We're going to summarize a lot here, because there's a long boring section between the time Our Heroes get into Oz and their arrival at the Emerald City. Most of it is taken up with introductions. Dorothy introduces her companions to Tiktok and Billina, who have come to welcome them. Then she introduces everyone to the Tin Woodman at his tin castle.
There is a nice bit in the illustrations: the Tin Woodman has (tin) statues of all his friends and companions in the castle gardens, and J.R. Neill cleverly draws the statues as being in the style of the original W.W. Denslow pictures from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He also very clearly draws Toto looking disparagingly at his earlier incarnation.
With the Tin Woodman now part of the growing party, they head for the Emerald City. Along the way they stop off to visit Jack Pumpkinhead, who lives in a house made from an enormous hollowed-out pumpkin. And again there's something very interesting in the illustration: Neill has drawn what are obviously electric power lines leading to Jack's pumpkin house! There's no mistaking: the wires end at ceramic insulators and everything.
Consider what this implies: someone (and I'd bet it's the Wizard) has built a generating plant in the Emerald City. Oz is electrified! In an earlier essay I mentioned the complete harmony of fantasy and technology in the Oz books, and this is another example. No pseudo-medieval fairyland here! Everything's up to date in the Emerald City.
There's also a weirdly grim little scene outside Jack's house -- the first thing Dorothy and Co. encounter is a row of gravestones, each marking the spot where Jack has buried one of his spoiled pumpkin heads. Interestingly, as with Princess Langwidere in Ozma of Oz, Jack's heads have different personalities. Some are cleverer than others, for instance. In a nice nod to continuity, all of Jack's replacement heads are carved for him by Ozma, who of course was his original creator back when she was a boy named Tip.
Now since Oz is a fairyland where no one ever dies, this suggests that anyone, not just magically-animated pumpkinhead men, can switch body parts if they feel like it. Since personal identity is not bound up with one's brain, Dorothy could theoretically lop off her own head and tie on the Scarecrow's highly intelligent one, or one of Jack Pumpkinhead's pumpkins. She could trade heads with the Wizard or General Jinjur. Bodies in Oz seem to be like computer game avatars -- however much you alter them, the essential "you" is unchanged.
More introductions: Cowardly Lion and Hungry Tiger, and finally the whole crew enter the Emerald City, where Dorothy has to introduce everyone to everyone else. This becomes a rather irritating feature of Oz books from here on out: whenever a new character arrives in the land, Baum can go on for pages and pages of introductions. Thankfully, his cast eventually gets so large he has to stop and just take it as given that if you've read this far into the series you know who everyone is.
The Shaggy Man is pleased to learn that there is no money in Oz, which means the people there enjoy their labors and never become proud or haughty. This is another change from the days of the Wizard, when it was explicitly stated that in the Emerald City one had to pay for everything. Of course, that was before the place was run by a fairy princess with magical powers.
There's a more plausible reason why nobody uses money in Oz: it's simply not practical. Everything in the whole kingdom is covered in gold or encrusted in jewels. Even simple household items would be worth J.P.Morgan's fortune in the outside world. If you're using gold and emerald as building materials, their value as money must be about on a par with asphalt. This means one would need tons of the stuff to make even ordinary purchases. They could use paper money, I hear someone thinking. Yes, but keep in mind that in Baum's day -- and indeed right up to the 1960s -- paper money was simply a convenient token representing "real" gold in a vault somewhere. So paper money in Oz would be absurdly inflated in value because of the abundance of gold and other precious things. Instead the Ozites have what amounts to a command economy, run by the fiat of their lovely Girl Ruler. The system works because it is under the command of a benevolent magical princess instead of, say, one of the Kim family of Pyongyang.
Finally in Chapter 20 Ozma turns up and reveals why she has brought Dorothy to Oz: it's Ozma's birthday and she's having a party! Now given that Ozma has the use of Dorothy's Magic Belt she could have just wished her there in an instant, but apparently Ozma was having a Tip moment and felt like jerking her friend around a little.
His dunk in the Truth Pond has affected the Shaggy Man. He's been trying to keep silent, but now he must admit that he lied to Dorothy when they first met. It turns out the story about avoiding Butterfield because someone there might give him money was a hoax. His real reason was that he stole the Love Magnet from a girl there.
Consider the implications! Until now there's been a strict (well, mostly strict) division between "fairy countries" like Oz, where magic works, and "civilized countries" like Kansas, where it doesn't. But apparently in Butterfield, KS, there was a young woman with a Love Magnet. If the Love Magnet could work there, what about other magical items? What about, say, Dorothy's Magic Belt? Ozma's been keeping it for her because she assures Dorothy that it wouldn't function outside of the Oz Continuum. But this now turns out to be less than true. Perhaps the Lovely Girl Ruler had other reasons for wanting to keep her lovely girlish hands on a device of apparently limitless magical power. But nobody thinks of this. Instead they decide that since the Shaggy Man doesn't need the Love Magnet, they'll hang it over the gate of the Emerald City to ensure that all visitors have the right attitude. Evidently hanging around with Glinda has taught Ozma a thing or two.
Next time: the big party!
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