The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (2 page)

The First American
Children’s Book

The first thing that you notice is what Dorothy notices: Kansas is gray.

Frank Baum was not the first to give Americans an American landscape in a children’s book. Twain had done it in
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876) and even more radically in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884), and Alcott had led out a suite of American pre-teens who grow into young adulthood with the March girls. But Twain and Alcott were writing juvenile books for a more mature audience. This book is Dorothy’s, and Dorothy is a child, in her own words, “a helpless girl” and clearly if indefinably younger than any host of a child’s narrative that Americans had encountered before 1900. We see Dorothy’s world through Dorothy’s eyes, a world constructed and policed, farmed and furnished by adults but modulated by a prose style that is childlike without being childish. In Dorothy, Baum gave America the first truly American
child
protagonist.
¹

Unlike the only two competing contemporary versions of pre teen female protagonists, Lewis Carroll’s Alice and J. M. Barrie’s Wendy (both ten-year-old girls), Baum put Dorothy in a book that features none of the potential cognitive difficulties that still tend to drive children (and some adults) away from the texts of
Alice in Wonderland
and
Peter Pan
. Though he admired
Alice in Wonderland
(1865), he also found it “rambling and incoherent,” a judgment echoed by subsequent critics, and apparently refused Carroll’s example of a highly internalized and ironic vision of a child’s world.
²
The openings alone reveal the vast differences between these visions of childhood:

There really is no “exterior” here because the author is taking advantage of the potential for exploiting a characteristic of children’s narrative, the tendency to drift between literary and social space. It is all happening “in her own mind”—there are at least three such references in the opening paragraph—and in the syntactic environment, where the reader’s attention is shunted like a Ping-Pong ball through bits of interior monologue (“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”) and gates of parentheses, which suggest a mind that is capable of reflecting on itself, resulting in the severely hypotactic style we associate with high-octane Victorian satire, while the narrative elides interior and exterior and, by the third paragraph, is
in
Wonderland.

Baum also understood the central dilemma of any writer entering the genre—that children lend their name to the genre and nothing else—and dedicated himself to creating a thoroughly exteriorized vision of a child who finds herself in trouble. In that consists the decisive difference between Dorothy and her nearest British and European counterparts. Alice’s rabbit hole is not only a corridor to Wonderland but a passage into the unconscious; the result is a serially distorted view of a world she is not all that anxious to get back to as well as a mockery of ordered thought and behavior with no self-enunciating moral or logical center. Scholars love
Alice in Wonderland
because there is so much space for interpretive intervention; but scholarship, and Freud especially, has no place to stand in Oz and very little to say to Dorothy or about her journey. Oz is a lot of things—colorful, dangerous, silly—but no means as obsessively deranged or as “morally unintelligible” as Wonderland.
³
The world of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
is optimistic, not sarcastically aloof or, as it so often is in Barrie’s
Peter Pan
(1904), archly satirical. Wonderland is a psychic, not a physical torment; Neverland is a theme park where the dominant modality is nostalgia. But Oz is a balloon ride away. MGM’s decision to transform Dorothy into a trauma victim and Oz into a mental state blurs the essential difference between these two radically opposed visions of fairy tale and, possibly deliberately, turns Dorothy into an American Alice and a gracefully nuanced American romance into a psychological allegory. Given Hollywood’s obsession with total cinematic disclosure and its prime directive that no fact must ever go unexplained, you get the 1939 film—a work of genius, but not of Baum’s genius.
⁴

So for readers who come to the novel after having grown up with the movie, the biggest shock is to find in the novel none of the film’s comforting, gap-filling backstory. Some of the cinematic revisions, such as the snowstorm that wakes the sleepers in the poppy field and that replaces their rescue by the Queen of the Mice in chapter IX, were cost-efficient alternatives to special effects that might have proven impossible or inadequate to the illusion.
⁵
The change from Silver Shoes to Ruby Slippers in the 1939 movie, as most people know, was dictated by technical considerations (red showed up more vividly on the film stock of the period than silver); and American culture would be poorer without some of its memorable dialogue. But the principal changes are in the overall characterization and in retrospect seem less defensible. In the book Uncle Henry and Auntie Em never really emerge from the background and appear together only in chapter I, Auntie Em appearing alone in the very brief closing chapter. The film, however, shows them as loveable (if two-toned) representatives of a loveable Kansas home. Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch turns out to be one more ripple in Dorothy’s concussed subconscious and the Kansas prototype of the Wicked Witch of the West, who even has a
name
—Almira Gulch. Auntie Em is hardly the “thin and gaunt,” childless old woman whose eyes had lost their sparkle and were as gray as Kansas. She is an all-American original with a tongue and a personality to match. “Almira Gulch,” she says on hearing of Almira’s plan to destroy Toto, “just because you own half the county doesn’t mean you have the power to run the rest of us!” Perhaps the biggest change is in Dorothy herself, who is actually a feistier child in the novel than on film. Consider the witch’s death. The film stages the event as an accident—Dorothy aims a bucket of water at the burning Scarecrow and douses the witch instead. But the novel makes it no accident. The witch tricks Dorothy and obtains one of her Silver Shoes. Dorothy gets “so very angry that she picked up the bucket of water that stood near and dashed it over the Witch.” Judy Garland’s Dorothy is tearfully apologetic; Baum’s is outspoken and “angry.”
⁶

The screenwriters (Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf ) also expanded the roles of the three companions and turned the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Lion into metamor phosed versions of farmhands named Hunk, Hickory, and Zeke. Professor Marvel (Frank Morgan), the genial fraud who watches Dorothy head off as the tornado prepares to descend, reenters her dream vision as the Wizard (as well as, once in the City of Oz, the doorman of the Emerald City, a cabdriver, and the Wizard’s guard). These were more than touches of simple psychological realism. Like the technical stroke to shift to color from black and white when Dorothy arrives in Munchkin Land and the suddenly indispensable musical score, these permanent contributions to the Oz mythology are also improvisations that may not necessarily constitute improvements.
⁷
They blur the clarity of the original, superimposing a second relational network on a clearer original. Dorothy and her companions each lack something and venture to the Emerald City to request it of the Wizard to find it, but in the novel neither the companions nor their deficiencies have reciprocal counterparts in the “real” world of Kansas. Oz is no Purgatory or compensatory educational experience, and it is definitely no metaphor for unconsciousness. Yet the film persuades the audience of a nearly allegorical symmetry between Kansas and Oz and raises unique questions. Is this Dorothy’s way of disclosing in dream truths too dangerous or painful to bear while awake? Are the three companions, like the three beasts who temporarily block Dante’s entrance to Hell, reflections of flaws in her personality? We don’t really know. The movie supplies teasing closures to questions that only it raises. The screenwriters’ brilliant adaptation—whether you find it welcome or not—turns each character into a symbolic referent, a point on a carefully plotted postcyclonic rainbow that begins and ends in Kansas. As a result, the film displaces emphasis from fantasy to psychology and makes several “unforgivable” changes.
⁸
Whatever its justification in commercial or technical terms, the film forces its audience to measure the distance between Kansas and Oz in psychic, not imaginative, terms; it tidies up certain loose ends, such as the origins of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, each of whose histories is explained in the book, by eliminating the need for explanations. Everything that occurs in the end occurs in Dorothy’s mind.

This is an essential point: Baum’s Oz, like the Elysian Fields in Greek mythology or the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel,” is a place you can get to from here. There is no complicated prospectus, more fit for adults than children, of dream projections of waking originals. The text has a serene confidence in its own imaginative conditions that, along with its disquietingly simple style, are its lasting strengths. For those raised on the movie, what is “missing” is surface complexity, density of characterization, and witty dialogue. Baum’s prose is clear and childlike and represents an uncompromising attention to plot rather than style, to events over character. It’s almost as if children’s literature had found in Baum its own Homer, a writer whose straightforward and occasionally pedestrian style is the determined outcome of the oddness of the story he has to tell. You may miss the character overlays of the film and its calculated verbal ironies, derivative of the more sophisticated children’s books. You may long for the
closure
you feel when you see Ray Bolger behind the Scarecrow’s outlines or hear the Wizard in Professor Marvel’s voice.
⁹
On the other hand, the novel dispensed with
Wonderland
-ish exits such as Dorothy’s coming to at the end or the final tableau where the ensemble, including Professor Marvel, gathers around her bed like a Broadway cast taking a second bow. While the last person to consult in matters of intention is the author, it’s noteworthy that Baum’s stated purpose was to “please children of today” with “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out” (p. 3). Simplicity, in other words, was his goal, not stylistic flash or psychological nuance.

For students of popular literature, one of the least appealing features of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
and its thirteen sequels may be its flat-affect style and its drifting meanings.
Alice in Wonderland
has been the subject of dissertations and a Norton Critical Edition.
¹⁰
Barrie’s
Peter Pan
, not yet a Norton, was the subject of a famous and still-resonant critical attack; and Barrie, like Carroll/Dodgson, is still a person of intense biographical interest, much of it directed at his suspiciously homoerotic attachment to the Davies boys.
¹¹
Andersen and the Brothers Grimm have attracted as many footnotes as readers. By contrast
The Wizard of Oz
, always clear sailing for children, is the horse latitudes for scholars, with its author’s intentions having drained away into the simple medium of his narrative and its oddities petrified into a system of connections that, as Edith Hamilton remarked of Greek myth, is comprehensive but never coherent. Its very simplicity, in fact, has paradoxically been a barrier to using it in education.
¹²
Yet Dorothy’s book remains nonetheless a book Dorothy herself would likely have been able to read—and probably on her own. Generations of readers struggle with Andersen’s moral inflexibility and his tendency to punish his female protagonists; they find the Grimm’s Fairy Tales as annoyingly elliptical as they find Andersen overwrought; and in both notice a fascination with acts of cruelty and violence.
Alice in Wonderland
, though not violent, is an intensely linguistic construct of wacky wordplay, allusion, and parody that features but really does not include the child. Wendy, like Alice, is ten, but what ten-year-old will understand what
Peter Pan
’s obnoxious narrator is alluding to when he compares Captain Hook to “the Sea-Cook”—or Long John Silver of
Treasure Island
? To get an allusion one must have read as much as the author. The allusive range of any text—whether a children’s book or Eliot’s
The Waste Land
—is an unspoken measure and reflection of the author’s education and the core curriculum of cultural expectations and values that inform it. More than one reader has asked himself—or his parents—whether protagonists like Alice or Wendy would be able to read the books they are in. Who asks that question about
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
?