THE WIZARD OF OZ (FIRST PART)

Much has been said about the meaning of The Wizard of Oz; Dorothy’s fascinating voyage to the Land of Oz, her outlandish friends and the eccentric characters she meets on her way, have haunted many generations of children and adults, Americans and non Americans. The countless adaptations for the stage, the movies, the sequels and television shows, compete with the multiple interpretations about the book and the film.
Since the publication in 1900, the fairy tale of L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, enforced the theory of a political allegory and a parable of populism in the last years of the XIX century in the USA. From this point of view almost every aspect of the story can be translated term to term; the Wizard would be President Grover Cleveland; the Cowardly Lion, the Democratic-Populist Presidential candidate; the Scarecrow, the farmers; the Tin Man, the alienated factory workers; Dorothy herself, the good American People; Emerald City, Washington D.C., and it goes on and on. The one l like the most in this interpretation, fashionable these days, is the Wicked Witch as the bankers who terrorized the people (the Munchkins?), and l am certain you had already guessed this last one.
Notwithstanding the authenticity of this theory, for the modern audience and fans of the Wizard of Oz, the explanation sounds flat and dull for such a rich account of adventures and extravagant and lovable characters. Frank Baum’s allegory surpassed the political intention of its time becoming a saga of self knowledge, a universal fable of coming of age.
Very few modern tales have acquired the status of universal myths, and here the merit cannot be ascribed totally to the author of the ‘Wizard’; the musical version of 1939, made and engrossed by the ideas of a big team of producers, writes, musicians and artists, set the ‘canon’ of the Wizard of Oz. The less acquainted modern audiences become of the historical context that produced the allegory of the book, the more the play becomes an open metaphor, a byproduct of the collective unconscious accountable of multiple interpretations.
One of the many is the gay approach. Reid Davis, a scholar from the University of California, published in Film Quaterly magazine a long and serious essay, a psychoanalytic (based mainly on Lacan) exegesis entitled: ‘Lost Objects, Repeat Viewings, and the Sissy Warrior’, where he studied the multiple screening in TV, cinema and theatre, the reaction and identification of several generations of gay people with the personality of the Cowardly Lion, first posing as a macho or a butch and then singing: ‘Oh it’s sad, believe me, missy, When you are born to be a sissy’; funny dialogues as this of the Good Witch: ‘Only the ugly witches are bad’; or Judy Garland and ‘Somewhere beyond the rainbow’, for some, definite icons of the gay culture.
My personal interpretation, deeply rooted in the enthusiasm for the movie and the play since my early childhood, is strongly influenced by Carl G. Jung. The Wizard of Oz is more an authentic myth than a fable of coming of age; it depicts a process of individuation, the perilous journey into owns psyche in order to become an integrated individual. The fact that a whirlwind transports Dorothy to the Word of Oz, interpreted in the 1939 version as a dream, a jump from the ‘real world’ into a fairyland inhabited by equivalents of Dorothy’s everyday life, authorizes this approach.
That Dorothy is not confident and grounded at her uncles’ home is a fact made clear since the beginning; she falls while playing on the fence and the adult that helps her seems weak and emotional (later, he will turn into the Cowardly Lion); we see her threatened viciously by the neighbour, Elmira Gulch, who wants to kill Toto, Dorothy’s most vital and cherish object; the aunt and uncle cannot help and she actually intends to run away. Then, the whole house is carried away by the tornado; are we talking here about a dysfunctional family?
Another important element related to roots and foundations in the tale are the Red Shoes; the same that the Wicked Witch of the West covets to the point of wanting to kill her. The shoes become the key element since her arrival in the World of Oz; her violent landing actually kills the other Wicked Witch, a sort of ‘acting out’ against this terrible mother image full of envy and repression; those same Red Shoes will eventually transport her to her native Kansas once she realizes that ‘There is no better place like home’. Dorothy can now stand on her own ground.
We know that Dorothy is an orphan. But how did her parents die? How did she lose her mother? If we assume that the witch can be a personification of the dark aspect of the child’s mother image, then the ‘accident’ that kills the witch is a sort of murder. Is Dorothy resentful at her mother for abandoning her? We also know that the surrogate mother, Autie Em, is a hard working stern woman with no time to express her love and that she hardly takes care about the child’s main concerns.
The Wicked Witch of the West personifies an aspect of what Jung calls the Shadow; a projection of Dorothy’s own psyche where she includes both her own destructive drives as well as the aggressive tendencies of those adults who are suppose to love and protect her. The witch coveting Dorothy’s Red Shoes can be associated with the ‘bad mother’ preventing her from being well rooted in life and therefore becoming an adult.
The World of Oz makes apparent every dimension of our heroine's inner world, the mother destructiveness, the inner personalities of her friends, their unconscious desires, and the aspect each of them represents in her own process of individuation, her own psychological function, her astrological elements and complexes. Thus, Toto stands for the part of herself (instinct to be protected) that feels threatened all the time, the endangered child persecuted by the ‘bad woman’; as instinct of survival, Toto is also the most sensible and clever part of herself.