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Maybe Dorothy doesn’t “feel so bad as you might think” because the world she left behind was not precisely paradisiacal:

nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else. (p. 2)

When Dorothy lands in Oz, however, the first things she sees are “stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies” (p. 10). Oz is a prelapsarian place if there ever was one.

She is welcomed into the land of the Munchkins because of her unwitting deed: “We are so grateful to you for having killed the Wicked Witch of the East, and for setting our people free from bondage” (p. 11). Dorothy, not surprisingly, is appalled: “Dorothy was an innocent, harmless little girl, who had been carried by a cyclone many miles from home; and she had never killed anything in all her life” (p. 11). She protests to the appreciative crowd that “ ‘You are very kind; but there must be some mistake. I have not killed anything.’ ‘Your house did, anyway,’ replied the little old woman with a laugh; ‘and that is the same thing’ ” (p. 12). Bonnie Friedman’s 1996 article, “Relinquishing Oz: Every Girl’s Anti-Adventure Story,” hints at the sort of reading that makes the Marin County television listing mentioned above sound like an accurate summary, especially since it is concerned with the underlying forces compelling our interest in Baum’s tale. Friedman writes: “Dorothy is capable of violence only under the guise of an accident. The murder implement of this first act? Why, it’s death by house, as if domesticity itself could bear down like the medieval torture of pressing, or as if the incarnated burden of housework could be hurled like a thunderbolt.”

This gives us an interesting insight into the workings of Oz, where intention has very little to do with standards of either morality or ethics. You’re judged on what happens, not what you intended to have happen. Dorothy didn’t intend to kill the Wicked Witch of the East, but credit for this action is thrust upon her—like greatness. In much the same manner as the Wizard was dropped into Oz when his advertising balloon went astray, Dorothy is hailed as an unusual creature of great power, one to be feared and worshipped not because she is magnificent or superior but because she is unfamiliar and puzzling.

Unlike the Wizard, however, she does not exploit this to her own advantage. Humbly identifying herself as “Dorothy, the Small and the Meek” despite the fact that she has accomplished a great deal in her quest, Dorothy is in direct contrast to the Wizard, who—despite being a fraud—identifies himself as “the Great and the Terrible.” The only difference between the two is that Dorothy does not seek to gain power by being misunderstood by the inhabitants of Oz; she does not traffic in “humbug” but, instead, always deals honestly and straightforwardly with anyone she meets.

With her stoic, jolly, and honest American character intact, Dorothy is not driven from the Garden: she is thrown back into this Edenic world, where even the wizards and witches cannot tempt her to duplicity. Her flexible but uncompromising and very American character is at the heart of Baum’s work; Baum is more Horatio Alger than Brothers Grimm, and