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Example
Three: Happiness on the Kansas Plain
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Lessons
in the Wizard of Oz
While
L. Frank Baum claims that The
Wizard of Oz breaks with traditional fairy tales by
disavowing morality and replacing moral instruction with pure
entertainment, Oz’s
moral message is clear: that a child can escape the bleakness of
adulthood by developing her brains, heart, and courage through
experience and imagination, by liberating herself from
dreariness through the development of the internal person.
Unlike the Brothers Grimm’s traditional tales in which the
girl lives happily ever after with her prince, Oz
promises a happy ending in everydayness. By encouraging the
development of the inner person and not presupposing the rescue
of Dorothy by a prince, Oz
teaches that all children can accomplish greatness and avoid
gray dreariness if only they retain their childlike imagination
and achieve self-awareness of and experience with their innate
abilities.
This
lesson of Oz is not
apparent in either the Grimm’s “Snow White” or “Cinderella.”
Snow White’s prince covets the coffin-enclosed body of Snow
White and declares his love for her despite having never spoken
a single word to her. Snow White had “tender feelings”
towards him and so they were married to presumably live happily
ever after (Tatar 89). Similarly, Cinderella merely danced with
her prince and did not necessarily love him; the prince
treasured Cinderella for her beauty and dresses and not for any
internal quality that she might possess, just as Cinderella
sought only to dance with the handsome, rich prince to make him
her husband. As Bettelheim noted, these two stories, “while
they take the woman to the threshold of true love, do not tell
what personal growth is required for union with the beloved
other” (278). In both these cases, the title characters
demonstrate the same selectivity in selecting mates as the women
on the Fox show “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire.”
In
contrast, Dorothy is a liberating force who achieves freedom in
self-awareness. The story starts out in the gray dreariness of
Kansas. The happy child, Dorothy, stands out in this unfriendly
place, a place that sucks the life out of everything it touches.
Aunt Em had once been a “young pretty wife” before “the
sun and wind changed her” by taking “the red from her cheeks
and lips” and making them gray. Likewise, the grass and house
had once interrupted the bleakness with color until the sun “blistered
the paint” and “burned the tops of the long blades” of
grass (2). Only Toto saves Dorothy “from growing as gray as
her other surroundings” (3). Nothing innate in Dorothy
prevents the onset of dreariness, but in Oz, Dorothy would find
that she herself has the power to prevent becoming like Aunt Em,
a pathetic old woman devoid of happiness to whom the laughter of
a child is startling.
The
tornado rips through the gray landscape and carries Dorothy to
the colorful world of Oz. In
effect, Dorothy escapes Kansas and its all-encompassing dullness
for the color, variety, and endless fascination of Oz through
her unconscious, childhood dreams. Corroborating this view of Oz
as colorful childhood imagination, Dorothy, in speaking to the
princess of the china dolls, mentions that she would love to
take the china princess home and place her on Aunt Em’s
mantle. The china princess objects that this imaginary world can
not exist in reality saying, “in our country we live
contentedly and can talk and move around as we please, but
whenever any of us are taken away our joints stiffen, and we can
only stand up straight and look pretty” (151). In effect,
Dorothy creates an imaginary world for the china doll
knick-knacks in Aunt Em’s house. In the 1939 movie based on
the book, the idea that Oz is a figment of Dorothy’s
imagination compels the director to have the Scarecrow, Tin Man,
Lion, Witch and Wizard be characters from Dorothy’s life in
Kansas.
In
Oz, she meets with adventure after adventure and yet these
adventures are clearly not written merely for entertainment as
Baum would indicate, but to suggest a lesson that Dorothy need
not end up as unhappy as Aunt Em if she can exercise her brains,
heart, and courage. Through her exercise of these attributes she
will be liberated, and indeed Dorothy is portrayed as a
liberating force throughout the book. She frees the munchkins
from bondage by killing the Wicked Witch of the East, frees the
scarecrow by removing him from his pole, frees the tin man by
oiling his joints, and frees the Winkies by melting the Wicked
Witch of the West. Baum suggests that to liberate oneself from
the oppression of outside circumstance one must take action and
not sit idly by. One must seize on the innate power of all
people to refuse to live a humdrum life acquiescing to the
demands of society and authority.
The
scarecrow’s belief that if only he had brains in his head he
would be as good a man as any, the tin man’s lament that only
his lack of a heart makes him incapable of love and thus
happiness, and the cowardly lion’s insecurity over courage
demonstrate obviously Baum’s message that we must not let
other people dictate the way we view ourselves. Like the child
who is insecure about his intelligence, his emotions, and his
courage, especially in a potentially menacing adult world, these
three characters all possess ample amounts of the traits they
feel they lack. It is not that they lack the traits but that
they have been convinced that they lack the traits. To discover
life and achieve their full potential, they must take off the
green lenses, pull back the curtain and see themselves as they
truly are. I argue that these characters are manifestations of
Dorothy’s own fears as a child in an adult world which views
children as stupid, emotionally senseless cowards who are
incapable of great things. By reaching Oz on the basis of her
strong courageous will, her quick thinking, and her care to help
her friends along the way, Dorothy demonstrates that while she
may be a child, she is as capable as an adult if only she would
realize that she has the latent power in her, awaiting
development through experience. As the Wicked Witch of the West
notes: “I can still make [Dorothy] my slave for she does not
know how to use her power.” In realizing that one has powers
of intellect, emotion, and courage through experiences, one can
avoid the tyranny of life’s everydayness.
Nowhere
is this fact of the innate power of the characters more apparent
than when the Kalidahs attacked. Facing large, clawed beasts,
the cowardly lion says: “We are lost for they will surely tear
us to pieces with their sharp claws. But stand close behind me
and I will fight them as long as I am alive.” Immediately
after this comment by Lion, Scarecrow who “had been thinking”
decides how to use Tin Man’s cutting skill to send the
Kalidahs to their death (49). Obviously, the characters already
have the attributes they seek from the Wizard and only lack
experience with the attributes, much as a child lacks experience
in developing his intellect, emotions, and talents.
Oz
himself makes explicit the “learning through experience”
theme saying to Scarecrow: “A baby has brains, but it doesn’t
know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge
and the longer you are on the earth the more experience you are
sure get.” Oz here suggests that everyone has the power to be
smart, emotional, and courageous, and that people only discover
this power through being smart, emotional, and courageous in the
face of difficulty or opposition.
In
the end, Dorothy discovers that she had the power to go home all
along, that she could leave her imagination and enter reality at
will. With three clicks of her silver shoes, she finds herself
back on the dreary Kansas plain, but now she seems happy
claiming, “I’m so glad to be at home again” (168). She has
finally realized that she possesses the abilities of an adult,
that the power resides in her to avoid the unhappy fate of Aunt
Em and Uncle Henry. While her guardians allowed the
circumstances of their life to destroy their happiness, we know
that Dorothy will use her powers to liberate herself from
drudgery should she ever momentarily fall into it. Kansas may
not always be her home, but with her newfound powers, we cannot
doubt that Dorothy will never allow herself to be oppressed by
job, family, or place.
This
reading of Oz is of
course not the only possible one. Salman Rushdie believes that
the “Wizard of Oz
is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even
of good adults, and how the weakness of grown-ups forces
children to take control of their own destinies and so,
ironically, grow up themselves” (10). While, to be fair,
Rushdie’s thesis is based on the film and not the book, I
dispute such a reading of the book. The Wizard
of Oz is not about the inadequacy of adults who occupy a
small role in the book but about the inner power of children.
Dorothy does more than grow up, she surpasses the abilities of
Aunt Em and Uncle Henry by refusing to be made miserable by
circumstance. She liberates herself and everyone she touches
with her will to happiness. Dorothy does indeed grow up, but
only in the sense that never can she again consider herself
inferior to adults; she does not lose the ability to dream of
emerald cities and great and powerful wizards. Dorothy, without
a male hero to save her, liberates the child from feelings of
inferiority and fear and liberates the adult from blindly living
a gray, plain life.
Bibliography
Baum, Frank L.
The Wizard of Oz.
Bettelheim,
Bruno. LAA-18 Sourcebook.
Rushdie,
Salman, The Wizard of Oz.
Tatar,
Maria. Classic Fairy
Tales.
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