[In the following essay, McReynolds and Lips argue that Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of the few examples in American literature depicting a nontragic adventurous female protagonist, who exemplifies the true experience of women on the American frontier.]

When Leslie Fiedler suggested that American literature is essentially children's literature,¹ he seemed to give legitimacy to what readers of American books had sensed for some time already but had been too self-conscious to think out loud: that the American experience not only was a learning, a youthful experience, but that childhood provides the effective analog for its telling; that the epic subduing of that great wilderness from Tennessee and Massachusetts through South Dakota to California was simply and finally a game. But it was a game only boys could play. From Rip Van Winkle to Huckleberry Finn and from Natty Bumppo to Nick Adams, the story of American literature has been the story of man's—boy's—escape from woman. Women have had a role to play in the fiction, to be sure; that role has been, almost invariably, to make life at home so miserable for some protagonist that he is forced to seek refuge in the Catskill Mountains or in the Indian Territory or in the Seventh Cavalry or, when all other avenues have been cut off, in Herb Woodley's garage. During the escape some heroic adventures are had, some androgynous kind of male innocence is maintained, and a land is incidentally won from the savage and wild. Of course, any time a particular parcel of land is tamed, women move in, and the cycle begins anew; hence, the opening of the American frontier.

None of this is news. And there are certain features of the story, both in its theme and in its motif, which are so familiar and so appealing that perhaps we should not dismiss them, which so accurately represent the imagined life of our cultural experience that perhaps we cannot dismiss them, for they are what characterize American literature and vivify it. The real question is, Why can't little girls as well as little boys have adventures?

Joanna Russ complains with a good deal of justification that stories about women are stories limited to limning such stuff as “How She Got Married. How She Did Not Get Married (always tragic). How She Fell in Love … How She Loved a Vile Seducer, Eloped, and Died in Childbed.”² Rare indeed is the story of a girl who adventures freely about the woods destroying evil as she confronts it, lives dangerously and emerges triumphant. Yet several historians have shown clearly enough that the actual pioneer women were not only as hardy but as self-reliant, as optimistic and as innovative as the men they accompanied into the American wildnerness. Surely Flora Hunter, for example, who evicted two foraging Indian braves from her Nebraska cabin, and Mollie Dorsey Sanford, who gave up her sugar to a band of Indians but not her braids, showed mettle enough.³

American literature is adventurous because the American experience and the American spirit, both male and female, are adventurous. Yet the traditional female protagonist in American books, according to Nina Baym, “has no ego, or a damaged one, and looks to the world to coddle and protect her … She expects nothing from herself because she recognizes no inner capacities.”⁴ She is the Virginian's Molly, placidly awaiting rescue from a mired stagecoach; she is Becky Thatcher, gratified enough simply to watch from the window as Tom Sawyer cavorts outside.

But it is Dorothy Gale, not Becky Thatcher, who stands in that relation to American girlhood which Huckleberry Finn fills in relation to American boyhood. Dorothy has not been given the critical attention granted a Becky Thatcher or an Ántonia Shimerda or a Hester Prynne or an Edna Pontellier, but she is certainly the only one of that company we've ever wished we might trade places with. She represents the experience of woman in America in a way which not only makes that experience accessible to a male audience but also makes it attractive. The search for Aunt Em is no less exciting, no less heroic, and no less dangerous than the escape from Aunt Sally; and if we will look for a usable past, for a tradition in which girls share equally with boys in the pursuit of some elusive American dream, we have to take seriously The Wizard of Oz.

The essential motif of Baum's novel identifies the book immediately with mainstream American literature. A protagonist wishes to get from point A to point B and is shown the broad path which will take her there through some intervening, incomprehensible wilderness. Dorothy's Yellow Brick Road is Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road and Huck Finn's Mississippi River; it appears as the wagon road to Fort Henry in The Last of the Mohicans, as the Overland Trail in Roughing It, the railroad in Winesburg, Ohio, and U.S. Highway 66 in On the Road. It is always the same, the true path, broad enough to be followed easily, which will convey one safely through the enchanted forest to the land of heart's desire if one keeps to it and reads its posted signs correctly. The Yellow Brick Road, by whatever name a particular writer calls it, is a fundamental element of the American's imagined experience just as it is of the real experience which has informed the imagined one. Dorothy's motives for travel are not Huck's or Natty Bumppo's, but her object is the same. Cairo is the Emerald City, and so is Fort Henry. All three are goals, but they are goals of a paradoxical sort; their seekers believe that once they are reached adventures are over and living can begin. In all three cases, of course, the goals turn out to have been ephemeral ones after all: Huck misses Cairo completely, Fort Henry is lost to the French as soon as Natty gains it, and the Emerald City offers Dorothy only more trials.

Nor is that enchanted forest which lies between Munchkinland and the Emerald City unfamiliar to the student of American books. Annis Pratt argues that “only in the fantasy cultures of science fiction” can a female protagonist “retain freedom to control her own body and to fulfill an adult social function,”⁵ but these woods are not so strange as all that. After all, this is the same forest through which one of Poe's narrators sought the home of his old school chum, Roderick Usher; the same that Edgar Huntly was drawn into, and deep within which discovered himself in the wild and ragged form of the madman, Clithero. It is the same forest that Natty Bumppo loves so dearly, where “no mosquito bites, no ant crawls; and the charmed underbrush itself relents and will not tear the clothes or mar the looks of the two girls [Alice and Cora Munro] who without soap or comb or brush must maintain their symbolic beauty, light and dark, unblemished.”⁶ Dorothy Gale encounters only straw men and lions in the forest; Goodman Brown had walked in it with the devil himself. Thomas Sutpen was no fool: he enlisted the aid of voodoo labor when he planned and built his gingerbread house deep within those woods.

No, the enchanted forest is as familiar a stock-piece of American writing as it was an actual phenomenon to be met and dealt with in the American experience; the Yellow Brick Road is as familiar as the Santa Fe Trail. “Somewhere downstream the last bend lay,” says John Neihardt, surveying the Missouri River from just below Great Falls, “and in between lay the playing of the game.”⁷

But Dorothy is not playing, and perhaps here is the real difference between the male experience of the wilderness and the female experience of it. Edgar Huntly went into the forest for amusement; he was playing amateur detective. Goodman Brown left the wide path to test himself, voluntarily to compete with the devil as though the Prince of Darkness were a racquetball adversary. Most of Huckleberry Finn is spent either playing at being royalty or playing a perverse sort of “free the slave” charade which is exposed as having been a game at the last. Thomas Sutpen sports with his slaves bare-knuckled for the sheer animal fun of it, and Rip Van Winkle, who climbed into the Catskills originally to hunt small game, stayed on to watch a bowling tournament. Not so Dorothy. She is alone and disoriented in a topsy-turvy world, yet her movements are consciously and unhesitatingly toward those very responsibilities—chores, family obligations, love—that the boys work so hard to escape. Dorothy does not choose to visit Oz. A natural force uncontrollably powerful, a tornado roiling up out of Oklahoma, disrupts her life and drops her there against her will. Her object is to get back to Kansas.

Now, the point is not that a woman has no choices, that she is battered about by emotions of cyclonic fury and helpless either to staunch them or to escape. Kate Chopin has shown that, for whatever purpose it might serve, a woman may at least choose not to be, and Margaret Mitchell showed that a woman may choose and thrive without being turned into a man. Huck Finn is as much at the mercy of the river as Dorothy is of the tornado, and both forces are finally benign. They destroy not children, but the enemies of childhood—parents, outlaws, witches. The point is, rather, that there is just as much adventure to be had, as much wonder to be experienced, as much terror to be subjected to, as much strangeness to be encountered in moving toward adulthood as there is in escaping it. “I can't tell if you're serious or not,” says a truck driver to Kilgore Trout in Breakfast of Champions; and the Nobel Laureate-to-be replies, “I won't know myself until I find out whether life is serious. … It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too.”⁸ And in one sense this is what The Wizard of Oz is all about. Whether life is serious or not, to seek Aunt Em is as dangerous as to flee Aunt Sally; and the danger is what makes it all worthwhile.

And so Baum tells us the story of a girl, not a boy, following the Yellow Brick Road west through the enchanted forest, a girl determined to find that for which she is responsible and ready to assume whatever burdens are attendant on the finding. Along the way she picks up incomplete, adult males as readily as Blanche Dubois picks up soldiers, gathers them like daisies, only sex does not intrude into these magical woods. She makes men whole by sharing with them her female self—her hopes, her dreams, her fears—not by offering them her body. Her essential woman-ness, incompletely developed though it is, still is enough to complete both the indecisive scarecrow and the robotic tin man. Russ suggests that women in literature “exist only in relation to the protagonist (who is male).”⁹ Not so Dorothy Gale, for in The Wizard of Oz it is a sequence of male characters who find existence, and literal consciousness, only in relation to the female hero. She makes caricatures of men into real ones, and does it without losing her own identity in theirs; surely this is a girl to be emulated.

For Dorothy is no beautiful-but-silly Katrina Van Tassel, no boyish Ántonia Shimerda, no sexually manipulative Caddy Compson or innocently corrupt Dolores Haze. She is a young woman, neither adamantly nor apologetically so, and she is good. She offers emotional commitment to a host of souls, themselves lost in the bewildering forest, and in giving she receives. She establishes the connections which are the foundations for successful human relationships everywhere she goes. Like Huckleberry Finn, she will consign herself to Hell—or at least to the interior of the witch's castle—if that is what it takes to secure the ransom of her friends; unlike Huck, she has every intention not to stay there, and she returns from the pit wiser, having learned something positive about both the human capacity for love and the power of good. In other words, having defeated the witch, she can forgive the wizard.

When she confronts the wizard and discovers that he is a humbug, she does not destroy him, as she by now has the power to do. Nor does she hate him for having sent her to what he must have guessed would be her death, sent her knowing full well that he could not keep his half of the bargain were she somehow successful in accomplishing hers. She does not even despise him for his abject helplessness. He is simply another man whom she can make whole by caring for wholeheartedly, and so she cares. Huck Finn avoids evil when he can and accommodates it when he has to; Dorothy Gale overcomes evil by doing good. The wizard is a changed man, ready at last to leave the rich fantasy world he had escaped to years before and return to reality, to the American Midwest, where the sun “baked the plowed land into a gray mass” and “even the grass was not green”; where paint blisters and men must work so hard from morning to night that they forget what joy is.¹⁰ Rip Van Winkle returns to his village because he has to; the wizard returns because a little girl has shown him what courage and love really are, and what they can accomplish. Oz anticipates that he will remain a balloonist when he gets back to Omaha, but he also acknowledges that the balloon he rides in from now on will be firmly tethered to the ground.

This is not to imply that Dorothy is a Pollyanna, too good either to be believed or to be liked. She may not intend to kill the witch of the East or her of the West, but nevertheless she kills the both of them; and if the first is killed in innocence, still the second is slain in anger. Dorothy douses the witch of the West not in some protective, reflex action, but in a fit of pique.¹¹ She may not be aware that water melts witches, but she throws the bucket with malice aforethought all the same. Forgiveness, of course, is worth much more when it comes from one who is known to be capable of vengeance.

But the quest for Aunt Em is not over when the wizard is forgiven. There are dangers still to be confronted, perils still to be passed in this land of Oz. Dorothy must be shown the effects of her compassion before her own wish will be granted. After the wizard disappears toward Kansas in his balloon, the girl's three male companions are now just that—companions; they are no longer her wards. And the group has one more task: to deliver Dorothy safely to the witch of the South and in the country of the Quadlings learn the secret of the silver shoes. On this journey the men are not helpless; in fact, it is they who deliver her to Glinda's palace much as she had shepherded them to the Emerald City earlier.

Once this journey is accomplished, Dorothy's initiation is complete. Dorothy has given herself, and so she has received. She has passed through the enchanted forest, always headed west, along the Yellow Brick Road, not escaping, but moving always toward adulthood's responsibilities. She has taken into her protection those fully grown but psychically incomplete males she has encountered, and she has made them whole without compromising her own integrity. She has destroyed evil not by sidestepping it, but by confronting it directly with good, and she has forgiven the wizard who was, after all, only a man. Finally she has allowed the good that she has done, now incorporated into her three companions, to come full circle: having saved others, she must herself at last be saved. Only now is it time for her to return to Kansas, for only now has she truly earned what she has long sought.

The charm of the silver shoes is explained, and in less time than it takes to say it Dorothy has found Aunt Em—who is, with Uncle Henry, still as engaged with the business of wresting a subsistence-level existence from the Kansas prairie as if Dorothy had never left. The magic shoes themselves are lost forever in the desert surrounding Oz, and childhood is over. In the opening pages of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's vibrant gaiety had been contrasted repeatedly to the gray sobriety of Aunt Em and Uncle Henry; it is significant that upon her return Dorothy is as somber as they. But now all three know what only the elders had known before, the value of human beings. They know, as Ole Rølvaag's settlers would discover later in Giants in the Earth, that human love and human trust are the only successful defense against the Great Plains of the American Midwest; against that brute and brutalizing force whose power, whether manifest in tornadoes or in blizzards, drought, or the horrifying emptiness of land without trees, is greater by far than the power of wicked witches.

Dorothy Gale's adventures are not Huckleberry Finn's or Natty Bumppo's, but they are every bit as thrilling, as dangerous, as wonderful. Nor does it diminish Dorothy that her story is one of search while theirs are of escape; indeed, it speaks quite well of her that she recognizes childhood's end.

The Wizard of Oz demonstrates that the experiencing of America is as much a girl's adventure as it is a boy's, and it suggests that a girl is perhaps better suited intuitively to understand the significance of the experience, and to learn from it and apply its lessons, than is a boy. In other words, a woman who has come through Oz may yet cope successfully and compassionately in a world whose male population consists mainly of Yossarians, R. P. McMurphys, and Rip Van Winkles.

Notes

1. The suggestion is made more than once in Fiedler's monumental Love and Death in the American Novel (revised edition, New York: Stein and Day, 1966). To the extent that American literature is children's literature it is also essentially asexual literature.

2. Joanna Russ, “What Can a Heroine Do? or, Why Women Can't Write” in Images of Women in Literature: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1972), p. 9.

3. Susan H. Armitage, “Women's Literature and the American Frontier: A New Perspective on the Frontier Myth” in Women, Women Writers, and the West, ed. L. L. Lee and Merrill Lewis (Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing Co., 1979), p. 7. See also Glenda Riley's Frontierswomen: The Iowa Experience (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1981) for an extended discussion of women on the American frontier.

4. Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction, A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 19.

5. Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 168.

6. Fiedler, p. 201.

7. John Neihardt, The River and I (1910: reprinted at Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books series, 1968), p. 134.

8. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Breakfast of Champions (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Delta edition, 1973), p. 86.

9. Russ, p. 5.

10. These descriptions of the Kansas prairie are Baum's.

11. The well-known Hollywood version shows Dorothy accidentally dousing the witch in an attempt to save the scarecrow, who has been set afire. Baum tells the story differently.