Return to Oz
Feb. 12th, 2007 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWhen I wrote about The Wizard of Oz, the film, the comments - which were all much more interesting and coherent than the original post - were so persuasive about reading the book that I sorted through the piles of the Great Unread and found it - a nice little hardback edition "not to be sold separately from the Daily Mail", which I bought in a charity shop for 25p. Separately from the Daily Mail. And I read it - on the train to and from the wine tasting the other evening - and was surprised, among other things, at how short a book it was. A children's classic, first published in 1900, had me anticipating something longer, weightier.
It's a quick read, too, in the way the story zips along, light and bright as a soap-bubble. A technicolour read, paradoxically, in that the film had added elements to exploit the new colour technology (I'd already found out that the studio had substituted ruby slippers dor the Silver Shoes of the book; the "horse of a different colour" was another piece of cinematic showing off) but had jettisoned the book's own colour sceme to do so: blue is the colour of the Munchkins, yellow the colour of the Winkies, the Quadlings wear red and only witches wear white. Only the Emerald City, so brilliantly green from a distance, maintains its single coloured theme by subterfuge, insisting that everyone within the city view it through green glasses.
The book also made me realise how much I had been seeing the film through a fog of preconceptions: Judy Garland sings " Over the Rainbow" so wistfully that Dorothy can't be happy at home in Kansas, the Cowardly Lion must - because that's what he's called - really be cowardly (and the Scarecrow brainless and the Tin Man heartless). I'm quite embarrassed to have regarded as an interesting reversal something which, in the book, is pointed out with a big flashing neon arrow: the Lion is not a coward, the scarecrow is bright and resourceful, the Tin Man is as soft-hearted as they come. The Wizard's cures for these ailments, in the film, struck me as curiously old-fashioned satire, with its "In my country there are men who...", giving an outward token which implies possession of the desired quality. So it's interesting to see that these things belong purely to the film; the Wizard of the book uses a more directly psychological ploy, giving in each case something internal - a new stuffing for the head, an actual if non-functional heart, a draught of something unspecified which "cannot be called courage until you have swallowed it".
Baum's Introduction to his book describes it as "a modernized fairy tale", and ascribes that modernity to an absence of those "horrible and bloodcurdling incidents" traditionally used to point a moral. It's an interesting reading of what a moral tale is, that it is seen as marked by terrifying incident, because in the more obvious sense, the book is as much of a moral lesson as any Victorian fairy story. The narrative is structured as a quest, the quest is (with the exception of Dorothy) for moral improvement, and when the characters succeed in their quest they are richly rewarded: the only difference between Oz and any other Pilgrims' Progress is that the lesson here is that the characters are better than they think, and are rewarded for what they already are. (There's a whole other argument there about whether a book which begins with a cyclone is entirely without frightening incidents).
It's a quick read, too, in the way the story zips along, light and bright as a soap-bubble. A technicolour read, paradoxically, in that the film had added elements to exploit the new colour technology (I'd already found out that the studio had substituted ruby slippers dor the Silver Shoes of the book; the "horse of a different colour" was another piece of cinematic showing off) but had jettisoned the book's own colour sceme to do so: blue is the colour of the Munchkins, yellow the colour of the Winkies, the Quadlings wear red and only witches wear white. Only the Emerald City, so brilliantly green from a distance, maintains its single coloured theme by subterfuge, insisting that everyone within the city view it through green glasses.
The book also made me realise how much I had been seeing the film through a fog of preconceptions: Judy Garland sings " Over the Rainbow" so wistfully that Dorothy can't be happy at home in Kansas, the Cowardly Lion must - because that's what he's called - really be cowardly (and the Scarecrow brainless and the Tin Man heartless). I'm quite embarrassed to have regarded as an interesting reversal something which, in the book, is pointed out with a big flashing neon arrow: the Lion is not a coward, the scarecrow is bright and resourceful, the Tin Man is as soft-hearted as they come. The Wizard's cures for these ailments, in the film, struck me as curiously old-fashioned satire, with its "In my country there are men who...", giving an outward token which implies possession of the desired quality. So it's interesting to see that these things belong purely to the film; the Wizard of the book uses a more directly psychological ploy, giving in each case something internal - a new stuffing for the head, an actual if non-functional heart, a draught of something unspecified which "cannot be called courage until you have swallowed it".
Baum's Introduction to his book describes it as "a modernized fairy tale", and ascribes that modernity to an absence of those "horrible and bloodcurdling incidents" traditionally used to point a moral. It's an interesting reading of what a moral tale is, that it is seen as marked by terrifying incident, because in the more obvious sense, the book is as much of a moral lesson as any Victorian fairy story. The narrative is structured as a quest, the quest is (with the exception of Dorothy) for moral improvement, and when the characters succeed in their quest they are richly rewarded: the only difference between Oz and any other Pilgrims' Progress is that the lesson here is that the characters are better than they think, and are rewarded for what they already are. (There's a whole other argument there about whether a book which begins with a cyclone is entirely without frightening incidents).
