Wonderful wizard, marvelous land

by Raylyn Moore

Frank Baum, Wizard of Oz, literary criticism

213 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the earliest book-length analysis of L. Frank Baum. While Moore is good at pointing out flaws in Baum's writing like his dangling modifiers, she has definitely fallen behind a lot of the subsequent criticism. she touches on the feminist aspects, although she never uses the term and doesn't really seem to have much of an understanding of it. She has a level of disdain for Baum's writing that is certainly not found in Bradbury's beautiful introduction, concluding that Baum wrote "as many as six or seven" (173) good books (she identifies these on page 70 as John Dough and the Cherub , Queen Zixi of Ix , and "the first four (or perhaps five) Oz books." I have never seen a critical consensus that would put Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz or The Road to Oz on Baum's top seven books, especially at the expense of books like The Lost Princess of Oz ). She can't even get right that the Mary Louise series, not the Aunt Jane's nieces series, was continued posthumously, and dismisses The Fate of a Crown purely on the grounds that Baum had never been to Brazil, where it is set (70) (she omits all mention of Tamawaca Folks at all, but still reaches the same count of Baum novels that I did at 55). Her passages from "The Suicide of Kiaros" 72-74 basically assess the book as crap, but her passages do not do a very good job illustrating her argument. She mostly allows them to stand on their own merits rather than dissect them closely, often comparing them to other, unspecified writings of the time or now-forgotten other writers. Another error is her claim (72) that "Aunt [']Phroney's Boy" is a retitling of "Aunt Hulda's Good Time," when in fact they are completely different stories with similar premises. Errors like these hurt her credibility and bind her back to the librarians decried for being anti-Baum. She knocks The Tin Woodman of Oz for its gruesomeness, which does not seem to me to be a valid quantitative criticism. How is gruesomeness an inherently bad quality in literature when it's clearly an intended mood? Her failure to catch the satire of Baum's characters expressing aphorisms that are often out of step with overarching themes (80) is also alarming, as is her reference to "a mortal who was made immortal" in The Enchanted Island of Yew coming from Christian theology (80), which seems to ignore that Baum was most likely thinking of the Mantle of Immortality in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus .

As with other reviewers, one of the most interesting things about the book is her linkages of Baum to the counterculture (which by 1974, when the book was copyrighted, was clearly fading, as hinted at by the closure of the Land of Oz restaurant), to which she devotes a good deal of the first section. Another aspect others have not mentioned is the influence on Baum of William Dean Howells, Elbert Hubbard, and William Morris, although she doesn't provide a good deal of detail on this latter element and assumes reader familiarity with them. Morris is familiar to me only from the Engels/Lafargue correspondence I read a few years ago (there are also several mentions of Edward Bellamy, whom she seems not to see as much of an influence. She does do a good deal of favorable comparison between Oz and George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark , and concludes with comparison to Antilia, Brasil (legendary lands mentioned earlier in the book), Jupiter, Planet "X," Lovo, and Capraria. The last two don't even rate relevant hits in a Google search.

When I was a kid, this was one of the few books about Baum and Oz (along with Martin Gardner and Russel B. Nye's The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was (which was basically an edition of Wizard with an introduction particularly scholarly, the 1971 1st edition of Michael Patrick Hearn's The Annotated Wizard of Oz , and David L. Greene and Dick Martin's The Oz Scrapbook were the only ones available to me at the time (the W.W. Denslow biography was in the library catalog, but I was never able to get it and to this day have never even seen a copy). Most of what I remembered were Bradbury's introduction, the hippies, and her more or less negative assessment of Baum throughout (she does her best to make him come off as a money-grubbing hack, and attacks the moral relativism she sees in the books). It's unlikely that I didn't finish reading it as a kid (although it would explain what names like Graustark rung no bells), especially by the time I was giving presentations and papers on Baum, and many of her comments from this third section did stay with me years after rereading it, but rereading this really shows how it shaped my impression of critical assessment of Oz as being negative even among the most generous critics and that there was something less intellectual about those that were't (which put me on the defensive).

[Gretchen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dated, but some interesting perspectives. Moore draws a lot of parallels between Baum's utopia and 60s hippie communes, which is an interesting perspective I hadn't thought of yet. She virtually ignores the feminism in Baum's book, which I think is also part of the dating. She's also fairly negative about Baum himself, which is new for me. In later books I've read her scholarship is criticized, but there are still some interesting points brought up.