Roads through Fantasy Last Longer than Maps (or, L. Frank Baum, Oz, and the Ephemeral Nature of Utopian Dreams)

Sunday night, we're going back to Oz again. Actually, this time it's not Oz. It's the Outer Zone or the O.Z. (As in "Welcome to the O.Z., bitch"? Well, those in mourning for Seth and Summer can dream, can't they?) Apparently, though, the Road that runs through this new country is still pretty much the same as the old Yellow one we already know and love, as are the quartet who go down that road, not to mention the humbug and the frightfest they have to face down at its termini.

Since it was published 107 years ago, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has inspired, not just countless passing references, but several dozen distinct adaptations and retellings. These began in 1902, with the original musical stage adaptation (which Baum himself had a hand in), through at least three literal film adaptations (in 1910, 1925, and 1939, as well as one very clever Muppetification a few years back that hewed surprisingly close to Baum, right down to the inclusion of a wonderfully Kalidah-like Statler and Waldorf), as well as the 1970s stage and film versions of The Wiz, and any number of would-be prequels and spinoffs, most notably Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked, its print sequels, and its 2003 musicalization.

In many ways, Baum's story has become exactly what he wanted it to be: the classic U.S. fairy tale, an American work that can stand on the shelf next to such British classics as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, not to mention such post-Baum perennials as The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, or even the recent Harry Potter books. In another sense, though, Baum's story has failed over time to achieve its goals, because for most of its fans Oz is only a story and not a world, at least not in the sense that Baum intended.


Between 1900 and 1920, Baum wrote fourteen books about Oz, as well as at least a dozen other fantasy novels for children that were eventually revealed, through overlapping characters and landscapes, to take place in the same "universe" as the Oz books. Incredibly, he did this before comic books and the golden age of the American pulps, about twenty-five or thirty years before all but the geekiest fanboys talked about universes or crossovers. (When you think about it, it was probably before either geeks or fanboys too.) According to pulp historian Jess Nevins, crossovers were more popular in Europe than the United States during these years, and when they did appear, they occurred more in passing than as a self-conscious construction. Quite often, they were simply sales gimmicks. Before Baum, the most lasting authors to have thought of their works as taking place in a holistic "universe" were such French writers as Honore de Balzac, Emile Gaboriau, and Jules Verne, and none of them were as interested as Baum in creating a fully imagined world that was starkly alternate to our own. For a time at least, Baum's vision was so powerful that it was regularly continued after his death by Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill, with one new Oz book appearing every year through 1942, for a total of 36 books over 42 years.

There are at least a half-dozen reasons why what Baum called "The Royal History of Oz" petered out after this point, dissolving from this increasingly detailed chronicle of an almost palpable universe into miscellaneous pastiches and apocrypha. But I don't think it's accidental that the decline of literary Oz almost exactly coincides with the rise of cinematic Oz. 1942 was just three years after the initial release of the famous MGM musical adaptation with Judy Garland. In those days before annual TV screenings and repeated VHS and DVD viewings, the movie didn't acquire instant cult status, but the story had been sufficiently reimagined in this mid-twentieth-century version that in retrospect it seems clear that it had now taken a new form. The Old World balkanization of Baum's Oz into four distinctly colored countries--purple Gillikin in the north, blue Munchkin in the east, red Quadling in the south, and yellow Winkie in the west--had been replaced by the simple cultural dichotomy of sepia Kansas and Technicolor Oz. Oz is not as foreign and resolutely monarchist in its MGM incarnation as it is in Baum, but rather a signifying dreamscape that inevitably refers back to our own grounded world. Noel Langley's screenplay for the film makes Dorothy's journey a comfortingly roundtrip one, making sure in the film's last scene that even the youngest members of the audience understand that, although it's fun to visit the colorful Emerald City, you would never really want to live there.

In Baum's books, though, that's exactly what Dorothy ends up doing. Having first arrived there in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), she returns in Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), and The Road to Oz (1909). In The Emerald City of Oz (1910), when Uncle Henry defaults on the mortgage for his Kansas farm, Dorothy finally decides that she, Henry, and Em should move to Oz permanently and live in the palace with Princess Ozma. Granted royal status, they can work there as they choose, to be helpful to others, but they will not need money and will never grow old or sick. In that wonderfully odd little book, Dorothy and her family take a tour of Oz to see if they want to live there, visiting such unique sequestered enclaves as Fuddlecumjig, Utensia, Bunbury, and Bunnybury. As Henry and Em discover, Oz is a nation the way Queens or Los Angeles is a city. The more we learn about Oz beyond the original Yellow Brick Road, the more we realize that it is a centrifugal aggregation of distinct, barely connected little villages that are somehow all benevolently presided over by a girl princess who will never age beyond about 10 years and who had previously lived for a time as a boy.

Baum's books are too imprecise to ever be considered science fiction, but they are what some scifi authors like to call speculative fiction. They imagine an alternate mode of social or cultural organization, in which the author retains the features of our world that s/he prefers, and corrects those that s/he believes cause our most obvious social ills. At its early twentieth-century peak, the Oz series falls in that chronological gap between the high tide of the American utopian novel and the so-called Golden Age of American science fiction. Baum's universe, however, obviously lacks the articulated sociological background of Howells' Altruria, Asimov's Foundation, and the like. It imagines a possible community without laying out the practical steps of how to build it.

Neither as rigorous a plan for the future as a nineteenth-century utopian like Edward Bellamy might have imagined, nor as mere a dream of the mid-twentieth-century present as Louis B. Mayer might have wanted us to believe, Baum's Oz is no more or less than a wish, a desire for a land in which children rule with the Romantic wisdom that precedes social theory, and each community is allowed to live on its own terms as long as its inhabitants do not threaten others. Famously inspired by the "White City" of Chicago's 1893 World Columbian Exposition, Baum's Emerald City is much more like the sort of necessary evil of a metropolis that regionalist writer Hamlin Garland imagined in his 1893 collection Crumbling Idols: a nexus through which unfettered provincial creativity may pass from one safely isolated community to another. So much a part of its time, Baum's dream of a rationally ordered large nation is a fantasy of antimodern Progressivism, a unique but telling vision of monoracial cultural pluralism. Seen from the perspective of its own time, Baum's Oz is in some ways a lovely little dream: a quirky if not necessarily practical alternate U.S., with a resolutely agrarian lifestyle no matter how much magic or technology may enter its borders, and a capital city that sits rather sensibly (like Chicago) in the middle of its geography and not off to one side or the other.

But that's not the Oz that most people seem to have wanted for the last seven decades. While such esteemed fantasists as Walter Murch, Philip Jose Farmer and Tim Burton may have tried over the years to relaunch Oz as a fullblown mythos, most audience members don't want to explore Baum's whole land in all its ramifications. They simply want to retell the same story again and again. Even within Baum's lifetime, he almost went broke trying to make a varied series of films about Oz during the 1910s, while continuing stage and film adaptations of his first Oz book flourished.

Moreover, the farther away we get from Baum's time, the more outlandish his dream of an alternate America seems, as impractical as Henry George's land tax scheme or the economic reorganization of the U.S. advocated by a contemporaneous socialist like Eugene V. Debs. In the years after Baum's death, the spread of mass media became so complete that the idea of discrete, culturally isolated villages making up a world, let alone a country, has become as quaint as a day in Bunnybury with the Whiskered Friskers. Tellingly, the transformative 1939 film of Baum's most well-known novel changed the cultural geography of its protagonist's journey, with the all-consuming Emerald City serving as a counterpart, not to the rural sections of Oz, but to Dorothy's own Kansas farm. For the Dorothy Gale of 1900, Oz is a country, with a fairly varied topography. For Judy Garland's Dorothy, however, Oz is a city surrounded by sparsely inhabited land that has been cleared and cultivated to varying degrees. In MGM's latter version, Dorothy's journey is thus from the country to the city and back, reinforcing the neotraditionalism of the period in which the film was made.

But what is so important about Dorothy's journey anyway? In some ways, it resembles the classic monomyth that Joseph Campbell was famously outlining in the same years during which cinematic Oz was waxing and literary Oz waning. Dorothy has a quest, a magical talisman (or two or three) that she must obtain, helpers, opponents, and a descent into darkness if not a literally submerged underworld. In the MGM version, The Wiz, and several other late twentieth century versions of the story, Dorothy even arrives home with the sort of boon of knowledge that good mythic heroes are supposed to attain. Some spin even wilder theories of what the telos of Dorothy's journey signifies, with two characters in the MGM commissary in film scholar Stuart M. Kaminsky's period detective story Murder on the Yellow Brick Road offering rival theories that the novel's most famous film version speaks symbolically of either a girl's discovery of her own menstruation or the United States' imminent entry into World War II.

In traditional mythology, though, the knowledge that a mythic hero gains is supposed to change things, to help her heal the wounded land to which she has returned at the end of the journey. By contrast, when Dorothy arrives back in Kansas, everything is just as bad as it was when she left. She has not come back with knowledge that will improve her world. She hasn't even brought back the beautiful slippers that she acquired during her journey. In nearly every version of the story, it is legitimate to ask why Dorothy wants to go back, when she can have so much more fun in Oz than in the home we have seen. In most versions--but not in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's highly graphic novel Lost Girls--we may even wish in vain for the sort of self-consciously rebellious protagonist for the story that the late Jonathan Larson imagined in one of his lyrics for Rent: "Why Dorothy and Toto/Went over the rainbow/To piss off Auntie Em/La vie boheme!" In Geoff Ryman's wonderful novel Was, the multiple protagonists go to various versions of Oz for almost exactly those sorts of reasons, most of them escaping violent or stultifying home environments.

But most versions' Dorothys are not bohemians or rebels, not bold girls wishing to escape the fatalistically grey (or sepia, if you must) landscape of environmentally precarious and economically challenged Kansas. They're tourists, albeit ones taking a vacation that is a little dangerous for girls of their tender years. And in most instances of Oz, so are we. What makes The Wizard of Oz satisfying in most of its mediated forms is not its destination but its journey--its Road, if you will, and the sights that we can see along its way. We don't want to live in Oz, in the way that some of Baum's original child readers might have wanted to, but we do want to visit it, again and again, to take the journey and see the sights, to stop at our favorite scenic overlooks.

Past a certain level of familiarity, Baum's narrative doesn't even matter at all, except as a touchstone that must not be thoughtlessly contradicted. (This is especially easy if one only knows the first book in the series.) The settings and characters serve their own functions, become their own archetypes, and can be spun off to form entirely different stories. This has happened most famously in the print and stage versions of Wicked, in which two characters that seemed to signify the traditional fairy tale good mother/bad mother dichotomy in the original story now come to serve as types of contrasting passages from girlhood to womanhood.

For Baum, though, I think the journey did matter, especially the reiterated journey that Dorothy takes across all of those early books. His Dorothy is the one version who seems to have most unequivocally had her consciousness raised. She knew she wanted to live in Oz and not in early twentieth-century Kansas, even if it took her five trips to figure out how to get her green card. The ending Baum chose for Dorothy's fifth and final trip, in The Emerald City of Oz, is quite touching. After Dorothy and her family have definitively decided to stay (and the book's nominal villains have been defeated), Glinda the Good seals off Oz, making it invisible to the outside world. "But Toto and I will always love you," Dorothy writes in a final note to Baum's readers, "and all the other children who love us."

For a Progressive-era story for children, this ending is rather stark. It suggests that once your consciousness has been raised enough to see that your surroundings don't necessarily have to be so unpleasant, your only responsibility is to save your immediate family, not to improve the impoverished world from which you came. Not surprisingly, this intended ending didn't stick, anymore than Arthur Conan Doyle's attempt to drown Sherlock Holmes in the Reichenbach Falls a decade or so before had stuck with that author's readers. Baum, like Doyle, ended up returning to the mythos that had made him so popular, but his later stories in this universe were as unsatisfying when compared to the originals as Doyle's post-return Holmes stories are when compared to Watson's pre-Reichenbach Adventures and Memoirs.

And yet the two endings are not exactly comparable. Professor Moriarty was a deus (or demon) ex machina: he was a wholly unanticipated narrative function that Doyle hoped would rid him of a character of which he had grown tired. For Baum's most perceptive readers, though, his story of Dorothy Gale had been tending toward this conclusion from the very beginning. In the original edition of Emerald City, at the top of the page on which the text of Dorothy's letter is reproduced, there is a picture of a plane very like the Wright Brothers'. "I am told," Princess Ozma remarks in another late chapter, "that the earth people have invented airships that can fly them anywhere they want to go." For Ozma and her creator, the arrival of the airplane, among other inventions, means that even fanciful connections between Oz and our world must soon come to an end.

In the long view of modern history, the articulated organization of society changes much more rapidly than any hegemonic notions we may share of the self. Consequently, the alternate societies that we imagine have a much more limited shelflife than any technologies of self-improvement that our latter-day myths may produce. Dorothy, Aunt Em, and Uncle Henry did need a map to Oz, as did many of Baum's original readers. 107 years later, most of us don't need a full map anymore. We just need to know the one road that will get us where we want to go.