by Alison Lurie
For the time this attitude, which Matilda Gage shared, was unusual, to say the least. It was common for the heroines of most nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century children’s fiction to learn household skills and to enjoy them. In Louisa May Alcott’s books great emphasis is put on being able to sew and mend stockings and produce tasty and nourishing meals; later the eponymous heroine of Anne of Green Gables (1908) learns to bake and iron and sew patchwork. Throughout Baum’s series, however, his female protagonists are never instructed in the domestic arts, though ordinary women all seem to be skilled in them. Meals in Oz often grow on trees or are prepared by invisible hands. When Dorothy and her friends are not on the road having adventures, they have nothing to do but play.
In the world of the Oz books, male rulers are almost always wicked or weak or both. The Wizard of Oz’s magic powers are parlor tricks, and nobody seems sad when he is deposed and leaves Oz in his balloon. Later in the series he is allowed to return and learn a little real magic under the guidance of Glinda, but it’s always clear that he is only her apprentice.
Oz, of course, is full of benevolent male characters who accompany Dorothy and later child protagonists on their adventures. Most of these beings, however, are either senior citizens like the Shaggy Man and Trot’s friend Cap’n Bill, or nonhuman, like the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Jack Pumpkinhead, the mechanical Tik-Tok, and the Wogglebug. They are comic figures, and often in some way damaged or incompetent; none are as brave or resourceful as his child companion. A Freudian critic has called them emasculated.15 Only one of these nonhuman characters, the Patchwork Girl, is female, and she is remarkable for her insouciant self-confidence.
Two of Dorothy’s companions, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, appear to represent unfortunate extremes of male identity. The Scarecrow, who is made of cloth and straw, is too soft: he lacks a brain and can feel but not think. The metallic Tin Woodman is too hard: he lacks a heart and can think but not feel. The Tin Woodman, of course, was once a human woodcutter, but all the parts of his body have been chopped off one after another and replaced with metal. He alone is given a kingdom to rule in The Wizard of Oz: he becomes the Emperor of the Winkies, but remains subservient to Ozma. In a later book of the series, The Tin Woodman of Oz, he decides to search for his former human fiancée Nimmee Amee. He no longer loves her, since the red silk heart he received from the Wizard of Oz is capable of friendship but not passion:
. . . the Wizard’s stock of hearts was low, and he gave me a Kind Heart instead of a Loving Heart, so that I could not love Nimmee Amee any more than I did when I was heartless.16
Nevertheless, he feels obligated to offer to marry Nimmee Amee out of duty. On the journey to find her he discovers another metallic man, Captain Fyter, the Tin Soldier, who was also once human and also engaged to Nimmee Amee. Neither of them really wants the girl, and they are relieved to discover that Nimmee Amee is now married to a man called Chopfyt who has been cobbled together out of both their old human parts. He is less than perfect, but Nimmee Amee declares herself satisfied with him:
“. . . I married him because he resembled you both,” [she says]. “I won’t say he is a husband to be proud of, because he has a mixed nature, and isn’t always an agreeable companion. But he is my husband, and I must make the best of him.”17
Besides, he does housework: “He is now trained to draw the water and carry in the wood and hoe the cabbages and weed the flower-beds and dust the furniture.”18 She tells the Tin Woodman and the Tin Soldier “to go back to your own homes and forget me, as I have forgotten you.”19 Since they have by now become close friends, they are happy to take her advice.
The dominant villain of the Oz books is the ugly little Nome King, who lives under a mountain and rules over hundreds of all-male miners and soldiers. He has childish temper tantrums, hates all happy people, and is terrified of eggs. In Ozma of Oz the Nome King and his vast army are put to rout by Dorothy’s pet hen, Billina, who not only spies on him and discovers the secret of his magic, but supplies the other good characters liberally with her eggs. (Oddly enough, Billina, like Ozma, is a sort of transsexual. She began life as Bill, and repeatedly insists that this is her real name, though eventually she becomes the mother of many chickens who seem to have no father.)
Later, in The Emerald City of Oz, the Nome King forms a military alliance with three other disagreeable nations: the Whimsies, the Growleywogs, and the Phanfasms. Their purpose is to conquer the Land of Oz and enslave its inhabitants; but each of the rulers is plotting to deceive and outwit the other three and take all the spoils for himself. Presently the Nomes begin to dig a long tunnel under the Deadly Desert that protects Oz from invaders. Ozma and Glinda find out about this with the help of their superior magical technology, and fill the tunnel with dust. When the four armies emerge in the palace gardens of the Emerald City, they are dreadfully thirsty. Their first act is to drink of the Fountain of Oblivion, which causes them instantly to forget everything, including their dreams of conquest, and become like innocent children.
Unfortunately, the Nome King does not remain an innocent child for long. Perhaps because of the exigencies of plot, his evil nature reasserts itself, and he has to be defeated twice more, first in Tik-Tok of Oz (1914) with the help of more eggs, and then in The Magic of Oz (1919) by drinking the water of oblivion again.
Eggs and water are both traditional symbols of natural force and life, and thus appropriate weapons against evil, which in the Oz books is always portrayed as sterile and dehydrated. After Dorothy’s house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East, killing her, her body is so dry and dusty that she simply blows away. And when Dorothy destroys the Wicked Witch of the West by throwing a bucket of water over her, she dissolves like brown sugar and can be swept out the door.
The Wizard of Oz represents a sharp break with the European nineteenth-century tradition of children’s fantasy, in both style and content. This was deliberate on Baum’s part. In his introduction he declared his wish to write “a modernized fairy tale” in which “the stereotyped genie, dwarf, and fairy are eliminated.”20
Both the characters and the setting of The Wizard of Oz are very American. Like the protagonists of many European folktales, Dorothy is accompanied on her initial journey by three “magic helpers.” But they are not the traditional magically gifted humans or enchanted beasts. The Tin Woodman was based on a figure Baum had created himself when he was decorating a hardware store window in Indiana. Scarecrows stood guard over hundreds of midwestern cornfields, and the Cowardly Lion could be seen any day moping in the Chicago zoo.
The Wizard himself, that famous humbug, with his gift for showmanship and publicity, and his lack of real powers, is a well-known American type. Not only does he resemble many of our politicians, past and present, but he also recalls the nineteenth-century traveling pitchman and sideshow barker, a type that reached its apotheosis in the impresario P. T. Barnum. Baum suggests both these connections when he reveals in later volumes that the Wizard’s father was a politician, and that he himself used to be with “Bailum and Barney’s Circus.”
Dorothy too is recognizably American, though she has much in common with her most famous predecessor, Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Both are independent, brave, and practical little girls, but Alice, as an upper-middle-class Victorian child, is far more concerned with manners and social status. She worries about the proper way to address a mouse, and is glad she doesn’t have to live in a pokey little house like Mabel. Dorothy already lives in a pokey little house, which she is deeply attached to. Demographers would class her among the rural poor, but she takes for granted her equality with everyone she meets.
The landscape of the Oz book too is familiar. Dorothy’s Kansas suggests Aberdeen, South Dakota, where Baum tried unsuccessfully to run a general store and then a weekly newspaper between 1888 and 1891, years marked by drought, crop failures, falling farm prices, and a disastrous cyclone. “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 grey color.”21
Oz itself can be seen as an idealized version of America in 1900—happily isolated from the rest of the world, underpopulated, and largely rural, with an expanding magic technology and what appear to be unlimited natural resources. Its lush vegetation and whimsical architecture also suggest Southern California, where Baum spent his final years.
The Oz books were written at a time when racial and ethnic prejudice was part of the cultural climate. Comedians routinely made fun of Irish, Polish, Italian, and other immigrants, as well as of blacks and Native Americans. Many public and private institutions were segregated, and some politicians recommended the deportation of minorities, or their instant, enforced assimilation. But Baum’s mother-in-law, Matilda Gage, like other radicals, protested these views.
Unless liberty is attained [she declared in 1862, during the Civil War]—the broadest, the deepest, the highest liberty for all—not for one set alone, one clique alone, but for man and woman, black and white, Irish, Germans, Americans, and Negroes, there can be no permanent peace.22
In the world of Oz, acceptance of minority rights is taken for granted. Baum’s books are full of eccentric subsocieties, some of them dangerous to outsiders. The Hammerheads, for instance, assault travelers with their huge, hard heads, which are mounted on extensible necks; the Wheelers, who resemble semihuman bicycles, attempt to run over strangers. In a single volume of the series, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the protagonists are threatened and attacked by the coldhearted vegetable Managaboos, who grow on bushes; the invisible carnivorous bears in the Valley of Voe; and a mob of angry wooden Gargoyles, who live in a country where the ground is sawdust and the leaves of the trees are shavings. Though all these creatures cause Dorothy and her friends a great deal of trouble, it is never suggested that they should be destroyed or even reformed—instead they appear to have a right to their own peculiar customs and way of life.
The social and political system of Oz, as presented—with some inconsistencies—in the series, appears to be a compromise between Baum’s own love of royalty, fancy dress, and theatrical display, and Matilda Gage’s democratic socialism. Princess Dorothy and Queen Ozma and their friends live in a palace paved with marble and gold and jewels, and wear extravagant costumes; they are treated with great deference by the ordinary inhabitants. But outside the palace equality reigns. There is no money in Oz; instead all products and services are freely shared, and everyone receives whatever he or she needs. The economy is largely agricultural, and no mention is made of machinery except for Tik-Tok, the Mechanical Man, and the magical inventions monopolized by Ozma and Glinda.
A good deal of the social criticism in the Oz books seems to derive from Baum’s own experiences. There is, for example, the ongoing satire on education and armies, which may be related to his unpleasant experiences at the Peekskill Military Academy. Academic authority is represented in Oz by Mr. H. M. Woggle-Bug, T. E., a huge beetle (possibly a cockroach, to judge by the illustrations). His initials, characteristic of academics a century ago even more than today, stand for Highly Magnified and Thoroughly Educated. The Woggle-Bug became trapped under a microscope in a classroom and grew to human size; before his escape, he absorbed a great deal of knowledge. Like some professors, he is extremely vain of his learning and makes terrible puns. Presently the Woggle-Bug founds a College of Athletics where students get instant education by taking pills, and can thus devote all their time to sports.
In Baum’s books armies and soldiers are either serious and hateful or comic and ineffectual. The Nomes and their allies are horrifying; the Soldier With the Green Whiskers who guards the gate of the Emerald City, in spite of his handsome uniform and great height, is a coward and a ninny. The second book in the series, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), contains a famous extended satire on militant—indeed, military—feminism. Baum’s mother-in-law, Matilda Gage, had died in 1898, so she could not object to—or be hurt by—the story, which suggests that however favorably disposed Baum was to feminism, he also enjoyed making fun of its political aspects. Early in The Marvelous Land of Oz the Emerald City is occupied by an Army of Revolt consisting of four hundred girl soldiers from each of the kingdoms of Oz, led by General Jinjur, whose pretty face “wore an expression of discontent coupled to a shade of defiance or audacity.”23 The goal of Jinjur and her army is “to obtain power over our former oppressors,” that is, men.24 When they appear, the Emerald City’s one soldier runs away, and Jinjur easily achieves victory. Soon gender roles are reversed: the men are “sweeping and dusting and washing dishes, while the women sat around in groups, gossiping and laughing.”25 But Baum also gives women credit for their natural skill and endurance: as one exhausted husband complains, “doing housework and minding the children is wearing out the strength of every man in the Emerald City.”26
Jinjur and her army are eventually defeated by the release of an army of mice and the dispatch by Glinda the Good of another all-girl army, but a more efficient and better-equipped one. Jinjur and her troops, however, accept the victory philosophically. According to Baum (who, as a matter of fact, is reported to have been an excellent cook), “The women were so tired eating of their husbands’ cooking that they all hailed the conquest of Jinjur with joy.”27 Jinjur is pardoned and returns home; in later books she appears briefly, first as a farmer’s wife who bosses her husband around, and then as an energetic and generous householder who raises cream puffs, chocolate caramels, and macaroons, and is also a gifted artist.
Several other all-girl armies besides Jinjur’s appear in the Oz books. The recurrence of this theme probably owes less to scorn of the military than to Baum’s lifelong fascination with the theater. For many years he attempted, always without success, to turn one Oz book after the other into a musical comedy, as had been done successfully with The Wizard of Oz. At the time, a chorus of showgirls or chorus boys dressed as soldiers, sailors, or police was a very popular part of many such productions—as indeed it remains today: a recent Academy Awards show, for instance, featured an all-female company of dancing Canadian Mounties. Tik-Tok of Oz (1914) contains a comic male army consisting of sixteen officers and one private, organized by the Queen of Oogaboo, Ann Soforth. Tired of housework and of ruling over eighteen men, twenty-seven women, and forty-four children, she decides that she wants to conquer the world without hurting anyone. As might be expected, all her officers run away. Finally, The Lost Princess of Oz (1917) contains another all-girl army, described as “the fiercest soldiers of all. . . . They are more brave than men and they have better nerves,”28 but this time the girl soldiers, like Baum’s dreams of stage success, are only an optical illusion.
There are other touches of social satire in Baum’s work, some of them, like the story of Jinjur, apparently directed more to adults than to children. In one of his non-Oz tales, The Sea Fairies (1911), an octopus bursts into tears when he is compared to Standard Oil. (Possibly it should be mentioned that Baum’s father and other independent businessmen once tried and failed to break the stranglehold of Standard Oil on local oil production.) And in The Patchwork Girl of Oz an animated phonograph named Victor Columbia Emerson who can clearly see into the future pursues the hero and his friends. In spite of their objections, Victor Columbia Emerson insists on playing an inane song called “My Lulu” over and over again:
“It’s the latest popular song,” declared the phonograph, speaking in a sulky tone of voice. . . . “One that the feeble-minded can remember the words of and those ignorant of music can whistle or sing. That makes a popular song popular, and the time is coming when it will take the place of all other songs.”29
Though the Oz books have always been read by children of both sexes, they have been especially popular with girls, and it’s not hard to see why.30 Oz is a world in which women an
d girls rule; in which they don’t have to stay home and do housework, but can go exploring and have adventures. It is also, as Joel Chaston has pointed out, a world in which none of the major characters have a traditional family.31 Instead, most of them live alone or with friends of the same sex. The Scarecrow stays with the Tin Woodman in his castle for months at a time, while Ozma, Dorothy, Betsy, and Trot all have rooms in the palace of the Emerald City, and Glinda lives in a castle with “a hundred of the most beautiful girls of the Fairyland of Oz.”32
The appeal of Oz seems even clearer if it is contrasted to that of contemporary books for girls. In the early years of the twentieth century, the heroes of most adventure stories were boys; girls stayed home and learned to get on better with their families. If they were rejected children like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or orphans like Anne of Green Gables and Judy in Daddy Long-Legs, they found or established new families. At the end of all these stories, or their sequels, the heroine grew up, fell in love, and got married.
There was of course already another famous little girl protagonist who had adventures in a magical world: Lewis Carroll’s Alice. But from the point of view of most child readers (including me) her experiences were less attractive. Unlike Dorothy and Ozma, who collect loving friends and companions on their journeys, Alice travels alone, and the strange creatures she meets are usually indifferent, self-absorbed, hostile, or hectoring. Rather than helping her, as Dorothy’s companions do, they make unreasonable demands: she is told to hold a screaming baby, do impossible math problems, and act as a ladies’ maid. One or two of the characters seem to wish her well in a helpless way, like the White Knight, whom many readers have seen as a stand-in for Carroll himself. Moreover Wonderland, unlike Oz, turns out to be only a dream.
