saw me come from the sky they naturally thought me some superior creature, and bowed down before me. I told them I was a Wizard, and showed them some easy tricks that amazed them; and when they saw the initials painted on the balloon they called me Oz.” [Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, ch 15]
He unites the four separate realms, previously ruled-over by four witches (‘the people thought my power was greater than that of the Witches; and perhaps the Witches thought so too, for they never dared oppose me’) and builds the Emerald City ‘just where the four countries cornered together, and when it was completed I announced myself the Ruler of the Land of Oz.’ This may make us think of the four provinces of Ireland, the ‘emerald isle’, with the land of the Munchkins approximating Munster, the Gillikins Connacht, the Winkies Ulster and the Quadlings Leinster. ‘Oscar’ is an Irish name, or at least a Celtic one—it came into currency with James McPherson’s gallimaufry of Celtic myth and individual forgery,
The Works of Ossian (1765)—and Diggs’s third name, in Baum’s idiosyncratic spelling of Pádraig, points in the same direction. At the same time the ‘Z-for-Zoroaster’ is clearly not Irish, but oriental: something mystic, transcendent. But if ‘Oz’, as the sounded-out first syllable of ‘Oscar’, or as ‘O.Z.’, is why Oz is called Oz, then Ozmar (‘the mother of Oz’, one presumes) must similarly be a reference to Diggs.
I mean, I'm straying into some abstruse and unlikely interpretation here, I'm well aware. But there's a long critical tradition of that.
In his 1964 classic article in American Quarterly, Henry Littlefield's finds
that The Wonderful Wizard of 0z contains a ‘symbolic allegory’ which
‘delineated a Midwesterner's fibrant and ironic portrait of this country as
it entered the twentieth century.’ In Littlefield's reading, Baum's
Scarecrow was a farmer, the Tin Woodman was a dehumanized industrial
worker, and the Cowardly Lion represented ‘William Jennings, Bryan
himself.’ According to this view, the story was made from the political
materials of the 1890s and authored by a social observer sympathetic to the
Populists. Yet, in a more recent analysis, William Leach argues that
politics and social criticism are not apparent in L. Frank Baum's work.
Rather, Leach contends that Baum did not ‘express much concern for
poor farmers or for any mistreated Americans. All evidence points the
other way - that he preferred to identify with the “best people,” with the
winners in American society, not with the losers.’ While, for Littlefield,
Baum's tale reflects a nineteenth-century political culture that valued producerism and agrarianism, for Leach, Baum was a twentieth-century proclaimer of the glories of consumption and industrial capitalism. [Gretchen Ritter, ‘Silver Slippers and a Golden Cap: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Historical Memory in American Politics’, Journal of American Studies 31:2 (1997), 172]
This is the least of it. It used to be argued that the Oz books were actually all about, I kid you not, the
bimetallism debate in the States, with Henry Littlefield making the case for the book as an allegory for this issue, and Richard J. Jensen proposing that ‘Oz’ was derived from the common abbreviation for ‘ounce’, used for denoting quantities of gold and silver. My humble speculations seem almost common-sense by comparison.
Folding Mexico (Old and New) and Texaco-Arizonico together, it does make a kind of sense to see Oz as American, in provenance and orientation. The Emerald City stands at the junction of the four states that comprise Oz. There is one place, and one place only, where that is true of the US: the point at which Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico connect, known as ‘Four Corners’:
Baum's own map of his fantasyland was originally painted on glass and projected onto a screen (Baum created it for a tour in which he read from his stories and gave a lecture on Oz). When it was copied onto paper to be printed the inversion of up down west east was copied over too, or so the story goes. At any rate, given the Carrollian logic of Baum's fantastical worldbuilding (inversion, parody and so on), we can treat this map as a looking-glass image of the world, such that the 'Nonestic' ocean (the non-east, that is the western or Pacific, ocean: but also of course the non-existent ocean) lies to the west, California becomes the Rose kingdom, and Oz maps more or less onto the Four Corners.
Of the surrounding ‘shifting sands’ of the ‘great sandy waste’, Baum's last words, on his death bed, were allegedly ‘now we can cross the shfting sands’. Then again, in
Ozma of Oz, Oz is surrounded on all sides by ocean, so absolute consistency is not the point here. Then there's
this:
In 1905, Baum declared plans for an Oz amusement park. In an interview, he mentioned buying “Pedloe Island” off the coast of California to turn it into an Oz park. However, there is no evidence that he purchased such an island, and no one has ever been able to find any island whose name even resembles Pedloe in that area. Nevertheless, Baum stated to the press that he had discovered a Pedloe Island off the coast of California and that he had purchased it to be ‘the Marvelous Land of Oz’ intending it to be ‘a fairy paradise for children.’ Eleven year old Dorothy Talbot of San Francisco was reported to be ascendant to the throne on March 1, 1906, when the Palace of Oz was expected to be completed. Baum planned to live on the island, with administrative duties handled by the princess and her all-child advisers. Plans included statues of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, Jack Pumpkinhead, and H.M. Woggle-Bug, T.E. Baum abandoned his Oz park project after the failure of The Woggle-Bug, which was playing at the Garrick Theatre in 1905.
So far as I can see this was all just marketing, whipping up interest up to and including auditioning young girls to act as princess: publicity for his novels and the Woggle-Bug play and never intended more seriously. That said, writer-me finds this idea quite intriguing: it would be a thing to do, to work out a sort of
Lord of the Flies (
Lord of the Fl-Oz) tale in which the entire population of a private island off California is prepubescent children and L Frank Baum living a solitary life in a big house in the middle, like the pig's head on a stick. [I did wonder if Baum's naming was supposed to imply that ‘Pedloe’ island was close to the shore, easily reached by somebody in a pedalo, but OED tells me that latter word isn't coined until the 1940s.]
But this brings in another dimension. Lewis Carroll was a manifest influence upon Baum's imagination, and in many ways the Oz books approximate to ‘nonsense’ better than they do to Fantasy of the Narnian or Wolfean portal mode. But a shadow lies across Carroll's reputation (as it does across J M Barrie's
Peter Pan). Some critics argue that there is something morbid about the way the pre-pubescent child is fetishized in their works, or worse something paedophilic. No such reputation adheres to Baum I think, although one might think it could: there is, as with Carroll, an intense focus on specific beautiful young girls (Dorothy, Ozma) who are forever fixed in their prepubescence. ‘The justification of secular art is the responsibility it bears for the enrichment of human awareness,’ says Peter Coveney. ‘The cult of the child in certain authors at the end of the nineteenth century is a denial of this responsibility.’ He is talking of Carroll and Barrie, but could easily have folded-in Baum.
Their awareness of childhood is no longer an interest in growth and integration, such as we found in The Prelude, but a means of detachment and retreat from the adult world. One feels their morbid withdrawal towards psychic death. The misery on the face of Carroll and Barrie was there because their response towards life had been subtly but irrevocably negated. Their photographs seem to look out at us from the nostalgic prisons they had created for themselves in the cult of Alice Liddell and Peter Pan. [Coveney, The Image of Childhood: the Individual and Society (1957; 2nd ed 1967), 241]
Baum looks somewhat jollier in his photographs than those other two, and there was a public construction (in which he took part) of him as the avuncular ‘wizard’-esque jolly old man. MGM put it about that the jacket Frank Morgan wears in the 1939 movie version was the very same jacket Baum himself had worn. It seems this wasn't true, but it feeds into the ‘persona’ of Baum-as-author. Shy, retiring Carroll, and strange, disconnected Barrie didn't do anything so hucksterish.
I've never found anything paedophilic in the Alice books, I must say. Here's
what I said in another place.
There are several ways of addressing the ‘paedophilia’ angle as far as Carroll was concerned. One way, of course, would be simply to sweep him into the box marked Monster and refuse to engage with his tainted art. I think that would be a pity, not because I’m certain that his heart was perfectly pure when he took his photographs of naked nine-year-old girls, but because the art itself doesn’t seem to me tainted. The paedophile’s fantasy (I assume) is that of the sexually available child; but the striking thing about Alice is how unavailable she is, how expertly she resists attempts to assimilate her to our agenda. That she is her own person is the ground of her splendour. Indeed, her curious inviolability is, I think, absolutely integral to the way she works in these stories. I also tend to think that the best reading of the ‘Freudian’ symbolism of the books—all those vaginal doors, tight entrances, all those phallic swellings and shrinkings, swimming through seas of bodily fluids, the oedipal anxieties of the Queen of Heart’s pseudo-castrating cry ‘Off with his head!’—that the best reading of all that stuff is William Empson’s ‘The Child as Swain’ chapter in Some Versions of Pastoral. Empson engages enthusiastically with all the ‘Freudian’ symbolism in the books, but does so within the conceptual framework of Some Version’s larger agenda: putting the complex into the simple; the ironies of class; the relationship between heroic and pastoral modes. In fact, recently re-reading 'The Child as Swain' was a revelation to me. It brought home to me how far Empson's account is from being a straightforward Freudian decoding of Carroll's books, despite the fact that he, tricksily, insists that it is (‘the books are so frankly about growing up that there is no great discovery in translating them into Freudian terms’, 253). In fact Empson’s stress is on the way the (sexual) world of adulthood becomes nonsensical when it is, in Empson's rather brilliant phrase, 'seen through the clear but blank eyes of sexlessness.' That’s right, I think.
There's certainly a good deal of ‘off with his/her/their heads!’-ness in the Oz books:
The villanous Princess Langwidere in
Ozma of Oz keeps a collection of thirty heads in a gem-studded golden dressing room, and regularly swaps her own with any of these exchangeable crania. All are very beautiful (‘no two formed alike but all being of exceeding loveliness ... golden hair, brown hair, rich auburn hair and black hair; but none with gray hair. The heads had eyes of blue, of gray, of hazel, of brown and of black; but there were no red eyes among them, and all were bright and handsome’) and the Princess controls her wardrobe with ‘a curious key carved from a single blood-red ruby’: red like Red Riding Hood's cloak, to signify menses and therefore sexual maturity (in the 1985 Disney movie
Return to Oz this character is combined with the witch Mombi). Jack Pumpkinhead, a main character in the novels, is a sentient pumpkin on a timber body who lives in a giant pumpkin house where he grows new pumpkins to replace his head every time it ‘spoils’. He buries the rotten heads in a graveyard beyond his garden, and seems unconcerned by the ship-of-Theseus dilemma of this circumstance:
‘I've a new head, and this is the fourth one I've owned since Ozma first made me and brought me to life by sprinkling me with the Magic Powder.’
‘What became of the other heads, Jack?’ [asked Dorothy]
‘They spoiled and I buried them, for they were not even fit for pies. Each time Ozma has carved me a new head just like the old one, and as my body is by far the largest part of me I am still Jack Pumpkinhead, no matter how often I change my upper end. Once we had a dreadful time to find another pumpkin, as they were out of season, and so I was obliged to wear my old head a little longer than was strictly healthy. But after this sad experience I resolved to raise pumpkins myself, so as never to be caught again without one handy; and now I have this fine field that you see before you.’ [Road to Oz, ch 16]
Then there are the aforementioned Scoodlers, who fight by pulling off their own heads and flinging them at their enemies. There are other examples too, although these various freudian-oedipal decapitations are only one aspect of the novels' repeating figures of (playful) dismemberment, bodily disintegration and reintegration. Not that Baum quite has Carroll's savagery. In
Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) Baum originally wrote a chapter in which Ojo the Unlucky and the titular Patchwork Girl encounter a species of vegetable people who grow ‘meat folk’ in their gardens to eat. Baum later thought better and deleted this chapter, though we still have some of Neill's illustrations and their captions for the episode, which show the heads of human children growing out of the ground and being watered by their vegetable gardeners. Carroll, I think, would have kept that scene in.
Still, my notional novel set in Baum's proposed Oz-themepark ‘Pedloe’ island could hardly avoid the fundamentally creepy, unpleasant vibe of the premise: the one adult man, the many pre-pubescent and cusp-of-pubescence girls (Ozma is fourteen forever), sealed away from the normal world. Like old Tiberius at Capri. Baum might indeed bite them, and do worse to them than that. A difference between Carroll's Alice and Baum's Dorothy is that the former seems more self-sufficient: she cries, from time to time, but otherwise passes through the dangers and anxieties of wonderland and looking-glass land with a kind of serene inviolability, untouchable even in a court convened to prosecute and execute her. Dorothy is altogether more anxious, uncertain, scared, especially in the earlier novels (a fact sealed by the fact that Judy Garland's performance has ‘fixed’ how Dorothy in a way no actor's performance of Alice has. Geoff Ryman's
Was (1992), discussed in
this post, though you have to scroll a way down, imagines Dorothy as victimised and violated, her Oz nothing more than a fantasy projection in her head into which she can escape her dolorous reality, and who ends up a whore, a destitute and eventually in a lunatic asylum. Hard to think of Alice being reimagined the same way.
