“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” - L. Frank Baum
By Kate Norrish
Staff Writer
The book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” came out in 1900, and I am an annoying snob about the literary version of this story. I only really like L. Frank Baum’s original works, and yes, that includes the beloved Judy Garland film. Sorry folks, but hear me out. For the maybe three people reading this who don’t know the gist of this book, Dorothy is a spunky and kind little girl who gets picked up by a particularly bizarre tornado and brought to a magical land. She then teams up with a scarecrow, a lion, and a tin woodsman to get home, while they seek human qualities they wish they had. The tone of this book is definitely what I miss the most when watching all the adaptations. In the same way the surrealist-animated series “Over The Garden Wall,” is heavily based on New England gothic folk culture, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” is so influenced by life in the rural American Midwest that you’ll be craving corn for a week. Between the small, close-knit town atmosphere of Munchkin Land, and the seemingly endless Midwestern plains that the characters spend much of the book in, I spent moments craving a home in Kansas, and while I have an intimate relationship with rural New England culture, I’ve never even stepped foot in The Midwest before. I particularly enjoy that almost all of the populated locations in Oz show up in small clusters, and between them are huge spans of natural landscapes, something which I’ve been told is one of the most notable parts of travelling through the region. The symbolism surrounding color is something I would love to research further within the context of The Midwest, as it is not a film addition that Kansas is mostly colorless, and the silver slippers initially seem like a contrast to the film’s critique of the upper class. Also, this book is dark in a particularly surreal way that makes the moment you were terrified of as a kid in the film seem like standard kid-friendly fun. If the flying monkeys freaked you out, the Tin Woodsman’s backstory, consisting of him accidentally chopping off body parts and replacing them with tin until he has no flesh left, and a scene where wolves are graphically murdered, may make you reconsider your childhood fear tolerance. This serves a pretty major thematic purpose. Baum struggled to support himself through his adult political writings, so he frequently included the ideas that he wanted to portray directly through metaphor. Many consider the close friendship between the Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman to represent solidarity between the agriculture and steel industry, during a period where they were being devalued and underpaid. Personally, I always saw the mistreatment of the flying monkeys to commentate on the lack of autonomy that the working class often has. This story has also held a place in the queer community for a long time. Some have interpreted the Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman as queer, and there is a plot point in a later book where a boy drinks a potion to turn him into a girl. What many people don’t know is that this book is just the beginning of a series of books further introducing Baum’s surreal world. This is because Baum put in the introduction of his second “Oz” book that he told a young girl who sent him fan mail that if he received a hundred letters from children asking for another “Oz” book, he would write one. Needless to say, that’s exactly what happened. As a result, I’ve found that “Wonderful Wizard of Oz” adaptations that add elements from further books, particularly “Return to Oz” from 1985, to be a bit more my speed. While I’ve only read “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” and its first sequel, “The Marvelous Land of Oz,” I hope to someday finish the entire 14-book series, and I can already confidently say the second book, focused on a young boy born in Oz escaping his evil caregiver, is underrated. At the risk of being the annoying bookworm everyone knows, the film is a classic, but “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” book deserves to be even more iconic.
