Via Wikipedia
May 17th 2010 marks the 110th anniversary of the publishing L. Frank Baum’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Yes, this epic story, commonly associated with the great depression, was published in 1900.
The intrepid tale of Dorothy’s journey through Oz has been told many time in different media. The most popular being MGM’s 1939 movie version The Wizard of Oz. There has also been a resurgence of popularity with Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and it’s Broadway adaptation, Wicked. None of these would have been possible without the original story.
In the introduction of the book, Baum says:
Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.
Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for 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 blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.
Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.1
Via Wikimedia
Baum wanted to reinvent the fairy tale; not a small feet by any measure. He saw the old fairy tales as terrorizing children to behave by threatening harsh consequences. Baum attempts to take the horror away, but he still has Dorothy kill the Wicked Witches of the East and West by accident. When She dumps the bucket of water on the Witch of the West Baum describes it “to see the Witch actually melting away like brown sugar before her very eyes.” He attempts soften the act by having her die by melting, yet he was still successful in creating one of the most classic villains of the 20th Century.
There have been many theories of what The Wonderful Wizard of Oz symbolizes. The impression that I weened from recently reading it is that actions speak louder than words and that labels are meaningless if they are not backed up by merit. The Wizard is a fraud and the characters know that fact, yet they insist he give them intangible things and are only satisfied when he goes through motions to give them conceptual gifts.
Chapter sixteen is titled “The Magic Art of the Great Humbug” and the character of the Wizard remarks “How can I help being a Humbug when all these people make me do things that everyone knows can’t be done.” This isn’t a simple moral for children to learn; it’s a more complex theme. It goes beyond the moral of “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” It touches on the hypocrisy of civilization and government, how the populous complains about being deceived, but literally demand deception from their leaders.
Another thing that caught my attention is the theme of color. Of course we’re all familiar with the Emerald City, but in the original tale each region has a color; green for the North, blue for the East, yellow for the West, red for the South. I don’t know if there is a significance of the colors in the story, but it definitely paints a vivid picture of the Land of Oz and aides you in drawing a map in your mind this wondrous land.
This novel was written 110 years ago but it is very easy to read. Baum used language that has held up well over time. I think a person of any age would find it engaging, mind you it is geared towards young readers. The version I read published in 2005 by Dalmatian Press, LLC had footnotes for any words that were no longer used in modern times, but their were very few. I recommend reading this story to everyone. It will give a different perspective on a story we thought we knew.
- Public domain via Project Gutenberg [↩]
10:51, May 17, 2010Pat Humphreys /
For some reason it didn’t keep Joanna as the author. That’s corrected, so give credit where credit is due.