Ozma uses her magic to summon Dorothy's Aunt Em and Uncle Henry right into her throne room. They are, understandably enough, completely freaked out by the sight of such an opulent room crowded with strange beings -- including a gigantic lion and tiger. Dorothy reassures them that they're perfectly safe before either one can drop dead of a heart attack.
I always found the arrival of Em and Henry to be a little awkward, and I think I've figured out why. In all their previous appearances, Dorothy's aged aunt and uncle are adults. They are reassuring symbols of normality. Dorothy enters the "realm of adventure" whenever she is separated from them, and undergoes perils and hardships, but when she is with them, all is well.
Emerald City completely flips that. Kansas is now the place of peril, and Em and Henry are the ones threatened with hardship, from which Dorothy can deliver them. But in the process, of course, Em and Henry are diminished. They become a pair of comic yokels -- Ma and Pa Kettle Visit the Emerald City.
I don't know if this was deliberate on Baum's part or not. It does reflect part of growing up. Dorothy is now effectively the adult in the family, despite being . . . however old she is. (By the calendar she should be fifteen or sixteen, but judging by Baum's descriptions and Neill's illustrations she's no more than ten. Moving her to Oz solves this particular problem, since from now on Dorothy will never age, no matter what year it is.) Her affectionate but slightly patronizing attitude toward her aunt and uncle is exactly that of a twentysomething toward his parents.
Of course, by bringing her entire family to Oz and abandoning Kansas as a place of final refuge, Dorothy has committed them to share the fate of Oz, and that fate is suddenly in danger.
The Nome King's able henchman General Guph turns out to be a very skillful diplomat. While the Nome King puts a thousand miners to work digging a tunnel under the Deadly Desert surrounding Oz, Guph ventures forth to recruit allies for the invasion.
The first people he visits are the Whimsies. It's hard to be fearsome when you are called "Whimsies" but these guys manage it. They are huge and strong, but have tiny heads, no bigger than doorknobs. Consequently they are pretty stupid. Ashamed of their chronic microcephaly, the Whimsies wear large, gaudy false heads made of pasteboard. In other words, they're a race of giant retarded psycho clowns. Fearsome enough?
The Chief of the Whimsies receives Guph fairly cordially, and hears out his proposal. Despite having a doorknob for a head, he is shrewd enough to ask what's in the whole invasion of Oz for his people. Guph has a ready answer: when the Nome King gets his Magic Belt back, he will use it to magically give the Whimsies real heads in proportion to their bodies, instead of the disturbing fakes. The Whimsies are ecstatic about this hope of a change, and agree.
Guph's next diplomatic coup is to bring the Growleywogs into his Axis of Evil. Growleywogs are even bigger than Whimsies, and their bodies are nothing but ropy muscle and bone, making them the strongest creatures in the world. More importantly, they aren't mindless at all -- they're clever and sadistic. Guph offers them twenty thousand Oz people as slaves once the kingdom is conquered, and the Growleywogs imprison him while they discuss the offer. The jailer sticks pins in the General and pulls out his beard hairs with tweezers to pass the time.
The Growleywogs are shrewd enough to realize that if the Nomes can't conquer Oz without their help, that means that presumably the Growleywogs are also powerful enough to conquer the Nomes, too. So the Grand Gallipoot of the Growleywogs decides to accept Guph's offer of alliance -- but plans to double-cross the Nomes and take them as slaves, too. Guph is making some pretty Faustian bargains here, and the worst is yet to come.
Given the benefit of hindsight, it's tempting to wonder if Baum was satirizing the burgeoning system of international alliances which was dividing Europe into two hostile camps. Back in 1882 Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy formed the Triple Alliance, uniting the center of Europe in a powerful mutual-defense pact. In response, Russia and France formed an anti-German alliance in 1892, and in 1904 and 1907 the United Kingdom established formal treaties of alliance with both of them, bringing three of Europe's greatest powers into a "Triple Entente." A variety of bilateral agreements gradually brought most of the the world's middleweight powers into the system on one side or another. The chief holdout was the United States.
Was Baum satirizing the way the Europeans were feverishly trying to line up allies against each other? Or was he subtly warning that America's isolation might not protect her forever -- that the Atlantic and Pacific weren't any better protection than Oz's Deadly Desert against a determined league of foreign foes?
The Emerald City of Oz can be seen as a slightly unconventional entry in what was a thriving literary sub-genre in the first decade of the 20th Century: the genre of "invasion literature." Invasion stories were more common in Great Britain than in America, but as international tensions rose every country saw the publication of novels depicting villainous foreigners overrunning the beloved homeland. Most of them have vanished into obscurity, but another weird outlier has gone on to classic status: H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, which became a taproot of the entire science fiction genre.
Next time: things get decidedly more strange, both within and beyond Oz.
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