L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

There was a documentary on BBC Radio 4 over Christmas about Alice — a couple of books to which I sometimes have an allergic reaction — that said something along the lines of the Alice books became popular in the 1960s in America because the US had had no fantasy aside from the Oz books.

Ho hum.

But presumably Alice is a taproot text — a young girl who falls into a fantastical world and undergoes an almost random series of encounters before returning home. Baum gives the story more architecture: there is the journey to the City of Emeralds; the journey to the Wicked Witch of the West and the return to the Emerald City. She is given more defined companions, each with a quest of their own: the Scarecrow; the Tinman and the Cowardly Lion. A recurring trope in the book is their restatement of their needs, a fairy tale recurring rhetorical structure.

The gimmick is surely clear from the perennial Newtonmas screenings of the film version — the titular Wizard is a humbug and you must search for the hero inside yourself. (Incidentally this is a variation on the anti-technology sf movie dependent on technology to narrate its tale — the fantasy narrative distrustful of fantasy and illusions.) The Wizard isn’t who he claims to be and that is a Bad Thing, but the Scarecrow, Tinman and Cowardly Lion must pretend to be who they want to be and that is a Good Thing.

The book doesn’t have the is-it-a-dream-or-not? frame of the film, in which various farmhands are anticipatory doubles of her companions. The farm sequence is pretty brief, barely a chapter, as Baum clearly knows to get her to the fantasy land as soon as he can. On the other hand, there’s little sense of why she wants to go home (although in the film it makes no sense at all). The flying monkeys are less scary than they become in the movie, as indeed is the Wicked Witch. If more incidents are thrown at Dorothy and the gang in the book than the film, they are dealt with chapter by chapter. Can one whisper the film is an improvement on the novel? Or maybe got to me first.

I think a comment needs to be made on gender, and the power vacuums created and filled by the narrative. Oz is divided into four segments, North and South ruled by good witches, West and East are ruled by bad witches. Four domains, four female rulers. The central zone is the Emerald City, built by the humbug wizard (but see The Marvelous Land of Oz) In the course of the novel two of the women are killed and one is replaced by a male character (it is not clear who rules Munchkinland, but presumably Dorothy has squatter’s rights). The male Wizard is replaced by the male Scarecrow, marking a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy. The novel was written in the era of the New Woman and an era of suffragism.

Perhaps this will become significant in the sequel.