The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (3 page)

The difficulty is not always cognitive. The emotional weather in Andersen, Carroll, and Barrie can be dark, wild, and off-putting. Irony is a cognitive threshold for all readers; for children it can be disabling or off-limits. (Try being sarcastic with even the brightest of five-year-olds and he or she may never forgive you.) Irony is a kind of negative exemplification, where you listen to one thing and hear it twice; it is as though the text were singing in harmony with its own implications. Most of life for most children must come with a script, but irony assumes that you already have one; and in fairy tales, which have traditionally been children’s earliest scripted plays, the irony is either structural or nonexistent. But when the Little Mermaid’s grandmother tells her that the only way that she can gain a human soul would be for the prince “to love you so much that you were more to him than his father or mother,” only those who get the allusion to the marriage ceremony will appreciate the bitter-sweet irony. Tinker Bell’s mantraic response of “silly ass” in response to Peter’s repeated failure to see that her feelings for him are romantic may inspire a ten-year-old’s smile but probably not her recognition. For better or worse, confusion like this never troubles readers of the Oz books, where the prevailing emotional weather is optimistic and the tonalities nearly irony free.

Nearly, but not completely. Frank Baum, who was crazy about puns, filled the book with soft-pedaled double entendres—which, for many of us, is Irony 101. Removing the Scarecrow’s head in chapter XVI, the Wizard empties the straw and fills the head “with a measure of bran, which he mixed with a great many pins and needles,” and then announces, “Hereafter you will be a great man, for I have given you a lot of bran-new brains” (p. 160). A moment later the Lion says of the pins and needles, “That is proof that he is sharp” (p. 160). Comparing the Tin Woodman to the Scarecrow, Glinda says to the former, “You are really brighter than he is—when you are well polished” (p. 208). Some of Baum’s puns are subtler, but not by much, such as the Tin Woodman’s declaration in chapter XV that he will “bear all [his] unhappiness without a murmur” (p. 155), which is exactly what you would expect of a character with no heartbeat. Other wordplays are contextual: If you were to ask the brainless Scarecrow the question usually posed to fools—“Were you born yesterday?”—he would have to say yes, because, as he relates in chapter III, he actually
was
born yesterday.

Baum’s novel is also a staging area for a form of childproof character irony called the irony of self-betrayal, a dramatic or situational irony that is both childproof and child safe.
¹³
The obvious example is the brainless Scarecrow’s habit of coming up with good ideas. It is he who proposes (in chapter VII, p. 68) the order in which the friends must leap the first chasm, each mounted on the Lion’s back. When the Lion asks, “Who will go first?” the Scarecrow explains his reply—“I will”—in splendidly rational terms: “If you found that you could not jump over the gulf, Dorothy would be killed, or the Tin Woodman badly dented on the rocks below. But if I am on your back it will not matter so much, for the fall would not hurt me at all.” Moments later, after directing the Tin Woodman to chop down a tree in order to make a bridge across the second chasm so they can escape the pursuing Kalidahs, the Lion remarks, “One would almost suspect you had brains in your head, instead of straw” (p. 70). Immediately afterward, the Scarecrow again figures out how to send the marauding Kalidahs crashing into the gulf (p. 70) and asks the Queen of the field mice to enlist the aid of her subjects in dragging the Lion from the poppy field (p. 87).

One of the funniest sites for self-contradiction is the heartless Tin Woodman, who is constantly bursting into “tears of sorrow and regret” over this or that violation of the natural order, such as his accidental squashing of a beetle in chapter VI:

The contradictions pile up: The brainless come up with the braini est ideas, the heartless are supersensitive, and the cowardly admit, courageously, to being a coward (and then perform feats of physical daring). The fact that the absence of a heart actually produces something more profound—intense regard for everything that moves—is completely lost on the Woodman, just as the Scarecrow is clueless when it comes to knowing the real meaning of having brains. All three companions are alike in assuming a transparent relationship between signs and their meanings—brains, heart, and courage—and this, of course, is the book’s running joke: All three already possess what they go looking for. Sheldon Cashdan has supplied probably the best short description of the novel in noting how it “focuses on perceived shortcoming in the self as opposed to excesses.”
¹⁴
The operative word there is
perceived.
The thematic center of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, like that of any discovery narrative or rite of passage, is a simple message: Accept yourself for what you are.

The differences between Dorothy and her overseas cousins aside, her story, like Wendy’s and Alice’s, is a version of the heroic quest, from Gilgamesh through Odysseus and Aeneas to Huck Finn, Gully Foyle (the protagonist of Alfred Bester’s science-fiction novel
The Stars My Destination
), and Luke Skywalker.
¹⁵
The Wizard of Oz
is an odyssey redacted for children and an elaboration of mi croquests like “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Little Mermaid.” Perry Nodelman has described these as “home-away-home” stories, child-sized versions of Northrop Frye’s Monomyth.
¹⁶
It is the same story that Western culture has in general outline been telling itself for millennia: Self-knowledge requires physical and emotional self-testing, heroes are often reluctant to answer the call, and at the center of the journey is an encounter with profound truths that connect us with our pasts. In more senses than one, Dorothy’s adventure fits the description, from her accidental landing in Oz to her reluctant acceptance of her power to her recognition, standing in the Wizard’s hall, that not even the lovely Emerald City of Oz can top gray Kansas. Baum’s story is a child’s meditation on Homer’s second great theme,
nostalgia
, and, like Odysseus, whose name means “born for trouble,” his protagonist has a last name (Gale) that is a subtle predictor of the event, a tornadic windstorm, that determines her destiny.
¹⁷
Alison Lurie has pointed out how women tend to occupy the dominant roles in all the Oz books, another of its similarities, accidental or not, to Homer’s
Odyssey
, also dominated by women and traditionally called our great domestic epic.
¹⁸

While the imaginative world of Oz bears a family resemblance to whole libraries of fantasy and adventure, it is hard to identify Baum’s principal influences. He so artfully sublimates his sources they seem sui generis, reminders of Eliot’s remark that bad writers borrow and good writers steal. Some, like the kind Stork, are elements that appear in all children’s literature, which features lots of talking animals—the noteworthy exception being Toto, who exemplifies that conundrum of children’s literature, the Goofy/Pluto Quandary—that is, why some animals speak and others do not, why Goofy has full command of the language and Pluto, Mickey’s dog, can only bark.
¹⁹
Some elements of suggestive iconographic value, such as the Wicked Witch’s dread of water or the fact that her blood has all dried up, seem easily parsed. Others are less certain. The mark on Dorothy’s forehead left by the Good Witch of the North is talismanic, like Achilles’ unprotected heel or the more contemporary inheritor of the same idea, the lightning-bolt scar on Harry Potter’s brow. Does it also point to the mark made by offended deity to protect Cain from harm and to perpetuate his torment? When Odysseus visits Hell in book 11 of the
Odyssey
, the reason is to get directions home from Tiresias, and, similarly, Dorothy undertakes the trip to the Emerald City to ask the Wizard how to get back to Kansas. Yet Oz is no more Hades than Hades Oz. The bar of iron that the Witch places in the middle of her kitchen floor to trip up Dorothy half works—Dorothy trips and loses one of her Silver Shoes—but also inverts tradition: Bar iron is usually associated with warding off demons, not innocent little girls. The witch has a single cyclopean eye that announces a disturbing union of monstrosity and omniscience (and to some may point to Freemasonry’s single eye that appears on U.S. currency). In Greek myth, Hermes wears a cap of wings, and in Baum’s Oz Dorothy has a Golden Cap. The Winged Monkeys seem related to neutral instrumentalities of evil authority like the Harpies or Wagner’s Valkyrie, but neither of these antecedents is as reasonable or eloquent as Baum’s equivalents.
²⁰
The apportionment of real estate in Oz is impressive, with the witches governing regions designated by the four cardinal points. But why did Baum assign positive moral values to north and south and negative to east and west—a literary fact, or accident, that Littlefield would use sixty-four years later when he advanced his famous reading of the book as a political allegory?
²¹

Or, again, take those Silver Shoes. They seem to reach back to the Cinderella story but in a not entirely helpful way. Dorothy is not Cinderella—and not only because she is of less than marrying age. Dorothy’s home life is comfortable and happy; moreover, all Cinderellas, male or female, are sponsored by some natural agency that functions as a parent surrogate—a fairy godmother, a Mother Holle, the spectral grandmother of the Little Match Girl, or in derivatives like
Flashdance
or
Rocky
, as the protagonist’s aging female dance instructor or his grouchy fight trainer. Every Cinderella is special in the first place, a member of a natural aristocracy who has gone unrecognized by dog-and-cat humanity until Nature intervenes and teaches the world to see beauty with Nature’s eyes. This is children’s literature’s own law of natural selection, which states that no naturally gifted child must ever be forced to suffer for very long either social exploitation, social invisibility, or familial mar ginality. The Cinderella scenario hardly applies to Dorothy, who is special only
after
she is picked up and set down in Oz. She has a happy home, is only technically “homeless” while in Oz, and has two adoptive parents who love her. She is, moreover, a typical little girl from Kansas whose most precious gift is that she knows it. Her confinement in the castle of the Wicked Witch seems an analogue to Cinderella’s situation, but Dorothy does little work and spends part of her time in bitter tears. Each invocation of possible precedent only introduces more alienating distance. Scattered throughout the novel there are many such symbols that seem interpretive dead ends—the fact that white is the witch color, for instance, which inverts the anticipated hierarchy of color-coded values, or that, as we learn in chapter XII, the witch is afraid of the dark. The same is true of so many story elements that their appearances, rather than being iterations of some ancient property of fantastic literature, are really opportunities for Baum to empty them and then fill them with his own American content. Whence the continuing and probably endless parade of allegorical readings of the novel, from Henry Littlefield’s to Herblock’s famous 1939 cartoon, in which Hitler is cast as the Wicked Witch of the West and Mussolini one of the Flying Monkeys. Baum approached his sources like someone on a shopping spree rather than one conducting a calculated raid.

Perhaps this whimsicality also explains why certain apparently pregnant details lead nowhere, such as the man in the small house Dorothy and her companions stop at on the way to the Emerald City, who “had hurt his leg, and was lying on the couch in a corner” (pp. 94-95), the “seven passages and three flights of steps” (pp.104-105) through which Dorothy is led on the way to her room in the Palace, or the fact that the Wizard charges them to come to his Throne Room “at four minutes after nine o’clock” in the morning (p. 148). Was Baum preparing some role for the character with the bad leg that he either forgot about or failed to find a place for? Was one of his children, perhaps, born at 9:04 A.M.? Or are these details simply forgivable inconsistencies, like the behavior of the Tin Woodman, who is moved to tears when he accidentally steps on a bug yet slays a wildcat and forty wolves, or that Dorothy is suddenly found to be wearing a whistle “that she had always carried about her neck since the Queen of the Mice had given it to her” (p. 140), when, in fact, this never happened?

Baum’s use of colors is particularly intriguing. There were initially four witches, and by the end of chapter III only one bad one, the Witch of the West, is left. (Should we make anything of the fact that by her very arrival in Oz Dorothy instantly tips the balance in favor of the good and dresses in a frock of white, the witch color, and blue?) Green, the color of the Emerald City, has a persistently ambiguous value in literature, a two-headed semantic arrow that points in opposite or divergent directions. While it gestures to nature and to the appealing presence of natural forces, like nature itself it can possess a malign, counter-Wordsworthian aspect. In
Gawain and the Green Knight,
for instance, green is assigned to a figure who mingles both beauty and monstrosity, virtue and cruelty; in
The Great Gatsby
, green is the color of the inspirational light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock and of the “death car” that kills Myrtle Wilson. But what does Baum’s selection of green represent?
²²
The same is true of blue, the Munchkin’s “favorite” color and the one “most frequently seen,” according to Biedermann, “as a symbol for things of the spirit and the intellect”—from the Virgin Mary’s mantle in stained glass windows to Veronica Sawyer’s outfits in Michael Lehmann’s
Heathers
(1989).
²³
Does Dorothy’s progression from a blue-dominated land to a “green” destination make some significant commentary on her journey, or is the relationship an accidental correlation? Leading the inexplicables is the name
Oz
itself.
²⁴
Baum, who as Hearn says was not the most careful writer, clearly had fun with his material—extemporizing from sources that may in the long run have been purely and hopelessly autobio graphical.