I remember reading most of the Oz 'canon' as a child. (One memory is of a large
pile of the Oz books in the back seat of the car during a summer camping trip.)
Of the 'meaning' and 'influence' of the Oz books in and on a child's life,
Frank L. Baum had the following to say in his Introduction to the THE WIZARD OF
OZ:
"Folk lore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the
ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for
stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm
and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other
human creations.
"Yet the old-time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed
as 'historical' in the children's library; for the time has come for a series
of newer "wonder tales" in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are
eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised
by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education
includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its
wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.
"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 the heart-aches
and nightmares are left out."
- L. Frank Baum. Chicago, April, 1900.
I find it curious that Baum felt that he had eliminated 'horrible and
blood-curdling incident' in his 'modernized fairy-tale'. (The gathering of
evidence which can be used in argument to the contrary is left for the moment
as an exercise for the reader.)
Chris Bruce,
in Kiel, Germany
I write deliberately of the Oz 'canon' - see the following for lists of Oz
Books, including 'The original Oz books by L. Frank Baum' (14); 'Story
compilations and other works by Baum (4); 'Plays by Baum' (7); a plethora of
books seen as 'canonical' by Baum's heirs and publishers; and alternate Oz
books which according to the Wikipedia article "deal with alternate versions of
Oz, that do not follow the canon established by L. Frank Baum."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books ;
Wikipedia has also a (literally!) encyclopedic entry about 'The Land of Oz,
going into great detail about Oz's geography, history, econoimy & politics,
etc.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Oz
-cb
On 9. Mar 2020, at 15:32, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John,
... You and your wife chose the Oz novels to read to your daughter and they
evidently meant nothing more to her than you suggest: some funny scenes with
funny characters, and having no more influence on her than the nursery
stories you might also have read to her.
Thinking back I can’t recall being influenced by any nursery-type stories. I
did mention being negatively affected by the movie, The Wizard of Oz which my
parents took me to see in 1939. ...
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
On Behalf Of John McCreery
Sent: Sunday, March 08, 2020 9:40 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: On reading Baum's Oz novels
Coming late to the party, grabbing a few minutes from preparations for a
flight from Japan to Australia tonight.
My wife has confirmed my memory that we purchased several of the Oz books and
read them with our daughter. We remember them as fantasies filled with odd
characters. Besides the the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion, the later volumes
included the Highly Magnified and Educated (HME) Wogglebug, an intelligent
flying sofa, and a villainous princess with a wardrobe full of heads that she
changed the way ordinary people changed hats.
The daughter wound up a US Naval Academy graduate married to a very large and
masculine Marine Corps jet fighter jock. I have long felt that people with
literary tastes overestimate the influence of the books they happen to read.
John
Sent from my iPad
On Mar 8, 2020, at 6:50, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Further in the spirit of the “early readings” thread, I just read the
article “The Oddness of Oz” by Alison Lurie. This article appears in the
12/21/2000 issue of the NYROB. I was surprised to learn that L. F. Baum
wrote a number of Oz books, none of which I read when I was young, and Lurie
mentions that “in the 1930s and 1940s they [Baum’s Oz books] were actually
removed from many schools and libraries.”
In 1941 I was seven just two months before Pearl Harbor and since the Oz
books were intended for children, and I was doing my best to read books for
the more-mature, perhaps I chose not to read them. Or perhaps my
grandmother steered me away from them.
Also, my parents took me to see the movie, “The Wizard of Oz” in 1939 when I
was five and I was empathetically terrified when the tornado took Dorothy
away from her home in Kansas. I was appalled, or I assumed that she
wouldn’t be able to find her way home again. I certainly wouldn’t have been
able to if a tornado swept me away. I have had a very poor sense of
direction my entire life and was apparently very aware of my limitations
while sitting in the Grenada Theater with my parents at age five.
Of course in reading Lurie’s articles I now learn that Baum didn’t intend
Dorothy’s adventures to be bad things. Also, she did later find her way
back to Kansas, but she didn’t stay there. Furthermore, after the bank
repossessed the family farm, she moved her Aunt and Uncle to Oz; which would
have helped me a lot watching the movie, had I been told that by my parents
– or maybe they did tell me and I didn’t believe them.
Also, Lurie writes, “Though the Oz books have always been read by children
of both sexes, they have been especially popular with girls, and it is not
hard to see why. Besides being a world in which women and girls rule, it is
also, as Joel Chaston has pointed out, a world in which none of the major
characters has a traditional family. Instead, most of them live alone or
with friends of the same sex. The Scarecrow stays with the Tin Woodman in
his castle for months at a time, while Ozma, Dorothy, Betsy, and Trot all of
rooms in the palace of the Emerald City, and Glinda lives in a castle with a
hundred of the most beautiful girls of the Fairyland of Oz.”
Well, now, if Lurie had ended her comment with the word “rule,” I wouldn’t
have questioned it, but the rest of it seems a feminist assumption, but none
of the girls I grew up with seemed to be. I had a girl-friend when I was
five. Her name was Arlene Cooper and she made a tremendous impression of
me. I can recall asking her if she liked me, and she replied, “I don’t like
you. I love you.” I recall missing her when, probably, her family moved
away and she had to go to school elsewhere, but I suspect that whatever
became of her, she preferred a world in which there were boys, and then
later on men. And, it would seem, so does Alison Lurie. She was born in
1926, married her first husband in 1948, had three children, divorced in
1985 but married again in I think 1989. She seems to be living happily with
her second husband today, and would have been married to him when she wrote
the above paragraph in 2000.
Lawrence
