At the end of his previous novel, The Emerald City of Oz, L. Frank Baum brought the series to what he thought was its end. Threatened by the possibility of discovery by aeronauts, the kingdom of Oz had been cut off from the rest of the world by a powerful magic spell, and there could be no more bulletins from Dorothy to the Royal Historian of Oz.
Three years later, the Royal Historian needed money. Necessity being the mother of invention, Mr. Baum came up with the brilliant rationalization that even if Oz was sealed off from the rest of the world, he might still be able to communicate via wireless. (Since the Wonderful Wizard of Oz has already established an electrical power system in Oz, there'd be no trouble in putting up a transmitting tower in the Emerald City, and Baum informs us that the Shaggy Man is a skilled Morse operator.)
All of this handwaving seems completely unnecessary to me. I don't think many of Baum's readers actually believed he was spending his nights sitting at the giant Marconi station on Cape Cod, feverishly transcribing the news from Oz as a wireless operator tuned in on the Shaggy Man's Morse Code transmissions. They knew it was fiction.
With his seventh novel, Baum abandons the formula that had served him so well for all but one of the preceding six. Now that travel between Oz and the outside world is impossible, he can't have some kid from a prairie state just drop in. Instead, Patchwork Girl -- like the second book, The Land of Oz -- is entirely contained within Oz itself. The American characters hardly show up at all.
Our story begins in an extremely remote corner of the Munchkin sector of Oz, where a boy named Ojo the Unlucky and his laconic uncle Unc Nunkie live in extreme poverty. Their only source of food is a bread tree, and that isn't bearing much any more. Ojo's circumstances are very much like Dorothy's back before her adventures began -- orphan, living with uncle, dirt-poor.
With nothing left to eat, Ojo and Unc Nunkie leave their remote home and head off to impose themselves on their nearest neighbors: Dr. Pipt and his wife Margolotte. Dr. Pipt is a Crooked Magician, and he must be something special because he rates Capitalization. After a meal with Margolotte, Ojo and his uncle look in on Dr. Pipt himself in his workshop. Pipt is fantastically busy making the amazing Powder of Life.
Anyone who remembers The Marvellous Land of Oz may recall that the witch Mombi acquired her Powder of Life from a Crooked Magician, and now, five books later, we finally meet him in person. He isn't crooked in the criminal sense, he's just deformed. Turns out he's also pretty gullible, because apparently Mombi traded him a bogus Powder of Perpetual Youth for his previous run of the Powder of Life.
He's making this batch of Powder so that Margolotte can animate the Patchwork Girl she has made -- a girl sewn of cloth scraps and stuffed with cotton, with yarn for hair and buttons for eyes. Margolotte wants the girl brought to life so she can be a servant and do all the housework, and so she doesn't want to put too much brains into the girl's cotton-stuffed head. Just obedience, amiability, and truthfulness.
But while everyone is distracted by Dr. Pipt finally completing the Powder of Life after six years of labor, Ojo takes the opportunity to dump a whole lot of other powdered intellectual qualities into the Patchwork Girl's head: cleverness, judgement, courage, ingenuity, learning, poesy, and self-reliance.
It almost seems like Mr. Baum is trying to send us a message here: a girl needs more than servile virtues. His mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage was a leading suffragette of the time, and in his newspaper days Baum had written in favor of votes for women. Maybe in Patchwork Girl he was trying to make up for his lampoon of the women's movement in Land of Oz.
The Powder of Life has to cool overnight, and to while away the time Dr. Pipt brags about some of his other magical marvels, including the Liquid of Petrification, which turns anything it touches into stone.
We're also introduced to one of Dr. Pipt's less successful creations: Bungle the Glass Cat. She's a cat made of glass, animated by the Powder of Life. She's entirely glass, except for some pink marbles which serve as brains, and a ruby which serves as her heart. Because she doesn't need to eat (being made of glass) and has a cold jewel for a heart, Bungle is vain, selfish, and lazy. In short, she acts just like a live cat, except that she also spends a lot of time mouthing off to Dr. Pipt.
In the morning, to the accompaniment of some music from Dr. Pipt's phonograph, the great experiment goes ahead: Pipt pours the Powder of Life onto the Patchwork Girl. Sadly there's no Jacob's Ladder or Tesla coil buzzing away in the background, and Dr. Pipt resists the urge to shout "She's alive!" but the Powder does its work and the Patchwork Girl springs to life.
In fact, she's a little too lively: her arm jerks as soon as the Powder is applied, causing Unc Nunkie and Margolotte to flinch back and knock the Liquid of Petrification off the shelf onto them both. The two of them are instantly turned to stone!
Worse yet, all the remaining Powder of Life has been spilled on the phonograph, so that poor Dr. Pipt has an animated record player and a live Patchwork Girl, but his wife and closest neighbor are stuck as statues.
Making a new batch of Powder of Life will take the Crooked Magician another six years of constant work, but he does know of a compound which will reverse the effects of the Liquid of Petrification, and that takes considerably less time to make. However, the antidote does need several hard-to-find ingredients: a six-leaved clover from the fields around the Emerald City, the left wing of a yellow butterfly from Winkie Country, a gill of water from a dark well (which must never have been touched by light), three hairs from the tip of a Woozy's tail, and a drop of oil from a live man's body.
Dr. Pipt assigns the task of gathering the ingredients to Ojo the Unlucky. Ojo can scour Oz for them while the Crooked Magician gets started on a new batch of the Powder of Life. He sends the Patchwork Girl along with Ojo, and the Glass Cat insists on joining them.
And so our three adventurers set out on their quest while the magician heaves a big sigh and starts another six-year course of work.
I love the ozblogging! I remember reading patchwork Girl and thinking "oh, this will go poorly" when the oil of petrification was introduced.
Posted by: Brian Rogers | 03/05/2013 at 06:33 AM