Let’s look at this from the religious context of good verses evil. I do believe that we have to conclude that L.F.Baum intended the wicked witch of the west to be the evil character. Thus, the relationship of water represents a baptism and pure evil “shrinking” from the “purity” of righteousness.:smack:
From the Staff Report, Why does water make the Wicked Witch of the West melt?:
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, cdutchhill, glad to have you here. It’s helpful if you provide a link to the Staff Report upon which you are commenting, helps keep everyone on the same page.
Thanks, Duck, for providing the link.
I recently listened to a set of tapes entitled “Great Ideas in Philosophy” from the TheLearningCompany.com. There is a lecture on the witch trials. (No, the lecture was not suggesting that the witch trials were a great idea in philosophy. One of its points that the “Renaissance”, in which the witch trials mostly occurred, did not come close to living up to its hype, and that the Middle Ages were not the desert of intellectual thought often espoused.)
One point the lecturer made was that the trial was not just throwing a witch in the water and seeing if she drowned. The suspected witch was tied to ropes. If I remember correctly, the trial was an attempt to measure the existence of a soul. I guess that if you sold your soul, you would weigh less, and so float more.
For what it’s worth, L. Frank Baum was not particularly religious, and was definitely not a small-o orthodox Christian. He even dabbled a little with Theosophy.
In Monty Python and the Holy Grail Sir Bedivere posits that witches float because they’re made of wood. In the movie *The Wizard of Oz, * Dorothy points out that wizards are also made of wood! Dorothy and company sing, “We’re off to cedar Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
(Nott runs in serpentine fashion, so as to dodge the hail of brickbats and zucchini)
Here’s another relevant quote from the canon, from Baum’s “The Tin Woodman of Oz”. The Witch in question is the Wicked Witch of the East.
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“I suppose so.” replied the Tin Woodman. “In the Land of Oz no part of a living creature can ever be destroyed.”
“If that is true, how was that Wicked Witch destroyed?” inquired Woot.
“Why, she was very old and was all dried up and withered before Oz became a fairyland,” explained the Scarecrow. “Only her magic arts had kept her alive so long, and when Dorothy’s house fell upon her she just turned to dust, and was blown away and scattered by the wind.”
I simply thought the “Wicked Witch of the West” was an allegory for the prairie drought.
The whole notion of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as allegory was exploded years ago. The man who invented it didn’t even mean it – it was a classroom exercise on “What if WWoO were an allegory?” that somehow escaped from the laboratory and ran wild through the general population. The so-called “allegory” doesn’t make sense, and, even worse, doesn’t correspond with Baum’s known politics.