Much
ink has been spilled on the question of Baum’s possible influences. I’ve mentioned a few already: feminism,
theosophy, Lewis Carroll. Another source
sometimes suggested is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Feathertop” (1852), a
satire on superficiality in which Mother Rigby, “one of the most cunning and
potent witches in New England,” brings to life a scarecrow with a pumpkin
head and patchwork body (thus
prefiguring three Oz characters for the price of one: the Scarecrow, Jack
Pumpkinhead, and the Patchwork Girl).
When the newmade Scarecrow complains of “being without wits,” its
creator tells it that it has “brains enough” to “babble like a mill-stream,”
which is all that it needs in order to “go and play its part in the great
world.” When it swears by all its heart,
the witch observes: “thou didst put thy
hand to the left side of thy waistcoat as if thou really hadst one” (thus
throwing in a fourth prefiguring, this time of the Tin Woodman). Rigby moreover
informs the pumpkin-headed scarecrow that it will turn back into its real self
if it fails to puff ceaselessly on its pipe; this is presumably a three-way
reference: to Ichabod Crane’s headless horseman leaving only a shattered
pumpkin behind; to Cinderella’s coach
turning back into a pumpkin at midnight; and to God’s breathing life into
Adam. But as an instance of a humbug at
risk of being exposed, it prefigures yet a fifth Oz character, the Wizard
himself.
 |
| The Emerald City without green spectacles |
A frequently-mentioned inspiration for the Emerald City in particular is the “White City” erected on the shores of Lake Michigan in 1893 as part of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition; visitors to the fair were even issued sunglasses to protect their eyes from the glare. We know Baum was one of those visitors, and the vision of people in tinted spectacles walking around a fantastic cityscape obviously caught his imagination. But it was not just the fair itself, but specifically the mythologised description of it in an 1895 book by Frances Hodgson Burnett – an author Baum admired – that seems to prefigure the Emerald City most clearly:
There was a great Magician who was the ruler of all
the Genii in all the world. They were all powerful and rich and wonderful magicians, but he could make
them obey him, and give him what they stored away. And he said ... I will build a splendid City, that all
the world shall flock to and wonder at and remember forever. And in it some of
all the things in the world shall be seen, so that the people who see it shall
learn what the world is like – how huge it is, and what wisdom it has in it, and what wonders!
And it will make them know what they are
like themselves, because the wonders will be made by hands and feet and brains just like their own. And so they
will understand how strong they are – if
they only knew it – and it will give
them courage and fill them with
thoughts. (Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress, ch. 11; boldface emphasis added)
One of the most persistent interpretations of Wizard sees the book as a parable for the political and economic disputes of the 1890s, particularly over monetary policy. On this reading the yellow brick road represents the gold standard, Dorothy’s silver shoes represent the silver that the Populists sought to combine with gold in a bimetallic standard, the Emerald City represents paper money (“greenbacks”), the Scarecrow represents the agricultural workers, the Tin Woodman represents the industrial workers, the Cowardly Lion represents William Jennings Bryan, Toto represents the prohibitionists (“teetotalers”) and so forth. (Ranjit Dighe’s Historian’s Wizard of Oz provides a useful summary.)
This
“Populist parable” interpretation, first broached in 1964 (so it’s as old as I
am), has grown in popularity to the point that it has now become part of
popular lore, even as historians and Baum scholars have grown increasingly
skeptical of its merits. I myself don’t
find the Populist interpretation especially fruitful, either as a historical
thesis about Baum’s intentions or as an analytical tool for thinking about his
work.
On
the analytical question: the Emerald
City with its mandatory green spectacles is, to be sure, a fitting symbol of
fiat money; but if the yellow brick road also symbolises the gold standard, why
would the yellow brick road lead to
the Emerald City? Moreover, for any
bimetallist enthusiasts out there, in the book we already have a golden
counterpart to the first witch’s silver shoes, namely the second witch’s golden
cap (the two being nicely matched, as the former is intended for one end of the
body and the latter for the other, and both provide magical transportation via
a spell associated with the number three).
Do both the golden cap and the
yellow brick road stand for the gold standard?
Given that the cap is explicitly described as “golden” while the road is
not, the cap actually seems better suited to that role; but the cap is
described as being able to be used for either good or evil, which makes it
ill-suited for use in a polemic either for or against the gold standard. Also, a woodchopper living alone in a cottage
in the forest makes an odd symbol of an industrial worker. And “Toto” was a common name for dogs in the
late 19th century, and so probably not a reference to teetotalism.
When
possible influences on Baum’s Oz books are suggested, one name I can’t recall
having seen broached is that of H. Rider Haggard. Haggard’s influence on Baum’s pseudonymous adventure
novels, like The Last Egyptian and The Boy Fortune Hunters In Yucatan, has
of course been noted; and it’s
also not hard to see the traces of Haggard’s 1893 Montezuma’s Daughter on
Baum’s 1902 play Montezuma; or The Son of
the Sun (rewritten in 1905 as The King of Gee-Whiz). But
the Oz books are so different that Haggard’s influence there is less obvious. Consider, however, the following parallels.
In
addition to these parallels with Wizard,
there are also parallels with Land. It
turns out that the true ruler, Ignosi, has been with the protagonists all the time
in disguise, like Ozma – though in Haggard’s book it is the visitors, not the
ruler, who have been putting on a show as humbug wizards (making use of
apparently detachable body parts – a monocle and false teeth – plus predicting
an eclipse but pretending to cause it, perhaps the earliest use of this trope);
and while a royal child is hidden away
by a wicked witch, as Mombi does with Ozma, this child is the usurper rather
than the true ruler. (The Anglo-Saxon
protagonist’s awing the natives by blowing soap bubbles, in Baum’s The King of Gee-Whiz, is
probably another nod to King Solomon’s
Mines.)
In
Haggard’s sequel, the 1887 Allan Quatermain, the
protagonists travel to another lost civilisation somewhere in Africa – Zu-Vendis,
or the “Yellow Country” (like the land of the Winkies) – so named for its
plentiful gold deposits: “In Zu-Vendis
gold is a much commoner metal than silver, and thus it has curiously enough
come to pass that silver is the legal tender of the country” (ch. 13), just as
gold is “the most common metal in the Land of Oz.” (Patchwork Girl, ch. 3) Zu-Vendis’s
capital city, Milosis, is thus a City of Gold rather than a City of
Emeralds. Zu-Vendis is ruled by two
beautiful queens – one good and one wicked – and is “on every side cut off from
the surrounding territory by illimitable forests of impenetrable thorn, beyond
which are said to be hundreds of miles of morasses, deserts, and great
mountains,” just as Oz is cut off from the rest of the world by a deadly
desert. The first syllable of “Zu-Vendis” is of course
a reversal of the Biblical Uz, often
cited as a possible inspiration for “Oz”; and a city ruled by two beautiful
queens, one good and one wicked, features in Baum’s Enchanted Island of Yew.
In
one of his newspaper editorials, Baum wrote concerning Haggard’s 1887 novel She:
To the “She” of H. Rider
Haggard is attributable much of the popularity of mysticism in modern works of
fiction. We doubt if Haggard realized how powerful his work was in occult
suggestions. A Theosophical friend [perhaps Matilda Gage?] recently declared to
the writer that this author was undoubtedly a reincarnation of some ancient
mystic, and therefore throughout his brain lingered some latent and
inexplicable knowledge which prompted the ideas from which “She” emanated. (Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 22 February
1890; quoted in Koupal, Baum’s Road,
p. 117)
The
“She” in question – short for “She-who-must-be-obeyed” – is Ayesha, a beautiful
and youthful-looking but 2000-year-old sorceress who rules over the lost
civilisation (perhaps we are sensing a trend here) of Kôr, somewhere in Africa. At the end of the book the spell that has
given Ayesha her eternal youth is undone, whereupon she ages and withers away
all at once:
The smile vanished,
and in its place there came a dry, hard look; the rounded face seemed to grow
pinched, as though some great anxiety were leaving its impress upon it. ... I
gazed at her arm. Where was its wonderful roundness and beauty? It was getting
thin and angular. And her face – by Heaven! – her face was growing old
before my eyes! ... [S]he was shrivelling up; the golden snake that
had encircled her gracious form slipped over her hips and to the ground;
smaller and smaller she grew; her skin changed colour, and in place of the
perfect whiteness of its lustre it turned dirty brown and yellow, like an old
piece of withered parchment. She … seemed to
realise what kind of change was passing over her, and she shrieked .... Smaller
she grew, and smaller yet, till she was no larger than a monkey. Now the skin
was puckered into a million wrinkles, and on the shapeless face was the stamp
of unutterable age. ... On the very spot where more than twenty centuries
before she had slain Kallikrates the priest, she herself fell down and died. (She,
ch. 26)
Both
of the wicked witches in Baum’s Wizard
die deaths similar to those of Ayesha and Dracula. When Dorothy’s house lands on the Witch of
the East, there are initially “two feet ... sticking out” from underneath; but
soon these feet have “disappeared entirely,” leaving only the silver
shoes. The Good Witch of the North
explains: “She was so old ... that she dried up quickly in the sun. That is the
end of her.” (Baum, ch. 2) A like fate
befalls her sister, the Witch of the West, when Dorothy douses her in water:
Instantly the wicked
woman gave a loud cry of fear; and then, as Dorothy looked at her in wonder,
the Witch began to shrink and
fall away. ... [Dorothy] was truly frightened to see the Witch actually melting
away like brown sugar before her very eyes. ... [T]he Witch fell down in a
brown, melted, shapeless mass and began to spread over the clean boards of the
kitchen floor. (ch. 12)
And
while the title character of Queen Zixi
of Ix does not age to death, she is like Ayesha in being a sorceress and
ruler who conceals her great age behind a youthful appearance:
To mortal eyes Zixi was charming
and attractive, yet her reflection in a mirror showed to her an ugly old hag,
bald of head, wrinkled, with toothless gums and withered, sunken cheeks. For
this reason the queen had no mirror of any sort about the palace. ... [S]he may
be forgiven for wanting to see a beautiful girl reflected in a mirror instead
of a haggard [ahem] old woman in her
six hundred and eighty-fourth year. (Zixi, ch. 11)
Zixi’s
true age being revealed in a mirror might be a nod to Oscar Wilde’s 1890 Picture of Dorian Gray, but Wilde’s
book too is likely indebted to Haggard’s She,
since Dorian also ages all at once at the novel’s end. (Wilde offers Haggard some backhanded praise
in The Decay of Lying.)
Hokosa,
whose name is reminiscent of “hocus pocus” (though it is apparently a genuine
Zulu name), styles himself “I ... the chief of wizards; I, the reader of men’s
hearts; I, the hearer of men’s thoughts! I, the lord of the air and the
lightning; I, the invulnerable” (Haggard, ch. 4) – in a manner reminiscent of
Oz’s bombast in greeting Dorothy. In
addition, Hokosa, like the Wizard in the later Oz books, plots to overthrow the
rightful ruler but later reforms. One
character tells him: “Truly, Hokosa, you
are the best of wizards, or the worst” (ch. 4) – best in the sense of being most
skilled in wizardry, worst in the sense of being most wicked. This ambiguity anticipates the recurring
concern in The Wizard of Oz as to
whether Oz is a good wizard, a good man, both, or neither:
“Is he a good man?”
inquired the girl anxiously.
“He is a good Wizard.
Whether he is a man or not I cannot tell, for I have never seen him.” (Baum,
ch. 2)
“I think you are a very
bad man,” said Dorothy.
“Oh, no, my dear; I'm really
a very good man, but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.” (Baum, ch. 15)
The
stone idol that the Amasuka worship has fallen from the sky (like Oz in his
balloon), as a ball of fire (the form Oz sometimes takes on his throne).
| Outside the circle of the tree he halted, and drawing a tanned skin from a bundle of medicines which he carried, he tied it about his mouth; for the very smell of that tree is poisonous and must not be suffered to reach the lungs. (Haggard, ch. 4) | [S]oon they found themselves in the midst of a great meadow of poppies. Now it is well known that when there are many of these flowers together their odor is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away from the scent of the flowers, he sleeps on and on forever. (Baum, ch. 8) |
Haggard’s
novel also includes the witch Noma, Hokosa’s apprentice, whose beauty “grew
greater day by day, but it was an evil beauty, the beauty of a witch; and this
fate fell upon her, that she feared the dark and would never be alone after the
sun had set.” (Haggard, ch. 12) Baum’s
Wicked Witch of the West is not beautiful, but she shares one important
characteristic with Noma: “The Witch was too much afraid of the dark to dare go
in Dorothy’s room at night to take the shoes ....” (Baum, ch. 12)
The incongruous idea of a wicked witch’s being afraid of the dark is
unusual enough to make it plausible that Baum might have gotten it from Haggard.
Indeed,
many Haggard characters and places have “Oz”
lurking in their names: Ignosi, Hokosa, Milosis, Umslopogaas, Rademas, Galazi, Macumazahn, Osiris, Ospakar, Ustane – even Ayesha, whose name Haggard tells us to pronounce “Assha.” And the names of his (real-life) Amazulu and (fictional) Amasuka people contain not only “Oz” but
the shadow of “Ozma.” In addition, we’ve
seen how the first syllable of “Zu-Vendis”
is the Biblical “Uz” backward, and we might add that the first syllables of the
names of Haggard’s rulers Solomon
and Sorais are “Os” backward. Baum will later give his Wizard the initials
“O.Z.” from “Oscar” (containing a
forward “Os”) and “Zoroaster” (containing a backward “Oz,” along
with a backward “As” for good measure).
I
don’t put too much weight on these etymological speculations; I still think
Shelley’s Ozymandias is the likeliest inspiration for the name “Oz,” and that
both Ozymandias and Anthony Hope’s Princess Osra are jointly the likeliest
inspirations for the name “Ozma.” The
correspondences are interesting, however.
And I do think the comparatively substantive parallels are, at least in
the main, more than coincidental.
Turning
from Baum’s influences to his legacy, we can find a number of later science
fiction and fantasy authors who seem to be following in his footsteps. I
want to focus briefly on six: Edgar Rice
Burroughs, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Dr. Seuss, Ayn Rand, and Iain Banks
(which is about as odd a grouping as a little girl, a dog, an animated
scarecrow, a tin man, and a talking lion).
A
note of warning. Edmund Burke writes of
the difference between wit and judgment:
Mr. Locke very justly
and finely observes of wit, that it is chiefly conversant in tracing
resemblances; he remarks, at the same time, that the business of judgment is
rather in finding differences. ... The mind of man has
naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than
in searching for differences .... And it is upon this principle, that the most
ignorant and barbarous nations have frequently excelled in similitudes,
comparisons, metaphors, and allegories, who have been weak and backward in
distinguishing and sorting their ideas.
In what
follows I will be focusing so much on similarities, sometimes fairly strained
and superficial ones, between very different authors, that you may be tempted
to charge me with ignorance and barbarism.
But I just did it first, so you can’t.
This is called “lampshading,” and it is a mighty psychagogic technology. (If I say that I’m lampshading, is that
meta-lampshading?)
I
feel some personal connections with both Baum and Burroughs: I’ve lived in upstate New York, as Baum did
(plus Baum’s wife attended Cornell, my second alma mater); in Arizona and
Idaho, as Burroughs did; and in the San Diego and Los Angeles areas, as both
did. Plus I have family history in
Chicago, where both lived; and my mother lived in Lanikai a little before
Burroughs did.
The similarities with the Oz books are clearest in Burroughs’ Mars series: John Carter, like Dorothy, is magically transported from the American frontier to another world whose principal city is a walled metropolis of lofty towers named after a physical substance (Helium rather than Emerald). In this new world he befriends an odd assortment of characters (including a faithful sort-of-dog), fights murderous plant people, visits the Valley of Otz (ahem), exposes the feared mystic rulers (who are not supposed to be gazed upon directly) as frauds, and eventually becomes a prince himself – marrying the princess Dejah Thoris, who even has a shadow of “Dorothy” in her name.
| Dorothy sat up and noticed that the house was not moving; nor was it dark, for the bright sunshine came in at the window, flooding the little room. ... The cyclone had set the house down very gently – for a cyclone – in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty. There were lovely patches of greensward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies. ... While she stood looking eagerly at the strange and beautiful sights, she noticed coming toward her a group of the queerest people she had ever seen. They were not as big as the grown folk she had always been used to .... (Wizard, ch. 2) | I opened my eyes in another world, beneath the burning rays of a hot sun, which beat through a tiny opening in the dome of the mighty forest in which I lay. ... I lay upon a close-cropped sward of red grasslike vegetation, and about me stretched a grove of strange and beautiful trees, covered with huge and gorgeous blossoms and filled with brilliant, voiceless birds. ... [A]t my right a mighty river, broad, placid, and majestic, flowed between scarlet banks to empty into the quiet sea before me. ... But it was not these inspiring and magnificent evidences of Nature’s grandeur that took my immediate attention from the beauties of the forest. It was the sight of a score of figures moving slowly about the meadow near the bank of the mighty river. ... Odd, grotesque shapes they were; unlike anything that I had ever seen upon Mars, and yet, at a distance, most manlike in appearance. The larger specimens appeared to be about ten or twelve feet in height when they stood erect .... (Gods of Mars, ch. 1) |
Burroughs’ Lotharians (Thuvia, ch. 7) send out armies of imaginary bowmen just as Baum’s Mombi (Land, ch. 12) sends out armies of imaginary sunflower girls. And the Gridley Wave, a discovery that enables travelers to Mars (as well as Pellucidar) to relay their adventures to Burroughs’ audience back home, recalls the wireless apparatus that enables Baum to receive updates from Dorothy on affairs in Oz despite Ozma’s having rendered her country inaccessible from our world.
 |
|
Once you pay Kaldanegeld,
you never get rid of the Kaldane
|
Just
as a victim of “patching” in Baum’s Sky Island “looked
as if he were made of two separate men, each cut through the middle and then
joined together, half of one to half of the other” (ch. 7), so Burroughs
describes the results of Martian biological experimentation as follows;
There was no symmetry of
design about them. The left arm of one was scarce a foot long, while his right
arm was so long that the hand dragged along the ground as he walked.
Four-fifths of the face of one was above the eyes, while another had an equal
proportion below the eyes. (Synthetic Men of Mars, ch. 3)
Though Burroughs is willing
to push the boundaries of body horror a bit further than Baum is:
I saw ... a billowing
mass of slimy, human tissue creeping gradually toward me. Protruding from it
were unrelated fragments of human anatomy – a hand, an entire leg, a foot, a
lung, a heart, and here and there a horribly mouthing head. The heads screamed
at me, and a hand tried to reach forth and clutch me .... (Synthetic Men, ch. 20)
There
are Baum/Burroughs parallels to be found beyond the Mars series as well. In the Tarzan novels, Burroughs’ lost city of
Opar (first introduced in 1913), run by an imperious priestess who commands an
army of brutish apemen, might be an echo of the Wicked Witch of the West and
her army of winged monkeys, and Opar’s status as a lost colony of Atlantis
laden with treasure could be a nod to Baum’s lesser-known 1910 Boy Fortune Hunters in Yucatan – though the
common influence of Haggard is obviously primary.
 |
| I’m melting! I’m melting in your arms, Tarzan! |
One
of Burroughs’ earliest stories, Minidoka,
written around 1903 and subtitled “A Historical Fairy Tale,” does feature a winged
monkey, as well as an island whose inhabitants chose to settle there “because
of its color on their maps,” which was “a beautiful emerald green.” There
are creatures somewhat reminiscent of Baum’s winged monkeys in Burroughs’ later
novel Out of Time’s Abyss too:
| The sky was darkened, and a low rumbling sound was heard in the air. There was a rushing of many wings; a great chattering and laughing; and the sun came out of the dark sky to show ... a crowd of monkeys, each with a pair of immense and powerful wings on his shoulders. ... The leader of the Winged Monkeys flew up to [Dorothy], his long, hairy arms stretched out and his ugly face grinning terribly .... [T]hey lifted Dorothy in their arms and carried her swiftly through the air.... (Baum, Wizard, ch. 12) | [H]e heard the dismal flapping of giant wings overhead .... he felt clawlike talons of great strength seize him beneath his arms and sweep him off his feet; and then the thing rose swiftly with him, so swiftly that his cap was blown from his head by the rush of air as he was borne rapidly upward into the inky sky .... The thin lips drew back tightly against yellow teeth in a grimace that was nothing but hideous. (Burroughs, Abyss, ch. 2) |
In the same novel we learn that the inhabitants of Caspak recapitulate the evolutionary process in each individual: “If an egg survives it goes through all the stages of development that man has passed through during the unthinkable eons since life first moved upon the earth’s face.” Thus every human on Caspak has begun life as an ape and then “slowly developed into the lowest order of man,” and thus “by degrees” through higher orders until ending as a full-fledged human. (Abyss, ch. 3) This process is reminiscent of the scene in Rinkitink of Oz where Glinda transforms an enchanted prince from a goat back by degrees into his human form:
First she transformed
Bilbil the goat into a lamb, and this was done quite easily. Next she
transformed the lamb into an ostrich, giving it two legs and feet instead of
four. Then she tried to transform the ostrich into the original Prince Bobo,
but this incantation was an utter failure. Glinda was not discouraged, however,
but by a powerful spell transformed the ostrich into a tottenhot – which is a
lower form of a man. Then the tottenhot was transformed into a mifket, which
was a great step in advance and, finally, Glinda transformed the mifket into a
handsome young man, tall and shapely, who fell on his knees before the great
Sorceress and gratefully kissed her hand, admitting that he had now recovered
his proper shape and was indeed Prince Bobo of Boboland. (Rinkitink,
ch. 22)
Incidentally,
recent editions of Rinkitink silently
eliminate the Tottenhot from the following illustration, thus toning down the
passage’s racist implications without exactly eliminating them:
Admittedly,
as I’ve mentioned before, starting
with an intelligent goat and ending
with a prince risibly named “Prince Bobo of Boboland” does complicate the suggestion
of a straightforward movement from lesser to greater.
In
his Venus novels, Burroughs introduces us to the Vooyorgans, a race of
androgynous humanoids each of whom bears “a well defined reddish line that
looks like a birth-mark ... [r]unning down the exact center of their face and
body.” While in the case of ordinary
humans “the two halves of our faces and bodies are not identical,” this “lack
of identicalness” is “more marked” in the case of the Vooyorgans. (Escape on Venus, ch. 31) The
Vooyorgans’ mismatched halves are again reminiscent of the victims of
“patching” in Baum’s Sky Island – and
also of Mr. Split in Baum’s Dot and Tot
In Merryland, whose “left side was dressed in a bright red suit while the
right side wore white, so it was easy to see where he was joined
together.” (Dot and Tot, ch. 16)
In
their reproductive cycle the Vooyorgans also recall Baum’s interest in bodily
fission and gender ambiguity:
There are neither males
nor females among them; but more or less periodically, usually after enjoying
an orgy of eating and drinking, they divide into two parts, like the amoeba and
other of the Rhizopada. Each of these parts grows another half during a period
of several months, and the process continues. Eventually, the older halves wear
out and die; sometimes immediately after the division and sometimes while still
attached, in which case the dead half merely falls away, and the remaining half
is carted off to make itself whole. (Escape, ch. 33)
This
too corresponds to Mr. Split, who when separated into his two separate halves,
“as if he had been cut in two from the middle of his head straight downward,”
comprises two animate half-men, each with “one ear, one eye, half of a nose and
of a mouth, one arm and one leg.” In
addition, the Vooyorgans’ habit of capturing travellers and turning them into living
statues to be displayed on their walls echoes the habits of Baum’s Nome King
and Mrs. Yoop.
Two years after the release of the MGM Wizard of Oz movie, Burroughs wrote the novella The Wizard of Venus, the culmination of his Venus series, in which a hypnotic wizard named Morgas (perhaps a reference to Frank Morgan, who played the wizard in the film?) greets visitors from his throne with “I am Vootogan Morgas, the wizard of Gavo .... Who are you?” and holds power by hoodwinking his subjects until he is exposed by the heroic Carson Napier. Interestingly, in this story Napier makes frequent use of a power of psychic projection that had been established in the previous novels, but never actually used (except to narrate his adventures telepathically back to Earth); might the 1939 film have inspired Burroughs to explore his protagonist’s “magical” side more thoroughly?
On
issues of gender, Burroughs is much more reactionary than Baum, insistently
reinforcing traditional gender roles.
Several of his stories feature matriarchies, and end with the hero
teaching the males of such societies to reassert the “natural” order of
masculine dominance, a result which the women of course are generally shown to
end up welcoming. (See, e.g., Tarzan and the Ant Men and
Land of Terror.) Yet on the other hand, his play You Lucky Girl contains some remarkably pro-feminist passages.
Burroughs’
record on race, like Baum’s, is a very mixed bag, with godawfully racist
passages mixed in with firm antiracist ones. In
Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, for
example, we are treated to Robert Jones, a jolly, lazy, deferential, dimwitted
black cook whose “simple, good-natured face” wears “a puzzled expression not
untinged with awe,” who says things like “Lawd-a-massy! ... Ah allus thought
some o’ dem gem’n in dat dere Adventurous Club in Bummingham could lie some,”
and who never manages to grasp that it is always daylight in Pellucidar and so
keeps checking his watch with bewilderment.
Burroughs
also seems to beat Baum on the “Indian question,” in his mostly-sympathetic
take on Indians’ relations with whites in The War Chief and its sequel Apache Devil
– even if he can’t resist making his Apache hero a secret white man. Place
a doughty Anglo-Saxon white man anywhere – among Indians as in The War Chief, among Martians as in the Mars
books, among apes as in the Tarzan books – and he will soon rise to the level
of chief over the rest; or so Burroughs invites us to imagine.
Tolkien’s
published stories grew in part, as did Baum’s, from stories he told his
children; and the first publishers for The
Wizard of Oz and The Hobbit each gave
the manuscripts to children for a test reading.
Baum and Tolkien both wrote very pagan stories about Santa Claus (or, in
Tolkien’s case, Father Christmas), incorporating him into their own personal
mythologies. And Oz’s
odd utopian mix of hierarchy and anti-hierarchy is mirrored in Tolkien’s
preference for anarchy and unconstitutional monarchy as his two favoured
political systems.
Sauron is
not the only Tolkien character with a searching eye. When Bilbo confronts the dragon in his lair, Tolkien
describes the “sudden thin and
piercing ray of red from under the drooping lid of Smaug's left eye,”
and adds: “Whenever Smaug's roving eye,
seeking for him in the shadows, flashed across him, he trembled, and an
unaccountable desire seized him to rush out and reveal himself and tell all the
truth to Smaug.” (Hobbit, ch. 12) Tolkien’s
dragon resembles the Alligator God in Baum’s short story “The Stuffed Alligator”:
The cavern was not
lighted; but ... she could dimly perceive an immense dark form lying
outstretched before her. The mighty magician was asleep. Then
a red light glowed in the dusk, flooding her with its rays. And now another
light flashed beside it. The Red-Eyed One had unclosed his eyelids. ... She
felt the terrible gaze full upon her, reading her every thought. ... [H]e moved
slightly his great body, so that the reflected light rippled from scale to
scale until it died away at the far tip of his tail.
And another of Baum’s dragons has “scales ... set with rubies and emeralds” (Yew, ch. 9), prefiguring Smaug’s being “armoured above and below with iron scales and hard gems.”
Tolkien’s
Ring of Power has its antecedent in Baum’s short story “The Tiger’s Eye,” concerning
a magic eyeball that passes from owner to owner, corrupting whoever possesses
it, unless the possessor has enough moral strength to reject it; and attempts
to crush the eye, or burn it in the fireplace, have no effect. And LOTR’s theme of the refusal of power has
as its predecessor Rob’s refusal of the gifts of the Demon of Electricity in The Master Key:
Nice thing for a decent person to own, isn’t it? Anyone who would take advantage of such a
sneaking invention as that would be worse than a
thief! Oh, I’ve used them, of course,
and I ought to be spanked .... I’ll have none of your magical contrivances. ...
I’m not wise enough .... to use such
inventions as yours unselfishly .... I’m just a common boy, and I don’t want to
be anything else .... (ch. 20)
This last
sentiment is echoed by the similar refusals of Tolkien’s Galadriel, who chooses
to “diminish ... and remain Galadriel” (LOTR
II. 7), and Sam Gamgee, who recognizes that “one small garden of a free
gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm.” (LOTR VI. 1) Oddly, Laura Miller complains that in Baum’s books
evil is “certainly never a temptation to any of the heroes” – though
admittedly the tools of power that Ozma and Glinda choose to use are almost
identical in function with those that Rob rejects. (But then Baum does regard women as more
reliable custodians of power than men.)
Both Wizard and Hobbit feature unlikely protagonists who are far from the
stereotype of the swordslinging action hero.
But in The Hobbit, instead of
being thrust by a storm into a quest to confront a wizard, as Dorothy is, the
protagonist is thrust by a wizard into a quest to confront a storm (or so Smaug
describes himself: “the shock of my tail
a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane”). Bilbo
cowering before and yet challenging Smaug is reminiscent of Dorothy and her
friends cowering before and yet challenging the Wizard; and although Smaug is
no humbug, he is nevertheless dubbed an “old fool” by Bilbo for overestimating
his own invulnerability. Bilbo also
resembles the Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion, in that the dwarves think he lacks
courage and wisdom but he turns out to have more than they do.
In the
course of their journey, both Dorothy’s and Bilbo’s companies pass through a
dark forest – which also resembles the somewhat more benign forest in Baum’s Adventures of Santa Claus:
| Toward evening they came to a great forest, where the trees grew so big and close together that their branches met over the road of yellow brick. It was almost dark under the trees, for the branches shut out the daylight; but the travelers did not stop, and went on into the forest. ... After an hour or so the light faded away, and they found themselves stumbling along in the darkness. Dorothy could not see at all, but Toto could, for some dogs see very well in the dark; and the Scarecrow declared he could see as well as by day. So she took hold of his arm and managed to get along fairly well. .... The road was still paved with yellow brick, but these were much covered by dried branches and dead leaves from the trees, and the walking was not at all good. ... But now and then there came a deep growl from some wild animal hidden among the trees. These sounds made the little girl’s heart beat fast, for she did not know what made them; but Toto knew, and he walked close to Dorothy’s side, and did not even bark in return. ... They found the forest very thick on this side, and it looked dark and gloomy. After the Lion had rested they started along the road of yellow brick, silently wondering, each in his own mind, if ever they would come to the end of the woods and reach the bright sunshine again. (Baum, Wizard, chs. 4-7) | Have you heard of the great Forest of Burzee? Nurse used to sing of it when I was a child. She sang of the big tree-trunks, standing close together, with their roots intertwining below the earth and their branches intertwining above it; of their rough coating of bark and queer, gnarled limbs; of the bushy foliage that roofed the entire forest, save where the sunbeams found a path through which to touch the ground in little spots and to cast weird and curious shadows over the mosses, the lichens and the drifts of dried leaves. The Forest of Burzee is mighty and grand and awesome to those who steal beneath its shade. Coming from the sunlit meadows into its mazes it seems at first gloomy, then pleasant, and afterward filled with never-ending delights. For hundreds of years it has flourished in all its magnificence, the silence of its inclosure unbroken save by the chirp of busy chipmunks, the growl of wild beasts and the songs of birds. Yet Burzee has its inhabitants – for all this. Nature peopled it in the beginning with Fairies, Knooks, Ryls and Nymphs. As long as the Forest stands it will be a home, a refuge and a playground to these sweet immortals, who revel undisturbed in its depths. (Baum, Santa, ch. 1) | The entrance to the path was like a sort of arch leading into a gloomy tunnel made by two great trees that leant together, too old and strangled with ivy and hung with lichen to bear more than a few blackened leaves. The path itself was narrow and wound in and out among the trunks. Soon the light at the gate was like a little bright hole far behind, and the quiet was so deep that their feet seemed to thump along while all the trees leaned over them and listened. As their eyes became used to the dimness they could see a little way to either side in a sort of darkened green glimmer. Occasionally a slender beam of sun that had the luck to slip in through some opening in the leaves far above, and still more luck in not being caught in the tangled boughs and matted twigs beneath, stabbed down thin and bright before them. But this was seldom, and it soon ceased altogether. ... There were queer noises too, grunts, scufflings, and hurryings in the undergrowth, and among the leaves that lay piled endlessly thick in places on the forest-floor; but what made the noises he could not see. ... It was not long before they grew to hate the forest as heartily as they had hated the tunnels of the goblins, and it seemed to offer even less hope of any ending. But they had to go on and on, long after they were sick for a sight of the sun and of the sky, and longed for the feel of wind on their faces. (Tolkien, Hobbit, ch. 8) |
In both Wizard and Hobbit this path leads to a river (just after the forest, for Baum; in the forest, for Tolkien) that the protagonists cross with difficulty, as one of their number (the Scarecrow, Bombur) gets stuck; shortly thereafter (for Baum), or immediately thereupon (for Tolkien), an enchantment sends one of the party (Dorothy, Bombur) to sleep; thus “they made a chair with their hands for the seat and their arms for the arms and carried the sleeping girl between them through the flowers” (Baum), or “they were burdened with the heavy body of Bombur, which they had to carry along with them as best they could” (Tolkien).
Later in
their journey (chs. 19-20), Dorothy and her party are attacked by animated
trees (prefiguring both Old Man Willow and the Ents in LOTR; of course Baum and Tolkien had each read Macbeth) and are also forced to dispatch a giant spider
(prefiguring both the Mirkwood spiders in The
Hobbit and Shelob in LOTR). And even the Scarecrow’s walking song,
“Tol-de-ri-de-oh!” (ch. 8), anticipates Tom Bombadil’s “Hey come merry dol!
derry dol!”
The very
name “Bilbo” is in a way prefigured in Rinkitink of Oz, one of whose protagonists goes alternately by the names Bilbil and
Bobo. But
Tolkien’s influence is more likely to have been Shakespeare, for whom a “bilbo”
is both a sword of a kind made in Bilbao (Merry Wives of Windsor I.1 and III.5) and a
comical French mispronunciation of “elbow” (Henry V III.4).
Two orders
of fairies that pop up in many of Baum’s stories are knooks and ryls, guardian
spirits in charge of animals and plants respectively. Baum often refers to knooks and ryls in such
a way as to suggest that they belong to an older mythology independent of his
own work; for example, in his 1909 essay
on “Modern Fairy Tales,” purportedly
a nonfiction discussion of an existing literary tradition, Baum writes:
[W]e know the family of
immortals generally termed “fairies” has many branches and includes fays,
sprites, elves, nymphs, ryls, knooks, gnomes, brownies
and many other subdivisions.
There is no blue book or history of the imaginative little creatures to guide us in classifying them, but they all have their uses and peculiar characteristics; as, for example, the little ryls, who carry around paint-pots, with which they color, most brilliantly and artistically the blossoms of the flowers.
There is no blue book or history of the imaginative little creatures to guide us in classifying them, but they all have their uses and peculiar characteristics; as, for example, the little ryls, who carry around paint-pots, with which they color, most brilliantly and artistically the blossoms of the flowers.
But to all
evidence these knooks and ryls are Baum’s own invention. Baum is subtly attempting to give his
creations an aura of antiquity and authenticity by backdating them – a kind of
gentle hoax.
My
suggestion, then, is that Baum with his knooks and ryls is working the same
kind of reverse-engineering revisionism on the common phrase “nooks and rills”
that Tolkien is working on phrases like orthanc
enta geweorc, not only exploiting the aural familiarity of “nooks and
rills” to create the impression of established tradition, but also implicitly
suggesting that our phrase “nooks and rills” is an echo of an older phrase with
a different meaning. (The fact that
knooks and ryls are like Ents in being nature-spirits adds an extra dimension to the parallel.) One suspects that Baum had a secret chuckle over
his own strategy of influence in this regard when he wrote, in his 1901 short
story “The Enchanted Types,” that “[m]ortals
seldom know how greatly they are influenced by fairies, knooks and ryls, who
often put thoughts into their heads that only the wise little immortals could
have conceived.”
This might also explain why Baum calls his underground spirits “Nomes” rather than “gnomes” – not, as sometimes suggested, to simplify the spelling for the kiddies (no one who offers his young readers the incantation “Pyrzqxgl” is going to be worried about their ability to pronounce “gnome”), but rather to suggest that he is offering us a more authentic etymology.
This might also explain why Baum calls his underground spirits “Nomes” rather than “gnomes” – not, as sometimes suggested, to simplify the spelling for the kiddies (no one who offers his young readers the incantation “Pyrzqxgl” is going to be worried about their ability to pronounce “gnome”), but rather to suggest that he is offering us a more authentic etymology.
The
parallels between the first Oz book (Wizard) and the first Narnia book (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)
are striking: a young girl is magically
transported to a fairy-tale kingdom, where she and her friends overthrow a
wicked witch with the help of a talking (though in the Narnian case not exactly
cowardly) lion, who in turn is at one point rescued by friendly mice. (The idea of a lion being rescued by mice
might have a common origin in Aesop.) The second Narnia book (Prince Caspian), like the second Oz book (Land), focuses on a young boy native to fairyland who gets caught up in a civil war and ends the book as the country’s ruler.
And the fourth Narnia book (The Silver Chair) parallels the canonically third – but arguably fifth – Oz book (Ozma), inasmuch as it involves a journey to a subterranean realm to rescue a kidnapped and enchanted prince from a wicked ruler – a green witch, in Lewis’s version – and her army of gnomes. (But the name of Lewis’s subterranean realm, “Underland,” is an obvious nod to Lewis Carroll – as, surely, is the dreaming king whose waking will mean the end of the world.)
The underwater kingdoms that Lucy glimpses from the deck of the Dawn Treader are reminiscent of those in Baum’s Sea Fairies; and the White Witch’s turning her enemies into statues could be a nod either to the Nome King’s transforming his captives into bric-a-brac or to Mombi’s threat to turn Tip into a marble statue. Both the Oz and Narnia series even include cameos from Santa Claus (in The Road to Oz, ch. 22, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, ch. 10). And Lewis’s whimsically various ways of transporting his protagonists to Narnia – stepping through a wardrobe, stepping through a disused gate, falling into a painting, touching a magic ring, being summoned by a magic horn – echo Baum’s similar ways of getting his protagonists to Oz: being carried by a tornado, being washed overboard by a storm, sailing in a runaway balloon, falling through a crack in the ground, taking a wrong turn on a familiar path, being summoned by a magic belt.
Baum and Lewis also share a common debt to Hans Christian Andersen (whom Baum called “the one great author of fairy tales”), and especially to Andersen’s story “The Snow Queen.” Blinkie, the witch who freezes Gloria’s heart in Baum’s Scarecrow, and Jadis, the White Witch who freezes all of Narnia while corrupting Edmund’s heart in Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, both appear to be inspired by Andersen’s Snow Queen, who freezes Kai’s heart in order to keep the splinter in it that corrupts him. The fragment of Morgul-blade working its way toward Frodo’s heart to turn him into a wraith. in Tolkien’s LOTR, probably takes inspiration from Andersen also. Polly and Digory, in Lewis’s Magician’s Nephew, meeting via the roofs of adjoining houses likewise recall Andersen’s Kai and Gerda.
The most obvious parallel between Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) and Baum, other than their shared connection to the San Diego area, is in artwork, which of course is not Baum’s but Neill’s. Neill’s and Seuss’s styles were very different, but there is something similar in their whimsy and mad inventiveness.
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| Neill’s Woggle-bug (left); Seuss’s Cat in the Hat (right) |
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| Aquatic fauna: Neill (left and middle); Seuss (right) |
There are some
textual parallels between Baum and Seuss, however; I’ll focus on just three
cases. First, in Seuss’s I Had Trouble In Getting to Solla Sollew, the
protagonist undertakes an arduous journey to a marvelous city where all his
problems will be solved: “I’m off to the
City of Solla Sollew ... Where they never
have troubles! At least, very few.” But the city’s promise turns out to be
hollow; and in the end, rather than seek out another even more magical city, he
decides to rely on his own abilities: “Now my troubles are going / To have
trouble with me!” The parallels with Wizard are striking enough already; but
reverse the letters of “Solla Sollew,” and change the S’s to Z’s, and you
get: “well, Oz; all Oz.”
Second, there’s
Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle, about a
turtle king who complains that “the kingdom he ruled was too small.”
“I’m ruler,” said
Yertle, “of all that I see.
But I don’t see enough.
That’s the trouble with me.
With this stone for a
throne, I look down on my pond
But I cannot look down
on the places beyond. ...”
So Yertle
forces the other turtles to form a tower out of their bodies, with himself on
top. At first he is pleased with his
greater altitude – until he notices the moon in the sky:
“What’s THAT?” snorted
Yertle. “Say, what IS that thing
That dares to be higher
than Yertle the King?
I shall not allow
it! I’ll go higher still!
I’ll build my throne
higher! I can and I will! ...”
Likewise, in Tik-Tok of Oz, Ann Soforth, ruler of the tiny country of Oogaboo, is tired of merely being “Queen over eighteen men, twenty-seven women and forty-four children,” so she decides to “conquer the Land of Oz and set herself up as Ruler in Ozma’s place,” then “go out into the world and conquer other lands,” and finally “find a way to the moon, and conquer that.” (ch. 1) But Glinda notices the approach of her army and causes them to become “hopelessly lost” in a “barren country” that is “not very pleasant to travel in.” There they plant “a flag bearing the royal emblem of Oogaboo,” in order to ”show that the country they were in had been conquered by the Queen of Oogaboo. So far, no one but themselves had seen the flag, but Ann was pleased to see it flutter in the breeze and considered herself already a famous conqueror.” (ch. 3) Yertle, for his part, is toppled from power by turtles father down in the tower, and plunges into the muck: “And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he, Is King of the Mud, that is all he can see.” Being King of Mud is of course rather like being Queen of an empty wasteland. In the end, Queen Ann comes to recognise that the world is “too big for one person to conquer,” and that she would be “happier with my own people in Oogaboo” (ch. 24); no such revelation seems to be in the offing for King Yertle.
Third,
there is some similarity between Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Baum’s
short story “A Kidnapped Santa Claus” (a sequel
to his better-known Life and Adventures of Santa Claus). Baum’s
story features a group of Daemons who, like the Grinch, “live in the mountain
caves,” and who “hate Santa Claus very much” because “he made children
happy.” So they decide to kidnap Santa
in order to deprive the children of gifts, in the hopes that this deprivation
will “make the children selfish and envious and hateful.” The Daemons’ taunts to their captive on
Christmas morning – “The children are waking up, Santa! ... They are waking up
to find their stockings empty! Ho, ho! How they will quarrel, and wail, and
stamp their feet in anger!“ – are similar to the Grinch’s exulting: “They’re finding out now that no Christmas is
coming! ... They’re just waking up! I know just what they’ll do! ... Their
mouths will hang open a minute or two, / Then the Whos down in Whoville will
all cry Boo-Hoo!” In Baum’s version,
however – somewhat more realistically than in Seuss’s – this catastrophe is
averted, not (as in Seuss) because the children care more about the Real
Meaning of Christmas than about the presents, but rather because Santa’s
helpers have managed to deliver them all in Santa’s absence. (But in a somewhat closer parallel, Santa is
released because one of the Daemons repents.)
Before he
became famous as the author of The Wizard
of Oz, Baum was famous instead as “Father Goose” for his early books of
nursery rhymes; he even lived in a house called “Sign of the Goose,” and was
known to his neighbours as “The Goose Man.” Here too
there’s a (minor) parallel: Dr. Seuss
originally pronounced his pen name (derived from his real middle name) to rhyme
with “voice,” and changed it to rhyme with “goose” in the hope that it would invoke Mother Goose.
Less
happily, Seuss is also like Baum in his mixed record on race. His books The Sneetches and Horton Hears a Who are
brilliant condemnations of racism and marginalisation respectively. But Seuss’s World War II editorial cartoons are
viciously racist, and he supported Roosevelt’s internment of
Japanese-Americans.
Just as
Baum strove to Americanise the tradition of the fairy tale, so Rand sought to
Americanise whatever tradition Les
Misérables and The Brothers Karamazov
belong to – a tradition of massive, sprawling romantic epics filled with essay-length
philosophical and sociological digressions.
(Of course this tradition was arguably a thoroughly American one
already, as Moby-Dick is an earlier
instance of the same genre; but it was Hugo and Dostoyevsky, not Melville, that
Rand grew up reading.) Readers who
complain about the long speeches in which Rand’s characters indulge tend to
forget in what tradition she was working.
But in Atlas Shrugged Rand
transposes the tradition of Hugo and Dostoyevsky to the streets of Manhattan
and the mountains of Colorado, to railways and steel mills, and the novel’s
theme is, in part, the meaning of America.
Rand also shared
Baum’s preference for understanding over faith, his rejection of original sin, and
his conviction that “reason revolts from the blind and superstitious faith upon
which rests the structure of the Christian religion” – though she would have
dismissed Baum’s interest in theosophy and spiritualism as irrational twaddle. Baum sent his children to an Ethical Culture
Sunday School; the Ethical Culture movement held that morality is, and should
be taught as, independent of theology.
Rand likewise complained that “Religion’s monopoly in the field of
ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and
connotations of a rational view of life.”
(Fountainhead, Introduction) And Rand
echoes Baum’s judgment that the “age of Faith is sinking slowly into the past”
when she writes that “mysticism, as a cultural power, is dead” (Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 63) – though
Rand no doubt had a more famous remark of Nietzsche’s in mind.
While best known for their novels, Baum and Rand both wrote short stories, plays, and screenplays, including adaptations of their own works; and both experimented with traditional play structure. In the middle of his play The Maid of Athens, a campus football comedy, Baum inserts “a genuine football game ... showing kick-off, scrimmage, etc.” The game is to be “earnestly and fairly conducted,” i.e., there is no guarantee on any given night as to which side will win, a move intended to “add the element of uncertainty to every contest” and thus “arouse enthusiastic interest in the audience.” Baum suggests recruiting college students to serve as players, and offering “a slight premium” to “ensure their best efforts.” Likewise, Rand’s play Night of January 16th is “a murder trial without a pre-arranged verdict,” with “jurors ... to be selected from the audience,” a feature which Rand expects to “heighten the public’s interest by leaving the decision in its own hands,” and to “add to the suspense by the fact that no audience, at any performance of the play, can be sure of its outcome.” (p. 17)
Baum
deplored the tendency to “force ‘nice’
and ‘gentle’ tales” upon children, and particularly upon girls, rather than “giving
them the exciting stories their natures demand.” There is “little excuse,” Baum wrote, “for
giving namby-pamby books to girls and adventurous ones to boys”; while “maiden
ladies and reverend grandmothers write many ‘sweet’ stories for girls,” such
authors would receive a rude surprise “if the little girls could only tell in
print what they think of these stories.”
Little girls, he thought, “as eagerly demand and absorb the marvelous as
their brothers,” and “need it as much.”
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| Dact I on the loose |
The Lost World was of course a major influence on Burroughs also, especially his Pellucidar and Caspak series; and Tolkien may have been a fan as well, given his description of the Witch-King’s winged steed, with its “vast pinions ... as webs of hide between horned fingers” bearing “neither quill nor feather,” as a “creature of an older world ... whose kind, lingering in forgotten mountains cold beneath the Moon, outstayed their day.”
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| Alida Valli as Kira in the best Rand film |
Both We the Living and Atlas Shrugged feature strong female protagonists. In the former, Kira as a child “had played
with mechanical toys, which were not intended for girls,” and had spoken of “the
houses she would build of glass and steel, about a white aluminum bridge across
a blue river,” and “about men and wheels and cranes under her orders, about a
sunrise on the steel skeleton of a skyscraper” (WTL I.3), despite being told that engineering is not “a profession
for women” and that she would be “much more useful to society in a more
feminine capacity.” (WTL I.2)
Kira is prevented by Soviet oppression from realising her dreams, but
Dagny Taggart, the protagonist of Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged – “a woman
whose head was lifted eagerly as at a sight of distance, whose steps were a
restless substitute for flight” (AS II.1)
– becomes the hyper-competent chief operating officer for a transcontinental
railroad, despite charges that “a woman acting like a grease-monkey and posing
around like a big executive” is “unfeminine,” “disgusting” (I.4), and “unheard
of” (I.3), and that instead of running a railroad she should be “practicing the
beautiful craft of the handloom and bearing children.” (I.6)
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| Taylor Schilling as Dagny in not such a good Rand film |
In one of his Aberdeen editorials, comparing gender norms in different parts of the country, Baum comments on the “superiority of western women.” In the eastern states, he says, it is “still considered a disgrace for young ladies to engage in any kind of regular occupation, and even a married woman loses her social status by engaging in business or following any pursuit which brings her monetary returns.” The women of the western states, by contrast, “cannot brook idleness when they see before them work to be done which is eminently fitted for their hands”; and such women’s “active brains and good judgment are responsible for the success of many a man’s business which without their counsel to direct it would be irretrievably involved in ruin.” (Pioneer, 15 March 1890; Koupal, Baum’s Road, pp. 118-119) A woman who cannot brook idleness, and whose brains and judgment are crucial to the survival of a business nominally headed by a man, is a fairly precise description of Dagny Taggart. She may be a New Yorker, but she is a western woman by Baum’s criteria.
Rand’s genuine
feminist impulses unfortunately coexisted with a romanticisation of male
dominance that led her in some horribly antifeminist directions, most
notoriously in the glamourised rape scene in The Fountainhead. For a
discussion of the feminist and antifeminist strands in Rand’s work, see the anthology
Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand. (And for a
ghastly downplaying of a rape attempt in Baum’s work, see his Daughters of Destiny.)
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| Don’t want to stay forever young |
The value
in childhood, for Rand, lay not in what it contained but in its promise and
potential. Kira, in We the Living, feels that something
great was “promised to her, promised in a memory of her childhood” (WTL I.3); and in the introduction to The Fountainhead, Rand notes that “at
the dawn of their lives” most people begin with a “sense of enormous
expectation, the sense that one’s life is important, that great achievements
are within one’s capacity, and that great things lie ahead” – an expectation
that frequently ends up being lost or betrayed.
Rand places great stress on early psychological development:
[A child's] mind is in a
state of eager, impatient flux; he is unable to catch up with the impressions
bombarding him from all aides; he wants to know everything and at once. ...
Observe ... the intensity, the austere, the unsmiling seriousness with which an infant watches the world around him. ...
If you ever find, in an adult, that degree of seriousness about reality, you
will have fond a great man. (Anti-Industrial Revolution, pp. 54-55)
And just
as Baum maintains that “fairy tales are of untold value in developing
imagination in the young,” and that the “imaginative child will become the
imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster
civilization,” so Rand
likewise holds that heroic, imaginative literature plays an important role in
fostering a child’s cognitive development, and so should be encouraged rather
than disparaged:
It is easy to convince a
child ... that his desire to emulate Buck Rogers is ridiculous: he knows that
it isn’t exactly Buck Rogers he has in mind and yet, simultaneously, it is – he feels caught in an inner
contradiction – and this confirms his desolately embarrassing feeling that he
is being ridiculous.
Thus the adults – whose
foremost moral obligation toward a child, at this stage of his development, is
to help him understand that what he values is an abstraction, to help him break
through into the conceptual realm – accomplish the exact opposite. They stunt his conceptual capacity, they
cripple his normative abstractions, they
stifle his moral ambition ... They arrest
his value-development on a primitively literal, concrete-bound level: they convince
him that to be like Buck Rogers means to wear a space helmet and blast armies
of Martians with a disintegrator-gun,
and that he’d better give up such notions if he ever expects to make a
respectable living. (Romantic Manifesto,
p. 149)
If the projection of
value-goals – the projection of an improvement on the given, the known, the immediately
available – is an “escape,” then medicine is an “escape” from disease,
agriculture is an “escape" from hunger, knowledge is an “escape” from ignorance,
ambition is an “escape” from sloth, and life is an “escape” from death. (p. 167)
This last
passage is reminiscent of Tolkien’s response to the same sort of critique:
In what the misusers [of
the term “escape”] are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule
very practical, and may even be heroic. ... Why should a man be scorned if, finding
himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do
so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
As we’ve seen, Baum
declares that children’s
literature should focus on the “well and strong” rather than on the “crippled”
or “maimed,” on the grounds that “a normal child should not be harassed with
pitiful subjects” – yet Baum defies his own advice by including disabled
characters like Cap’n Bill.
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| Artistic styles: Rand-approved (left); Rand-disapproved (right) |
Rand
offers a philosophical justification for at least the literary side of her
aversion to concern for the disabled. An
artist, she holds, “selects those aspects of existence which he regards as
metaphysically significant – and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting
the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence.” Thus
an artist who “presents man as a god-like figure” is aware that “men may be
crippled or diseased or helpless,” but “regards these conditions as accidental,
as irrelevant to the essential nature of man,” as not being “important enough to include.” Thus such an artist “presents a figure
embodying strength, beauty, intelligence, self-confidence, as man’s proper, natural
state.” By contrast, an artist who
focuses on a “deformed” subject, while aware that “there are men who are
healthy,” does so because he regards health as “accidental or illusory,” and so
“presents a tortured figure embodying pain, ugliness, terror, as man’s proper,
natural state.” (Romantic Manifesto, pp. 36-37)
Here Rand
once again shows the influence of Nietzsche, who writes of the “preachers of
death,” with a reference to the sights that led the Buddha to the realization
that life is suffering:
They encounter a sick
man or an old man or a corpse, and immediately they say, “Life is refuted.” But
only they themselves are refuted, and their eyes, which see only this one face
of existence. (Zarathustra I.9)
In similar
vein, Rand complains that modern literature focuses on “dipsomaniacs” and “drug
addicts,” and chooses such subject-matter as “a married couple whose child was
born with six fingers on her left hand,” the “hopeless love of a bearded lady
for a mongoloid pinhead in a circus side show” (Manifesto, p. 125), or the “torment of a young man whose prominent
Adam’s apple makes him an outcast to his classmates.” (p. 131)
 |
| Jennifer Jones in Love Letters realising that life is suffering |
Rand goes
on to argue not only against a literary focus on the disabled, but against any
comparable focus on the psychologically weak.
Only heroic, larger-than-life characters can provide the reader with
moral and emotional fuel:
Inspired by James Bond,
a man may find the courage to rebel against the impositions of his in-laws – or
to ask for a deserved raise – or to change his job – or to propose to the girl
he loves – or to embark on the career he wants – or to defy the whole word for
the sake of his new invention.
Rand
offers in contrast Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty,
which she describes as “an extremely sensitive, perceptive, touching portrayal
of a humble man’s struggle for self-assertion.”
One can feel sympathy
for Marty, and a sad kind of pleasure at his final success. But it is highly doubtful that anyone –
including the thousands of real-life Martys – would be inspired by his example. No one could feel: “I want to be like Marty.” Everyone (except the most corrupt) can
feel: “I want to be like James Bond.” (Manifesto,
p. 140)
Rand’s
argument is also closely analogous to Baum’s when he writes that while
“[d]oubtless many crippled children have derived a degree of comfort” from
books like The Little Lame Prince,
“even the maimed ones prefer to idolize the well and strong.”
All this
is, of course, nonsense. To be sure, the
highest fulfillment of an ideal is inspiring in virtue of its perfection; but
lesser, partial, or more proximate realisations of that ideal are likewise inspiring,
in virtue of their greater achievability and more immediate relevancy. Surely we need both.
 |
| Kent Smith as Peter Keating |
The
relationship between human beings and machinery is, as we’ve seen, a central
one in Baum, and one he was somewhat ambivalent about – sometimes worrying
about the evils of industrialisation, while at other times treating modern
technology as our equivalent of the glorious wonders of Fairyland. Rand is less equivocal in her attitude; she
gives one of her villains in Atlas
Shrugged the line: “Machines have
destroyed man’s humanity, taken him away from the soil, robbed him of his
natural arts, killed his soul and turned him into an insensitive robot.” (I.6) Atlas’s chief protagonist, Dagny
Taggart, by contrast muses:
Why had she always felt
that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines? ... In these giant
shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the
causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer
to “Why?” and “What for?” – like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort
of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel.
They are alive, she
thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power – of
the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its
purpose, to give it form. For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were
transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of
connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits:
the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one
part of them for the first time.
They are alive, she
thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every
man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. (AS
I.8)
 |
| And Toto too. |
Dagny’s
first two lovers, Francisco d’Anconia
and Hank Rearden, are both tin woodmen, of a sort. Both are devoted to metal: Francisco to
copper (his mines) and silver (his family crest), and Rearden to steel (his mills)
as well as to the green-hued alloy he calls Rearden Metal. Rearden in particular is described in ways
that make him sound metallic himself:
The glare cut a moment’s
wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice – then
across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair
– then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his
hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those
around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines
.... Ever since he could remember, he had been told that his face was ugly,
because it was unyielding, and cruel, because it was expressionless. It
remained expressionless now, as he looked at the metal. (I.2)
Significantly,
Rearden is emotionally repressed, and thus lacks a heart, or thinks he
does: “If his family called him
heartless, it was true.” (AS I.6)
Like Nick Chopper, he has made himself inhuman by (metaphorically)
chopping off parts of himself, under the influence of his wife Lillian, the
wicked witch who has been manipulating him for years; as Rearden himself later
says: “I had cut myself in two.” (III.3) Francisco is not repressed in the same way, and
is not described in such metallic terms; but he has stifled or sacrificed his love for Dagny in order to further a
higher cause, and so in a sense has cut his own heart out – though in his case
the influence at work is a good wizard, John Galt, rather than an evil witch.
 |
| Ouray, Colorado: Rand’s model for Galt’s Gulch |
They cut two of us in
halves and mismatch the halves – half of one to half of the other, you know –
and then the other two halves are patched together. It destroys our
individuality .... and there you are,
patched to someone you don’t care about and haven’t much interest in. If your
half wants to do something, the other half is likely to want to do something
different .... (Sky Island, ch. 7)
The path
to Rand’s Atlantis is even paved with gold:
not golden paving stones, but the gold bars that Ragnar Danneskjöld
offers, and the gold dollar-sign cigarettes that Galt’s followers smoke. This path is even linked, as in Baum, to the
realisation that what one needs must be found within and cannot be a gift from
without: “I wish I could spare you what
you're going to go through,” Francisco tells Dagny, “[b]ut I can’t. Every one
of us has to travel that road by his own steps. But it’s the same road .... [t]o
Atlantis.” (II.9) And just as Dorothy has all along unknowingly
had the ability to get back home, and just as her companions have all along
possessed the qualities they seek, so Galt tells Dagny: “through all the years of your struggle,
nothing had barred you from Atlantis and there were no chains to hold you,
except the chains you were willing to wear. ... Remember that you can reach it
whenever you choose to see. Remember that it will be waiting and that it’s
real, it’s possible – it’s yours.” (AS III.3)
Despite the uneasy relationship between
Rand and feminism, there is a natural convergence between Rand’s critique of
altruism and feminist critiques of patriarchy and heteronormativity. After all, the idea that women should be
fundamentally oriented toward others is a specific, patriarchal version of the
altruist ethos that Rand critiques for either sex. The link between altruism and heteropatriarchy
can be seen in the swiftness with which Curry and Velasquez pass from a general
critique of self-sufficiency to a specific insistence on traditional gender
norms. Even if Dorothy’s friendships do
exemplify “relatedness in a general or communitarian sense,” they complain, she
fails to move on to “relatedness in the sense of sexual pair bonding” (p. 50),
or “giving herself to Princes” (p. 32); as a model for young girls she thus
contrasts unfavourably, they opine, with the “radical self-donation involved in
Cinderella’s relation to the Prince.” (p. 33)
The notion of “self-donation” should give both Randians and feminists an
itchy trigger finger.
Curry and Velasquez moreover maintain
that Dorothy’s love for Toto is narcissistic, since as a pet Toto is really
“part of” her and “a sort of doll,” making her concern for Toto yet a further
instance of “closed-off, atomistic self-containment.” (pp. 31)
To this I can only say that anyone who thinks that a beloved animal is
simply an extension of its human owner either has never had a pet or else
should not be allowed to have one.
Judging by the stories about Rand and her cats, along with her now-famous letter to Cat Fancy, I suspect she would not have been on
board with Curry and Velasquez’s dismissive attitude toward animals either.
Shortly
before her transportation to Rand’s version of Fairyland, Dagny is trapped on a
Western prairie – though in Nebraska rather than Kansas. And like Baum – who writes of the “great gray
prairie on every side,” where “[n]ot a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep
of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky,” with “the same gray color
to be seen everywhere,” leaving both the house and Aunt Em’s eyes “as dull and
gray as everything else” – Rand emphasises the prairie’s bleakness and
drabness:
[T]he train seemed lost
in a void, between a brown stretch of prairie and a solid spread of rusty,
graying clouds. The twilight was draining the sky without the wound of a
sunset; it looked more like the fading of an anemic body in the process of
exhausting its last drops of blood and light. ... (AS
II.10)
And just
as Dorothy, whirling around and around, crashes to Oz in a house, so Dagny,
“circling and dropping lower,” crashes to Galt’s new Atlantis in a silver
plane, to wake in a paradise of “sunlight” and “green leaves,” “flaming with
glass panes and green lawns.”
Here she
meets her third lover, John Galt, who in addition to being the elusive
brain-draining wizard turns out to be yet another tin woodman, albeit with
emerald eyes:
 |
| Arriving in Fairyland |
[H]is body had the
hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry
casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed,
soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy, the color of his skin
blending with the chestnut-brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair
shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing the colors, as
the one part of the casting left undimmed and harshly lustrous: his eyes were
the deep, dark green of light glinting on metal. (AS
III.1)
Galt is
also a tin woodman in the further sense that he, like Francisco, has been
sacrificing his love for Dagny, in order to advance the cause. (Baum’s Tik-Tok is also “made out of
burnished copper,” and “where the light struck upon his form it glittered as if
made of pure gold.” (Ozma, ch 4) It’s safe
to say that Galt’s body is not “round as a ball,” however.) Galt’s discovery of a new, fantastic, and
secret source of electricity is also reminiscent of Rob in The Master Key hitting upon the eponymous key to the demon of
electricity; and Galt’s refusal of power at the end of Atlas likewise aligns him with Rob (as well as with Tolkien; the
refusal of power is of course a central theme of both Atlas and LOTR).
In Atlas it is not the regime of Fairyland
but rather that of the real world that turns out to be humbuggery, a fraud
whose persistence depends on its victims’ willingness not to remove their
distorting spectacles:
If you choose to deal
with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the
voluntary co-operation of your victims, in many more ways than you can see at
present. And your victims should discover that it is their own volition – which
you cannot force – that makes you possible.
(AS II.4)
I saw that evil was
impotent – that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real – and that
the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. …
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
Withdraw your sanction. (III.7)
This theme
of power’s dependence on popular belief and acquiescence was pioneered by La Boétie, Hume, and
Godwin, and is a
commonplace in anarchist thought. Baum’s
stories likewise repeatedly feature figures of authority whose power stems
solely from people’s mistaken belief in that power. The Wizard himself is the most obvious case,
but there are many others. One example
is Kwytoffle (“quite awful”), a tyrannical humbug sorcerer in The Enchanted Island of Yew:
“If you resist the
sorcerer, you will be turned into grasshoppers and June-bugs,” declared the
man, staring at them in wonder.
“How do you know that?”
asked Marvel.
“Kwytoffle says so. He
promises to enchant every one who dares defy his power.”
“Has any one ever yet
dared defy him?” asked Nerle.
“Certainly not!” said
the man. “No one wishes to become a June-bug or a grasshopper. No one dares
defy him.”
“I am anxious to see
this sorcerer,” exclaimed King Terribus. “He ought to prove an interesting
person, for he is able to accomplish his purposes by threats alone.” (Yew,
ch. 20)
Kwytoffle’s
soldiers turn out to be as much a humbug as his magical powers:
Kwytoffle yelled at the
captain:
“Why don’t you go on?
Why don't you capture them? Why don’t you fight them?” ...
“The fact is,” said the
captain, woefully, “we simply can’t fight. For our swords are only tin, and our
axes are made of wood, with silver-paper pasted over them.”
“But why is that?” asked
Wul-Takim, while all the party showed their surprise.
“Why, until now we have
never had any need to fight,” said the captain, “for every one has quickly
surrendered to us or run away the moment we came near. But you people do not
appear to be properly frightened ....” (Yew, ch. 21)
In the
same book, another tyrant, the Red Rogue of Dawna, has transformed himself into
a giant, but has a secret – he “had never been able to gain the strength to
correspond with his gigantic size, but had ever remained as weak as when he was
a puny boy,” and so had to rely on “the terror his very presence usually
excited to triumph over his enemies.” (Yew, ch. 23)
In Dot and Tot, the Watch-Dog of Merryland
is similarly ineffective at securing obedience to his commands:
“I’m placed here to keep
everyone from passing through the archway that spans the river into the fair and
happy valleys of Merryland.”
“How can you keep them
from passing through?” asked the girl.
“Why, tell them they
mustn’t, of course.”
“But suppose they won't
mind you, what will you do then?”
The old man looked puzzled,
and shook his head slowly.
“I’m sure I don’t know
what I could do in that case,” he answered. (Dot and Tot, ch. 5)
And the
Queen of Merryland has soldiers who are similarly unable to back up her, and
their, directives:
“The Queen has commanded
me to shoot any stranger who tries to open the gate.”
“But your gun is only
wood,” said Dot, who was annoyed at the soldier’s interference. ...
The soldier seemed
somewhat embarrassed at this and Dot thought he blushed a little. (Dot and
Tot, ch. 10)
(Though
some of the Merryland soldiers turn out to have wooden swords that are a bit
more effective.)
 |
| Somebody call CopBlock |
Back in Oz
itself, the Cowardly Lion’s status as King of Beasts depends on others’ false
belief in his fierceness:
All the other animals in
the forest naturally expect me to be brave, for the Lion is everywhere thought
to be the King of Beasts. I learned that if I roared very loudly every living
thing was frightened and got out of my way. Whenever I’ve met a man I’ve been
awfully scared; but I just roared at him, and he has always run away as fast as
he could go. If the elephants and the tigers and the bears had ever tried to
fight me, I should have run myself – I’m such a coward; but just as soon as they
hear me roar they all try to get away from me, and of course I let them go. (Wizard, ch. 6)
Even the Emerald
City under the Scarecrow’s rule turns out to have defenses as hollow and
illusory as its green colour was under the Wizard’s rule:
Followed by her Army the
General now rushed to the gateway, where she was
confronted by the Royal Army of Oz – which was the other name for the Soldier
with the Green Whiskers.
“Halt!” he cried, and
pointed his long gun full in the face of the leader. ...
General Jinjur bravely
stood her ground and said, reproachfully:
“Why, how now? Would you
shoot a poor, defenceless girl?”
“No,” replied the
soldier; “for my gun isn’t loaded.”
“Not loaded?”
“No; for fear of
accidents. And I’ve forgotten where I hid the powder and shot to load it with.
But if you'll wait a short time I'll try to hunt them up.” ... (Land,
ch. 8)
Jinjur’s
army is of course unwilling to wait, and so the Emerald City is “captured
without a drop of blood being spilled.”
(This trope is partly instantiated and partly subverted in Emerald City of Oz, wherein Ozma refuses
to use force against the invading army of the Nome King and his allies, but manages
to defeat them through magic and trickery instead.)
 |
| Over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the Bitcoin |
While the
Emerald City (pre-Ozma, at least) has some parallels with the corrupt power
structure of the world outside Galt’s Gulch, it also has parallels with the
Gulch itself. Just as the Wizard tells
Dorothy that she has “no right to expect me to send you back to Kansas unless
you do something for me in return,” since “[i]n this country everyone must pay
for everything he gets” (Wizard, ch. 11),
so when Dagny asks Galt “Did I understand you to say that Mr. Mulligan – who’s
worth about two hundred million dollars, I believe – is going to charge you twenty-five
cents for the use of his car? ... Good heavens, couldn’t he give it to you as a
courtesy?” Galt replies: “there is one
word which is forbidden in this valley: the word ‘give ….’” (AS III.1)
Both
Baum’s fairyland and Rand’s are hidden from mortal eyes. Ozma tells Dorothy: “It won’t affect us at all; but those who fly
through the air over our country will look down and see nothing at all. ... In
other words, the Land of Oz will entirely disappear from the knowledge of the
rest of the world.” (Emerald City, ch. 29: ) Galt
similarly tells Dagny:
The valley bottom that
you saw is a mountain top eight thousand feet high, five miles away from here.
... A mountain top that no flyer would ever choose for a landing. What you saw
was its reflection projected over this valley. ... [T]his place is private
property intended to remain as such. (AS III.1)
Just as,
in Emerald City, the narrator
receives a last message from Dorothy “written on a broad, white feather from a
stork's wing” (ch. 30), so in Atlas
“the screen split open for one brief break – for the length of a letter she
received a week after he vanished.” (III.7)
And just as Ozma, in Dorothy and
the Wizard, keeps a watch on Dorothy via her magic picture in order to be
ready to help her return to Oz when she desires to do so, so Galt keeps a like
watch (if somewhat riskier for himself) on Dagny to be ready to help her return
to the Gulch.
 |
| “That’s all right,” said Dorothy, cheerfully. “You may make Oz
invis’ble as soon as you please, for all I care.”
“It is already invisible,” Glinda stated. “I knew Ozma’s wishes, and
performed the Magic Spell before you arrived.”
|
If Dagny
is an echo of Dorothy, the character of Cherryl Brooks is too, since Cherryl is
Dagny’s doublet – her tragic, weaker counterpart. Cherryl, like Dagny, is from
upstate New York (Buffalo, in this case), and Dagny describes herself and
Cherryl as spiritual sisters. Like Baum’s
Dorothy, who loves to “wander out into the country and all through the land,
peering into queer nooks and corners,” and who “always laughed at [the
Wizard’s] fears for her and said she was not afraid of anything that might
happen” (Little Wizard Stories, ch. 2), Cherryl
has a “look of alertness, of eager interest, a look that expected the world to
contain an exciting secret behind every corner” (AS I.9), and “the courageous trust of a kitten when it sees a hand
extended to play.” (II.2) But Cherryl,
instead of meeting a benevolent copper revolutionary, has the misfortune to be
hoodwinked by a humbug wizard, in the form of Dagny’s slimy brother James, whom
Cherryl initially admires because she mistakes Dagny’s achievements for his: “He had never had the experience of seeing
his presence give color to a place he entered: the girl looked as if she was
not tired any longer, as if the dime store had become a scene of drama and
wonder.” (I.9) When she asks him, “Mr. Taggart, how does it
feel to be a great man?” he replies, “How does it feel to be a little girl?” –
an exchange reminiscent of “Dorothy, the Small and Meek” telling “Oz, the Great
and Terrible”: “you are a Great Wizard
and I am only a little girl.” (Wizard, ch. 11) One of James’ first gifts to Cherryl is even an
emerald bracelet.
When the
Wizard is unmasked in Baum’s tale, he claims to be a good man though a bad
wizard – though it is hard to see what is good about him considered apart from
his humbug wizardry, since impersonating a wizard is pretty much all he has
been doing. Likewise, once Cherryl find
out the truth about James, she confronts him:
“I loved you for your courage, your ambition, your ability. But it wasn’t
real, any of it.” To this, James
responds: “I don’t want to be loved for anything. I want to be loved for
myself – not for anything I do or have or say or think. For myself – not for my body or mind or words
or works or actions.” And Cherryl responds: “But then ... what is yourself?: (AS III.4) The question of how one’s identity relates to
one’s attributes is, as we’ve seen, a recurring them in Baum’s work as
well.
 |
The same I did to them,
baby, I can do to you
|
Ellsworth
Toohey, the chief antagonist in The
Fountainhead, is another Wizard figure, though a more complex and
formidable one than either James Taggart or Mr. Thompson in Atlas.
When Toohey is first introduced, speaking at a public meeting, we hear
him without seeing him:
It was not a voice, it
was a miracle. It unrolled as a velvet banner. It spoke English words, but the
resonant clarity of each syllable made it sound like a new language spoken for
the first time. It was the voice of a giant.
Keating stood, his mouth
open. He did not hear what the voice was saying. He heard the beauty of the
sounds without meaning. He felt no need to know the meaning; he could accept anything,
he would be led blindly anywhere. ...
Keating looked at
Catherine. There was no Catherine; there was only a white face dissolving in
the sounds of the loudspeaker. ... It was something cold and impersonal that
left her empty, her will surrendered and no human will holding hers, but a nameless
thing in which she was being swallowed.
(Fountainhead, I.9)
This
description is incidentally reminiscent of Tolkien’s description of Saruman’s
voice:
In
our next encounter with Toohey, we see him only as an enormous shadow in Catherine’s
living room:
I couldn’t hear a thing,
not a sound in the living room, and there was that paper rustling, so softly,
like somebody being choked to death. And then I looked around and ... and I
couldn’t see Uncle in the living room, but I saw his shadow on the wall, a huge
shadow, all hunched, and it didn’t move, only it was so huge! ... That’s when
it got me. It wouldn’t move, that shadow, but I thought all that paper was
moving, I thought it was rising very slowly off the floor, and it was going to
come to my throat and I was going to drown. That’s when I screamed. And, Peter,
he didn’t hear. He didn’t hear it! Because the shadow didn’t move. Then I
seized my hat and coat and I ran. (Fountainhead I.13)
 |
| No one will ever suspect I’m the villain |
Why should I help you
lie to yourself? I’ve done that for ten years. That’s what you came to me for.
That’s what they all come to me for. But you can’t get something for nothing.
Ever. ... Why don’t you throw me out of here? Why don’t you take me by the
throat and choke me? You’re much stronger than I am. But you won't. You can’t.
Do you see the nature of power, Petey? Physical power? Muscle or guns or
money? ... God, how you make me sick,
all you hypocritical sentimentalists! You go along with me, you spout what I
teach you, you profit by it – but you haven’t the grace to admit to yourself
what you’re doing. ... That’s what I have to put on an act for all my life –
for mean little mediocrities like you. To protect your sensibilities, your posturings,
your conscience and the peace of the mind you haven’t got. That’s the price I
pay for what I want – but at least I know that I’ve got to pay it. ... If you
learn how to rule one single man's soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s
the soul, Peter, the soul. ... Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it – and
the man is yours. You won’t need a whip – he’ll bring it to you and ask to be
whipped. (Fountainhead IV.14)
Toohey,
like the Wizard, holds that “In this country everyone must pay for everything
he gets” – but with a very different meaning from John Galt’s.
Chicago’s
1893 Columbian Exposition, Baum’s probable inspiration for the Emerald City,
shows up in The Fountainhead too –
but in a negative light heavily influenced by Louis Sullivan’s strictures on the architecture:
The Rome of two thousand
years ago rose on the shores of Lake Michigan, a Rome improved by pieces of
France, Spain, Athens and every style that followed it. It was a "Dream
City" of columns, triumphal arches, blue lagoons, crystal fountains and
popcorn. Its architects competed on who could steal best, from the oldest
source and from the most sources at once.
It spread before the eyes of a new country every structural crime ever
committed in all the old ones.
It was white as a
plague, and it spread as such.
People came, looked,
were astounded, and carried away with them, to the cities of America, the seeds
of what they had seen. The seeds sprouted into weeds; into shingled post
offices with Doric porticos, brick mansions with iron pediments, lofts made of
twelve Parthenons piled on top of one another. The weeds grew and choked
everything else. (Fountainhead I.3)
This is a
far cry from Burnett’s evaluation
(though not really from her description) of the “splendid City, that all the
world shall flock to and wonder at and remember forever.”
There are also
Baumian parallels with another of Rand’s works, her 1937 Anthem (about which more here), concerning
a future dystopia in which the concept of individuality has been lost, along
with the word “I.” (This linguistic
alteration is a deliberate strategy on the part of the society’s rulers to
suppress undesirable thoughts – an anticipation of Orwell’s “Newspeak.”) A similar idea occurs in Baum’s Enchanted Island of Yew, in which the
protagonists visit the land of Twi where every person has an identical double –
or, perhaps, every person is a pair
of such doubles – and the pairs act and speak in unison.
“Are none of your people
single?” asked Prince Marvel.
“Single,” returned the
men, as if perplexed. “We don’t understand.”
“Are you all double? –
or are some of you just one?” said the prince, who found it difficult to put
his question plainly.
“What does ‘one’ mean?”
asked the men. “There is no such word as ‘one’ in our language.” (Yew,
ch. 13)
This
difficulty of expressing individuality in an anti-individualist language is
dramatised in Anthem also:
They were silent, then
they spoke slowly, and their words were halting, like the words of a child
learning to speak for the first time:
“We are one ... alone
... and only ... and we love you who are one ... alone ... and only.”
We looked into each
other’s eyes and we knew that the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled,
and left us groping vainly.
And we felt torn, torn
for some word we could not find. (Anthem, ch. 9)
And Rand
would certainly endorse Prince Marvel’s comment that it is “better each person
should think her own thoughts and live her own life, rather than be yoked to
another person and obliged to think and act as a twin, or one-half of a
complete whole.” (Yew, ch. 19) But in Baum’s
land of Twi, unlike the society depicted in Anthem,
such doubling is natural rather than the product of a collectivist ideology,
and Baum suggests that Twi’s inhabitants are accordingly better off as they
are, even if their doubled lives are no model for others to follow.
The idea
of two people each thinking as “one-half of a complete whole” shows up in
another of Baum’s works, Dot and Tot in
Merryland, with the aforementioned Mr. Split:
“Even—, Your Maj—,” he
cried out, as he drew near. “Hap—see!”
He meant to say: “Good
evening, your Majesty, I’m happy to see you,” but there being only half of him
he spoke but half of each word. ...
Just then the Queen
exclaimed: “Here comes Mr. Right Split,” and the children looked up and saw the
other half of the split man .... hopping toward them, saying in his jerky voice
“—Ning,—jesty!—Come our—ley.” By which he meant to say: “Good evening, your Majesty!
Welcome to our Valley.” But being the right half of the man he spoke only the
right half of each word. (Dot and Tot, ch. 16)
When the
two halves (Mr. Left Split and Mr. Right Split) are hooked together, the
resulting person (Mr. Split) appears to speak normally.
Mr. Split
represents a whimsical dramatisation of an idea Rand elsewhere condemns as
incoherent:
An idea, simple or
complex, cannot be held in half by two men, working together as a Siamese-twin
unit or collective. A man cannot say in reference to his ideas:
“I’ve only got the nouns and adverbs – my brother Joe’s got the verbs and
adjectives – we think kinda like a team.” An idea is not a jig-saw puzzle
whose pieces can be scattered among various participants, while a mystical
super-entity – the collective – puts the picture together …. An idea, an
intelligible mental conception, is held in its entirety in the mind of one
man. Another man may hold the same idea – in its entirety and in his own
mind. (Journals of Ayn Rand, p. 306)
A more
recent fictional representation of individual minds contributing to the thought
of a collective person is Vernor Vinge’s
“Zones of Thought” series (the Tines).
Rand’s
negative evaluation of collectivism extends to racism, which she regards as a
symptom of a concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality. (Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical has an especially interesting discussion of her views on racism.) Unfortunately,
her views on European settlers’ dispossession of Native Americans, and her
defense of the ethnic-cleansing policies pursued by whites in North America, suggest
that she did not always practice what she preached:
Since the Indians did
not have the concept of property or property rights – they didn’t have a
settled society, they had predominantly nomadic tribal “cultures” – they didn’t
have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them
rights that they had not conceived of and were not using. It’s wrong to attack a country that respects
(or even tries to respect) individual rights. ... But if a “country” doesn’t
protect rights – if a group of tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chief –
why should you respect the “rights” that they don’t have or respect. ...
What were they fighting
for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive
existence; for their “right” to keep part of the earth untouched – to keep
everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen. Any European who brought with him an element
of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it’s great that
some of them did. ... The Indians were savages, with ghastly tribal rules and
rituals, including the famous “Indian Torture.”
Such tribes have no rights.
Anyone had the right to come here and take whatever they could, because
they would be dealing with savages as the Indians dealt with each other – that
is, by force. (Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q & A, pp. 103-104)
(As Robert Campbell has documented, the materials in Ayn
Rand Answers have been heavily edited by Robert Mayhew, and are not the
faithful transcripts they purport to be. But there
is no reason to doubt that the passages I’ve quoted give the general tenor of
Rand’s position.)
Rand’s remarks are reminiscent of Baum’s Aberdeen editorials asserting that whites “by justice of civilization ... are masters of the American continent” – though without Baum’s admission that whites had treated the natives with “falsehood and treachery.” (And by contrast with Baum’s case, there is no chance that Rand was being satirical.) Her remarks are also such a shameful farrago of historical inaccuracies and moral absurdities that it’s hard to know where to start. But here are at least some of the highlights:
1. Native American society comprised a wide
variety of different nations, tribes, and cultures. Some were nomadic; others, sedentary and
agricultural. Some practiced collective
or communal property, others – many – private property, and others a mix. So even if it were true that nomadic and
communal societies have no just land claims, that would justify dispossessing
only some Indian communities, not all of them.
2. In any case, there is nothing inherently
illegitimate, even by Rand’s own libertarian standards, about communal or collective
property; see here and here.
3. As for nomadic cultures, even when habitual
use is not transformative enough to secure an exclusive property right, it at
least grounds easement rights, which European settlers had no right to violate.
4. Degree of hierarchy is another factor that
varied from one community to another; but few, in the territory of the future
U.S. at least, had anything like so great a degree of hierarchy as to license
the claim that “tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chief.” (Perhaps this description is defensible for
some of the native societies of Mexico and Central and South America; but those
societies, with their vast empires and towering pyramids, could hardly be
described as primitive or nomadic. It’s
difficult to name an Indian tribe that was both nomadic and highly autocratic.)
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| Benefits of enlightened European civilisation |
6. A group’s failure to practice the “correct”
version of property rights does not license massacring that group; in
particular, a failure on the part of the adults in a group to practice the
correct version of property rights does not license massacring their children.
7. When contracts between European settlers and
Indians were made in clear terms, and respected by the former, Indians proved
perfectly willing and able to respect European-style property rights.
8. The European settlers were not exactly great
respecters of individual rights themselves; most of them practiced slavery, for
example. And torture by Europeans was
common as well, primarily against slaves.
So why do rights-violations by Indians deprive them of rights, but
rights-violations by Europeans don’t have the same effect?
It’s hard
to see how to explain Rand’s inconsistency and incoherence on this issue except
in terms of racist attitudes. Her remarks
on the Indians are also flatly inconsistent with her own stated principles:
To interpose the threat
of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to
negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own
judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. ... When you
declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you
define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of
reason .... (AS III.7)
In
insisting that Indians adopt property norms alien to their own experience or be
forcibly driven from their homes, what is Rand doing if not interposing the
threat of physical destruction between the natives and their perception of
reality? And in asserting that the
Indians lived “like animals,” that they had “no rights,” and that Europeans “had
the right to come here and take whatever they could, because they would be
dealing with savages,” how is Rand not, contrary to her own strictures, “declar[ing]
that men are irrational animals and propos[ing] to treat them as such”?
The
ultra-capitalist Rand and the ultra-socialist Banks would doubtless have despised each
other’s works; but from my own individualist anarchist standpoint,
with its pro-freed-market but anti-capitalist orientation,
the ideological distance between the two writers, while genuine and important,
naturally looks less significant to me than it would have to them. The main parallel between Banks and Baum is
found in his series of novels and stories dealing with the “Culture,” a high-tech
interstellar anarchist utopian civilisation.
The two series are not similar in style or sensibility; Banks’ stories
are darker, more cynical, and often gut-wrenching. But with
its extended lifespans, bodily fluidity (both transgender and transhuman), and
post-scarcity economy, the Culture bears more than a passing resemblance to Oz;
in one Banks novel, Inversions, one of the
protagonists, self-exiled from the Culture to a primitive earthlike planet, even
tells stories of his home society in the form of fairy tales.
Where Oz is a benevolent despotism that
appears at closer inspection to have characteristics of an anarchy (inasmuch as
the rulers at least sometimes seem disinclined to enforce their edicts) the
Culture is an anarchy that appears at closer inspection to have characteristics
of a benevolent despotism (with AI equivalents of Ozma, Glinda, and the Wizard
pulling the strings from behind the scenes).
Where Rand holds that “money is the root of all good” – meaning not the having
of money, which Rand was largely indifferent to, but the idea of money as a symbol of voluntary rather than forcible
exchange – Banks’ characters repeatedly observe that “money is a sign of
poverty,” echoing Baum’s remark that “[t]here were no poor people in the Land
of Oz, because there was no such thing as money.” (Emerald City, ch. 3) Banks’ point is that reliance on monetary exchange is a sign that one has not yet achieved a technological level where most goods are rapidly reproducible at minimal cost. (As a synthesis of the Randian and Banksian antitheses, we may note Bastiat’s point that the natural tendency of monetary exchange is to render ever smaller the range of cases in which it is needed.)
Perhaps
the closest Baum/Banks parallel is between Emerald
City of Oz and Look to Windward. (Spoiler
alert for both.) The main
plot of Emerald City concerns a plan
by foreign hostiles to invade Oz and enslave and/or destroy its inhabitants, out of revenge
for a previous intervention on Oz’s part; the story cuts back and forth between
the antagonists’ gradual accumulation of forces, and the protagonists’ blithely
wandering around Oz having adventures with no awareness of their peril. But in fact Ozma has all along been magically,
if somewhat absent-mindedly, monitoring the invasion plans in her spare time,
and when the enemy army arrives it is quickly and somewhat anticlimactically
dispatched with the help of some magic dust.
This description, with minimal alteration, would summarise the plot of Look to Windward also; there’s even an “E-dust
assassin” to correspond to Ozma’s magic dust. The effects are rather different, however;
Ozma’s dust makes her enemies thirsty so they’ll drink from a fountain of
amnesia, while the E-dust assassin rips the Culture’s enemies to shreds in
especially nasty ways.
Another
feature common to all of the writers (except Seuss) that I’ve been discussing –
theists and atheists alike – is that their version of Fairyland doubles as an
afterlife. Oz does this (Dorothy’s aunt
and uncle dress in mourning while she is in Oz; and Baum’s own last words on
his deathbed were supposedly “Now I can cross the Shifting Sands”), as do
Lewis’s Narnia (reached by railway crash in The
Last Battle), Tolkien’s Valinor, and Burroughs’ Mars (as well
as his Poloda and, in
one incident, his Pellucidar). Banks’
Culture has its own (somewhat less pleasant) virtual afterlife in the form of
the Sublime. And Rand describes her Atlantis
a.k.a. Galt’s Gulch as a metaphorical afterlife, a “place which only the
spirits of heroes could enter, and they reached it without dying, because they
carried the secret of life within them” (AS
I.6), whose inhabitants are nonetheless “dead – as far as you're concerned.” (II.9) And going right back to the beginning, when
the protagonists of Burnett’s Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress reach the
Columbian Exposition (a visit that I’ve argued served as Baum’s inspiration for
the Emerald City), their first reaction, dazed and delighted, is “perhaps we
are dead.” (ch. 11)
Here ends
my rather rambling three-part introduction to this blog. What lies ahead? My plan is to blog my way through all of Baum’s
fiction, work by work, both Oz-related and not (the “not” outnumbers the Oz
material by something like two to one). My
focus will continue to be on the “bodily,” including material utopianism,
physical identity, and questions of race, gender, and class.
Beyond
that I’ll be more selective. I’ll certainly
cover the 26 “official” follow-ups by Ruth Plumly Thompson and her immediate
successors (including Eloise McGraw, the first post-Baum Oz writer I read –
plus I later ended up going to grad school with her grandson); and I’ll cover
the 1939 movie and its silent predecessors.
I don’t plan to cover every single sequel, adaptation, or spinoff; that would
take forever, and much of the material I would probably find annoying. For example, I admittedly don’t know anything
about the project that the following picture is from, but while it looks like a
parody of how modern comic books would handle The Wizard of Oz, I have the sinking feeling it’s probably played
straight:
(Now someone’s probably going to contact me and tell me that this comic I’m making fun of is actually great. Well, fine, I’m willing to be convinced.) But certainly
I will cover a fair number of the later films
and books – whichever ones look most interesting to me. That’s a while away yet, though.
Follow my
yellow brick blog!
Next up: The Marvelous
Landlady of Oz!
I believe you meant "witch of the west" just befor the block quote when discussing the evaporation of the sisters...
ReplyDeleteThanks! Fixed.
DeleteThat comic was not great in my opinion, but tastes differ.
ReplyDelete