Re: Is The Wizard of Oz a satire of the French Revolution?
It is true that the Littlefield interpretation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is nonsense (and never intended by Littlefield to be factual in the first place). However, having just seen the Canton Comic Opera’s revival of the 1902 (Chicago)/1903 (New York) musical extravaganza, The Wizard of Oz, last month, I have to say that there is a sort of French-Revolutionary vibe to bits of it. Even more so, however, is Baum’s first sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), in which the Scarecrow is overthrown as ruler of Oz by an army of young and pretty feminists. Baum was planning ahead to make a second musical, The Woggle-Bug (Milwaukee, then Chicago, 1905), and he wanted to repeat the first show’s successful effect of chorus girls doing drills in uniform.
(By a strange coincidence, the Fox Movie Channel was showing The Pin-Up Girl (1944), which ends with Betty Grable leading just such a routine, this morning.)
Perhaps the original 1983 letter writer had a vague memory of those in mind.
I agree that the Populist linkage is very vague and a little far fetched…there is also another reading of the story explained here.
The article refers to articles in the end of the page.
This theory gives a little more meaning, I think. It is a basic Cultural Studies reading of The wizard of Oz.
That’s absolutely wonderful. Thanks for the link.
Those abstracts of articles, BTW, follow a long history of trying to interpret fantasy. That one of them is Freudian makes the connection obvious, but both Freud and Jung are subject to the criticism that they and their followers have learned that you can take any arbitrary set of symbols and read into them any significance or pattern that you want. It’s no coincidence that Freud believed that Bacon (and later Oxford) wrote Shakespeare. The temptation to read the text as a coded series of referents was too great.
It’s not true, however, that all such readings must be worthless, although it is impossible to believe that any one writer, no matter how brilliant, could code so many divergent scenarios into a surface story simultaneously.
David Payne’s reading, e.g., is interesting in that it can be used to explain why so many girls identify with Dorothy. It has deeper insight into literature and reading than the superficial Populist rendering. OTOH, Daniel Dervin is delightfully insane and would make a great poster here, if only to make fun of.
It is true that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is highly attractive to gay men, and not just because of the Judy Garland connection. The last I heard (ten years ago), there was some ongoing academic research on that subject. On the other hand, as far as I know, lesbians are no more likely to be Oz fans than straight women, though I don’t have sufficient information to be sure one way or the other. I think that girls appreciate Dorothy’s independence and capacity for action – what some people would call “masculine qualities” – but not every straight woman is a clinging vine, and not every lesbian is “butch”.
It should be noted that, unlike the teenage Judy Garland (or the teenage Anna Laughlin in 1902), Dorothy in the original book is about six years old, and is expressly stated to be a carefree, happy child before her great adventure begins.