The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

First published: 1900, as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; retitled, 1902

Type of plot: Fantasy

Time of work: The early 1900’s

Locale: Rural Kansas and the imaginary land of Oz

Principal Characters:

• Dorothy, a young girl growing up on a farm on the Kansas prairie
• Toto, Dorothy’s dog
• Uncle Henry, Dorothy’s uncle
• Aunt Em, Dorothy’s aunt
• The Scarecrow, a living scarecrow Dorothy meets in Oz
• The Tin Woodman, a wood-chopper made entirely of tin
• The Cowardly Lion, a lion befriended by Dorothy in Oz
• The Wicked Witch of the East, an evil witch accidentally killed by Dorothy
• The Wicked Witch of the West, an evil witch who pursues Dorothy
• The Wizard of Oz, a circus balloonist who passes himself off as a wizard after landing in Oz
• Glinda, the Good Witch of the South

The Novel

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz consists of twenty-four chapters that tell the story of Dorothy’s arrival in Oz and her adventures in that magical country. An omniscient narrator tells the story in simple language. It begins on a Kansas farm where Dorothy, an orphan, lives in a one-room house with her grim, hardworking uncle and aunt. A tornado appears and Dorothy, her uncle, and aunt run for a cellar under the house. When Toto, Dorothy’s dog, jumps out of her arms, Dorothy runs to get the gog, and she and her pet are carried away by the winds. Dorothy falls asleep as the house whirls through the air.

When she awakens and goes outside her house, she finds she is in a strange and beautiful country inhabited by small, strangely dressed people known as the Munchkins. Dorothy’s house has fallen on the Wicked Witch of the East, ruler of the Munchkins. Dorothy is awarded the Witch’s silver shoes, which have some magical power unknown to the Munchkins or to the Good Witch of the North, who has come to meet Dorothy. The Good Witch tells Dorothy to go to the Emerald City, ruled by the Wizard of Oz, in the hope that the Wizard may be able to help the little girl return home.

On her way to the Wizard’s city, Dorothy acquires three unusual companions: a scarecrow who complains of having no brains, a woodman made entirely of tin who complains of having no heart, and a lion who complains of having no courage. Dorothy suggests to each of them that the accompany her to see if the Wizard can help them.

After a number of adventures, Dorothy, Toto, and the three odd friends reach the Emerald City, where all of the houses seem to be made of green marble and studded with emeralds. They make their requests of the wizard, who goes by the name of Oz. The wizard refuses to grant their requests until they kill the Wicked Witch of the West, who rules the western people known as the Winkies.

The adventurers travel to the west, and the Witch sends wolves, crows, bees, and her frightened Winkie subjects against them. Dorothy and her friends manage to defeat all of these adversaries, but the Witch finally uses a magic golden cap to send Winged Monkeys to destroy the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow and carry Dorothy and the lion to the witch as slaves. After Dorothy becomes a servant in the witch’s castle, the witch manages to grab one of the little girl’s magic silver shoes. In anger, Dorothy throws water on the witch and, as it happens, this melts the old woman. The grateful Winkies then find and repair the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, and the lion is set free from his prison.

After using the witch’s magic golden cap to have the Winged Monkeys fly them back to the Emerald City, Dorothy and her friends discover that the magnificent wizard is only a former ventriloquist and circus balloonist who happened to land in Oz. However, after some thought, he is able to meet the requests of Dorothy’s companions by giving the Scarecrow brains made of bran and pins, the Tin Woodman a silk heart stuffed with sawdust, and the lion a drink claimed to give courage. After three days, the wizard offers to fly Dorothy back to Kansas with him in his old balloon. Unfortunately, Toto jumps after a kitten at the last moment, Dorothy runs after him, and the wizard and his balloon float away without her.

Dorothy calls upon the Winged Monkeys, but they are unable to cross the desert that surrounds Oz. Therefore, Dorothy and her friends leave Oz to travel to the southern country of the Quadlings, where Glinda the Good Witch of the South rules, in the hope that Glinda can help Dorothy return home. After still more adventures, they reach Glinda, who tells Dorothy, in exchange for the golden cap, that the silver shoes will carry her anywhere she wishes to go if she only knocks the heels together three times. Dorothy does so and is flown back to Kansas, losing the silver shoes over the desert on the way.

The Characters

Baum’s characters are simple, but also sympathetic. Dorothy, the heroine, is a straightforward little girl who shows courage and perseverance. Dorothy is a poor orphan, a type of character recurring in children’s literature. In the drawings by the original illustrator of the book, W. W. Denslow, Dorothy seems to be very young, perhaps only five or six years of age, although she frequently seems to behave as a much older child would. Baum also gives little hint to her appearance. Letting readers construct their own images of the child heroine may have been intentional, because it made Dorothy an “Everychild,” a representative of children in general.

Baum’s great success with his other characters was the creation of individuals who are at once impossible and entirely believable. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion have won the sympathy of generations of readers. Part of this success may be the result of the depths of personality that the author was able to convey by giving these fantastic creatures human qualities of self-contradiction. The Scarecrow complains that he has no brains, but he shows himself to be the most thoughtful of Dorothy’s companions, and his quest for intelligence demonstrates that this is what he values. Similarly, the Tin Woodman places the highest importance on feeling, and shows a continual concern with emotion as he seeks a heart. The Cowardly Lion is a coward in his own eyes, but he accompanies the others through dangerous adventures and sometimes protects the group with his fierce roar. These three characters embody the classical human virtues of intelligence, caring, and courage, but their self-doubts keep them from being reduced to mere symbols of these qualities.

At the end of the story, all the characters achieve self-realization by accomplishing their goals. Dorothy does eventually manage to return home, having found that she had actually had the power to do so all along. The Scarecrow also apparently had his goal, his intelligence, within his grasp all along, since all the Wizard needs to do is to mix bran and pins and needles in the straw man’s head to convince the Scarecrow of his intellectual powers. The Woodman and the Lion, respectively, require only a silk heart and a drink to arouse confidence in their capacities for love and bravery.

Critical Context

L. Frank Baum had struggled through a number of careers, working as a department-store buyer and newspaperman among other jobs, before achieving a modest success as a writer of children’s verse and stories. The Wizard Oz, though, was the book that established his reputation. It became an immediate best-seller, outselling all other children’s books during the 1900 Christmas season. In 1902, a musical version of the story was staged at the Grand Opera House in Chicago to enormous popular acclaim. There were a number of efforts to put the story in film, but none of these met with much success until the Hollywood film company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer staged it in 1939, with Judy Garland as Dorothy, Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, Jack Haley as the Tin Woodman, and Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion. The 1939 film continues to run on television regularly and is probably more familiar to the public than the original book version.

After The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum attempted to repeat his success with other attempts at fairy stories and fantasies. His readers, however, wanted more stories about Oz. Baum responded by producing fourteen more Oz books. None of these received the popular or critical recognition given to the first, but they did create dedicated readers who eagerly awaited each new volume. The demand was so great that even after Baum’s death, a new “Royal Historian of Oz,” Ruth Plumly Thompson, was chosen by the publisher of the Oz books, Reilly and Lee. Beginning in 1921, Thompson published a book about the magical land of Oz every year for nineteen years. Others, in the years following Thompson, have attempted to follow in Baum’s footsteps with other tales about Oz.

In the years before Baum’s writing became popular, interest in the fairy tale as a literary form had increased greatly. The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen had brought the fairy tales of continental Europe to written form. In Victorian England, Andrew Lang assembled collections of fairy tales from England and other countries. Major English literary figures, such as John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, also tried their hands at fairy stories. Lewis Carroll’s works were received by a public willing to appreciate fantasy.

Literary critics have argued that the popularity of the fairy tale was a reaction against an increasingly industrialized society. America, however, was rapidly industrializing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and it had few fantasy writers to match those of England. Baum, then, may be considered one of the first American masters of the fairy tale and the fantasy.

With its appealing characters, its dreamlike adventures, and its well-constructed story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of those rare books that can offer pleasure to both children and adults. Although it never becomes shallow moralism or mere allegory, it always conveys hints that its characters and events are somehow metaphors for features of the world of its readers.

Bibliography

Carpenter, Angelica Shirley, and Jean Shirley. L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1992. A detailed account of Baum’s career and writings. Includes numerous maps and illustrations. Also contains plot summaries of most of Baum’s books.

Hearn, Michael Patrick. Introduction to The Annotated Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973. This sets Baum’s best-known work in the context of his life and work.

Riley, Michael O. Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997. A comprehensive analysis of Baum’s development as a fantasy writer. It considers the influence of Baum’s childhood and adult experiences on his writing and looks at how his works reflect his philosophical and social views.

Rogers, Katherine M. L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz. New York: St. Martin’s, 2002. A good companion to the Oz series that demonstrates how Baum animated his progressive ideals in the persons of Dorothy and company.