My brother and I hated The Wizard of Oz, the terrible 1939 movie starring Judy Garland. When we were little we were terrified of the flying monkeys, the man-eating pigs, and the homicidal Wicked Witch. When we grew older, we ridiculed the saccharine songs and the corny "It was all a dream" bit. And why would anybody want to go back to Kansas? I never heard of any Oz books until one day in junior high I stumbled across a whole shelf of them at the library, 14 published by L. Frank Baum and 20 by other people. I picked one up out of curiosity. And then another. And another. I had found a "good place."
There was little beefcake: the protagonists, boys or girls, were drawn in the same style, as delicate and pretty as cherubs yet tough and hardy, able to endure long wilderness treks and fight monsters.
There was little bonding. The protagonist traveled with a melange of talking animals, magical objects, and adult companions. I found only two significant homoromances. In Ojo in Oz, between Ojo and the bandit Realbad, but in the end Realbad turns out to be the boy's father, ruining it.
And in Rinkitink in Oz (1916), the jovial king Rinkitink discovers that his talking goat companion is really an enchanted prince named Bobo. The two walk into the sunset together.
There were many disturbing, horrible elements.
1. No one ages in Oz, so babies stay babies and kids stay kids forever.
2. No one can die, so if you cut someone into pieces, each piece remains alive and conscious.
3. Inanimate objects can easily be brought to life, and they stay alive and conscious forever.
4. There is casual racism, sexism, and class-based bigotry. Rude comments and unpleasant mannerisms are presented as endearing. Kids are often threatened by sinister adults.
1. The delicate, pretty boys in their flamboyant costumes are all gay-coded. Every boy in Oz is gay.
2. Adult men and women follow a strict division of labor, with women who hoped for equality ridiculed. But the boys and girls have precisely the same interests and activities. A boy named Tip is transformed into Princess Ozma.
3. The boys and girls never express any heterosexual interest. Occasionally an adult does, but only minor characters in side-plots irrelevant to the main story.
4. There are few if any nuclear families. The main family structure in Oz is single parent and child.
5.The outsiders who find their way to Oz are the odd, the unusual, the outcast, the "queer." And they always find a home.
See also: The Wizard of Oz
Baum's mother-in-law was a well-known suffragette and feminist, Matilda Gage, and it almost certain that he learned quite a bit from her, including the very feminist notion of 'good witches'. The feminist Army of Revolt was a pretty gentle satire of suffragettes, and in the end (in a folktale tradition) the men have been unable to cope with the demands of housekeeping and welcome the return to their accustomed roles. When asked how the women manage it better than the men, one man replies he doesn't know: "Perhaps the women are made of cast-iron."
ReplyDeleteIn general, the child heroes in Baum's books are girls, not boys, and Baum portrayed girl heroes in some of his pseudonymous books like 'The Flying Girl' about a young aviatrix, although he also wrote some fairly standard boys' adventure novels (with typical buddy bonding like 18-year-old Sam Steele and Joe Herring, "our cabin-boy and my particular friend.")
The transformation of Tip to Ozma is a panto-type stage tradition: like Peter Pan, Tip would have been played by a girl. And Baum was certainly thinking of a stage version of that book - the Army of Revolt would have made a splendid chorus line of girls with pretty legs!
It has been observed that gay men are statistically over-represented among the members of the Oz fan organization. As one article on the subject put it, Judy Garland didn't make Oz gay — Oz made Judy Garland a gay icon. After all, it isn't just the outsiders visiting Oz who are odd - Oz is full of queer (in the old sense) folk of all description, in a land full of bright and gay (in the old sense) colors. "I hate dignity!" announces the Patchwork Girl in one of Neill's great illustrations.
But the most gender-subversive of all is Baum's book 'John Dough and the Cherub', in which a child character named Chick the Cherub accompanies the titular John Dough on a series of adventures. At the end, they settle down, and we are told the the Cherub grew to adulthood as a high minister - but the official records of the kingdom do not say whether the minister was a man or a woman! Sure enough, a rereading shows that Baum managed to get through the whole book without using a gendered pronoun for the child, who was drawn quite androgynously by the illustrator. This was the basis of a marketing campaign, 'The Great John Dough Mystery' in which children would write an essay explaining why they think Chick was a boy or a girl. I do not know if the winning essays still exist. When John Dough and Chick have a guest cameo in one of the Oz books, Dorothy asks a taciturn boy character, "Is it a boy or a girl?" "Don't know."
I haven't read any of Baum's non-Oz-related books. I'll have to look up the Cherub stories.
DeleteI'm Lakota. We have...a different opinion of Baum.
DeleteThere seems to be more to Oz than the beloved MGM musical
ReplyDeleteBaum published 14 Oz books, plus a number of other stories set in similar fantasy worlds, with the characters interacting with each other in complex ways. He died in 1919, but new Oz books came out ever year until World War II, and intermittently after that.
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