Oz, the Great and Powerful

  

The Wizard of Oz is, and has always been, my favorite movie.  Originally released in 1939 (long before I was born), it has become a perennial classic on television, and I suspect that it is at the top, or very near the top, of many others’ lists of personal favorite movies as well.  I remember watching it on television with my family as a child, usually around some holiday, with a sense of awe, suspense, and emotional attachment that I don’t think I ever outgrew.  The movie still has an effect upon me when I watch it, even if I only catch parts of it, as I occasionally do these days when channel-flipping between the many television stations now available.  All of the characters in that movie made an indelible, lasting mark upon me in my childhood.  I’m even embarrassed to say that the first woman who I ever fell in love with bore a superficial resemblance, in my mind, to Billie Burke’s Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.  I was still in my teens then, but many years later, when I was well into adulthood, the second woman who I fell in love with resembled, at least in some of her features, Judy Garland, who of course portrayed Dorothy in the movie.  (I worry, that if there is ever a third time for me, the woman will look like either Elvira Gulch or Auntie Em.)

And of course The Wizard of Oz is remembered for more than just having a universal, popular appeal among children and the young-at-heart.  The American Film Institute ranks it 10^th in its list of greatest American movies of all time.  A poll that consisted exclusively of contemporary screen actors placed it at 15^th in their list of the top 100, and the website Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates the reviews of critics, currently puts it at No. 1, based upon 110 of these reviews.

 

What is it that makes this movie so enduringly popular, and so special to so many people?  It was based on the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written by L. Frank Baum, which was originally published in 1900.  Because of my lifetime fascination with the movie, I actually purchased this book a few years ago and read it.  I think it is of interest to print the author’s brief introduction to it in full:

Folk lore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal.  The winged fairies of Grimm and Anderson have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.

                Yet the old-time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotypical genie, dwarf and fairie are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.  Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

                Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to pleasure children of today.  It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.

I observed a couple of things about the book when I read it.  First, I was impressed by how closely the movie followed Baum’s story, particularly since I had remembered looking through the book in the school library as a child, and coming away then with the impression that the story in the book was very different than the one in the movie.  Even the film’s artifice of showing Dorothy’s home world in black and white, and that of Oz in color, was an ingenious but faithful rendition of the author’s contrast between the two.  Because in the book, Baum describes Dorothy’s Kansas surroundings as follows:

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side.  Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions.  The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it.  Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.  Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

  

The passage goes on to explain that even Aunt Em, who had once been a “young, pretty wife”, had been similarly ravaged over the years by the sun and wind:  “They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also.”  And Uncle Henry “. . . was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, . . .”.  When Dorothy later lands in Oz, however, this is what she encounters:

. . . There were lovely patches of green sward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits.  Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. . . .

It is a striking contrast, and one that is of course perfectly rendered in the movie.

  

But the second thing that caught my attention when reading the book was that, in spite of what Baum says in his introduction about leaving out the “heart-aches and nightmares” that darkened traditional children’s tales, there are parts of his story that are rather gruesome, and would not leave children – especially young children – with a sense of “wonderment and joy”.  In the book, for example, the Tin Woodman explains to Dorothy that he was once a human being, like her, but after running afoul of the Wicked Witch of the East, who then put a curse on his axe, he fell victim to a series of terrible accidents, involving the severing of all of his limbs, each of which was then replaced by a tin prosthetic.  But the curse did not end there, as the axe even dismembered his head (which was also then replaced with a tin one) and finally split his entire body in two (causing his heart to fall out), requiring the addition of a tin cover for his torso and metallic joints to hold him together.  One can forgive the movie scriptwriters for altering episodes like these, as in this case by having the Tin Woodman being created that way from the beginning, and never having been an actual man.

Some have even questioned whether The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was really a children’s book at all, but instead held some deeper meaning that was disguised as a children’s tale.  Various interpretations have been made over the past century of Baum’s work as a social or political allegory, but perhaps the most famous one was published by Henry Littlefield in the American Quarterly in 1964.  In his essay, titled “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism”, Littlefield argues that Baum’s tale is a subtle commentary on the Populist movement of the late-19^th century, which arose in response to the poverty of farmers in the northwest, and exploited laborers in the industrial east: a plight that had been exacerbated by a very severe recession in the 1890s.  One of the champions of this movement was William Jennings Bryan, who ran for President in 1896 on a platform of economic reform.  The political faction that he represented, known as “Silverites”, argued that America’s printed money supply should no longer simply be based on a gold standard (i.e., with gold and dollars interchangeable at a certain fixed exchange rate), but should be convertible into silver as well.  The consequence of this “bimetallic” policy would be an expansion of the money supply, and while this would cause price inflation, its supporters contended that it would also help to ward off future economic depressions, such as the terrible one that was just ending, which had been accompanied by falling prices that curtailed consumer demand, led to high unemployment, and further impoverished farmers.  In a famous speech that Williams Jennings Bryan gave at the Democratic National Convention in 1896, condemning the gold standard, he ended, very melodramatically, by declaring, "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!"

William Jennings Bryan Making "Cross of Gold" Speech in 1896

According to Littlefield, and later writers who expanded on his ideas, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was rife with symbolism that alluded to this controversy, such as the yellow brick road (representing gold), Dorothy’s silver slippers (they were changed to ruby slippers in the movie, because that shade looked better in Technicolor), the Emerald City (representing “greenback” paper money), and even the name “Oz”, a word that is the twin of “oz”: the abbreviation for “ounces”, which is the standard unit of measure for metals such as gold and silver.  (Baum actually claimed that he got the name “Oz” from one of his alphabetized file cabinet drawers, which had the label “O-Z”.)  Like the Wizard of Oz, William Jennings Bryan proved to be more of a puffed up beacon of hope rather than the Great Man and deliverer that his followers hoped he would be, although like the Wizard, behind his bombast there were genuinely good intentions.  (Interestingly, however, Littlefield believes that Baum – who had been a supporter of Bryan’s movement – actually had recent U.S. presidents in mind such as “William Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley . . . hiding in the White House” when creating his Wizard of Oz character.  Littlefield notes the similarity between a “naively innocent” poor people’s march to President Cleveland – they were going to ask him for jobs – that happened in 1894, and the quest of Dorothy and her friends to the Emerald City to ask the Wizard for help.)

Now this is an interpretation that only an economist can love, but in spite of being one of these, I have always suspected that Baum’s allegory was of an entirely different sort.  I think that it is an exploration of the male psyche, and of how that psyche is responsible for many of the problems that feminism has historically confronted.  That there is a feminist element to Baum’s work has been noted by other critics and interpreters.  (Most of these, however, cite The Marvelous Land of Oz, the first sequel which he penned to his famous story, which features a sort of feminist revolt, culminating in the men of Oz being compelled to do housework, and the accession of a female ruler over the entire land.)  They point out that Baum’s mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a prominent feminist of the age, and an associate of both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  (Susan B. Anthony was actually a guest in the Baums’ home for a time.)  Baum was the editor of a local newspaper, the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, that featured many editorials supporting the women’s suffragette movement, and he was even the secretary of the Aberdeen’s Women’s Suffrage Club.

  

Michelle Dean, in her essay “What ‘Oz’ Owes to Early Radical Feminism” (published in the March 8, 2013 edition of The Nation magazine) traces some interesting connections between the writings of Matilda Joslyn Gage and some ideas that appear in the Oz story.  Based on her studies of ancient history, Gage concludes, for example, that:

These records prove that women had acquired great liberty under the old civilizations. A form of society existed at an early age known as the Matriarchate or Mother-rule. Under the Matriarchate, except as son and inferior, man was not recognized in either of these great institutions, family, state or church. A father and husband as such, had no place either in the social, political or religious scheme; woman was ruler in each.

And she had a particularly sympathetic interpretation of the witch in history:

Whatever the pretext made for witchcraft persecution we have abundant proof that the so-called “witch” was among the most profoundly scientific persons of the age. The church, having forbidden its offices and all external methods of knowledge to woman, was profoundly stirred with indignation at her having, through her own wisdom, penetrated into some of the most deeply subtle secrets of nature: and it was a subject of debate during the middle ages if learning for woman was not an additional capacity for evil, as owing to her, knowledge had first been introduced in the world.

Dean writes that Gage encouraged her son-in-law to publish the stories that he told his children, and suggests that these stories had been strongly influenced by her own radical ideas about the relations between men and women.

As I have observed men and women during my life, I’ve noticed (and I actually first noticed this at a very early age) that men seem to have an innate compulsion to prove – both to women as well as to other men – that they are necessary.  This compulsion manifests itself in various ways, but one of the most common and recurrent stratagems is to create the general belief that there are certain things that only men can do.  I saw a very interesting demonstration of this behavior when I worked at a McDonald’s restaurant as a teenager.

Most or nearly all of the employees there were teenagers like myself, and there was probably an equal proportion of males and females.  But the two genders behaved very differently while at work there, particularly in the way that they interrelated with members of their own sex.  I should preface what I’m about to describe by saying that there was no official “rank” among us teenagers: there was simply the distinction between regular employees (who wore blue paper hats) and trainees (who wore white hats).  Those who were in charge of us all were always adults: generally men in their thirties or forties, and usually one or at most two of them would be overseeing the entire crew of employees at any particular time.  There was, actually, a higher rank that could be achieved among the teenagers, signified by a red paper hat, but this was ironically not a coveted position, for reasons that I’ll explain in a moment.

So all of us, with the exception of the trainees, were technically equals, of the same rank.  But among the female employees, a clear dominance hierarchy emerged.  Female employees generally did one of two things at the store: they took orders at the window and worked the cash registers, or they made milk shakes (this was back when these were made with the old fashioned rotary spindle in a metal cup, and were much more delicious than the machine-generated stuff that is sold now).  But there was one other position held by the females, and this was the role of “bin-caller”.  The bin-caller shouted back orders to the cooks on the grill for new batches of hamburgers or fish to be made.  The interesting thing is that rarely was a bin-caller appointed by the manager.  The role would be assumed by the most dominant female who happened to be working on the floor at that time.  It was always fascinating to watch when a female came onto the floor who was higher up in this hierarchy than whoever happened to be working as bin-caller.  That person would immediately step aside and go to work at a cash register or a shake machine, and the other woman would take over.  This hierarchy emerged naturally, and every girl seemed to know her place in it.

McDonalds: a Study in Urban Anthropology

The boys, on the other hand, had an entirely different social order.  What emerged among them was a sort of “achievement hierarchy”.  The way to achieve status among one’s fellow males here was to become a “star player”.  The male employees at McDonald’s generally worked the grills and the fryers.  And the way to stand out when working at one of these was to be able to handle a “rush”: those times around noon and in the early evening when the lobby was packed with customers.  A guy who could turn out great food, in high quantities, and continue to do so over a stretch of two or more hours, was a star.  If you were a male employee, you always knew if you were well-placed in the status hierarchy if you were called upon to work one of the grills or the fryers during rush hour.  (I am proud to say that I made a name for myself as “the fry king”, the best of the French fry makers among our group.)  Boys who did not make the grade could actually find themselves relegated to working one of the cash registers or milk shake machines.  If they were lucky, they were allowed to assist the “star players” behind the grill.

And this was the interesting thing about the whole arrangement: the boys who worked at this McDonald’s succeeded in creating the general fiction that there were certain jobs that only males could do in this restaurant.  Only the most assertive of the females would dare to transgress the imaginary line between men’s work and women’s work and tread upon this male-only domain.  And what were those jobs that only men were capable of doing?  Cooking and cleaning.

But aside from this competition for status, we male employees pretty much treated each other as equals.  The only “alpha males” were the adult managers, and these were the ones that exercised clear authority over us.  There was an additional rank that we teenagers were supposed to aspire to, and that was the position of “red hat”, which was supposed to be a sort of sub-manager.  But any of the teenaged boys who found themselves unlucky enough to be conferred that “honor” generally became outcasts among their male peers.  (If I recall, the managers had the good sense to only give red hats to females who had naturally risen to the top of their dominance hierarchy.  I think it would have been catastrophic if they had tried to do otherwise.)  Any of the boys who got red hats were regarded more as “turncoats” or “collaborators” among the other boys, rather than males who had achieved a different kind of status. 

I might have attributed these experiences at McDonald’s to just the eccentric behavior of adolescents, had it not been for other observations that I made later in life.  After I graduated high school and left McDonald’s, I put off going to college in earnest for a few years, having decided to pursue one of my loftier ambitions, which was to be a songwriter and musician.  What this ended up meaning was that I had to support myself by working menial, low-paying jobs while hoping to hone my skills as a songwriter and musician in my free time.  One of these low-paying jobs was as an attendant at a facility for mentally-challenged children and adults.  (I wish I could say that I took this particular job out of a sense of social responsibility, but the real reason was because it did not require a college degree, and it also allowed me to work the night shift, which freed up my days.)  One of my coworkers there was a woman who was probably about twice my age, and I remember her telling me the story of how her husband had recently left her.  (I think they had children together, which of course made his abandonment even more traumatic for her.)  She said that her husband had been working three jobs, but the money that he was bringing in from all three jobs combined did not equal the paycheck that she was bringing home on this job (which, I can personally attest, was not that much of a paycheck, either).  As she explained to me, “A man has to feel needed.  He has to feel that he is doing something useful, and important.  If you take that away from him, he is nothing.”  That observation of hers haunted me, and I never forgot it.  I was tempted, when I had that conversation, to believe that this brand of adult male insecurity only happened to poor people, but this temptation was quickly dispelled.  Because around that same time, I happened to be browsing through a bookstore one day, and came across a book titled The Natural Superiority of Women, by Ashley Montagu, an anthropologist.  I’ll never forget how profoundly shaken and disturbed I was, as I leafed through its pages.  Tears actually started welling up in my eyes.  Reading the author’s compelling arguments for why women are better than men, at just about everything (better immune systems, greater longevity, stronger verbal skills), I felt very deeply that that there was something horribly wrong about this.  Men had to be better than women at something important.  They had to be.  Because if they weren’t, it was just terribly . . . unfair.

Of course, I resisted Montagu’s conclusions, and tenaciously continued to believe that there was something innately superior about men, in some important sort of way.  Wasn’t it common knowledge, for example, that men excelled over women in science skills, and particularly in math skills?  This belief was particularly attractive to me, because I had exhibited an aptitude for science when I was in school, and even considered myself something of a mathematical prodigy, like the title character in the movie Good Will Hunting.  But this cherished belief was shattered years later when I went to graduate school to get an advanced math degree.  Not only did I discover that I was not the prodigy I fancied myself to be, but one of my foils was a young Englishwoman named Bernadette.  Her mathematical aptitude was clearly superior to mine: she could run circles around me in doing the mental gymnastics that mathematics requires.  And what was worse for me, I couldn’t even enjoy the consolation of feeling resentment toward her, because – in addition to being a gifted mathematician – she was one of the kindest and most charming persons I have ever met.  I remember doing homework with her once, and as she quickly completed a proof that I had been struggling through, she said to me, with a genuinely compassionate smile, “Oh, I was just lucky.  I’m sure you would have gotten the answer in another minute or two.”  But she was “lucky” far too many times for chance to explain it (I at least had the mathematical aptitude to recognize that), and I always seemed to be just one step or two from finding the solution to a proof or a problem that she quickly discovered.

Surely, though, there is one obvious way that men exhibit a general superiority over women, and this is the fact that they tend to be larger and more physically powerful.  Hasn’t this been a vital factor in the survival of the species?  Perhaps there was a time, long, long, ago, when this trait – along with the more aggressive behavior typical of males – served to fend off predators and rival species.  But if one looks at recorded history, at least, it seems that men have used their skills as combatants almost exclusively in fighting each other, and when women have needed protection, it is from men themselves.  And even in pre-historic times, this function may have become unnecessary very quickly, if it ever was necessary at all.  Anthropologist Marvin Harris, in observing contemporary primitive tribes, concludes that the role the savage male plays in these tribes is paradoxically to keep the population low, rather than to ensure its protection and unhindered growth.  As he argues in Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, by engaging in a process of perpetual mutual warfare with their neighbors, the males of a tribe prevent their population from growing unchecked and staying too long in a single area, which would result in a depletion of the food sources in their local environment beyond the rate of natural replenishment.  And far from women being protected by this aggressive male behavior, the cultures that condone it create a corresponding culture of violence directed specifically against women: not only in the acts of rape and abduction directed against women in rival tribes, but also in acts of brutal bullying and intimidation against women in the same tribe.

Harris goes even further, and draws some very sobering conclusions about the overall value of men in these primitive cultures.  After describing the behaviors of the warlike Maring, Kundegai, and Tsembaga tribes of New Guinea and the Yanomamo of the Amazon in South America, he writes:

. . . Even from a subsistence point of view, most males are entirely dispensable, and their deaths in combat need create no insurmountable difficulties for their widows and children.  Among the Maring, . . . the women are the main gardeners and pig raisers anyway.  This is true of cut-and-burn subsistence systems all over the world.  The men contribute to the gardening by burning off the forest cover, but women are perfectly capable of carrying off this heavy work on their own.  In most primitive societies, whenever there are heavy loads to be moved – firewood or baskets of yams – the women, not the men, are regarded as the appropriate “beasts of burden”.  Given the minimal contribution which Maring males make to subsistence, the higher the percentage of women in the population, the higher the overall efficiency of food production.  As far as food is concerned, the men are like the pigs: they consume much more than they produce.  The women and children would eat better if they concentrated on raising pigs instead of men.

Maring Tribe

But Harris doesn’t stop there.  He goes on to say:

. . . In strictly biological terms, females are more valuable than males.  Most males are reproductively redundant, since one male can suffice to impregnate hundreds of females.  Only females can give birth to the young and only females can nurse them (in societies that lack baby bottles and formula substitutes for mother’s milk). . . . Women can do every job that men can do, although perhaps with some loss of efficiency where brute strength is required.  They can hunt with bows and arrows, fish, set traps, and cut down trees if taught to do so or permitted to learn.  They can and do carry heavy burdens, and they can and do work in gardens and fields throughout the world.  Among cut-and-burn horticulturalists like the Maring, women are the main food producers.  Even among hunting groups like the Bushmen, female labors provides over two-thirds of the group’s nutritional needs. . . . The alleged biological basis for a sexual division of labor is a lot of nonsense.  As long as all females in a group are not found in the same stage of pregnancy at the same time, the economic functions considered to be the natural male prerogative – like hunting or herding – could be managed very nicely by women alone.

 These conclusions present a very dismal picture of the value of men in primitive societies:  Not only are they unnecessary, but they tend to consume or destroy more than they contribute.

I read Harris’s book in my early twenties, when my youthful experiences at McDonald’s, my encounter with the woman whose husband had abandoned her, and my strange emotional reaction to Ashley Montagu’s book were still relatively recent memories.  And I think that it was at this time that I began to perceive a connection between all of these events, and experienced something of a revelation – something that made sense of all of them.

Sometime in the early history of our species, when we were transitioning from leading lives governed by instinct to lives guided by intellect, men must have begun to contemplate the differences between themselves and women.  They could see that women, through the miracle of childbirth, performed what must have seemed the most important act of all – that of perpetuating the species.  But, if the primitive peoples studied by Marvin Harris are representative of earlier primitive tribes, then men must have also realized that women did much, much more than merely produce new human beings.  They also performed much if not most of the useful work that sustained their tribes.  It is not hard to imagine men developing a very severe and fundamental identity crisis, as they asked themselves why they existed, and what important purpose their gender served.  Their reaction to this crisis must have been to take an activist role in creating a culture that posited a vital male role, beginning with mythology, and, later, religion, in which a male god or gods either created the universe, or at least were at the head of the pantheon of gods and goddesses who did.  Hence, while “she” created babies here on earth, “he” (or “He”) created the entire universe around us.  But the process didn’t stop here.  For what really is patriarchy, except the outcome of a form of cultural conditioning that accompanied the growth and development of civilization, in which social norms and formal institutions evolved that supported the idea that there are vital functions that only men can and/or should do?

And this brings me back to L. Frank Baum and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  Because I believe that Baum’s book was an allegory about this primal source of insecurity in men that drives them to try to find – or create – something both in and beyond themselves that gives them a sense of fundamental self-worth.  The Scarecrow, in his search for a brain, is an archetype for Intellectual Man: the scientist, philosopher, inventor, engineer, and technician, who derives self-worth by living out the quest to improve the world through the generation of new ideas.  The Tin Woodman represents the poet, the playwright, the romantic, the musical composer, and performer, who tries to establish his worth through artistic achievement.  The Cowardly Lion, of course, represents, the warrior, the athlete, the policeman, the fireman, and the adventurer in general who seeks to find himself in the hero’s quest.  And then there is the wonderful Wizard himself, the ultimate fulfillment of the male quest for identity: the leader and its many incarnations – the politician, or head of a large company, or dictator, or conqueror.  Here, more than in any of the other paths, lies the hope and the promise of someday reaching the apex of male fulfillment: by becoming the Great Man.

The climactic final confrontation with the Wizard in Baum’s book closely parallels the one in the classic movie, when, after his subterfuge is exposed by Toto the dog, Dorothy exclaims, “I think you are a very bad man,” and he replies “Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man; but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”  (A little earlier in the book, when trying to explain why he had been hiding away for years behind this grand illusion that he had created about himself, he says, “One of my greatest fears was the Witches, for while I had no magical powers at all I found that the Witches were able to do wonderful things.”)  The Wizard then attempts, unsuccessfully, to convince the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion that the things which they had come to petition him for they had already possessed all along.  And so he resorts to subterfuge again, giving each of them in turn a token, symbolic object representing the special thing that they had been seeking.  Having satisfied them, he now realizes that with Dorothy, he must produce a genuine solution, and that involves sending them both back home with the aid of a hot air balloon.  But the balloon lifts off before Dorothy is able to join the Wizard in it, and she is left to appeal to Glinda, the good witch of the North, to help her, who explains that the magic shoes that she is wearing have always had the power to send her wherever she wants to go.

Was Baum’s tale, then, a symbolic representation of the quest of men throughout history to establish a special role for themselves, and of how, through patriarchy, they have at least partially succeeded in that quest?  Patriarchy, with its academic degrees, and awards, and titles, and formalized occupations, and artificial hierarchies, enabled men to live the illusion that there were indeed certain vitally important things that only they could do, or if not them, then at least those among them who were able to climb through the necessary ranks, or pass the requisite tests.  Women, of course, through most of history were either barred from participation in these institutions and activities outright, or presented with obstacles that made it very difficult for them to engage in them.  And, like the Wizard, those men who held positions of authority and power over these institutions and customs – priests, college deans, corporate executives, political and tribal leaders – used their power and prestige to maintain the illusion that men found their unique value through them, rather than to dispel it.

Perhaps I am being too harsh in my interpretation.  After all, none of the male characters in Baum’s book try to diminish Dorothy’s value, or limit her sphere of action.  In fact, they do the very opposite, and, while hoping to find what they believe they lack in themselves, they are committed to Dorothy’s goal of finding a way home, and support her and protect her in every way that they possibly can.  Is this what Baum is trying to tell us – or rather tell us men in particular: that we have to get past this sense of lack that we harbor about ourselves and our place in the world, and simply devote ourselves to being the best friends to the Dorothys of this world that we can possibly be?  The story provides a happy ending for the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion (in addition to of course Dorothy herself), and it is clear that it was by being brave and trustworthy friends that they have earned this reward.  But still, each of the male heroes needed a token object – conferred upon them by a man in authority – that enabled them to believe that they had finally filled the particular emptiness which they felt within themselves.

By sheer coincidence, while I was writing this blog, I happened to come across an essay written in the late 1960s by Patricia Robinson, a feminist psychologist, titled “Poor Black Woman”.  Writing about the racial and economic class hierarchies that she and many of her contemporaries were fighting against at that time, and their psychological effects, she says, “. . . one’s concept of oneself becomes based on one’s class or power position in a hierarchy.”  And for Robinson, the economic institution of capitalism supported or at least exacerbated the toxic societal effects of hierarchy.  She writes:

In a capitalist society, all power to rule is imagined in male symbols and, in fact, all power in a capitalist society is in male hands.  Capitalism is a male supremacist society.  Western religious gods are all male.  The city, basis of “civilization”, is male as opposed to the country which is female.  The city is a revolt against earlier female principles of nature and man’s dependence on them. . . .

Now I should say outright that, as an economist, I find such a vitriolic condemnation of capitalism to be unjustified (although it is rather intriguing that all economic systems that have evolved with patriarchy have managed to confer a higher monetary value on men’s work and a low or even nonexistent monetary value on women’s work).  But her remarks caused me to wonder: could Baum’s book have been both an allegory about the economy – as Henry Littlefield believed – and about gender?  Even more intriguing to me was Robinson’s remarks about the city as a masculine abode, as opposed to the country, which is feminine.  Was Baum thinking along the same lines when he contrasted the country life of Dorothy’s home in Kansas – which she was so desperate to return to – with the walled emerald city of Oz?  But in Baum’s tale, Dorothy’s home is painted in shades of grey, while the land of Oz is rich in color and spectacle.  Was Baum perhaps offering one mitigating defense of patriarchy – that it has brought more “color” into the world, with the historical pageantry of wars, conquests, empires, and scientific and architectural marvels?  If so, he must have realized that while this pageantry is entertaining to read about in history books, or see in movies, it is very often not so pleasant to live through.  (I love a good war movie, historical epic, or gangster saga as much as the next man, but I would not want to be living in present-day Syria, or a number of other places in the world stricken by military conflict, religious fanaticism, terrorism, or despotism.)  This message certainly comes through in the story, particularly at the end of the movie, when Dorothy says that while there was much in Oz that was very beautiful, there was also much about it that was not so nice.

And what of this male identity crisis?  Why is it even still with us today – as evidenced in the daily news headlines?  After all, if primitive men were simply intimidated by the female ability to produce other human beings, hasn’t science taken the awe and the mystery out of this process?  And while such an ability was certainly of immeasurable importance at the dawn of civilization, when human beings were struggling to survive, what about today, when there are nearly 8 billion people on the planet, and it seems that we could very well someday choke our own species – let alone most or all of the other living species that we share this world with – out of existence?  And, too, there seems to be much more fluidity in gender roles and identities in our modern society, so that the lines between male and female – at least in a traditional sense – have become increasingly blurred, to the point where it is even possible for a person to change genders if the one they were born with does not fit them well.  I suspect that the answer to these questions lie in the fact that certain male behaviors derive from more than just some psychological existential crisis, because it is not only human males that display them.  From the peacock spreading his plumage, to the seasonal sparring between antlered bucks, to the elaborate nests built by the males of certain species to attract future mates, instinct seems to have driven the male to create a niche for himself, or at least draw attention to himself.  The animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz once asserted (and I don’t think that he was joking) that the tendency of young men to rev up the engines of their motorcycles or hot rod cars comes from the same primal urges that cause the males of some species of birds to engage in exaggerated struts when in the presence of females.

Did L. Frank Baum actually occupy himself with thoughts like these as he composed his timeless classic tale?  Like any fan of a great book, or a great film, I have probably succumbed to the temptation to read more into it than is actually there.  And in the end, what has made the tale a timeless classic is that it is about heroes and heroines with pure hearts and intentions, engaged in a great quest that allow them to discover qualities about themselves that they never realized they had.  And it is about friendship, and love, and finding one’s way home.  That, more than anything, is what gives it its special magic, and brings so many people, over so many generations, back to it, over and over again.