1930s The Wizard of Oz (1939)

1930s
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
The story is the classic American fairy tale, written in 1900 by L. Frank Baum (and followed by numerous sequels). As befits an American fairy tale, it contains nothing of royal weddings or births, princes or princesses, magic carriages or knights-errant, as one finds in classical European folklore. Instead, we have a young heroine from a Kansas farm, an ominous cyclone, a cornfield scarecrow, a newfangled sort of metal-work man, and an Omaha-bred sideshow huckster in the role of a wizard-king. (Just the sort of wizard-king you’d expect a Yank writer to come up with.)

Yet there’s also continuity with older, non-American tales and images: wicked witches, good queens (Glinda, who in the book lives in a palace and in the film wears a crown, and also the book’s Queen of the Field Mice), and a lion (not a New World beast). The "quest" structure of the story, too, is shared with many older fairy-tales.

Like all fairy tales, this one has suffered countless attempts by critics and commentators to explain its meaning and power. Countless interpretations have been advanced, of the book and of the film, from almost every conceivable angle: political, economic, religious, feminist, Freudian, you name it.

But is there any "explaining" this story? Baum himself, in his introduction to the book, professed that it "was written solely to pleasure children of today." Yet even Baum seemed not to understand what he had done. His express intention was to create "a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out." The conventions of traditional fairy tales — the "stereotyped genie, dwarf, and fairy" — were to be eliminated, "together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale." Such moralizing, Baum felt, was now superfluous: "Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident."