Ozblogging: this is the first in an irregular series of posts about L. Frank Baum's Oz books. I think Baum is unjustly neglected as a fantasy writer -- though I also recognize his considerable shortcomings. These little essays are not heavy literary criticism. I'm not going digging for complicated and unlikely interpretations of the books and characters. I'm just going to talk about random stuff that occurs to me. Think of this as me "liveblogging" as I read them.
Oh, and as far as I'm concerned, the Baum books are the only ones worth discussing. They are Canon, everything else is . . . not.
We begin with the first and best-known of the series,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz!
Episode I: Witches and Windstorms
Everybody remembers the movie, not the book. Even when I talk to my Oz-literate kids about the stories, we end up referencing stuff that's in the movie. The film The Wizard of Oz is such a classic, such an icon, such an absolutely damned perfect movie, that it has overshadowed the book for going on seventy years now.
Consequently I'm not even going to try to avoid referencing the movie as I write about the book. No matter how hard I tried, you'd all be seeing Judy Garland and Ray Bolger and Jack Haley Jr. and Bert Lahr in Technicolor, instead of W.W. Denslow's drawings.
The book, like the film, begins in Kansas. And, as in the film, Kansas is a dreary place. Baum describes the whole place as gray -- gray soil, crops burned gray by the sun, houses faded to gray, Uncle Henry and Aunt Em worn gray by a lifetime of work. In the film, Uncle Henry's farm is part of a community. There are bumbling farmhands, bothersome neighbors, and wandering mountebanks in the sepia-toned Kansas of the film. The book has none of that. There are no neighbors, no hired men, just a vast gray emptiness. Baum's Kansas is the Empty Quarter, the Waste Land, a place so barren and harsh that Aunt Em nearly has a heart attack the first time she hears little Dorothy laugh.
Baum's Kansas is so dreary that he doesn't waste much time there. The cyclone arrives by the fourth page of the story and blows Dorothy away in the house. While she's airborne like the Virgin of Loreto, we catch our first hint of just how bad-ass Dorothy is. In the film she's knocked out by flying debris, thereby setting up the whole story as a hallucination brought on by brain damage. Book Dorothy is tougher than that. Where most of us would be paralyzed by terror, expecting each instant to be smashed to bits, Dorothy eventually gets bored and decides it's time for bed. So while she's being hurled along through the upper atmosphere, she's cool enough to go to sleep. Gordon Cooper, the man who dozed atop an Atlas rocket during the Mercury program, would be proud.
The cyclone blows Dorothy to Oz, and safely lands her house in the country of the Munchkins, using the Wicked Witch of the East as a terminal braking system. As in the film, Dorothy is amazed at how lush and colorful the country is. The sepia-tone to Technicolor transition is a perfect metaphor, one I'm sure Baum would have approved of. In fact, the book does something similar, switching from brown to blue ink for the illustrations. When she's done gaping at her surroundings, Dorothy meets some Munchkins (who aren't quite the "little people" of the film, though they are described as being no bigger than Dorothy herself). And she meets the Good Witch of the North.
This is not Glinda. The film combined the Good Witch of the North with Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, into one character, "Glinda," played by Billie Burke. It works (and avoids a structural problem with the novel which we'll get to), but it creates a new difficulty almost as big. The Good Witch of the North (hereafter "North") knows that the Wicked Witch of the East's silver shoes (not ruby slippers, but everybody knows all about that by now, right?) are powerful magic items, but she doesn't know what they do or how to use them. She does give Dorothy a kiss on the forehead which will protect her from harm, and sends her off to seek the Great Oz. Fine. Makes sense.
Here's the problem: by combining Glinda with North, the movie makes her kind of a jerk, since she knows perfectly well how Dorothy can get back to Kansas, but sends her off on an extended wild-goose chase across Oz before telling her, fobbing her off with some handwaving about "you had to learn it for yourself." There is an interesting alternate interpretation of movie-Glinda's actions: by the time she finally lets Dorothy know the shoes can take her home, the little girl from Kansas has eliminated both Wicked Witches and the Wizard, leaving Glinda as the single most powerful sorceress in Oz, with a literal straw man on the throne of the Emerald City. This makes movie-Glinda rather Machiavellian, but it's still the most charitable interpretation. Otherwise she's just mean.
Anyway. Having sent Dorothy off to the Emerald City, North leaves the story, and we don't see her again until a cameo appearance in Road to Oz, nine years later.
There's another big difference between the movie and the book in this section: the absence of the Wicked Witch of the West. In the film, of course, she shows up soon after Glinda, and is wild to get revenge for the death of her sister, East -- and to get her hands (or feet) on the ruby slippers. In the book, there's no sign of her, no hint of any family connection between the Wicked Witches, and West isn't even aware of Dorothy's presence in Oz until much later. In the film this has the effect of turning all of Dorothy's difficulties into a kind of proxy war between Glinda and West. Movie Dorothy is a pawn in Glinda's deep game. Book Dorothy is more proactive: she has a goal, and nothing is going to stop her. Don't get in Dorothy's way.
Continued in Part 2!
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