![]() ![]() Right off, Baum breaks his own rule that no one ever dies in Oz. The house crosses the Deadly Desert and lands on top of the Wicked Witch of the West who promptly dries up and dies. Alone in the house (except for Toto, a Cairn terrier), Dorothy is established as a sensible girl who is not going to worry unduly about events that she cannot control. Newspaper accounts of recent cyclones had obviously impressed Baum. In the first four pages Baum demonstrates the drabness of Dorothy’s life the next two pages are devoted to the cyclone that lifts the house into the air and hurls it to Oz. But aunts and uncles need not be taken too seriously. A child separated from loving parents for any length of time is going to be distressed, even in a magic story. ![]() The author’s motive seems to me to be not only obvious but sensible. Some commentators have made, I think, too much of Baum’s parentless children. Like most of Baum’s central characters Dorothy lacks the regulation father and mother. This is the plain American style at its best. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. “Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife.” The landscape would have confirmed John Ruskin’s dark view of American scenery (he died the year that The Wizard of Oz was published). Baum locates her swiftly and efficiently in the first sentence of the series. In the later books she seems to be ten or eleven. In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy is about six years old. Now I find that all of the books tend to flow together in a single narrative, with occasional bad patches. Yet, as a child, I preferred The Emerald City, Rinkitink, and The Lost Princess to The Wizard. After all, the first book is the one in which Oz was invented. Arguably, The Wizard of Oz is the best of the lot. The jaggedness can be explained by the fact that the man who was writing fourteen Oz books was writing forty-eight other books at the same time. ![]() I was struck by the unevenness of style not only from book to book but, sometimes, from page to page. I have reread the Oz books in the order in which they were written. Frank Baum says that he would like to create modern fairy tales by departing from Grimm and Andersen and “all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised” by such authors “to point a fearsome moral.” Baum then makes the disingenuous point that “Modern education includes morality therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wondertales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.” Yet there is a certain amount of explicit as well as implicit moralizing in the Oz books there are also “disagreeable incidents,” and people do, somehow, die even though death and illness are not supposed to exist in Oz. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |