Just about everybody knows this story. A little girl gets
blown to a magical land by a tornado, makes some odd friends, travels with them
to see the Wizard who is supposed to be powerful enough to get her back home,
suffers disappointment that said Wizard is a fake, destroys a wicked witch more
or less by mistake, and eventually gets home again using a power she had at
hand (or rather at foot) the whole time. The little girl, Dorothy, is pretty
easy to like. She’s rather resilient for just a little girl, and she brings out
the best in all her new friends.
I’ve read this book several times, of course. Many American
girls have, I suppose, and I have enjoyed it on each occasion, even though I’ve
always been hard pressed to let the printed word be the “real story,” since I
saw the movie many times before I ever peeled open the cover of the novel. I do
like that Dorothy is a very young girl (as compared to Judy Garland in the
film), simply because it makes some of the silliness that takes place during
her adventures more fun and less weird.
I’m a big fan of the fantasy genre, and this story was one
of my earliest exposures to it. I like just letting The Wizard of Oz be a cheerful and wonderful fantasy story and really
don’t need any more heft or “deep hidden meaning” to enjoy it as an adult. In
the introduction to the novel, Baum himself wrote:
Modern education
includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its
wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incidents.
Having this thought in mind, the story of “The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to pleasure children of today. It
aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are
retained and heart-aches and nightmares are left out.
And this is why I like Dorothy. I feel like she’s the one
who has brought this out in each of her new friends, even if she doesn’t notice
or at least doesn’t mention it. I also like her for the same reason just about
any little girl might like her: she doesn’t scream or cry or faint when plunged
into a strange place with magic and witches and talking scarecrows. “But, you
see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized,” says the Good Witch of the
North, and such a land is the perfect place to play and have adventures,
especially if the “heart-aches and nightmares are left out.” Mostly.
You might also like: Wicked
by Gregory Maguire from A Year (Plus) of Books I Should Have Read by Now (a seriously adult view of this story)
Coming soon: Pride and
Prejudice by Jane Austen