The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Signet Classics) - L. Frank Baum [1]
No one would argue that the 1939 film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s mythopoeic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz did anything except more firmly codify what had already become an American classic. In cultures worldwide, Dorothy quickly became a recognizable heroine, a little girl known for her honesty, her resilience, and her fierce loyalty to her friends—and to her little dog, too.
Oz was the bestselling children’s book of 1900, having achieved almost instant fame and guaranteeing its forty-three-year-old author economic security. A review in The New York Times declared that the book had “a bright and joyous atmosphere” and cheered it for “not dwell[ing] upon killing and deeds of violence.” This last accolade could have been drawn from Baum’s own “Introduction to the Original Edition” of the book where he exclaims that “the time has come for a series of newer ‘wonder tales’ in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and bloodcurdling incident devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale” (p. xix).
What Baum wanted was to create the “modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out” (p. xx). (For those who protest that they have been plagued by nightmares of Winged Monkeys’ pursuit, I would advise a rereading of the passages where Baum makes clear that the Winged Monkeys are by nature “careless and happy and full of fun,” but obliged to work—as more or less hired help—by the owner of a magic cap; they help Dorothy on occasion, and indeed it is only by threatening to use them again that Dorothy forces the Wizard to honor his promises [pp. 144, 151]). Baum accomplished his goal in writing the new century’s first “modernized fairy tale”—and more.
What Baum also invented, as many critics have commented, is the first genuinely and decidedly American fairy tale. Dorothy’s viewpoint in the novel (as opposed to the film) is unwaveringly up-beat and optimistic; lacking the heavy sentimentality of the film’s depiction of her character, Dorothy even bids her friends in Oz good-bye with equanimity: “I am glad I was of use to these good friends. But now that each of them has had what he most desired ... I think I should like to go back to Kansas” (p. 216).
Dorothy believes that armed with the camaraderie of good friends, a reasonable set of directions, and a willingness to face trouble head-on, a person can get what she wants in life. She is the quintessential American traveler. Active rather than passive, engaging rather than aloof, and resilient rather than demure, Dorothy—as Baum created her, not as Hollywood reinvented her—would most accurately be classified as a female hero rather than a traditional heroine. Dorothy’s independence and ingenuity are not surprising, given Baum’s politics and those of his family. Married to the daughter of the one of most prominent campaigners for women’s rights of her day, Baum himself was also an advocate of suffrage. He was unlikely to sculpt his central female character as anything but hardy, insightful, and free. In several of the fourteen later novels Baum set in Oz, female rulers prevail. (Not that women are always perfect: even in this first Oz novel, the story of the strong but humorless Gayelette offers a glimpse of the complexities of feminine leadership, including the difficulty of finding a man to love because “all the men were much too stupid and ugly to mate with one so beautiful and wise” [p. 145].)
I want to suggest that Dorothy can also be seen as a version of one of the first prominent, less-than-perfect female figures: Eve. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is, in fact, the story of what happens when you send Eve back into the garden.
Unlike Eve, of course, Dorothy retains her innocence. It can be argued that Dorothy’s heroism depends on the fact that she is shameless (and so once again unlike Eve,