Episode II: Incidents of Travel in Oz
Dorothy's journey to the Emerald City is about what you remember from the movie. Yellow brick road, finds Scarecrow, finds Tin Woodman, meets Cowardly Lion. Sure, the Wizard can help you, off we go.
The Cowardly Lion is a really big lion, presumably born in the usual way for lions. All the lions in Oz can talk anyway, and he's no different. He just wants to go to see the Wizard. The Tin Woodman has a long "origin story" of progressive cyborgization (which gets expanded and made even more bizarre in the novel The Tin Woodman of Oz).
But the Scarecrow is just a Scarecrow. No explanation of how he can walk and talk. No enchantments, no accidents with the Powder of Life, no "retcons" in later stories. He's just a man made of straw. I kind of like it that way. Too many writers get afflicted with a strange mania to explain everything. C.S. Lewis wasn't content with the surreal image of a gaslamp burning in a snowy forest, he had to go and explain where it came from. In science fiction, explaining too much is simply dull -- "infodumps," we call them. In fantasy it can be deadly. There are some things we just don't need to know. Baum can seldom resist giving us a backstory for his characters (even the Winged Monkeys get one), but the Scarecrow just . . . is. Hooray for him.
The journey to the Emerald City also reflects one ongoing trope of the Oz books. There's always a lot of friction when characters try to get anywhere in Oz. You can't just walk from the Munchkin country to the capital. You have to cross chasms and flooding rivers. You get stuck on poles. You have to get away from Kalidahs. Nothing's easy.
It's also interesting to reflect on the scale of fantasylands like Oz or C.S. Lewis's Narnia. They seem huge and diverse places, yet are small enough for a grade-school child to walk across in just a few days. Dorothy makes it from the land of the Munchkins to the Emerald City in less than a week, and her journey to the West later in the book doesn't take much longer. Assuming Dorothy's a healthy little girl used to lots of walking in turn-of-the-century Kansas, let's figure she can cover ten miles a day. That means Oz is no more than a couple of hundred miles from end to end. This magical fairyland full of strange isolated communities and bizarre subspecies is about the size of Pennsylvania. (Narnia is even smaller.)
Perhaps some of this trouble with scale is due to our own perspective as people of the 21st Century, accustomed to rapid car and air travel. I can drive across Massachusetts in an afternoon, so it seems like a small place. But the towns along the Connecticut River valley where I live are spaced at intervals of ten to fifteen miles, which is to say, a day's travel in the age of wagons and shoe leather. On foot, Massachusetts is big enough to hold wacky wayside tribes like the people of Northampton, isolated communities like Athol and Orange, and even some genuine wilderness in the Berkshires. When H.P. Lovecraft wrote his horror stories, a generation after Baum sent Dorothy to Oz, Massachusetts was still big enough to hold remote inbred towns full of dark secrets and inhuman races, and that was the age of fast trains and the Model T. Even in "realistic" Lovecraftian Massachusetts there was room enough for shoggoths and Deep Ones, so Oz can hold its share of Kalidahs.
What are Kalidahs? They're scary monsters in the forest. They have the bodies of bears, the heads of tigers, and big sharp claws. The Cowardly Lion gets a great moment when he's ready to fight off two Kalidahs even though they'll probably kill him. I wonder if there's an echo of the Kalidahs in the movie. Just before they encounter Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, the adventurers get a nifty little musical number about "Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!" And what are Kalidahs? Tigers and bears!
After escaping the Kalidahs and emerging from the forest, they run into the poppies. In the film, the poppies are created by West as a trap for Dorothy. In the book, they're just another random deadly peril in the lovely fairyland of Oz. The nonliving Scarecrow and Tin Woodman aren't affected, and have no trouble getting Dorothy and Toto out of the soporific poppy field -- it's the Lion they can't budge. Which is about what one would expect: it's kind of odd in the film that the two of them are so helpless. Presumably Ray Bolger and Jack Haley could move Judy Garland without much effort. They were pretty fit guys. But a lion "the size of a cart-horse" would give even Victor Mature trouble.
Instead of Glinda deux ex machinating them out of trouble, they get help from an unexpected source. The tender-hearted Tin Woodman casually beheads (!) a wildcat chasing a mouse, and the mouse turns out to be no ordinary plebian mouse but the Queen of all mice. She and her people haul the Lion out of the poppies.
That's going to need a lot of mice. Assuming the lion has a mass of 500 kilograms, and each mouse can pull a load equal to its own mass, which we'll take as maybe 10 grams. Ignoring the mass of the Tin Woodman's improvised gurney, and the strings used to connect the mice to it, that still means the Queen had to call in 50,000 mice! The image of a horde of mice saving a lion is an interesting premonition of the scene in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which a flock of mice swarm over the body of the lion Aslan, gnawing away his bonds as he lies dead on the Stone Table. Both tales echo the Aesop fable of the lion and the mouse. I wonder if Lewis ever read the Oz stories. He would have been about the right age, but I don't know if Baum's books were available in the U.K. before World War I.
Continued in Part 3!
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