Wicked and Thoughts on Oz
Feb. 1st, 2010 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceebeegeeI've been reading Wicked lately which Rachel was kind enough to lend to me. Very interesting book--very, very interesting. I'm just not sure if I like it yet. I think it's a fascinating take on the Oz universe although it seems to favor the movie over the books in some respects. The movie conflates the unnamed Good Witch of the North with Glinda, who is the Good Witch of the South. However as I was saying on Facebook, it's fascinating how he takes little things that are mentioned and explores them much more fully. Case in point: there is ONE throwaway mention of Krumbic Witches in the original series--in the last book, Ozma and Dorothy are confronting this snotty teenage witch/queen, Coo-Ee-Oh, who terrorizes her subjects in her little queendom way up in the Gillikin country. She says "I am a Krumbic Witch--the only Krumbic Witch in the world--and I fear the magic of no other creature that exists!" And that is IT, the only mention in all of the Baum books. But Maguire really develops this--it's a belief system, geographical features are named after the Krumbic. Very interesting.
And it's worth upending the Oz universe and examining some of its assumptions and biases. Talking with my mother, I realize how bizarrely anti-intellectual the books come off as sometimes. We'd been talking about the better books in the series, and she's never read Tik-Tok of Oz. TToO is actually based on one of Baum's earlier shows--it's about one of the minor Queens of Oz (Queen Ann of Oogaboo, reigning over "eighteen men, twenty-seven women and forty-four children") who decides she wants to conquer the rest of Oz. (Yet another strong female figure, a la General Jinjur.) Glinda sees what she's doing and casts a spell that makes them wander way off-course, across the desert, and they end up running into Betsy and Hank, Tik-Tok, one of my favorite characters, Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter, and the Shaggy Man. The Shaggy Man always got on my nerves a bit, mainly because frankly I'm shallow and dislike ill-kempt people. But he has a tendency in this book, and none of the others, to quell people in a really annoying way. Someone will ask a question and Shaggy will jump in from across the room and say "Don't ask that--don't ask her or me either."
Then, after a pause, she added: "But where do you s'pose we're going to, Your Maj'sty?"
"Don't ask her that, please don't!" said Shaggy, who was not too far away to overhear them. "And please don't ask me why, either."
"Why?" said Betsy.
"No one can tell where we are going until we get there," replied Shaggy...
Um--what? How about minding your own damn business, Shaggy! He does this a couple of times on TToO. It reminds me of when I was at the West End Dinner Theater and Kim K. and I would talk about--oh, politics or T.S. Eliot or something, and Krissi D., never known for her intellectual tendencies, would whine (literally, she had this very distinctive squeaky voice) "Why are you talking about that? Don't talk about that."
Anyway, I remember reading an essay in Salon comparing the Narnia and Oz books, and one thing stuck with me. the essay said that in Oz, people are always declaring themselves--who they are and what they are. "Here in Oz, we..." "You're in the Land of Oz now where we..." This is a little mean-spirited but hilarious nonetheless:
Then there's the universal narcissism of the characters. Social conversation in Oz consists almost entirely of creatures explaining themselves to each other. It weirdly resembles the brandishing of identity credentials seen in certain graduate seminars, with "as a working-class lesbian ..." replaced by "as a scarecrow ..." In a typical disquisition, the straw man announces, "I am never hungry, and it is a lucky thing I am not. For my mouth is only painted, and if I should cut a hole in it so I could eat, the straw I am stuffed with would come out, and that would spoil the shape of my head." I mean, I love the books but yes, people ARE what they ARE, they never really change in the Oz universe. And they certainly don't grow, which creeped me out even as a child. Baum explains that when Oz became a fairyland, people stopped growing--nobody ever died, nobody got bigger and--this was creepiest of all--babies who were babies never got older. As organically feminist as the Oz books are (notice how most of the strong, kick-ass characters are female? Baum's mother in law was a suffragette and had a great influence on him), it's obvious the man has never had to watch a baby all day!
And don't get me started on the completely WTF? pacifist slant of The Emerald City of Oz (which I rave about in this entry, still so hilarious!). Okay, to sum up, the Nome King and a bunch of very, very evil allies--I mean, truly evil--are tunneling under the desert so they can invade Oz and enslave/murder everyone. Ozma happens to catch wind of this via the Magic Picture (don't ask me why Glinda wasn't on top of this) and she's all "hmm, isn't it sad that someone can be so angry?" and goes on her merry way, picking roses and whatnot. When Dorothy hears the news, she's devastated, as are Scarecrow and Tin Man. They, and all the others (Wizard, etc.) have a powwow to discuss what's to be done:
"Our enemies will be here sooner than I expected. What do you advise me to do?"
"It is now too late to assemble our people," said the Tin Woodman, despondently. "If you had allowed me to arm and drill my Winkies, we might have put up a good fight and destroyed many of our enemies before we were conquered."
"The Munchkins are good fighters, too," said Omby Amby; "and so are the Gillikins."
"But I do not wish to fight," declared Ozma, firmly. "No one has the right to destroy any living creatures, however evil they may be, or to hurt them or make them unhappy. I will not fight, even to save my kingdom."
ARE YOU F-ING KIDDING ME? You won't fight *even* to save all the innocents in your coutnry FROM getting killed? Oh good LORD. Look, even if you posit that self-defense is "evil" (a highly questionable statement), sometimes you have to do "evil" in order to prevent a worse evil. I have a feeling your subjects might feel a little differently about being handed over so blithely to the Nome and Growliwogs and Phanphasms just so your conscience is clear.
It gets better. Scarecrow has a genuinely good idea (not all of Baum's endings are as clever as this--frequently good conquers evil because of a completely new magical device that just enters out of nowhere (Rinkitink in Oz, an otherwise excellent book, is somewhat marred by its Dorothy-ex-machina resolution). Because the tunnel is going to emerge right on the royal grounds in front of the Water of Oblivion, he proposes to fill the tunnel with dust so that the armies get very thirsty--as soon as they exit the tunnel, they make a mad rush for the Fountain. Having drunk from it, they've now forgotten everything they've ever known and so are no longer evil, nor do they have any plans now to conquer Oz. In fact they're like little children now. And this is seen as a good thing:
"But, best of all," said Dorothy, "the wicked people have all forgotten their wickedness, and will not wish to hurt any one after this."
"True, Princess," declared the Shaggy Man. "It seems to me that to have reformed all those evil characters is more important than to have saved Oz."
Oh, shut up Shaggy, that's not really reform--they didn't genuinely repent, they didn't make a conscious choice to turn away from evil. That's more like a lobotomy!
And it's worth upending the Oz universe and examining some of its assumptions and biases. Talking with my mother, I realize how bizarrely anti-intellectual the books come off as sometimes. We'd been talking about the better books in the series, and she's never read Tik-Tok of Oz. TToO is actually based on one of Baum's earlier shows--it's about one of the minor Queens of Oz (Queen Ann of Oogaboo, reigning over "eighteen men, twenty-seven women and forty-four children") who decides she wants to conquer the rest of Oz. (Yet another strong female figure, a la General Jinjur.) Glinda sees what she's doing and casts a spell that makes them wander way off-course, across the desert, and they end up running into Betsy and Hank, Tik-Tok, one of my favorite characters, Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter, and the Shaggy Man. The Shaggy Man always got on my nerves a bit, mainly because frankly I'm shallow and dislike ill-kempt people. But he has a tendency in this book, and none of the others, to quell people in a really annoying way. Someone will ask a question and Shaggy will jump in from across the room and say "Don't ask that--don't ask her or me either."
Then, after a pause, she added: "But where do you s'pose we're going to, Your Maj'sty?"
"Don't ask her that, please don't!" said Shaggy, who was not too far away to overhear them. "And please don't ask me why, either."
"Why?" said Betsy.
"No one can tell where we are going until we get there," replied Shaggy...
Um--what? How about minding your own damn business, Shaggy! He does this a couple of times on TToO. It reminds me of when I was at the West End Dinner Theater and Kim K. and I would talk about--oh, politics or T.S. Eliot or something, and Krissi D., never known for her intellectual tendencies, would whine (literally, she had this very distinctive squeaky voice) "Why are you talking about that? Don't talk about that."
Anyway, I remember reading an essay in Salon comparing the Narnia and Oz books, and one thing stuck with me. the essay said that in Oz, people are always declaring themselves--who they are and what they are. "Here in Oz, we..." "You're in the Land of Oz now where we..." This is a little mean-spirited but hilarious nonetheless:
Then there's the universal narcissism of the characters. Social conversation in Oz consists almost entirely of creatures explaining themselves to each other. It weirdly resembles the brandishing of identity credentials seen in certain graduate seminars, with "as a working-class lesbian ..." replaced by "as a scarecrow ..." In a typical disquisition, the straw man announces, "I am never hungry, and it is a lucky thing I am not. For my mouth is only painted, and if I should cut a hole in it so I could eat, the straw I am stuffed with would come out, and that would spoil the shape of my head." I mean, I love the books but yes, people ARE what they ARE, they never really change in the Oz universe. And they certainly don't grow, which creeped me out even as a child. Baum explains that when Oz became a fairyland, people stopped growing--nobody ever died, nobody got bigger and--this was creepiest of all--babies who were babies never got older. As organically feminist as the Oz books are (notice how most of the strong, kick-ass characters are female? Baum's mother in law was a suffragette and had a great influence on him), it's obvious the man has never had to watch a baby all day!
And don't get me started on the completely WTF? pacifist slant of The Emerald City of Oz (which I rave about in this entry, still so hilarious!). Okay, to sum up, the Nome King and a bunch of very, very evil allies--I mean, truly evil--are tunneling under the desert so they can invade Oz and enslave/murder everyone. Ozma happens to catch wind of this via the Magic Picture (don't ask me why Glinda wasn't on top of this) and she's all "hmm, isn't it sad that someone can be so angry?" and goes on her merry way, picking roses and whatnot. When Dorothy hears the news, she's devastated, as are Scarecrow and Tin Man. They, and all the others (Wizard, etc.) have a powwow to discuss what's to be done:
"Our enemies will be here sooner than I expected. What do you advise me to do?"
"It is now too late to assemble our people," said the Tin Woodman, despondently. "If you had allowed me to arm and drill my Winkies, we might have put up a good fight and destroyed many of our enemies before we were conquered."
"The Munchkins are good fighters, too," said Omby Amby; "and so are the Gillikins."
"But I do not wish to fight," declared Ozma, firmly. "No one has the right to destroy any living creatures, however evil they may be, or to hurt them or make them unhappy. I will not fight, even to save my kingdom."
ARE YOU F-ING KIDDING ME? You won't fight *even* to save all the innocents in your coutnry FROM getting killed? Oh good LORD. Look, even if you posit that self-defense is "evil" (a highly questionable statement), sometimes you have to do "evil" in order to prevent a worse evil. I have a feeling your subjects might feel a little differently about being handed over so blithely to the Nome and Growliwogs and Phanphasms just so your conscience is clear.
It gets better. Scarecrow has a genuinely good idea (not all of Baum's endings are as clever as this--frequently good conquers evil because of a completely new magical device that just enters out of nowhere (Rinkitink in Oz, an otherwise excellent book, is somewhat marred by its Dorothy-ex-machina resolution). Because the tunnel is going to emerge right on the royal grounds in front of the Water of Oblivion, he proposes to fill the tunnel with dust so that the armies get very thirsty--as soon as they exit the tunnel, they make a mad rush for the Fountain. Having drunk from it, they've now forgotten everything they've ever known and so are no longer evil, nor do they have any plans now to conquer Oz. In fact they're like little children now. And this is seen as a good thing:
"But, best of all," said Dorothy, "the wicked people have all forgotten their wickedness, and will not wish to hurt any one after this."
"True, Princess," declared the Shaggy Man. "It seems to me that to have reformed all those evil characters is more important than to have saved Oz."
Oh, shut up Shaggy, that's not really reform--they didn't genuinely repent, they didn't make a conscious choice to turn away from evil. That's more like a lobotomy!
