 |
| From the website of the Cardiff Theosophical Society |
These themes were important to Baum, who along with his wife Maud was personally involved with the first three movements on my list. The Baums were at least partly devotees of Theosophy, joining the Theosophical Society in 1892, with the encouragement of Maud’s mother, Matilda Gage (about whom more below), who had joined in 1885. The Baums also held Spiritualist séances at their house, and sent their children to Ethical Culture Sunday School.
Baum makes
clear his opposition to traditional Christianity (though not, he clarifies, to the “beautiful
religion of Christ” which Christianity had corrupted) in his newspaper editorials:
While everything else
has progressed, the Church alone has been trying to stand still, and hang with
a death-grip to medieval or ancient legends. It teaches the same old
superstitions, the same blind faith in the traditional bible, the same precepts
of salvation and damnation. And all this
while the people have been growing more liberal in thought, more perfect in
comprehension. They feel unable to reconcile with their common-sense, their
intuition, their heart-emotion, the doctrines and dogmas of the priests. Their reason revolts from the blind and
superstitious faith upon which rests the structure of the Christian religion. (Aberdeen
Saturday Pioneer, 18 October 1890; quoted in Koupal, Baum’s Road, p. 125)
“The age
of Faith is sinking slowly into the past,” Baum believes, giving way to a new
form of spirituality based on “an eager longing to penetrate the secrets of
Nature,” an “aspiration for knowledge,” focused on a deity who is “not
necessarily a personal god” since “God is Nature and Nature God.” (Pioneer,
25 January 1890; Koupal, pp. 107-109) Baum
also supports the separation of church and state, condemning “the attempt to place God in the Constitution,
an encroachment on the sacred liberty of thought, a departure from the
intentions of the founders of the government” (Pioneer, 5 April 1890; quoted in Schwartz, p. 156)
Baum
stresses that he regards the new religious movements as spiritual pathways
rather than as final answers: “Theosophy is not a religion. Its followers are simply ‘searchers after
Truth.’” (Pioneer, 25 January 1890; Koupal, p. 108) “Spiritualism
is a stepping stone to something higher which shall yet be revealed to
mankind.” (Pioneer, 17 January 1891; quoted in Schwartz, p. 191)
Baum’s
religious interests are reflected in his novels. Theosophy teaches a kind of fusion of science
and magic, a naturalisation of the supernatural and/or supernaturalisation of
the natural; such a perspective is appropriate to the Land of Oz, which
contains both magic wands and mechanical submarines, both animated trees and
clockwork robots, both magic pictures and optical projectors. The fact that the four petitioners to Baum’s
Wizard receive nothing valuable from him and already possess what they have
been seeking could also be a nod to the theosophical teaching what we should
not look to external authority. The Good
Witch of the North’s magic slate (Wizard,
ch. 2) essentially functions like a spiritualist’s Ouija board; and Schwartz
suggests (p. 109) that Dorothy’s silver shoes might be intended to represent
the silver cord that is said to enable astral voyagers to return to their
bodies.
 |
| Baum disliked his first name and went by Louis on stage. |
Despite
Baum’s strictures on “blind faith in the traditional bible,” his writings are
not without the occasional Biblical resonance.
In particular, the Emerald City resembles the Bible’s New Jerusalem,
whose towering walls are “garnished with all manner of precious stones,”
including “emerald” (Revelation 21:19); and the land of Oz itself, with its
friendly carnivores and child ruler, echoes the Biblical description of the
reign of the Messiah: “The wolf also
shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the
calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead
them.” (Isaiah 11:6) In short, we have met the promised Messiah –
and she is a young girl of mutable gender, raised by witches and fairies.
Baum seems
to have had no personal interest in Mormonism, but there may be a Mormon
connection to his work nonetheless.
According to LDS tradition, Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon
by looking through mystical spectacles fitted with transparent stone lenses and
given to him by an angel. This
well-known story might have inspired both the humbug green spectacles in Wizard and the genuinely magical
spectacles, the gift of a demon, in Master
Key.
 |
| With enough LSD you too will see OZ |
I think one can probably make just as good – or bad – a case for the seal of the Theosophical Society, with the serpent again being the O and some carefully chosen segments of the Star of David being the Z. But it’s hard to put too much stock in any of this.
 |
| Swastikas – less scary in those days |
Baum’s own
claim was that he got the name “Oz” from the O-Z drawer of his filing cabinet;
but his wife dismissed this as nonsense.
Others have suggested that the name came from gold ounces, or the
Biblical land of Uz, or the Greek pagan prayer O Zeu, or the first two letters of “Zoroaster” reversed (the
Wizard’s full name eventually includes a “Zoroaster,” referencing the founder
of the “Magi” and thus of “magicians”), or the “Ahs” of wonder, or “NY” shifted
one letter to the right. Given Baum’s
use of “Noland” (No-Land, essentially one of the two meanings of utopia) in Queen Zixi of Ix, and of the Nonestic Ocean (from non est, “does not exist”) in the later
Oz books, “OZ” could even be “NO” flipped on its side (or conversely, “Oz-land”
becomes “No-land” – or, adding a zag, “Mo-land”).
My own
preferred hypothesis, however, is that “Oz” derives primarily from Shelley’s Ozymandias; the
similarity between Baum’s “I am Oz the great and terrible” and Shelley’s “I am
Ozymandias, king of kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” is too
great, especially considering that both are meant to represent hollow boasts by
political rulers. (Shelley was an
admirer of the anarchist ideas of his father-in-law, William Godwin, and in
exposing the pretensions of an Ozymandias he is making a point about authority
in general.) Both Oz and Ozymandias are
moreover vast and trunkless; and just as Shelley points to Ozymandias’
“shattered visage ... on the sand, half sunk,” so Baum shows us a “corner, in
which lay the Great Head, made out of many thicknesses of paper, and with a
carefully painted face.”
Victor
Herbert’s then-recent comic opera The Wizard of the Nile (1895) has no particular connection to the story of The Wizard of Oz (Herbert’s titular
wizard is not a humbug so much as a “sorcerer’s apprentice” figure, unleashing
powers he cannot successfully control), but might have served to link “Wizard”
and “Egypt” in Baum’s mind, and given the further natural link between “Egypt”
and “Ozymandias,” might have led Baum to “Oz” if he started with “Wizard,” or
else to “Wizard” if he started with “Oz.”
I also
suspect that the name “Ozma” derives partly again from Ozymandias and partly
from Anthony Hope’s 1896 novel The Heart of Princess Osra (a prequel to The Prisoner of Zenda). (The cover even has an O containing a Z – Z for Zenda.) But there
may also be something to Hearn’s suggestion that the last syllables of Ozma and Ozga (Ozma’s cousin, introduced in Tik-Tok of Oz) refer to the first and last syllables of Baum’s
wife’s maiden name, Maud Gage.
 |
| The key to all mythologies |
There is a
widespread tendency to think of philosophical issues as too mature for
children; that is presumably why philosophy is one of the few college-level
subjects not taught in grade school (by contrast with math, science, history,
literature, and social science). This is
of course a massive blunder. As Gareth
Matthews points out in his excellent book Philosophy and the Young Child (as well as its successors, Dialogues With Children and The Philosophy of Childhood), the kinds of questions that children, especially
preteen children, typically ask – how do we know we’re not dreaming? where does
the light go to when you turn off the switch? how can something have a name if
it doesn’t exist? is my hair still part of me after you cut it? – are
paradigmatically philosophical questions (even if unrecognised by their elders
as such), showing that children are intensely interested in philosophy (at
least until they are socialised out of it).
This is why the most successful children’s literature tends to deal with
philosophical themes; Matthews points to examples in the writings of Baum,
Lewis Carroll, and other classic children’s authors.
 |
| The dragon’s ire more fierce than fire laid low their towers and houses frail. |
But the
sorts of philosophical issues to which the two authors gravitate tend to be
different. Carroll’s focus is on logical and conceptual and
philosophy-of-language puzzles, like the difference between “I eat what I like”
and “I like what I eat,” or the difference among a song, what the song is
called, the name of the song, and what the name of the song is called. Baum’s focus is more on issues in metaphysics,
philosophy of mind, and moral psychology, such as: what changes can someone undergo and still be
the same person? does the continuity of one’s personality depend on what material
one is made of? what distinguishes the living from the non-living, the
conscious from the non-conscious? what is the nature of happiness? is it
achievable? is it compatible with moral commitments?
Baum’s
attraction to body horror dovetails nicely with his philosophical interests. After all, many of the most popular thought-experiments
in philosophy are examples of body horror:
the person who is merely a brain in a vat, being fed the illusory
experience of being a normally embodied person (an idea variously employed by
Hilary Putnam, Daniel Dennett, and Robert Nozick); Judith Thomson’s
people growing from seeds in the carpet, and violinists plugged into your kidneys while you’re sleeping; Donald
Davidson’s Swampman, an exact physical replica of you created at the moment of
your destruction; Harry
Frankfurt’s intervener, prepared to manipulate your neurons to force you into
compliance should you show signs of acting in undesired ways; or Mary
Anne Warren’s space explorer whose alien captors transform every cell in his
body into a developing fetus. Body
horror is philosophically useful because it focuses our attention on the nature
of the self and its relation to the body.
 |
| Tigers love babies. |
In presenting
this character, Baum raises a problem for his own moral perspective. There’s a long tradition, going back to
Plato’s Gorgias, of debate
between the view that happiness is a matter of having strong desires but being
able to satisfy them, and the view that happiness is a matter of restraining
one’s desires so as to be more easily satisfied with whatever one already
has. Baum appears to be firmly in the
restraint camp. He has the Scarecrow say: “the beasts are happier than [humans], for
they require less to make them content.” (Lost Princess, ch. 26) In Queen Zixi of Ix, the titular queen declares,
“We long for what we cannot have, yet desire it not so much because it would
benefit us as because it is beyond our reach. ... So hereafter I shall strive
to be contented with my lot” – and Baum adds:
“This was a wise resolution.” (Zixi, ch. 14)
Nerle, in The Enchanted Island of Yew, concurs: “I find wherever I go people are longing for
just the things they can not get, and probably would not want if they had them.
So, as it seems to be the fate of most mortals to live unsatisfied, I shall try
hereafter to be more contented.” (Yew, ch. 25) In the Oz
books, the Fox-King counsels: “Be contented with your lot, whatever it happens
to be, if you are wise.” (Road, ch. 3) A house in
which the protagonists stay overnight “had only one room and no furniture
except beds of clean straw and a few mats of woven grasses; but our travelers
were contented with these simple things because they realized it was the best
the Donkey-King had to offer them.” (ch.
7) And Ozma tells the Scarecrow and Tin
Woodman: “You are both rich, my friends
... and your riches are the only riches worth having – the riches of
content!” (Land, ch. 24) And in propria voce Baum declares: “No one is so unfortunate that there is not
some enjoyment to be extracted from his daily life, if he makes an endeavor to
obtain it.” (Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 15 February 1890; quoted in Koupal, Baum’s Road, p. 115)
 |
| Socrates tells Plato how to pose for Raphael |
Baum in
effect adheres to what philosophers call an “adaptive conception of happiness,”
according to which the path to fulfillment is not to strive harder to achieve
what one lacks, but rather to be content with what is presently available.
Yet the
Hungry Tiger threatens to destabilise the very concept of contentment, by
treating discontent as the inevitable
result of having any desires at all, and thus as an ineradicable part of the
human condition. The Tiger thus
represents a viewpoint like that of Thomas Hobbes, who pens one of the most
famous critiques of the idea of happiness as contentment:
[T]he felicity of this
life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis ultimus (utmost aim), nor summum bonum (greatest good), as is
spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man any more
live whose desires are at an end than he whose senses and imaginations are at a
stand. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to
another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter. (Leviathan
I.11)
 |
| Schopenhauer laughing |
There are
philosophies – e.g., Buddhism,
Stoicism, Schopenhauer’s own theories – that accept the idea of desire as
something like a recurring disease, but still hold out the hope of achieving
contentment through a kind of detachment.
But the Hungry Tiger sees no hope of a noble path to successful
detachment.
In
addition to challenging the coherence of the ideal of contentment, the Hungry Tiger
also challenges the idea – one that Baum ordinarily seems to accept – of a
harmony between the requirements of happiness and the demands of morality. For
the Tiger. the moral life is one of perpetual self-abnegation:
I’m a savage beast, and
have an appetite for all sorts of poor little living creatures, from a chipmunk
to fat babies. ... Don’t they sound delicious? But I've never eaten any,
because my conscience tells me it is wrong. ... No; hungry I was born, and
hungry I shall die. But I’ll not have any cruel deeds on my conscience to be
sorry for. (Ozma, ch. 8)
In his
1913 Island of Dr. Moreau, H. G.
Wells would satirise human society as a collection of “animals half wrought
into the outward image of human souls,” for whom a “long list of prohibitions”
laid down by their maker “battled in their minds with the deep-seated,
ever-rebellious cravings of their animal natures.” The Hungry
Tiger embodies this pessimistic conception of the relationship between morality
and human nature, sitting in perpetual tension with the overall thrust of
Baum’s ethical thought, neither refuted nor embraced.
 |
| Life may be suffering but I am totally baked |
If Nerle
and the Hungry Tiger, in their different ways, challenge the possibility of Baum’s ethic of
contentment, another character, Mrs. Yoop, challenges its desirability, by taking Baum’s customary advice and giving it a
sinister turn. As she imprisons the
protagonists, Mrs. Yoop tells them: “you
are all helpless and in my power, so you may as well make up your minds to
accept your fate and be content,” for “discontent leads to unhappiness, and
unhappiness, in any form, is the greatest evil that can befall you.” (Tin Woodman, chs. 5-6) However salutary
the advice to seek contentment may be, Baum recognises that it can also be used
to defuse resistance to oppression and injustice.
Baum’s best-known
metaphysical conundrum, itself likewise an instance of body horror, is Nick
Chopper, who becomes the Tin Woodman through the successive replacement of his
parts with tin ones. Nick’s case is
often compared with that of the Ship of Theseus. a well-known philosophical
puzzle laid out by Hobbes as follows:
[I]f, for example, that
ship of Theseus, concerning the difference whereof made by continual reparation
in taking out the old planks and putting in new, the sophisters of Athens were
wont to dispute, were, after all the planks were changed, the same numerical
ship it was at the beginning; and if some man had kept the old planks as they
were taken out, and by putting them afterwards together in the same order, had
again made a ship of them, this, without doubt, had also been the same
numerical ship with that which was at the beginning; and so there would have
been two ships numerically the same, which is absurd. (Elements of Philosophy II.11.7 )
The point
of the puzzle is that the replacement is gradual. A ship cannot lose its identity simply by
having a plank or two replaced; but if Theseus’s ship never has more than
one or two planks replaced at a time, it must survive each replacement, and so
will apparently still be the same ship – even if all the original planks have
been kept and reassembled into a ship that also seems to have a strong claim to
be the original.
Some
philosophers, like David Hume, or Derek Parfit – and some entire traditions,
like Buddhism – think the answer is nothing,
that identity over a time is really a kind of fiction or illusion. René Descartes, on the other hand, thinks
that sameness of body is determined by sameness of soul:
[W]hen we speak of the body
of a man, we do not mean a determinate part of matter, or one that has a
determinate size; we mean simply the whole of the matter which is united with the soul of that
man. And so, even though that matter changes, and its quantity increases or
decreases, we still believe that it is the same body, numerically the same
body, so long as it remains joined and substantially united with the same soul
.... (Letter to Mesland, 9 Feb 1645)
That being then one
plant which has such an organization of parts in one coherent body, partaking
of one common life, it continues to be the same plant as long as it partakes of
the same life, though that life be communicated to new particles of matter vitally
united to the living plant, in a like continued organization conformable to
that sort of plants. ... An animal is a living organized body; and consequently
the same animal, as we have observed, is the same continued life communicated
to different particles of matter, as they happen successively to be united to
that organized living body. ... This
also shows wherein the identity of the same man consists; viz. in nothing but a
participation of the same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of
matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body. He that shall
place the identity of man in anything else, but, like that of other animals, in
one fitly organized body, taken in any one instant, and from thence continued,
under one organization of life, in several successively fleeting particles of
matter united to it, will find it hard to make an embryo, one of years, mad and
sober, the same man ....
(Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.27.4-8)
Locke also draws a
distinction between being the same man
and being the same person; but the
latter, for him, still involves continuity of a process (consciousness), not of
an entity like the soul.
Nick’s
case differs from that of the ship, or of Locke’s animal bodies, in that his
parts are replaced, not just with new material, but with new material of a different kind: metal instead of
flesh. But this does not seem to
matter; we have no reason to doubt that
psychological states exhibit compositional plasticity, that is, that they are
capable of being realised in more than one kind of stuff. Or, as Hilary Putnam memorably puts it: “We could be made of Swiss cheese and it
wouldn’t matter.” (The
further twist, mentioned by Hobbes, of reassembling the original pieces also
gets dramatised in Tin Woodman of Oz,
and in a different form in Magical
Monarch of Mo.)
 |
| I forgot to include this picture last time when talking about Neill, so I’m inserting it randomly here. |
The
gradualism of the changes seems crucial to the case for continued identity; if
every plank in the ship were thrown out
all at once and replaced with an entire assembly of new planks, there would
be little temptation to say that the ship had survived. Hence Nick stresses the gradual character of his
own transformation:
A man with a wooden leg
or a tin leg is still the same man; and, as I lost parts of my meat body by
degrees, I always remained the same person as in the beginning, even though in
the end I was all tin and no meat. (Tin Woodman, ch. 2)
But of
course Nick’s transformation is not really as gradual as we may think it needs
to be. If the neurons in Nick’s brain
had been replaced one by one with tin substitutes, we might agree that he is
still Nick by the end of the process.
But instead his head goes all at once:
When I began chopping
again, my axe slipped and cut off my right leg. Again I went to the tinsmith,
and again he made me a leg out of tin. After this the enchanted axe cut off my
arms, one after the other; but, nothing daunted, I had them replaced with tin
ones. The Wicked Witch then made the axe slip and cut off my head, and at first
I thought that was the end of me. But the tinsmith happened to come along, and
he made me a new head out of tin. (Wizard, ch. 5)
Or, as
Nick describes the chain of events (slightly differently) in a later book:
When I returned to my
work the axe slipped and cut off my head, which was the only meat part of me
then remaining. Moreover, the old woman grabbed up my severed head and carried
it away with her and hid it. But Nimmie Amee came into the forest and found me
wandering around helplessly, because I could not see where to go, and she led
me to my friend the tinsmith. The faithful fellow at once set to work to make
me a tin head, and he had just completed it when Nimmie Amee came running up
with my old head, which she had stolen from the Witch. But, on reflection, I
considered the tin head far superior to the meat one .... (Tin Woodman, ch. 2)
Indeed,
the humour of Baum’s account – as likewise of the cartoons by Larson (right) and Silverstein (below) (and see also the Orson Scott card story “Memories of My Head”)
– is precisely that of treating the loss of one’s head as being on a par with
the loss of one’s other body parts, and of treating personal identity as going
with the body rather than with the brain.
(And we may well wonder why it isn’t Nick, rather than the Scarecrow,
who complains of lacking a brain. After
all, the Scarecrow at least has some sort of stuffing in his head, while Nick’s
head is presumably hollow; at least the conversation between Nick Chopper and
Captain Fyter in chapter 19 of The Tin Woodman of Oz strongly implies that Fyter, the Tin Soldier, has a metal
brain in his head while Nick has nothing at all in his head – confirming Nick’s
claim “my head is quite empty” from chapter 5 of Wizard. Lacking a heart
seems like the least of Nick’s troubles.)
Baum’s
account goes against our common presumption that the brain is the seat of
personality. This presumption has its critics, though. Gretchen Weirob, the central speaker in John
Perry’s Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, gives an able defense – drawing on the ideas of Bernard
Williams – of the thesis that personal identity resides in the body as a whole,
so that if A’s brain is transplanted into B’s body and vice versa, it is the
person with A’s body, not the person with A’s brain, who has the best claim to
be the continuator of A.
Weirob grants,
however, that the brain transplant is likely to leave the possessor of A’s
brain believing himself or herself to
be A, and having (false) memories of
being A, whereas the Tin Woodman not only counts as the real Nick Chopper but
takes himself to be Nick and remembers Nick’s earlier life.
Weirob grants,
however, that the brain transplant is likely to leave the possessor of A’s
brain believing himself or herself to
be A, and having (false) memories of
being A, whereas the Tin Woodman not only counts as the real Nick Chopper but
takes himself to be Nick and remembers Nick’s earlier life.
Katharine
Rogers suggests that Nick Chopper’s career embodies the “theosophical doctrine,
according to which one’s true self, the continuing ‘I,’ exists separately from
the physical body, which it acquires on being born into the physical world.” On this interpretation, Nick’s “spiritual
body,” which is “not changed or lost in birth or death,” has somehow
accompanied his tin parts rather than his meat parts, which even reassembled will
be only “the material body” (Creator of Oz, p. 225) – in short, the Cartesian option.
I don’t
think this is the right way to interpret Nick’s transformation. Views on the relation between mind and body
sort roughly into six categories. I’m
simplifying here a bit, ignoring various
qualifications and distinctions, so please bear in mind that things are a
little more complicated than what follows, but this should be enough for a
first approximation:
eliminative
materialism: there are no mental states, only bodily
states
reductive
materialism: there are mental states, but they are reducible to (or are the same thing as, or are fully
explicable in terms of) bodily states
nonreductive
materialism: mental states are not reducible to bodily states, but they supervene on bodily states (i.e.,
it’s impossible for two entities, or one entity at different times, to differ
in mental states without differing in bodily states)
property
dualism: mental states do not supervene on bodily
states, but they cannot be separated from the body
substance
dualism: mental states can be separated from the body
idealism: there are no bodily states, only mental
states
(The
frequent claim that mental states are “nothing but” or “nothing over and above”
bodily states is ambiguous between eliminative materialism, reductive
materialism, and nonreductive materialism, and so is best avoided.)
Descartes’s
“I think therefore I am” strikes me as a pretty good argument against eliminative
materialism; I can’t coherently embrace any thesis that requires me to suppose
my own mentality to be nonexistent. Hilary
Putnam, a nonreductive materialist, presents a more complex, but to my mind
equally convincing, argument against reductive materialism.
According
to Locke, we have just as much evidence that God might have “given to some systems
of matter, fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think” (as in property
dualism) as we have that God instead “joined and fixed to matter, so disposed,
a thinking immaterial substance” (as in substance dualism), since it is “not
much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that GOD can, if he pleases,
superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that he should superadd to it
another substance with a faculty of thinking.”
(Essay, IV.3.6)
 |
| Descartes, Locke, Hume |
Rogers’
interpretation of the Tin Woodman story assumes a substance-dualist
reading. Such a reading is tempting for
a biographer like Rogers, since Baum appears to have been a substance dualist
himself. After all, as we’ve seen, Baum
was at least to some degree a believer in spiritualism and theosophy, both of
which on the most straightforward reading seem to involve the separability of
the soul from the body (though some versions of theosophy do gesture in the direction of a kind of idealism). And in
one of his newspaper editorials, Baum wrote:
A clairvoyant is a
person so constituted that through lapsing into a trance the soul is freed from
[its] confines and allowed to roam at will through space. ... Their power lies simply in the ability to
divorce temporarily body and soul .... (Aberdeen
Saturday Pioneer, 5 April 1890; quoted in Koupal, Baum’s Road, pp. 121-122)
Likewise,
although Baum appears to have been a personal believer in an afterlife (perhaps
of a reincarnationist sort), the idea seldom makes an appearance in his
stories. (One exception is the early
ghost story “My Ruby Wedding Ring.”) Indeed, in
The Sea Fairies (which takes place in
the same universe as the Oz books and involves some of the same characters),
Baum mocks the idea of an afterlife, thus apparently implying that nothing of
the kind exists in the world of Oz:
Presently they came upon
a small flock of mackerel, and noticed that the fishes seemed much excited.
When they saw the mermaid, they cried out, “Oh, Merla! What do you think? Our
Flippity has just gone to glory! ... We were lying in the water, talking
quietly together when a spinning, shining thing came along and our dear
Flippity ate it. Then he went shooting up to the top of the water and gave a
flop and – went to glory! Isn't it splendid, Merla?”
“Poor Flippity!” sighed
the mermaid. “I’m sorry, for he was the prettiest and nicest mackerel in your
whole flock.”
“What does it mean?” asked Trot. “How did Flippity go to glory?”
“Why, he was caught by a
hook and pulled out of the water into some boat,” Merla explained. “But these
poor stupid creatures do not understand that, and when one of them is jerked
out of the water and disappears, they have the idea he has gone to glory, which
means to them some unknown but beautiful sea.” ...
“Why don't you tell ’em
the truth?” asked Trot.
“Oh, we do. The mermaids
have warned them many times, but it does no good at all. The fish are stupid
creatures.”
“But I wish I was
Flippity,” said one of the mackerel, staring at Trot with his big, round eyes.
“He went to glory before I could eat the hook myself.”
“You’re lucky,” answered
the child. “Flippity will be fried in a pan for someone’s dinner. You wouldn’t
like that, would you?”
“Flippity has gone to
glory!” said another, and then they swam away in haste to tell the news to all
they met. (Sea Fairies, ch. 7)
If the
mind-body relation that prevails in Oz is something more corporeal than
substance dualism, what is it? Clearly
not eliminative materialism, because the characters have minds. Equally clearly not reductive materialism,
since Nick’s mentality has remained the same, even though his bodily states
have been utterly transformed. So the
two likeliest options are nonreductive materialism and property dualism. But it’s hard to believe that Nick’s thoughts
so much as supervene on any physical processes; since his head is hollow, there
are no brain states to alter as his thoughts alter. And since, after his decapitation, Nick’s
consciousness and sense of self go with the tin parts rather than the meat
ones, his locus of mentality seems to be his body as a whole, and independent
of any particular part of it. This sort
of emergent holism looks more like property dualism than nonreductive
materialism.
 |
| Nick Chopper visits a head shop |
This is
not to say that such transformations have no effect on mentality. Nick does stop loving Nimmie Amee when he
loses his heart (though this may be psychosomatic), and Langwidere’s
personality is definitely affected by which head she is wearing at any given
moment. Still, personal identity appears
to go with the body as a whole, not with any individual part.
All the
same, it is not quite true that
Nick’s mind goes with his tin parts rather than his meat parts. That seems to be what Baum intended in Wizard, but when he revisits the story
in Tin Woodman, we learn that Nick
was actually split, with his “meat” head likewise retaining mentality and
remembering being Nick: “I used to be
called Nick Chopper, when I was a woodman and cut down trees for a living.” The tin Nick’s response is apposite: “If you are Nick Chopper’s Head, then you are
Me – or I’m You – or – or – What relation are we, anyhow?” (Tin
Woodman, ch. 18) Star Trek fans will recall the episode
“Second Chances” in which Riker found himself in a similar situation.
 |
| The ultimate slash |
One
possibility is that neither of them
is the original Nick; the “fission” (as philosophers call it) instead destroyed
Nick, replacing him with two successors who came into existence with Nick’s
destruction. (The opposite of fission is
“fusion.” Incidentally, here’s a great story – not by Baum – about fusion. Also, one
of Baum’s less successful stories, Dot and Tot of Merryland, features a character, the appropriately named Mr.
Split, who undergoes periodic fission and fusion.) Another
possibility is that one of the two – the one that is the “closest continuer” of
the original – is the original Nick
while the other is not. Meat-head Nick
is a closer continuer in terms of physical composition; but tin Nick has
greater continuity of consciousness, since despite his possessing a brain,
meat-head Nick’s memory has grown “quite hazy” ever since, as he puts it, “my
separation from the rest of me,” and in particular he, unlike tin Nick, cannot
remember chopping off his limbs. Yet
another possibility is that each Nick is only half of the original Nick, with
the whole Nick surviving as a scattered object made up of both of them. A person existing as a scattered object is
possible in Oz; in Glinda, for
example, we’re told that Dorothy, though now invulnerable to being killed,
might be “cut into pieces,” which “while still alive ... could be widely
scattered.” (ch. 1)
(Of
course, if Dorothy were indeed to be reduced to still-living but scattered
pieces, that would not be a “horrible and blood-curdling incident,” since Baum
doesn’t write those.)
 |
| Mixed and matched |
Baum
prided himself on writing “modern” and “American” fairy tales. Yet his books are filled with kings, princesses,
castles, woodcutters’ cottages, and other such trappings of a premodern,
preindustrial, European economy. Dorothy
also meets lions and tigers, the fauna of the old world – not the mountain lions and buffalo of the new. Yet Oz does occasionally contain machinery
(such as the phonograph in Patchwork Girl
and the submarines in Glinda); and if
democracy has no place there, versions of feminism and pacifism do.
Baum’s
other fairylands feature electricity as well.
In Merryland we find houses “lighted by a soft glow from hidden electric
lamps.” (Dot and Tot, ch. 7) There are
several cases of electricity in Mo, including “a diamond-covered chandelier,
with hundreds of electric lights.” (Monarch, ch. 7) The
inhabitants of the mermaid kingdom “use electric lights in our palaces and have
done so for thousands of years.” (Sea Fairies, ch. 8) Even Mr.
Woodchuck’s house has “an electric door-bell.”
(Twinkle Tales, ch. 2)
Many
interpreters of the Oz books stress the differences between Oz and the United
States, suggesting that Oz is a kind of utopia where America’s defects are
corrected. Yet Baum sometimes describes America as a kind of Oz. In Tik-Tok
of Oz, the Shaggy Man says: “All the
magic isn’t in fairyland .... There’s lots of magic in all Nature, and you may
see it as well in the United States .... Is anything more wonderful than to see
a flower grow and blossom, or to get light out of the electricity in the air?
(ch. 15) Likewise
in Queer Visitors, the Scarecrow
tells an American audience that his own history is “not more marvelous than
your own tale of the wire rope that carried words across the ocean” (ch. 13),
and the Woggle-Bug observes: “You people
also do wonderful things ... but no one here seems surprised at
moving-pictures, talking-machines, or telephones ....” (ch. 15)
Baum explains that “everything here seems as wonderful to [the Ozites]
as they themselves are wonderful to us,” since, lacking magic, we “do so much
by means of machinery alone.” Echoing
theosophy’s fusion of science with magic, Baum concludes that “perhaps the
United States is, after all, as great a fairyland as the kingdom of Oz, if we
look at the matter in the right way.” (ch. 5)
But Baum’s
attitude toward machinery is complicated.
Baum was fascinated by machinery; for one of his plays he designed a
rocking stage to simulate a ship at sea, described by newspaper accounts at the
time as “a triumph of mechanical art” and “one of the finest and most elaborate
pieces of stage-mechanism ever presented to the public.” (quoted in Loncraine, Real Wizard, p. 66) Baum also
helped to develop the special effects – or “fairy photography,” as he called
them – for the first Oz film (now lost) in 1908. (pp. 230-234)
 |
| “Tea, Earl Grey, hot. Not as hot as the sun this time.” |
Like the
Federation in Star Trek, Baum’s Oz is
sometimes envisioned as a moneyless, boss-less,
post-scarcity socialist utopia (at least from the start of Ozma’s messianic reign),
as here:
No disease of any sort
was ever known among the Ozites, and so no one ever died unless he met with an
accident that prevented him from living. This happened very seldom, indeed.
There were no poor people in the Land of Oz, because there was no such thing as
money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler. The people were
her children, and she cared for them. Each person was given freely by his
neighbors whatever he required for his use, which is as much as any one may
reasonably desire. Some tilled the lands and raised great crops of grain, which
was divided equally among the entire population, so that all had enough. There
were many tailors and dressmakers and shoemakers and the like, who made things
that any who desired them might wear. Likewise there were jewelers who made
ornaments for the person, which pleased and beautified the people, and these
ornaments also were free to those who asked for them. Each man and woman, no
matter what he or she produced for the good of the community, was supplied by
the neighbors with food and clothing and a house and furniture and ornaments
and games. If by chance the supply ever ran short, more was taken from the
great storehouses of the Ruler, which were afterward filled up again when there
was more of any article than the people needed. (Emerald City, ch. 3)
From each according to
his ability, to each according to his need, in short. This is not a purely post-scarcity society, however; for as Ozma tells Dorothy:
If every one could wave
a wand and have his wants fulfilled there would be little to wish for. There
would be no eager striving to obtain the difficult, for nothing would then be
difficult, and the pleasure of earning something longed for, and only to be
secured by hard work and careful thought, would be utterly lost. (Glinda,
ch. 4)
Yet despite this paean
to the virtues of work, we never actually see much in the way of work done by
Dorothy or her fellow expatriates.
It’s not entirely clear how Oz does without money. The chief function of a pricing system, and
thus of money, is to enable consumer preferences to direct the allocation of production goods to their most needed uses.
The way post-scarcity utopias are usually imagined as getting around
this is through the use of some technology (like the replicators in Star Trek)
that can produce large quantities quickly at low cost near the point of
consumption, thus maximally streamlining the stages of production. Given the availability of magic in Oz, one
might suppose that this is just how matters are handled there; but Baum’s talk
of distributing goods from government storehouses
in times of shortage, and then returning
them to the storehouses in times of surplus, suggests that Baum is imagining
all this to be arranged by ordinary means (despite his disclaimer that “I do
not suppose such an arrangement would be practical with us”). Of course Baum was writing at a time when the
chief obstacle to state-socialist central planning was thought to be incentival
rather than epistemic.
 |
| Anarchy in Oz! |
Continuing Baum’s
description:
Every one worked half
the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as
they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to
do. There were no cruel overseers set to watch them, and no one to rebuke them
or to find fault with them. So each one was proud to do all he could for his
friends and neighbors, and was glad when they would accept the things he
produced. ...
There were all sorts of
queer characters among them, but not a single one who was evil, or who
possessed a selfish or violent nature. They were peaceful, kind hearted, loving
and merry, and every inhabitant adored the beautiful girl who ruled them and delighted
to obey her every command. (ch. 3)
This
portrait of Oz is, of course, less than fully accurate. There are frequent references to money in the
early books – presumably before Ozma’s reforms, but Baum has a tendency to
backdate those reforms – and in the later books we find that money is still in
use in some parts of Oz. Ojo and his
uncle live in poverty in Patchwork Girl. And of course Baum peoples Oz with plenty of
“selfish” and “violent” characters, from Kiki Aru to Mrs. Yoop. (How else are the books going to get their
villains? One can’t bring back the Nome
King every time.)
Baum is
just as capable of painting the United States is similarly unrealistic utopian
colours. In an 1890 newspaper
editorial, he writes:
Our citizens derive
their origin from every nation and every clime, yet they live together in
perfect harmony. No feuds of ancestry, no prejudice of birth mar the
tranquility of their daily interchange of courtesies. Every man falls naturally
into the niche for which his education and abilities fit him, and his neighbor
has pride in his success, or sorrows for his misfortunes, no matter from whence
he came. ... Many religions prevail throughout the land, but no one quarrels
with a friend because he chooses to worship God through different channels than
those he himself believes to be the true ones. Bigotry, if not wholly unknown,
is so intolerable as to be nearly entirely suppressed. (Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 1 February 1890; quoted in Koupal, Baum’s Road, pp. 109-110)
Yes,
that’s the USA he’s writing about, not one of his imaginary countries. Bear in mind that in the very year – 1890 – that
Baum wrote of America as a fairyland of tolerance, Moses Harman was languishing in prison (as his
daughter and son-in-law had done four years earlier) for the
crime of protesting the existing laws on marriage and freedom of the press; the
Mormon church was being legally bullied into giving up polygamy; and Jim
Crow and lynch law were reigning supreme in the South (and to a lesser degree
the North), where “prejudice of birth” had a somewhat greater impact on the
“daily interchange of courtesies” than Baum seems prepared to acknowledge.
 |
| Somehow I doubt they really want my opinion. |
Despite
the authoritarian structure of Ozma’s government, many critics find a highly
democratic aspect to Oz society.
Katharine Rogers writes:
Manners in Oz are those
of rural America at its best – pleasant and friendly to everyone one meets, but
disregardful of decorum or deference to rank.
Dorothy speaks politely to a hen and outspokenly defies Princess
Langwidere. Her unconsciousness of
conventional status distinctions is the prevailing attitude in Oz. ... When problems appear in the Oz books, the
characters apply their traditional American self-reliance and practical common
sense to solving them. If a group is
involved, everyone contributes something: human adults and children, stuffed or
metal people, animals, robots. They discuss
the problem logically, everyone is free to give his or her opinion, everyone is
listened to. When anyone thinks of a
promising suggestion, the rest of the group agrees to follow it. It is spontaneous democracy, without a formal
structure. Very often it is the least
prestigious member of the group who comes up with the best ideas. … Children in
the Oz books are reasonable, responsible, and deserving of the respect they get
.... Over and over, Baum’s work deflates self-important adult authority figures
.... (Creator of Oz, pp. 245-246)
Charity
Gibson likewise observes that “there is no class
consciousness in Oz,” since “Dorothy, a lowly farm girl, is treated with a
sense of equality by the rulers of the land” – though unlike Rogers, Gibson
takes this as a point of contrast
between Oz and America. Baum’s Oz, for
Gibson, is “a land with hierarchical roles but devoid of hierarchical
attitudes.” (“The Wizard of Oz as a Modernist Work,” p. 112; in Durand &
Leigh, Universe of Oz, pp.
107-118) And Andrew
Karp finds in Oz a culture
of “cooperation and respect not just between [sic] human beings but between human beings and the world around
them, a world that includes animals, vegetables, minerals, and machines” – a
vision that Karp deems essentially useful for our “world of clones and genetic
engineering, of virtual reality and artificial intelligence,” where “the
boundaries ... between biological and mechanical are becoming more and more
blurred.” (“Utopian Tension in K. Frank Baum’s Oz,” p. 119; Utopian Studies
9.2, 1998, pp. 103-121)
Richard Tuerk
argues that Oz is not a utopia at all, because a) some inhabitants are
discontented, b) there are dangers menacing the country from both within and
without; and c) the government functions as something “closer to being a
totalitarian state,” ruled by “a kind of marriage of technology and magic that
Orwell’s Big Brother would have envied,” since between the magic picture and Glinda’s
great book of records,” Ozma is “able to spy on every action of her subjects,”
while her “monopoly on magic” enables her to “exert total control.” (Oz in Perspective, pp. 103, 191) As Tuerk
points out, the vision of Oz as a police state in such recent works as Gregory
Maguire’s Wicked and Edward Einhorn’s
Paradox in Oz are simply developing
potentialities already present in Baum’s text. (Einhorn
also explores the question of the justice of Ozma’s monopoly on magic in his
sequels “Unauthorized Magic” and The Living House of Oz.) In
Foucauldian terms, Oz’s rulers seem to maintain control through a mixture of
the disciplinary, pastoral, and biopolitical models of power.
But I don’t
think these considerations are an obstacle to calling Oz a utopia. As regards
(a) and (b), the term “utopia” is ambiguous; it can mean “ideal” in the sense
of being flawlessly perfect, as when
David Friedman says that “Utopia is not an option.” This is
what the term generally means when it is used pejoratively. It is not, however, how the term is used by
utopian advocates themselves, for whom it means an ideal society in a much more
ordinary-language sense of “ideal” – a society that is a radical and systematic
improvement on our own, but not one without defects or dangers. It is this more constrained sense of
“utopia” that is in play when Friedrich Hayek praises “the courage to be utopian,” or John Rawls
defends a “realistic utopia,” or Robert
Nozick calls for a “framework for utopias.”
Incidentally,
Tuerk annoyingly buys into the idea that “utopia” means only “no place,” so that
a separate term, “eutopia,” is needed to mean “good place.” But surely the whole point of the word
“utopia” is its ambiguity between eutopia,
“good place,” and outopia, “no
place”; in any case, that a utopia is ideal is part of the standard meaning of
the word, so no separate “eutopia” term is needed.
Wagner,
like Tuerk, thinks the existence of threats serves to “destabilize the
otherwise utopian tone” of the Oz books:
“Utopian novels rarely foreground” conflict between “the forces of good
and the forces of evil,” she writes;
such battles “generally take place, if at all, in the past.” (“Unsettling Oz,”
p. 49) But this simply suggests that
Wagner has not read much science fiction or fantasy, since the idea of a
utopian society under internal or external threat is an utterly commonplace
trope of such literature, from Plato’s ur-Athens, Tolkien’s
Shire, Laurel and
Hardy’s “Atoll K,” and
Russell’s Gand to Hogan’s
Chiron, Smith’s
North American Confederacy, Robinson’s
Mars, and Banks’
Culture.
As Karp
points out, the attempt to reconcile opposites is crucial to Baum’s utopian
vision:
In developing the
community of Oz, Baum seems to be trying to do the impossible: to create a world that combines the pastoral
and artistic features of William Morris’s utopia with the technological and
urban advantages of Edward Bellamy’s; to fashion a utopia that is
simultaneously egalitarian and authoritarian; and to establish a society that
values and protects individual rights, interests, and freedoms, as well as
cultural multiplicity, at the same time as it promotes the value of a unified
state to which individuals owe allegiance, a state created “E Pluribus Unum.” (“Utopian Tension,” p. 103; on Morris and
Bellamy, see also Rogers, Creator of Oz,
pp. 170-171.)
But as
Karp goes on to show, Baum dramatises the tensions among these desiderata.
 |
| Pierre-Joseph Proudhon |
This idea
of maintaining social order through the balancing rather than the resolution of
antinomies shows up in Aunt Jane’s Nieces at Work (written under the name “Edith van Dyne,” one of Baum’s many
pseudonyms), where one character explains that while
there is “no difference of importance” between the Democratic and Republican
parties, they serve as the “positive and negative poles that provide the
current of electricity for our nation” to “keep it going properly,” and also
“safeguard our interests by watching one another.” (ch. 4) Baum expresses the same sentiment in propria persona in one of his
newspaper editorials: “The two great parties are a necessity, and in their very
discords is found the security of our country.”
(Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 1 February 1890; quoted in Koupal, p. 110) Perhaps the
tensions within Oz should be viewed in a similar light.
“The key to the success of our country is tolerance,” Baum
maintains (Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer,
1 February 1890; quoted in Koupal, p. 109), and his books often contain
warnings against prejudice. When she
meets the Good Witch of the North, Dorothy exclaims, “But I thought all witches
were wicked,” and receives the reply “Oh, no, that is a great mistake.” (Wizard,
ch. 2) The message is still clearer in
Baum’s short story “The Witchcraft of Mary-Marie”:
“... Witches, you know, are withered dried-up old hags. ...
And they sell their souls to Satan, in return for a knowledge of witchcraft,”
continued Mary-Marie ....
“Stuff and nonsense!”
cried the stranger angrily. ... “[Y]our
words prove you to be very ignorant of the subject. You may find good people
and bad people in the world; and so, I suppose, you may find good witches and
bad witches. But I must confess most of the witches I have known were very
respectable, indeed, and famous for their kind actions.”
Nor does Baum buy into the equation of beauty with virtue
and ugliness with vice. Glinda’s idiotic
line “Only bad witches are ugly” occurs only in the movie, not the books. Baum stresses the pleasant appearance and
affable manner of one of his most chilling creations, the towering enchantress Mrs.
Yoop:
The good-natured Giantess was more terrible than they had
imagined. She could smile and wear pretty clothes and at the same time be even
more cruel than her wicked husband had been. ... She did not affect any
mysterious airs or indulge in chants or mystic rites, as most witches do, nor
was the Giantess old and ugly or disagreeable in face or manner. Nevertheless,
she frightened her prisoners more .... (Tin Woodman, chs. 5-6)
Conversely, the true appearance of the witch-queen Zixi, in Queen Zixi of Ix, is old and ugly; but despite some discreditable choices into which she is driven by vanity, her character is essentially good. (And of course the Good Witch of the North, while not ugly, is, unlike Glinda, old.)
 |
| A right jolly old elf |
Baum’s insistence in “Mary-Marie” that witches are more
likely to be good than bad may evince the influence of his mother-in-law, feminist
activist Matilda Gage, whose writings Baum admired. In 1893, Gage wrote:
Whatever the pretext made for witchcraft persecution we have
abundant proof that the so-called "witch" was among the most
profoundly scientific persons of the age. The church having forbidden its
offices and all external methods of knowledge to woman, was profoundly stirred
with indignation at her having through her own wisdom, penetrated into some of
the most deeply subtle secrets of nature .... The superior learning of witches
was recognized in the widely extended belief of their ability to work miracles.
The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist
of those ages. The persecution which for ages waged against witches was in
reality an attack upon science at the hands of the church. As knowledge has
ever been power, the church feared its use in woman's hands, and leveled its
deadliest blows at her. (Woman, Church, and State, ch. 5)
In The Master Key,
Baum offers a similar moral about judging people as individuals rather than as
members of a group:
“I've always understood that demons were bad things,"
added Rob, boldly. ...
“Not necessarily,” returned his visitor. “If you will take
the trouble to consult your dictionary, you will find that demons may be either
good or bad, like any other class of beings. Originally all demons were good,
yet of late years people have come to consider all demons evil. I do not know
why. ...” (ch. 2)
Likewise, in The Sea Fairies Cap’n Bill believes that “nobody never sawr a mermaid an’ lived to
tell the tale,” since anyone who sees one is lured into the water and “is bound
to get drownded” – a prejudice that is shortly refuted by events.
A typical sample from the latter:
The colored lady cast one glance behind her and imagined
that Satan had at last arrived to claim her. ... “Go ’way, Mars’ Debbil! Go ’way
an’ lemme ’lone!” she screeched, and the next minute she dropped her empty
basket and sped up the street with a swiftness that only fear could have lent
her flat-bottomed feet.
At the same time, Baum could also write
stories portraying nonwhites with dignity.
In “The Tiger’s Eye,” which takes place on “an island of the South Seas,
where the people are black and have never heard of telephones or chocolate
caramels,” Baum gives a young native boy the same courage, intelligence, and
resourcefulness he gives Dorothy and Trot:
The boy, with the spear clutched in his little hand, sat
still and looked at his enemy. The tiger snarled and crouched for a spring. ...
Titticontoo had never been afraid in his life, and he was not afraid now. He
knew the tiger was dangerous and realized his mother had fainted and could not
help him. So he must do his best to help himself. He set one end of his spear
against the ground and pointed the other – the sharp end – at the leaping
tiger.
In Daughters of Destiny, Baum presents positively a romance between a white Christian
American woman and a Persian Muslim man. And in The Patchwork Girl of Oz – the very book that introduces the
offensively racist stereotype of the Tottenhots – Baum insightfully illustrates
the way in which differences in skin colour are exploited to reinforce
differences in power. Here, Dame Margolotte
explains the origin of the titular Patchwork Girl, a rebellious, cotton-stuffed,
yarn-haired “colored” woman:
We never have used my grandmother’s many-colored patchwork
quilt, handsome as it is, for we Munchkins do not care for any color other than
blue, so it has been packed away in the chest for about a hundred years. When I
found it, I said to myself that it would do nicely for my servant girl, for
when she was brought to life she would not be proud nor haughty ... for such a
dreadful mixture of colors would discourage her from trying to be as dignified
as the blue Munchkins are. ... [A]ll
Munchkins prefer blue to anything else and when my housework girl is brought to
life she will find herself to be of so many unpopular colors that she’ll never
dare be rebellious or impudent, as servants are sometimes liable to be when
they are made the same way their mistresses are. (Patchwork Girl, ch. 2)
Defenders of Baum sometimes argue that
his negative racial attitudes do not make Baum a racist “by the standards of
his day.” Maybe not, but so what? The standards of his day were racist
standards; an appeal to them will not get Baum off the hook. Baum’s critics, on the other hand, sometimes
suggest that his racism makes his books unsuitable for today’s children. I can’t agree with that either. If we shelter children from any literature
containing bigotry or prejudice, we will close them off from the vast majority
of what has been written throughout history.
Children need to learn to distinguish the good from the bad in what they
read, and rendering the bad invisible does them no service. With Baum as with any author, what is good in
his writings does not redeem or excuse what is bad in them – but neither does what
is bad invalidate what is good.
I don’t think this interpretation holds
up. In Wizard, where the idea of the colour-coded regions first appears,
it is quite definitely only the Emerald
City (along with its immediate environs), not the country as a whole, that
is said to be ruled by the Wizard – which strongly implies that Oz, like Italy
prior to 1871, is initially a country only in the geographical rather than the
political sense. In other words, the
Munchkins, Winkies, Quadlings, Gillikins, etc., as originally conceived, are
“segregated,” not by central authority – there being none, as yet – but because
they are distinct nation-states. The
different colours – which apply to clothing and other artefacts, not to skin,
nor yet (as they later will) to vegetation – are more likely to indicate
governmental than racial differences, like differently coloured flags – or
football jerseys. (Baum’s later idea
that the colour of vegetation likewise varies by region is perhaps inspired, as
Hearn suggests (p. 61, citing Martin Gardner), by the passage in chapter 3 of
Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad where Huck expects countries to have the same
colour schemes in real life that they have on maps. Twain’s book also involves travel via balloon
from the American Midwest to Egypt, land of the historical Ozymandias, so that
may be another possible influence.)
 |
| The first Oz map, before east and west got switched |
While Baum may be innocent on this
point, however, he is guilty of worse.
Baum’s most extreme and notorious descent into racism, seemingly, is found
in a pair of newspaper editorials he wrote in late 1890 and early 1891,
apparently calling for genocide against Native Americans:
Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit
broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable
wretches that they are. ...
Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to
protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed
and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. (Aberdeen
Saturday Pioneer, 20 December 1890 and 3 January 1891)
Baum’s call for extermination is a
farrago of ambivalence and inconsistency.
In these very same editorials, Baum speaks of the “proud spirit of the
original owners of these vast prairies,” whose white conquerors “were marked in
their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery”; and he
quotes favourably the observation that “when the whites win a fight, it is a
victory, and when the Indians win it, it is a massacre.” Yet he also asserts that the white settlers
are “masters of the American continent ... by law of
conquest, by justice of civilization” – a claim of moral justification that
sorts oddly with the admission that the white conquest of America has been a
“wrong.” Likewise, his assertion that
the “fiery rage” of rebellion has died with Sitting Bull, so that those Indians
who remain are mainly “whining curs who lick the hand that smites them,” does
not fit well with his claim that these same Indians are “untamed and untamable
creatures” who must be destroyed to “protect our civilization” and ensure the “future
safety for our settlers.”
 |
| Sitting Bull |
Moreover, in Baum’s Twinkle Tales, as Reneau points out, a woodchuck
upbraids Twinkle, the young human protagonist, for the human propensity to set
traps for wild animals. Twinkle initially defends the practice, arguing that “We
have to sell the clover and the vegetables to earn our living ... and if the
animals eat them up we can’t sell them.”
But the woodchuck replies that, first, the animals “don’t eat enough to
rob you”; second, “the land belonged to the wild creatures long before you
people came here and began to farm”; and third, it “hurts dreadfully to be
caught in a trap” and “there is no reason why you should be so cruel.” In response, Twinkle grows “sorry and repentant,”
and promises to “ask papa never to set another trap.” It’s hard to square this judgment with the
endorsement of defensive genocide against a dispossessed people.
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| Pericles, Jefferson, Kipling |
It’s true that Baum’s sentiments in
these editorials are mostly at odds
with the attitudes he endorses in his fiction; but since both the editorials
and the fiction contain mixed messages, not much can be inferred from
that. Who would have expected Baum, in The Last Egyptian, to introduce the
book’s hero kicking a sleeping native to wake him? Yet he does so, with no
suggestion that such conduct is incompatible with the character’s heroism. And Baum does seem to endorse genocide
of the Awgwas in Santa Claus and of the
Gargoyles in Dorothy and the Wizard. Thus while I now lean toward the ironic
reading, I don’t regard the choice between the literal and ironic
interpretations as definitively settled.
Schwartz (in Finding Oz), while taking the anti-Indian editorials to be sincere,
asserts that Baum eventually came to regret them; but offers no evidence for
this thesis. Schwartz also claims that
Baum’s later writings are free from racism, which is easily shown to be false –
the Tottenhots being a salient example.
Even if Baum should turn out to be off the hook for the editorials, his
docket is not exactly wiped clean thereby.
The Bells defend Baum’s ethnic
stereotypes on the grounds that “Baum jokes at everyone’s expense,” and that
someone who pokes fun at all groups, including his own, is defensible in a way
that someone who pokes fun at just one or two groups is not. But I don’t find it blindingly obvious that being an equal-opportunity offender gets you off the hook for racist remarks. In any case, when one recalls, for example, the
transformation scene in Rinkitink, where the (black) Tottenhot is a “lower
form of a man”; the Mifket, described elsewhere as a “sort of creature that is neither
an animal nor a man,” is “a great step in advance” over the Tottenhot; and the
apex, the (white) prince, is “a handsome young man, tall and shapely,” it’s not
so easy to see Baum as an equal-opportunity offender. (To
be sure, the fact that a) the starting point of this process, Bilbil the goat,
is as intelligent as a human, while b) the end result of this process is
saddled with the somewhat risible name “Prince Bobo of Boboland,” serves in
some degree to undercut the presentation of the transformation as one of unambiguous
ascent.)
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| Matilda Joslyn Gage |
It was Gage who urged Baum to take up writing, and encouraged his interest in spiritualism and theosophy as well. Gage also revered the Iroquois Confederacy for its relative gender equality, defended Indian tribal independence from the u.s., and had even been adopted into a clan of the Mohawk nation. (If she had any influence on Baum in this area, it was evidently incomplete, at least if his extermination articles are sincere.)
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| Frank and Maud Baum |
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| Judy Garland and Maud Baum reading Wizard |
Baum’s enthusiasm for women as rulers
is matched only by his enthusiasm for women as pilots. In The Flying Girl (1911), he has one (positively presented) character say: “The most successful aviators in the future ...
are bound to be women. As a rule they
are lighter than men, more supple and active, quick of perception and less
liable to lose their heads in emergencies.”
(ch. 19)
Of course the idea that women will make
better rulers (or aviators) than men owing to their innate feminine virtues is
an essentialist notion that few modern feminists will greet with favour; and
the very notion that anybody, whether
male or female, should “rule” is arguably a notion inextricably entangled with
patriarchy, and wrong for much the same reasons. But in Baum’s historical context, when
women were widely thought to be devoid of competence in any field outside the
domestic sphere, such ideas are surely an improvement on the prevailing culture.
Baum’s books feature female
protagonists more commonly than male ones – including teenage girl detectives
(the Phoebe Daring and Mary Louise books – well before Nancy Drew) and of course teenage girl aviators (the
Orissa Kane books), as well as the irrepressibly
anarchistic Patchwork Girl in the Oz books.
(Baum’s 1912 Flying Girl and Her Chum incidentally contains one
of the very first published uses of the
word “aviatrix,” at a time when it was a word with few referents.) In Aunt Jane’s Nieces, a dangerous incident that nearly any other writer of the era
would have handled by having the boy rescue the girl, instead ends with the
girl rescuing the boy.
Baum was opposed to inflicting “namby-pamby books” on girls, insisting that they “as eagerly demand and absorb
the marvelous as their brothers; aye, and need it as much” – an attitude that led him into conflicts
with his publishers, who complained that his girl characters were excessively
adventuresome. Upon reading the first
draft of The Flying Girl and Her Chum,
Baum’s publishers told him that he had “made the story too thrilling” for a
young female audience, a remark that recalls Miss Prism’s
advice to young Cecily, in Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest, to omit the “chapter on the Fall of the Rupee” from her
economics lesson as it is “somewhat too sensational.”
As with the “Garden of Meats” episode
discussed previously, Baum dutifully wrote back that he regarded the criticism
to be “just and proper”:
I find I have a tendency to be ultra-sensational in these
girls’ books, and it is a fault I must earnestly try to correct. I suppose I have acquired that habit through
writing fairy tales, where exaggeration is a virtue; so that when I get this
into this other class of stories, I am unconsciously tempted to create a plot
too weird for the purposes I wish to accomplish. I will bear this in mind and try to tone down
the excitement in future stories.
(quoted in Robert A. Baum’s introduction to the 2003 Oz Club edition of Aunt Jane’s Nieces)
Given his aforementioned conviction
that girls want and need “the marvelous” as much as boys do, it seems unlikely
that Baum’s contrition here was sincere.
But Baum’s books for teenage girls under his “Edith Van Dyne” pseudonym
were one of his chief sources of income, so he bowed to the harness and mostly
reined himself in for the future. Little
wonder that Baum would fantasise about a society in which people did their work
as they pleased, without “overseers set to watch them [or] to rebuke them or to find
fault with them,” and in which each worker was provided with the necessaries of
life “no matter what he or she produced.” (Emerald City, ch. 3)
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| Everybody knows that she’s a wonderful little cook |
Baum’s critique of male supremacy runs
through the Oz books as well. In Wizard, the female witches, both good and bad, mistakenly regard
the male wizard as their superior when in fact his superiority is pure
charlatanism; and in Land he turns
out to have actively connived at displacing the legitimate female authority,
who is gloriously reinstated. (Burger’s
claim that the “unquestioned patriarchal power of the Wizard” in the Oz
tradition is not “explicitly challenged” until Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked (American Myth, p. 193) is baffling.)
Baum
also repeatedly satirises patriarchal attitudes of possession, objectification,
and faux “protection” toward women. When
the Nome King is accused of having cruelly enslaved the royal family of Ev, he
responds:
Cruelty ... is a thing I
can’t abide. So, as slaves must work hard, and the Queen of Ev and her children
were delicate and tender, I transformed them all into articles of ornament and
bric-a-brac and scattered them around the various rooms of my palace. Instead
of being obliged to labor, they merely decorate my apartments, and I really
think I have treated them with great kindness.
(Ozma, ch. 11)
A
similar attitude is found in Mrs. Yoop, who transforms “Polychrome, the
Daughter of the Rainbow, into a canary-bird” in “a gold cage studded with
diamonds” so “she couldn’t fly away” – lines that would have reminded Baum’s
early-20th-century audience of the enormously popular song lyric “She’s only a bird in a gilded cage.” Mrs.
Yoop complains: “I expected she’d sing and talk and we'd have good times
together,” but “she has refused to speak a single word.” (Tin Woodman, ch. 5; interestingly, we also learn that Mrs. Yoop herself is a
former victim of domestic abuse: “my husband treated me badly at times .... Often he kicked me on my shins, when I wouldn’t wait on him.”)
Likewise,
when Dorothy meets the little princess made of china, she tells her: “you are so beautiful ... that I am sure I
could love you dearly. Won’t you let me carry you back to Kansas, and stand you
on Aunt Em’s mantel?”
“That would make me very
unhappy,” answered the china Princess. “You see, here 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 at once stiffen, and we can only stand straight and
look pretty. Of course that is all that is expected of us when we are on
mantels and cabinets and drawing-room tables, but our lives are much pleasanter
here in our own country.” (Wizard, ch. 20)
Baum
surely had the status of women in mind when writing about those of whom “all
that is expected” is to “stand straight and look pretty” rather than being free
to “talk and move around as [they] please.”
Given his dual interest in feminism and theatre, Baum was probably
familiar with Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House,
which takes the same theme. Torvald, the
husband in the play, is like the Nome King in imagining that in providing an
infantilising captivity for his wife he is rescuing her from the necessity of
labour and so treating her “with great kindness”; and Nora’s eventual repudiation
of the role of decorative plaything is akin to Polychrome’s reproachful silence
toward Mrs. Yoop.
Baum’s
satire on the suffragist movement in Land,
in which General Jinjur and her all-female army rebel against male authority
only to be betrayed by their own feminine foibles, has been interpreted as antifeminist. Given Baum’s own support for women’s
suffrage, critics have assumed that he was simply pandering to popular
prejudice, perhaps with an eye to the possibilities of an all-girl chorus in a
stage adaptation (there was one).
But
one has to read Land rather
selectively to see in it an antifeminist moral.
After all, Jinjur and her army of silly girls are overthrown, not by
men, but by the sorcerous Glinda and her own, competent all-female army; and
Jinjur’s soldiers are defeated because they behave in conventionally “feminine
ways” – shrieking at mice, being obsessed with clothing and jewelry. That such failings are not inherent in their
gender is evidenced by Glinda and her army, who do none of these things. Moreover, Glinda overthrows Jinjur not to
restore male authority, as the Scarecrow and his friends expect, but to install
a better female authority, Ozma, on the throne.
Indeed the book’s male protagonist (Tip) must be transformed into a
female (Ozma) before being entitled to rule.
Glinda is thus just as much a rebel against patriarchy as Jinjur is,
though Baum manages to slip this fact under the radar. No doubt he took quiet satisfaction in
putting across his exaltation of female authority by wrapping it in the sugared
pill of a satire on female authority.
As
we’ve seen, Land is also unusual,
especially for a turn-of-the-century children’s book, in featuring a
transgender protagonist, Tip/Ozma.
Admittedly Baum’s handling of this theme is open to criticism. Tip has no memory of being a girl and has
always thought of himself as male; hence he is understandably hesitant about
being transformed back into Ozma.
Accordingly, he tells Glinda: “if
I don’t like being a girl you must promise to change me into a boy again.” Glinda replies that doing so is “beyond my
magic,” which at first sounds like a confession of inability; but then she
continues: “I never deal in
transformations, for they are not honest, and no respectable sorceress likes to
make things appear to be what they are not. Only unscrupulous witches use the
art ....” (Land, ch. 23) Glinda’s insistence that Tip take his birth
gender as authoritative, and return to it, despite his own self-identification
as male is not exactly transgender-friendly; such essentialism also seems out
of keeping with the fluidity of bodily identity that pervades the Oz books,
where the Tin Woodman, for example, is allowed to prefer his metal body to his original
meat one. All the same, Baum’s decision
to turn the book’s boy hero into a girl – and then put her in charge of the
whole country, to boot – is certainly a gutsy one.
And
Baum is not always so rigid on gender identity.
Consider, for example, two of his non-Oz fantasies, The Enchanted Island of Yew and John
Dough and the Cherub. In the former,
a female fairy tires of her fairy life and decides to spend a year as a mortal;
but she finds the prospect of becoming a female
mortal unappealing:
“I fear a girl would not
be allowed to travel alone,” Seseley remarked, after some further thought. “At
least,” she added, “I have never heard of such a thing.”
“No,” said the fairy,
rather bitterly, “your men are the ones that roam abroad and have adventures of
all kinds. Your women are poor, weak creatures, I remember.”
There was no denying
this, so the three girls sat silent until Seseley asked: “Why do you wish to become a mortal?”
“To gain exciting
experiences,” answered the fairy. “I’m tired of being a humdrum fairy year in
and year out. Of course, I do not wish to become a mortal for all time, for
that would get monotonous, too; but to live a short while as the earth people
do would amuse me very much.”
“If you want variety,
you should become a boy,” said Helda, with a laugh, “The life of a boy is one
round of excitement.”
“Then make me a boy!”
exclaimed the fairy eagerly.
“A boy!” they all cried
in consternation. And Seseley added:
“Why – you’re a girl fairy, aren’t you?”
“Well – yes; I suppose I
am,” answered the beautiful creature, smiling; “but as you are going to change
me anyway, I may as well become a boy as a girl.”
“Better!” declared
Helda, clapping her hands; “for then you can do as you please.”
“But would it be right?”
asked Seseley, with hesitation.
“Why not?” retorted the
fairy. “I can see nothing wrong in being a boy. Make me a tall, slender youth,
with waving brown hair and dark eyes. Then I shall be as unlike my own self as
possible, and the adventure will be all the more interesting. Yes; I like the
idea of being a boy very much indeed.” (Yew, ch. 4)
And
so the fairy spends the rest of the book as the boy Prince Marvel, until her
transformation back into a fairy at the end – and unlike Ozma’s, both her
original transformation and its subsequent reversal are chosen.
In
John Dough and the Cherub, the sex of
one of the two protagonists, Chick the Cherub, is never revealed; Chick’s
status as an incubator baby is evidently meant to explain this transcendence of
traditional gender identities. Throughout
the book, Baum carefully avoids using gender-specific pronouns, and his
illustrator – Neill again – maintains the androgyny visually. Chick eventually grows up to be “Head
Booleywag” (essentially Grand Vizier) but – as the novel’s last line tells us –
“curiously enough, the Records fail to state whether the Head Booleywag was a
man or a woman.” Nor is the author any
more forthcoming outside the pages of the book:
“I can’t remember that Chick the Cherub impresses me as other than a
joyous, sweet, venturesome and lovable child,” Baum writes; “Who cares whether
the Cherub is a boy or a girl?” (quoted in Rogers, Creator of Oz, p. 142) – a bold question in 1906.
Baum’s
publishers highlighted Chick’s gender ambiguity in their publicity for the
book, offering pictures of how Chick would look if dressed as a boy or as a
girl, and offering a prize for the best essay defending a particular answer to
the question of Chick’s gender. These
campaigns of course relied on the assumption (not Baum’s) that the ambiguity
urgently needed to be resolved; yet,
in tension with that assumption, the publishers also felt the need to maintain
the ambiguity so as not to relinquish their book’s chief advertising gimmick. In the end, of course, they assigned two top
prizes, one for an essay arguing that Chick must be a girl, and the other for
an essay arguing that Chick must be a boy.
For
Burger, Baum’s portrait of the Wicked Witch in Wizard represents “a woman with too much power” (American Myth, p. 16) – as
though putting powerful women in charge of everything were not the preferred
social system in the rest of the series.
Burger also charges that in Baum’s vision, the Witch of the West is
“wicked, and therefore automatically ugly” (p. 90), and charges that “Baum
equated dangerous magical power with the incomplete or fractured body.” (p.
168) Now of course it’s true that the
Wicked Witch in Wizard is ugly (as
are her successors in the later books, Mombi and Blinkie), while Glinda is
beautiful; but as we’ve seen with the examples of Zixi and Mrs. Yoop, Baum goes
out of his way to underline the fact that good witches can be ugly and bad
witches beautiful.
Burger further complains of the “polarization of female characters” in Baum’s stories “as either good or evil, wonderful or wicked” (p. 56), by contrast with the male Wizard, who is allowed moral greyness and even redemption: “The Wizard has manipulated Dorothy and her companions into attempting this dangerous journey,” and “has given them nothing but an illusion,” yet “he is forgiven his deceit and reinvested power by those whom he had tricked.” By contrast, “women are afforded none of this moral relativism” (I have no idea why Burger calls this “moral relativism”), but “instead are framed as either entirely good or evil, and are rewarded or punished accordingly.” (p. 204) Yet looking forward to later books, we see a number of morally grey female antagonists – General Jinjur, Princess Langwidere, Queen Ann Soforth, Queen Zixi – who despite some fairly dubious actions (including, in several cases, the attempted murder of the protagonists) end up forgiven and reintegrated into the community.
Burger
also tells us that Dorothy “remains firmly situated within the patriarchal
structure, happily sacrificing her independence and sense of adventure to
return to Kansas and take up her role as dutiful niece once again.” (p. 20) And again, discussing the Oz-inspired
miniseries Tin Man, Burger writes
that its version of Dorothy “marks a departure from previous Dorothys in that
she has no desire to return to Kansas,” but instead learns that Oz is her true
home and that she is by rights a princess of Oz. (p. 71) But of course in Baum’s later books
Dorothy does elect to stay in Oz, and indeed becomes a princess; and while her
aunt and uncle come to join her, they do not take up their former parental
role, but are instead relegated to the periphery of the narrative – ensconced
in some corner of Ozma’s palace – while Dorothy continues to wander off on her
own adventures. (Moreover, the idea that
Dorothy is actually from Oz and has unknowingly been a princess all along
originates with the 1925 film, not with a 2007 miniseries.)
Burger,
strange to say, acknowledges in an endnote that “in Baum’s later Oz books,
Dorothy repeatedly returns to Oz, developing an adventurous and independent
life outside the context of family life” and “eventually relocating there
permanently” (p. 211); and even in the main text she quotes Joel Chaston’s apt remark
that Dorothy “eventually rejects her Kansas home and domestic life to join a
community of homeless nonconformists” (p. 130).
But Burger apparently sees the later books as extraneous to the Oz
narrative that interests her. (Burger’s
inattention to the later works also causes her to fail to pick up on references
in other writers; for example, she notes (p. 184) the role of a “trio of Adepts”
in Maguire’s Wicked but apparently
misses that this is a nod to chapter 21 of Glinda of Oz.)
My
concern is that a narrow focus on Wizard
distorts our understanding of Baum’s work by treating exceptional features as
though they were representative and vice versa, generally with the result of
making Baum’s overall vision look less enlightened and less complex than it
actually was.
[To be continued. Next up:
Ayesha! Aslan! Atlantis!]
Very enjoyable read, Professor.
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DeleteI find your take on Oz very interesting. I'm personally more interested in viewing Oz as the fictional world it developed into as I went from research to writing my own Oz stories.
ReplyDeleteI've always been a little wary of anyone claiming to know of the origins of Baum's creations. (I found "Finding Oz" QUITE tedious in that regard.) There are various reasons why one might create an odd name or character or place or rule. In a story I recently finished, a character is a Ceylon Magpie who is also a vague oracle, based on the "One for sorrow" tradition. Her name was Corina, based on the scientific name of the family of such a bird. While I don't deny that some speculations may be onto something, sometimes I feel as if that it really was that deliberate, it sells the human imagination short.
But, as I say, I find revealing how the Good Witch of the North was removed from existence in a Thompson book but was present in a later Jack Snow book far more interesting than whether the word "Oz" came from a filing cabinet, Theosophy, the Biblical land of Uz, or Charles Dickens' nickname.
Other than that, I do try to keep up on research of Baum's life that is absolutely factual. I did recently pen a defense for Baum on my blog, but am a little dissatisfied. Saying "Baum wasn't racist because everyone was" is kind of contradictory. I don't believe he was incensed against any one group than anyone else in his day, the Indian editorials being more a product of stress and a fearful community. But I suppose that since the guy's no longer around, there's no real point in demonizing him. The surprisingly progressive themes in his work might point to him being a little more open minded if he was around in today's society. Very glad for your idea that ignoring or censoring non-PC classics is actually more harmful than just reading them.
I also REALLY appreciate your look at Baum's works as a whole. I've read a couple commentaries lately that try to make points based on just Baum's Oz work that could be countered with points in his other work. So seeing someone this well-read in Baum is quite refreshing!
I'll be following your RSS feed.
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