While in an English class some years back, a classmate had an interesting interpretation of the Wizard of OZ and I’ve never heard it since. His idea was that the story was written about the debate of leaving the gold standard in the latter half of the century. On one side we had Dorothy, pure and good; Glenda the good witch; the Munchkins (little people like you and me), the Cowardly Lion (William Jenning Bryan; Scarecrow (farmers) and the Tin Man (small manufacturing companies). On the other side there was the Wicked Witch of the East (large east coast business)and others I can’t recall (too many years ago). Well, they decide to march on OZ (Washington) but find out that the Wizard (the President) is nothing but smoke and mirrors and has no real power. I’m sure I’ve left something out. Has anyone else heard of this?
FWIW, I have heard the same thing (from a social studies teacher in HS), but I cannot vouch for the accuracy of that interpretation (although it made a lot of sense when he explained it, and some people I knew at the time read it for extra credit in another teacher’s economics class).
This has been debated a few times on here, and the last time someone had a few links discussing whether or not this was the case.
It certainly sounds like a good interpretation to me. Try doing a search to find the threads with the links.
(with a more comprehensive analysis linked at the bottom)
I’ve heard that one too - from a lecturer in college, a brilliant, brilliant man. He stated it as fact, not speculation, and he’s not the type of man to embellish for his students (he didn’t have to - he was too good a speaker).
Look at it this way: What is it about The Wizard of Oz that gives it its lasting appeal? My contention is that it’s an Archetypal Quest Story. See my reviews of The Star Wars Trilogy and The Phantom Menace at
(Click on Reviews and then on the film names.)
Like the Star Wars movies, The Lord of the Rings, the story of King Arthur (in its various versions), The Ring Cycle of Wagner, The Chronicles of Prydain, or the Earthsea books, the reason that it has been so popular is that people are attracted to its arechetypal story elements. Baum perhaps wasn’t deliberately trying to create such a story (unlike George Lucas, who had studied Joseph Campbell’s theories and knew exactly what he was doing in the Star Wars movies), but he did say that he was writing an American fairy tale. Read the later books in the Oz series. They’re all filled with clever fairy tale elements (although they’re not quite as good as the first book), and I dare you to try to continue the allegory into those books.
Perhaps one could treat the book as a populist allegory, but there’s no reason to think that it’s not just an arbitrary structure one’s created. Leach’s theory that it’s a consumerist allegory makes as much sense as Littlefield’s populist allegory theory, and Leach’s fits the known opinions of Baum better. Even if Baum did intend an allegory in the book, so what? It’s the story that’s made it popular, not the allegory.
I said it before and I’ll say it again, you can always stretch stuff to fit any interpretation you’d like, if you’re willing to stretch far enough… especially stuff with great mythic underpinings.
Wanna hear me describe how the Iliad is really about the Marxist view of labor vs capital?
I’ve never heard of the gold standard until here, I was told once though that the flying monkeys were really the Chinese. don’t remember how that one was explained though. I always wondered why people tried to work so much crap into stories in the first place, just enjoy the damn story.
Yes actually I would like to hear/read this.
You can interpret anything any way you want. (Did you know Shakespeare was a Martian? It’s in his sonnets; I proved it conclusively!). The theory is interesting, but the author of it was working in a vacuum. The key question was “Did L. Frank Baum care a rat’s ass about Bryan?” If nothing in her personal life indicates so, it’s extremely unlikely Oz would be. BTW, the evidence seems to indicate that Baum was for McKinley, not Bryan.
Further, those who interpret a book usually have no clue about how a book is written. An author is concerned with a lot of issues, and if he’s going to go to the trouble of sprinkling in allegorical references, he’s going to be damn sure it doesn’t take over 60 years before anyone notices.
As a matter of fact, the time gap is a further indication that it just isn’t so – the critic who came up with the “interpretation” didn’t know enough about the period. He’s looking at it like someone from the 1960s, and assume Baum shared his own assumptions and worldview.
Look, we all know that Baum was a visionary, in as much as he envisioned generations of stoned teenagers watching the movie version of his story while trying to syncronise it with “Dark Side Of The Moon”.
I told you he was a visionary.
This may be a hijack, but I have to take issue with, especially, the assertion in the first paragraph. You’re completely discounting the sub- and unconscious mind, not to mention the absolute deviousness of some authors. After all, if we’re going to go by authorial statements, then “Huck Finn” has no symbolism or allegory, right? Faulkner used to confirm conflicting interpretations of his novels depending on who was interviewing him and how the questions went. Many authors want readers to find unknown variables in the text and that’s why they hide them. If they don’t, it becomes a didactic screed.
Mind you, I’m not discounting the value of biography in literary criticism, but mere analysis of the (often dead) author’s letters and personal writings is as fallacious as not looking at it at all. We know Hemingway’s mother dressed him as a girl for years. Does this have anything to do with the extreme macho aesthetic? Perhaps. I doubt if Ernie would have ever admitted it, but then again we don’t know for sure why he blew the top of his skull out either.
The second point I’d take issue with is the time gap, but I think I discussed that already. Some authors take their secrets to the grave.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by stofsky *
**
Maybe Baum was psychic - after all, in the second novel, “Ozma of Oz,” the ruler of Oz turns out to be (are you ready?) a girl princess who has been living disguised as a boy! When you compare this to the Hemingway short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” you can see that the unspoken thing hanging over the characters’ heads is not an unwanted pregnancy but actually tranvestitism. You can see that the introduction of the Tiktok character hearkens to the modern robot, while in the third quatrain NostraLFrankBaumus describes people who can throw their heads at others in self defense, clearly a prediction of our current presidential election.
I think that’s an interesting theory, but if I’m not mistaken the Wizard of Oz was written for children, so it would seem odd that he’d stick in some political thing. And if the Wicked Witch of the East was supposed to actually represent the East coast, it doesn’t match up with the Emerald City being Washington DC, since the Emermald City was located in the center of the land of Oz, not over to the side. If you’re going to be logical about this.
I remember a lot of things from those books, but I don’t remember if in the novel the Wicked Witches of the East and West were sisters, as they were in the movie. If so, why would the evil easteren industrialists be “sisters” with the symbolic untamed American West?
And at the end of the book, Dorothy goes home and loses her shoes on the way, and isn’t upset about it. How does that fit into the parable? “There’s no place like home!” is the moral, not “Silver shoes are great!”
The two previous relevant Oz discussions can be found at:
This has been garbled by the software change back on yond. The OP starts at post 13.
For the Pink Floyd synchronicity: Another brick in that road… I mean, Wall
The Wizard of Oz series, and the Alice in Wonderland books are my perennial favorites. They were great to read as a girl, because they had gals as the heroes, undertaking a tranforming journey with wit and strength through a lot of weirdness. I’m glad that Baum and Carroll were creative and generous enough to do that in their own time, and that it’s had enough of a profound effect that we’re trying to figure out why.
I ran across this site some time ago. This particular page mentions the WWoOz connection but the site goes into far greater detail about the economics of bimetalism and the switch to a pure gold standard.
Sorry, but unless you can come up with some biographical statements to back up your assertion about what might be in the author’s unconscious, anything you find there is merely your own biases.
You’re perfectly free to read a work any way you want. (Shakespeare was a Martian!). But what YOU see in a work is what YOU bring into it. Any critic’s analysis of “unconscious factors” is merely his own emotional baggage. It tells a lot about the critic, but nothing about the work.
Exactly. There is no overt symbolism in Huck Finn, any more than there’s a picture of a rabbit in an inkblot. It what the critic brings, not what the author put there.
Your conflating two things – the author’s biography and the author’s work. The author’s work stands alone with or without the biography. But when you make assertions about what the author “really” meant – that are, after all, just reflections of what you want to see – then you need more than just a reading of the text to show they are there. If the author meant it, it wouldn’t take a Ph.D. thesis to find it.
But to assert that Baum was pushing Bryan and the Populist cause when the historical record shows that he favored McKinley in the election puts you off into woo-woo land. At the very least, it shows extremely sloppy scholarship.
There you go again; you’re assuming Hemingway was born in the year 2000. When he was a child, there was nothing particularly remarkable about putting a boy in dresses; it was the standard way many boys were dressed. (See http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/canterbury/28/dress1900.html for a discussion).
So by ignoring the historical context, any connection you make with Hemingway’s wearing dresses and his macho attitude is spurious.
If there are biographical statements, then for the most part it’s not sub- or unconscious, now is it? Just as a trained psychologist–or often an amateur psychologist–can find motivation hidden in someone else’s actions and be correct, a trained reader can find hidden motivations and ideas in a text. To use the Huck Finn example again, it’s obvious to a good reader that Twain was discussing slavery among other things and had a subtext that gave his views on it. However, to quote his notice–the “authorial intent,” if you will–“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot will be shot. By Order of the Author, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.” Therefore, by your reasoning, Huck Finn is a plotless, meaningless book.
No, I think you’re doing the conflation. We have to tie a work into some sort of living being, unless you are a New-Critical or Reader-Response purist. To do so, as trained readers, as good readers, we can take a combination of known biography and good reading and come up with certain theories, which by the nature of theory are not absolute fact but are believable by preponderance of evidence, scholarship, and clear thinking. Sure, sometimes this goes too far as in the recent article in Salon about Gatsby being black: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/08/09/gatsby/index.html
But you dodge my point that overtly pointed books are didactic and rarely literary, The Jungle as a case in point.
Reread my post. I never asserted any such thing, and I’ve been hunting for the link (I think it was either Cecil or Snopes) where the Gold Standard argument is debunked. I was merely taking issue with the idea that there is no subtext or ulterior meaning in a literary work.
Not the best example, but the one that came to mind at the moment. That one was my bad, except that it addresses the problem of discounting sub- and unconscious motivation and influence in the author. If I’m not misremembering, Eliot discusses the same thing in “Anxiety of Influence,” but I could be wrong–it’s been a while. I know that Fiedler discusses it obliquely in An End to Innocence, especially in the chapter about the Dark Other.
Sorry 'bout the extra bolding, folks. To quote several other posters, “Damn codes!” Chuck, I notice you’re a sci-fi writer. Care to provide some bona-fides as a critic? Me, I’m a 4th year ABD Ph.D. student at a top-50 English program specializing in post WWII American Lit, with a dissertation topic on Jazz, Blues, & R&B as structurally applied to literature. To translate, I’m looking at how be-bop and late musical styles translate to how writers structure their works and their dialogues. And I’m an extremely anti-political interpreter as well, which causes me problems. Post-colonialism, radical-feminism, etc. gives me the running shits.
I understand that authors and critics are often at odds, but if your works live beyond you, we’re the ones who get to play with them. In your genre, look at Philip K. Dick–there’s an example of someone who both knew how to play with the critics, to write (at least somewhat) literary science fiction, and was still a complete nutcase. When you consider that Dick was a lunatic, how can you take any personal statement as gospel? At that point it becomes the job of the reader, the critic, or the academic to interpret the work using a combination of verifiable and trustworthy biography, ephemera, personal writings, and of course the most important part, the text itself. Gee, not to mention that PKD is dead, and I can’t ask him if he was looking at Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as an allegory for, I dunno, transvestitism or the gold standard or slavery or whatever. Do we stop trying to interpret the novel? If so, we stop teaching it and it’s dead. Or do we take the available evidence, the available text, and do with it what we can so that it continues to live?
stofsky,
Philip K. Dick may have had more than his share of psychological problems, but he was not a “complete nutcase” or a “lunatic”. Have you actually read any of the published biographies or memoirs about him? I’ve read nearly all of them, and it’s clear to me that while he was capable of doing stupid things in his personal life (as are many people), he was in most ways a normally functioning human being. If you’re going to do psychoanalysis on writers, at least do a decent job of it.
You ask:
> Do we stop trying to interpret the novel? If so, we stop
> teaching it and it’s dead. Or do we take the available
> evidence, the available text, and do with it what we can
> so that it continues to live?
If we can’t come up with reasonably clear evidence for our interpretations, then perhaps it’s better that we don’t try to interpret novels in that way at all. To claim that a writer had an unconscious motive, it’s necessary to show at least two things. First, it’s necessary to show that this unconscious motive really does fit all of the writer’s works. It shouldn’t just be invoked whenever it seems to fit and forgotten when it doesn’t. Second, it’s necessary to show that this motive explains the author’s works better than any other conscious or unconscious motive that can be thought of. If you don’t apply those two rules, it’s too easy to find unconscious motives.
Earlier you asked:
> I doubt if Ernie [Hemingway] would have ever admitted it,
> but then again we don’t know for sure why he blew the top
> of his skull out either.
Well, let’s start with some simple explanations for why Hemingway committed suicide. He was an alcoholic. He had not been in good health for years. He hadn’t been doing his best work for decades. He was quite possibly genetically prone to depression, since his father had also committed suicide. Is it necessary to find any deeper explanations?
This question was in this week’s edition of US World and News and the answer given by them was no.
Mr Baum was a gold standard believer and NOT a populist(he was a Republican). His only job was to deliver a good yarn and apparently he did that.
It’s been a few years, but I read Divine Invasions a couple of times and I just ran through a couple of online bios just to make sure my memory was correct. Dick had several amphetamine-fueled breakdowns, thought the CIA had broken into his house, and believed that God had beamed information to him through a laser-like light. Perhaps the language I used was strong, or at least colloquial, but if I had a neighbor like that, he’d be “the nutjob down the street,” whether he kept up his job and house payments and functioned normally or not.
I agree, except for your statement that the motive must be a motif over the entire catalog as that does not allow for growth and change in the author over possibly decades. You can’t apply Dick’s spiritual themes from, say Valis to the earlier short-stories. As events happen in the authors lives, their ideas and reactions change.
Not at all. But my point was that we have to make some psychological assumptions to explain Papa’s suicide–he didn’t make a list of why. If we do this–reasonably–with people’s lives and deaths, why can’t we do it–again, reasonably, and I don’t think I’ve suggested anything other–with their works?