L. Frank Baum
(1856-1919)

LIFE:
    Lyman Frank Baum was born in Chittenago, NY, the son of a businessman/ theatrical entrepreneur; Baum's father had made a fortune in the oil business.  Baum’s health was weak in childhood, and he was primarily educated at home, suffering a nervous breakdown when he was sent away to military academy.  Already at age 12 he was publishing a family paper, the Rose Lawn Journal, stimulated by his fascination with a print shop he had seen in Syracuse.  He also developed an interest in breeding Hamburg chickens, and his first book, written in 1886, was about raising such chickens.  At 18 he began reporting for a New York newspaper, but his real passion was for the stage, and he was determined to have a theatrical career.  He didn’t do very well as an actor, but did have some theatrical success, particularly with The Maid of Arran, a melodrama that opened in 1882.
    In 1881, Baum was introduced by his aunt and his sister to Maud Gage, daughter of a prominent member of the suffrage movement, Matilda Joslyn Gage.  The aunt introduced her to Frank: “This is my nephew, Frank.  Frank, I want you to know Maud Gage. I’m sure you will love her.”  Baum: “Consider yourself loved, Miss Gage.”  Maud: “Thank you, Mr. Baum. That’s a promise.  Please see that you live up to it.”  The courtship took a while, as she was in college and he was in New York working with The Maid of Arran; her parents also opposed the marriage, because of the precariousness of theatrical life, but she prevailed and they were married November 9, 1882.  They continued to travel with the theatrical troup for some time, but decided to establish a permanent home in Syracuse when their first child was expected (Frank Joslyn Baum, b. Dec. 4, 1883). Baum had a steady income from the play and a chain of small theaters and also became more involved in the family oil business.  He also suffered a heart attack shortly after his marriage and was again somewhat sickly.  Family financial affairs became sticky and, in his son’s biography of Frank Baum, it is suggested that money was embezzled by a bookkeeper.  He became a salesman for his uncle’s company, but financial affairs continued to deteriorate.
    Seeking his fortune, he came to Aberdeen in July, 1888, where some of his in-laws lived.  Sold on Aberdeen by their glowing account of business opportunities, he moved his family here and operated a store (Baum’s Bazaar - like a five and dime).  When that failed, he took over a weekly newspaper, which he renamed the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer.  There were, however, two other weeklies (Star and Republican) and the daily News (the ancestor of today's Aberdeen American News). It was while editing this paper that he wrote two editorials calling for the extermination of the Sioux people.  By February 1891, Baum was not longer bringing in enough from advertising to continue the newspaper.  The newspaper was taken over by the sheriff for nonpayment of debts on March 24.  Failing here, he then moved to Chicago, working for a while as a traveling salesman, and finally California.
    Baum continued to write in various genres, including journalism.  While in Chicago, he tried his hand at writing children's books, making his mark with Father Goose, His Book (1899), which sold 90,000 copies on first release.  His big success was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), which sold enormously (Gardner tells how Baum was able to give his wife a $2500 royalty check from Wizard at Christmas 1900) and has never since been out of print.  (Karla Walters cites Hearn that the original title of The Wizard of Oz was “The Emerald City,” but it was changed by the publisher because of a superstition that “any book with a jewel in its title was doomed to failure” (161).)  He then turned to other projects, but found that a dramatic version of Wizard produced in 1902 stimulated interest in further Oz books, and that -- along with letters from children requesting a sequel -- ultimately led him to write The Marvelous Land of Oz in 1904.  The book was to focus on the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, who were the star characters of the stage show.  Additional sequels also sold well, so that other authors were commissioned after Baum's death to continue producing Oz books (Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote 19, John Rea Neill three, Jack Snow two, and Rachel Cosgrove and Frank Joslyn Baum one each).
    Trying to avoid stereotyping, Baum also tried a number of other genres of children's books (plus three adult novels), but nothing was as successful.  Although he tried to stop writing about Oz, the demand was there and he kept having to return; from 1913 on he produced an Oz book every year.  All told, following the appearance of Wizard, he wrote some 60 children's books (under his own and other names) during the last 19 years of his life.

The Wizard of Oz:

    Brotman calls the Oz books a departure from earlier children's literature, in that they avoid the fatalism of European fairy tales; they are clearly American in their optimism, their sense that a little ingenuity can change everything (164).  However, they are linked to folktales; all of the Oz books are fairy tales, beginning in "the hardness of real existence"; moreover, these are fairy tales for America.  The books' perspective is rural and midwestern, and they affirm the child's ingenuity; children and the childlike always prove to be more honest and to lead better than adults.
    Baum proposed to write fairy tales cleansed of the violence of the Old-World models, but Beckwith notes that whereas Alice, whose experience he finds similar, arrives in Wonderland without injury to anyone, Dorothy arrives with a death, and continues to face much more hazardous obstacles in her odyssey.  He identifies the killing of the Witch of the East as "Dorothy, an innocent child. . . [accidentally] kill[ing] her mother as she is born" (81).  For a book that sought to avoid the horror of the earlier tales, there is a lot of killing – the Woodman kills the wildcat (100); he slays 40 wolves with his axe (142); the Scarecrow wrings the necks of 40 crows (143); the Woodman causes the deaths of the bees (144); and Dorothy herself destroys both Wicked Witches (154).

Her search for the Wizard becomes a search for the father; she is accompanied by another innocent, the Scarecrow, like Dorothy a projection of Baum himself, but a physically ineffectual straw man.  The Woodman and the Lion are more advanced avatars of Baum, with some attributes of grown men but maimed/anxious; they are tamed nightmares.  All three are emasculated.

South Dakota: The opening chapter emphasizes the aridity and isolation of the Kansas farm – reminiscent of Baum’s neighbors in South Dakota: small houses, materials hauled a long way, worry about cyclones.  The dominant color is gray, and the landscape is flat and treeless.  There is no happiness or joy in this prairie setting.  Auntie Em is specifically described as having been “a young, pretty wife” whose beauty and energy had been sapped by years on the prairie (12).  The description of the prairie contrasts immediately with the beauty and greenness of Oz (20).  Many of the other places described similarly are pretty, with abundant plant life – in contrast to the gray and dry prairie.  The comparison of Kansas to the beautiful country of Oz is made explicit in her conversation with the Scarecrow (44-45), with its ironic observations on the wisdom of choosing one place to live over another. 

      Em appears to have dried up – the fate that comes literally to the Witch of the East (25).  The Witch of the West is also dried up, so much so that she doesn’t bleed when bitten because “the blood in her had dried up many years before” (152).

Similarity to folk/fairy tale:  The story uses the common quest theme, during which the hero (or in this case, heroine) acquires magical helpers and magic tools that will help her in achieving her goals.  While each of the companions joins Dorothy for his own reasons, each has attributes that are immediately or eventually valuable in her attempt first to reach Oz and then to defeat the wicked witch.  The scarecrow's strategizing and his ability to find solutions to problems are perhaps the most obvious; but the woodsman's ability with an ax is immediately needed to clear their path, and the lion's innate ferocity helps to protect them from other predators.  The fact that neither the scarecrow nor the woodman need to breathe is essential, since that is what saves the entire party in the poppy field.
    In addition to the helpers, Dorothy acquires a magic sign from the witch of the north –  the lip print that tells others that they may not harm her.  And of course, there is that most famous magic tool, the silver shoes that ultimately enable her to return home.  She also acquires the witch of the west's golden crown, which gives her control over the monkeys.  All of these elements correspond structurally (and sometimes exactly) to common fairy-tale motifs.

The Quest: Dorothy is told she must go on “a long journey, through a country that is sometimes pleasant and sometimes dark and terrible” (27) – the danger of the journey is frequently reiterated through the text, even though the many perils they encounter are almost always resolved very quickly (66-67, the lion attacks Toto; Scarecrow stuck in the river (ch. 8); the Hammer Heads (247)).  She travels under protection of the good witch’s kiss, and quickly picks up magic helpers as well as magic objects (see above). 

Utopian vision: Baum’s Oz is frequently described as a utopian place where all sorts of creatures live in peace with one another, a model of tolerance.  In The Emerald City of Oz, we find one of the more extensive “utopian” descriptions of Oz (pp. 30-31).  Russell B. Nye cites in support of the widespread view of Oz as an American Utopia; as Nye says, “In Emerald City man lived in complete harmony with man. . . Men lived in complete harmony with nature and technology. . .”^[1] Nye identifies the first law of this utopia as love, which “binds all the Oz books together as a moral unit” (170).

The three companions:  McMaster has argued that the trinity archetype (embodying power, love, and knowledge) of Western civilization helps to inform the characters of the scarecrow, woodman, and lion, thus accounting for part of their appeal.  Other examples of this trinity include Mowgli's chief companions in the Jungle Books (Baloo the Bear, Bagheera the Panther, Akila the Wolf), the Holy Trinity of Christian belief, the three goddesses in the Judgment of Paris, etc.  The specific lacks of the three companions reflects medieval concepts of the seats of attributes - the brain for wisdom (scarecrow), the heart for love/passion (woodman) and the liver for "appetites" (lion).  The latter is less explicit, but the liver has traditionally been associated with courage, the specific lack of the lion (101-102).
    Baum himself seems unaware of his use of the trinity archetypes, but he nevertheless presents it in interesting ways - for instance, the usual authority lines are reversed, so that Dorothy leads the companions rather than being led or instructed by them.  Also (and this I feel is the real source of their appeal) each is most acutely aware of the lack of that which he most clearly has (McMaster, 104). (Note, too, that the companions’ “flaws” are mis-matched with the travelers’ perceptions of Oz – Dorothy sees him as a great Head (brain-Scarecrow), the Scarecrow as a lovely woman (heart-Tin Man), the Tin Man as a frightening beast (courage-Lion), and the Lion as a bright ball of fire, reminiscent of God’s appearance to Moses (Dorothy’s need is for truly divine intervention).  When they come later to see him together, he is invisible, only a voice – again an evocation of God.

Structural weakness:  The work seems anticlimactic after departure of Oz, and not just because we have been conditioned by the movie to have the trip home take place immediately after the other three get their desires.  Why is the trip to Glinda's house necessary?  Dorothy has achieved all of the things asked of her, and only has to make the journey because the wizard is a fake.

The liar at the heart:  Many readers detect a utopian vision in the Oz books generally.  In this first book of the series, Oz is cleansed of wicked witches and fake wizards, and thus may seem indeed to be an ideal world (but then the subsequent books all introduce conflicts in various ways).  But the essential problem here is that at the heart of Oz are a lie and a liar.  That is, the peace that generally reigns in Oz is the gift of Oz "the great and powerful"  - but in the event he is neither great nor powerful, and can give us nothing that we don't already have ("Oz never did give nothing to the tin man/ that he didn't already have" - America).
    The novel is clearly progressive and utopian, but as Watkins notes, it is not an escape from American life; rather it symbolically recapitulates the American idea of the frontier ("the Garden of the World set in the midst of the Great American Desert" - qtd. from Attebury).  It presents images of hope in which the ordinary people (common man/wizard, Dorothy, unconfident creatures) find they have the power themselves to overcome their obstacles.  In this sense, perhaps it is essential that the benevolent demi-god at the center prove to be a fake; how else can individuals discover their own power?

A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD  57401

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