The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (4 page)

Unlike the Freudian dimensions that Alice finds at the bottom of the rabbit hole, all the dangers in Oz are external. And a general understanding prevails. When the Wicked Witch dispatches the Winged Monkeys she instructs them to destroy all except the Lion (“I have a mind to harness him like a horse, and make him work”) (p. 122), they successfully carry out her orders until they reach Dorothy:

In Oz, and nearly everywhere in fantasy, this is the prime directive: Good is inevitably stronger than evil. It informs Dorothy’s appeal to the Wizard and, prior to that, the behavior of the Stork, and it is one more reason, arguably the principal one, for the discomfort experienced by the first generation of fans of the book who were faced with a troubling ambiguity. Oz is a place where good dominates, but where you will also find that impossible contradiction, the good witch. This is by all evidence Frank Baum’s invention and arguably his lasting contribution to the representational vocabulary of Western literature. Nowhere do you find a good witch before Baum, who combines a traditional occult figure with the American progressive’s optimistic faith in human nature—what is nowadays termed, often disparagingly, secular humanism—and invents a whole new moral typology. The righteous who may be tempted to read J. K. Rowling understand the dilemma intimately. What good is it if the message is consonant with Christian morality but the vehicle is not? In the long run, Baum’s entrepreneurial approach to tradition echoed Whitman’s cry of “creeds and schools in abeyance”; like Whitman, Baum wanted to give America something completely new—the concept of “neutral magic,” of the occult as something rationally available and subject to domestication without the help of traditionally “demonic” assistants. The outcome is everywhere around us, in films especially, from the Force in
Star Wars
to
Practical Magic
. Baum’s morality is rooted in humanistic ideals and only incidentally in scriptural principles.

Adding to the appeal of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
was the fact that its protagonist shared many of the audience’s prejudices. Dorothy, a product of the core curriculum of American morality, reacts the way a reader in 1900 would have reacted. “I thought all witches were wicked,” she says forcefully to the Good Witch of the North in chapter II. The witch’s reply, which includes a lesson in Oz geography keyed to which witch owns what, does little to assuage her:

This exchange has essential premonitory value. Many in the audience who believed as Dorothy did (“all witches [are] wicked”) might have objected to the whole concept of a Good Witch, one certainly without scriptural or moral precedent. The only witches who appear in the Bible came to their power through satanic influence; prior to that the only appeal is to Greek myth’s two isolated examples, Circe and Medea, either of whom occupy a different register since, technically, neither had any traffic with the infernal. As for fairy tales, which by then had been circulating at least since Grimms’ tales appeared in English in 1826, they feature neither “good” witches nor exemplary human practitioners of the black arts.
²⁵
Yet Baum gives his audience a strange, tricky place to stand in Dorothy’s narrative by having Dorothy ask
their
question and receive an answer that, couched in the suggestion that Kansas is a synechdoche for civilization, must have struck an ambivalent chord. His essential imaginative discovery was that to be a witch did not mean you belonged to some dark aristocracy of the spirit because magic was an instrumentality like electricity, magnetism, or fire.
²⁶
In this new republic of the imagination, a person could become a president, a wizard, a person with brains, or a witch.

In the longest run, Baum’s book is remarkable for its Emerson ian attitude toward science, the future, and technology. Everywhere you look in
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
you find gadgets or inventions that seem to reflect the adventurousness of its author’s imagination. The Wizard of Oz, hardly a bad man after all (and certainly no wizard), is originally from Omaha and arrives (and departs) by balloon. His transformation of Oz into the Emerald City, a green utopia, is accomplished mostly by salesmanship—he distributes among the population green spectacles—and thereby joins that distinguished cast of commercial foot soldiers in American literature, from Stephen Crane’s drummer in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” through Dreiser’s Hurstwood (in
Sister Carrie
), Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway all the way up (or down) to Willy Loman. The Wizard of Oz produces “wonders” by means of technical daring or simple chicanery, a stark contrast to the victories of the witches, both good and bad, who surround (and fear) him; the Emerald City of Oz is the elision of convention and novelty, of the typical magical props of fantasy with nuts-and-bolts American technology. The magical Silver Shoes coexist with the Wizard’s balloon, the balloon with the Wicked Witch, the tinkers and the tinsmiths with the Winged Monkeys and that oddest of Oz’s brain belches, the dainty china people. The title of chapter XVI, “The Magic Art of the Great Humbug,” effectively summarizes what Baum is up to: forging an alliance between the human and the occult, the latter being owned by the former. Under no compulsion to separate the fantastic from the science fiction element, he ignores the self-consciously generic distinction, still enforced on newsstands where you can find
Analog
side by side with
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, between the magical and the manufactured. With Oz he designed an alternative Wonderland—American, external, and accessible.

And a wizard, lest we forget, whose success—to the extent we credit it as such—is the result not of black magic but benign chicanery and fairground illusion. It’s always amazed me how we tend to overlook the fact that the title is as ironic as
The Great Gatsby
. Baum’s Wizard is to the traditional sorcerer what Yossarian is to the hero—a comic, and therefore unconventional representative of a class of characters whom we rarely, if ever, laugh at when we see them. He is an antiwizard, a disarmingly likable fraud who has everybody in town wearing green spectacles and who builds a balloon, that last word in air travel in Baum’s day, but forgets to rig it with controls—his balloon will only descend, it appears, when the hot air cools. The point is not that Frank Baum considered all wizards frauds—which would be equivalent to suggesting that he had made up his mind about the nature of all fantasy—but that he could imagine a fraud who might, given the right opportunity, turn out to be a pretty good wizard. Moral categories in Oz are identified by
how
you use what you have and not by your innate character traits—which once upon a time was what America stood for. Oz, in other words, is no aristocracy but a magical democracy. You can be anything you want—wizard or witch—without worrying that your choices are front-loaded by a particular set of values. For some, the appeal of fantasies like Andersen’s and Grimms’, continuing through Carroll and directly into Rowling, is a lingering nostalgia for an aristocracy of moral personality, where distinctions are innate and a person is born, as Blake said, “a garden ready and planted.” Into those fantasies enter characters who bridge the gaps and introduce welcome elements of ambiguity. Even Harry Potter, that ide alization of the adolescent consumer, has an elite pedigree that separates him from the Mudbloods. But Dorothy is hardly an aristocrat, and the Oz she enters is ambiguous from the beginning, a triumph of coexistent and codependent moral and imaginative technologies. One is the ancient one of fairy tale and fantastic literature, of wicked witches with nonaligned helpers, natural agents that serve as liminal figures, talking animals and enchanted footwear. The other is Baum’s, whose sublimest invention is this place where the extraordinary and the everyday live side by side and mirror each other. When the good witch says that Oz is “more powerful” than any of the other witches in Oz, she is preparing the reader for the book’s gentlest but most engaging irony. “How can I help being a humbug,” he says after he is exposed, “when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can’t be done?” (pp. 162-163). But, of course, they
don’t
know. The Wizard of Oz’s power is ultimately dependent on the gullibility of his audience and his sense of supply and demand. At bottom he may not be much of a wizard, as he himself admits. But he is still a pretty good American salesman. And in Oz, salesmanship—that improbably American contribution to Western cultural values—is stronger than sorcery.

 

 

J. T. Barbarese,
an authority on children’s literature, teaches at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, where he is a member of the Rutgers Center for Children and Childhood Studies. He is the author of four books of poetry and a translation of Euripides. His fourth volume of poetry,
The Black Beach
(University of North Texas Press), was awarded the Vassar Miller Prize for poetry in 2004. He is also the author of
New Science
(University of Georgia Press, 1989) and
A Very Small World
(Orchises Press, 2004). His poems have appeared in
Atlantic Monthly
,
Boulevard
,
Georgia Review
,
Denver Quarterly
,
Sewanee Review
, and
Poetry
, and most recently in the anthology
The Italian-American Reader
(Morrow, 2003). His short fiction has appeared in
Story Quarterly
and
North American Review
, and his critical essays and literary journalism have appeared in a variety of publications, from
Tri-Quarterly
,
Studies in English Literature
,
The Looking Glass
, and the
Journal of Modern Literature
to the
Georgia Review
and the
New York Times
. He is presently working on a collection of essays on Little League baseball in America.

1
Michael Patrick Hearn reports that Dorothy “may have been no more than five or six years old when [she] took her first trip to Oz,” which he calculates based on material in the sequels, on Denslow’s drawings, and on a remark made by one of Baum’s sons that Baum “wrote the book for children two to six years old.” See Hearn,
The Annotated Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, 2000, p. 35, note 4. See “For Further Reading.”

2
Baum, quoted in Hearn, p. 12, note 1.

3
Donald Rackin, “Blessed Rage,” in Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland
, edited by Donald J. Gray, A Norton Critical Edition, second edition, New York: W. W. Norton, 1971, p. 401.

4
Mark Evan Swartz, author of
Oz Before the Rainbow
, chronicles the evolution of adaptations of
The Wizard of Oz
and demonstrates the inaccuracy of blaming MGM and Victor Fleming for all these changes. As early as the 1910 one-reel silent version of the novel, which itself inherited elements from the 1902 stage version, film-makers, some of them with Baum’s blessing, had begun blurring the line between Kansas and Oz. One way to look at the 1939 film adaptation is that it was a vast improvement on changes already introduced in earlier adaptations and raised several stop-gaps and audience concessions to the level of high art.

5
The snowstorm was introduced in the 1902 musical and may have been Baum’s own suggestion. See Hearn, p. 156, note 5.

6
Hearn reports that elementary schools occasionally put Dorothy on trial for murder. See Hearn, p. 226, note 18.

7
The idea to shifting from sepia to Technicolor when Dorothy steps out of the house was, as it turns out, a duplication of an effect produced in an earlier, shorter 1933 cartoon version that received limited distribution. See Hearn, p. 33, note 2.

8
Hearn, p. 27, note 13.

9
The idea of a play that tacitly embodies its interpretation did not begin or end with
The Wizard of Oz.
The staging of
Peter Pan
routinely casts the same actor to play both Mr. Darling and Captain Hook, and legend has it that in Sophocles’
Philoctetes
the same actor played the role of both the evil Odysseus and the god Hera cles, who arrives as a deus ex machina.

10
Though there have been dissertations written on
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, it has tended to attract a good deal less scholarly interest because on the surface it offers scholarship too little opportunity to do what it does best—quibble.

11
Jacqueline Rose,
The Case of
Peter Pan
, or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction
, London: Macmillan, 1984. Both Dodgson and Barrie are the subject of biopics. In the case of Barrie, the most recent is
Finding Neverland
(2004).