SOURCE: Franson, J. Karl. “From Vanity Fair to Emerald City: Baum's Debt to Bunyan.” Children's Literature 23 (1995): 91-114.

[In the following essay, Franson discusses the possible influence of John Bunyan's allegory Pilgrim's Progress on Baum's writing of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.]

My interest in a possible “confluence of reminiscences” affecting the creation of L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) began (like the curiosity of Lowes regarding Coleridge's imaginative vision) with “a strange footprint caught sight of accidentally just off the beaten track” that became “an absorbing adventure along the ways which the imagination follows in dealing with its multifarious materials” (Lowes 180, 3). It was the beaten track itself, the Road of Yellow Brick, that led me to a major source of Baum's classic tale and ultimately a new perspective from which to read it.¹

On the original map of Oz, Baum envisioned the road leading to the Emerald City in a straight line.² It resembles the famous road to the Celestial City in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678, 1684), which is “straight as a Rule can make it” to enable pilgrims to stay on course.³ In addition, both roads are associated with the color yellow: the road through Oz is paved with yellow brick (27), and the road to the Celestial City becomes paved with gold inside the City itself (162).⁴ Additional similarities between the books convinced me that Baum's supposedly original tale is simply a recasting of Bunyan's. Doubtless Baum was familiar with Bunyan's book, the most famous allegorical journey in Western literature. The work of a creative genius, Progress is a colorful, imaginative, and suspenseful story often claimed, in past generations, by children although not written originally for them (Georgiou 31), and is thus a logical source of inspiration for Baum's book.⁵

No extensive inquiry has been made into what influenced or inspired Baum's story, even though a variety of sources have been suggested for several of Baum's other books.⁶ Greene and Martin propose that parts of Oz [Wonderful Wizard of Oz] came from stories Baum had made up for his sons (10; see also Mannix 36-37). Perhaps warded off by the widely held view that Oz is a uniquely American fairy tale and hence original and experimental, commentators generally have ignored the possibility that Dorothy's adventures might be modeled directly upon stories Baum had read.⁷ Baum himself acknowledged no direct literary influences, claiming that Oz was “pure inspiration … right out of the blue” from the Great Author Himself.⁸ His introduction to Oz alludes to European fairy tales by Grimm and Andersen but purports to be presenting a new kind of tale without the horrible and bloodcurdling incidents, the heartaches and nightmares of traditional tales.⁹

In the first published essay on Baum's book, Wagenknecht records his suspicion that the author used quite freely whatever suited his purposes from older literatures (UA 23), and that in Mother Goose in Prose (1897), Baum's fancy “plays about and transforms not things that he has seen but things that he has read about” (UA 19). Nye later expresses the same view, that the Oz books are far more derivative than even Baum realized (2). The Pilgrim's Progress, in particular, has come to the minds of many who have written about Oz, but none has recognized it as a direct Baum source.¹⁰ Nevertheless, strong empirical evidence that Baum relied heavily on Progress calls into question his own claim to having been inspired when composing Oz. His likely purpose in rewriting Bunyan gradually emerges as the extent and nature of his borrowing become apparent.

A close comparison between Oz and Progress reveals that Baum drew heavily upon the earlier book for narrative structure, episodes, visual imagery, and diction. The nature of his appropriation suggests that it depends upon a vivid recollection of Progress rather than a direct copying of Bunyan's text. Baum combines parts 1 and 2 of Progress, the former depicting Christian's journey to the City, and the latter, the journey of his wife, Christiana, accompanied by their four boys and a friend named Mercy. He omits overtly religious elements, transporting the tale to the American prairie and to a mythical, secular Land of Oz. Also omitted are episodes Baum presumably considered unsuitable for children.¹¹

Not every aspect of Oz, however, derives from the cornucopia one finds in Progress. The Munchkins, the Winged Monkeys, and the Hammer-Heads have no obvious counterparts in Bunyan and probably are Baum's own creations or derive from other sources he used. Nor does Baum replicate every major Bunyan episode and character. Missing, for instance, is the man in an iron cage at Interpreter's House, the Arbor where possessions are often lost, the notable Mr. Talkative, Faithful's trial by jury, a fearful mastiff, and the bottle of tears. Nearly all Baum's borrowings from Progress appear in the first three-quarters of Oz, or until Dorothy and her companions leave the Emerald City for the second time. The final chapters of Oz, which contain fewer similarities to Bunyan, have less narrative appeal, as evidenced by their being omitted from the classic 1939 film of the book.¹²

A major consequence of this discovery is to locate Oz more clearly within the tradition of religious allegory, thus corroborating the two book-length studies of Oz, both of which read the book allegorically. Moore views Oz as an allegory of self-reliance (135), and Nathanson identifies its strong religious elements (Rainbow 13-14), observing in a recent address to the American Academy of Religion that Dorothy's adventures tap into religious themes deeply embedded in American culture (The Wizard of Oz A16). Like Progress, Baum's book is more than a voyage imaginative or a psychological journey: it depicts a Grail-like quest during which each traveler seeks to conquer an inner emptiness or deficiency (Downing 29).

Because allegories seek to communicate on two levels, those of outward events and of ideas they convey, we are led while reading Progress to place ourselves in the roles of Christian and Christiana. So is it with Oz, wherein Dorothy (Littlefield 52), or the four protagonists together, also typify each of us. Baum's intent was to delineate aspects of spiritual growth, not through promotion of organized religion or established creed, which he rejected, but through creation of protagonists whose inward journeys toward spiritual fulfillment the reader follows as they progress toward the Emerald City and beyond. Always a religious man, Baum was raised a Protestant but drifted into Theosophy and Buddhism. As his friend Rev. Ryland put it, Baum clearly had a religion of his own, and “he lived and wrote by it” (Potter 12). His concern for spiritual well-being and moral values is apparent in his belief that our “earthly journey [is] but a step in our spiritual evolution.”¹³

Why Baum's substantial indebtedness to Bunyan has gone virtually unnoticed may be owing to a twentieth-century lack of familiarity with Bunyan's allegory, in particular the less popular part 2, which captured Baum's imagination the most.¹⁴ Examples of Baum's use of Bunyan that follow are arranged from the first chapter of Oz to the last: episodes preceding Dorothy's departure for the Emerald City, during her journey to the City, and following her arrival. The study makes no pretense at being comprehensive, nor does it consider illustrations to various nineteenth-century editions of Progress that may have influenced Baum's book.

Similarities between the initial settings of Oz and Progress are readily apparent. Kansas as depicted by Baum is a foreboding wasteland: Dorothy's one-room farmhouse epitomizes the family's poverty and is surrounded by a great gray prairie, the plowed ground baked by the sun “into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it” (12). Dorothy is an orphan taken in by a taciturn uncle who is a stranger to joy and a thin, gaunt aunt who never smiles.¹⁵ Dorothy's guardians consider her odd because she is cheerful. Aunt Em is astonished Dorothy can find anything to laugh at (12-13), leading one commentator to describe her situation accurately as “a home environment of spiritual death” (Barasch 56).

Dorothy's extreme poverty causes Scarecrow, as well as many readers, to wonder why, once in the verdant Land of Oz, she wishes to return to Kansas (44). Baum's narrative emphasizes Dorothy's love and concern for Em and Henry, locating it symmetrically at the beginning, middle, and end. Arriving in the Land of Oz, she says, “I am anxious to get back to my Aunt and Uncle, for I am sure they will worry about me” (25), a concern she repeats at the Emerald City (128), then again at the palace of Glinda the Good Witch (254). In The Emerald City of Oz (1910), Baum brings Dorothy's concern for Em and Henry to a happy resolution when Princess Ozma rescues the couple from physical and spiritual dissolution by transporting them to live with Dorothy in Oz permanently.¹⁶ Bunyan does the same in his own sequel: supernatural intervention brings Christian's wife and children to the Holy City to be reunited with him forever.

This opening scene of Oz closely resembles that of Progress, part 1. Christian appears in rags (8), evidence of his poverty. A wide field or plain extends from his house into the distance (10), and although neither the sun nor drought is mentioned, Bunyan does depict a spiritual drought that reappears in the Kansas farmhouse. Christian and his family must escape the City of Destruction (11) to avoid being burned with fire from Heaven (8). When he proposes fleeing, like Dorothy he is considered mentally imbalanced, his family concluding that “some frenzy distemper” affects him (9), and none will accompany him. After his pilgrimage and death, his wife announces that she and her children are fleeing the city, whereupon she too is treated as if she were mentally ill (182). Both Baum's and Bunyan's books, therefore, open on scenes of physical and spiritual poverty amid vast, empty fields threatened by the sun or fire from heaven, and both portray unsympathetic relatives who, while agreeing circumstances are dreadful, consider it madness to leave.

Rereading Baum with these similarities in mind, we must consider Dorothy's grim circumstances to be representative of America as Baum saw it at the turn of the century, focused more on temporal than spiritual matters. Dorothy's aunt and uncle reflect despair, and we cannot imagine their finding security and happiness on their own. Only the intervention of a cyclone, ironically, opens the way for them to escape the dissolution, both physical and spiritual, that threatens them.

Dorothy's adventures in the Land of Oz are not depicted as a dream, but as real-life experience in an isolated land somewhere on earth.¹⁷ When Dorothy returns to Kansas, Uncle Henry has built a new farmhouse (259), thus precluding a dream experience. Nevertheless, because she falls asleep while transported by the cyclone (16), and because the Land of Oz is fantastical, the implication of dream fantasy is strong. This element is important because both Bunyan title pages specify the accounts are offered “under the Similitude of a Dream.” In addition, Bunyan claims to have dreamed part 1 while imprisoned in “a Denn” or jail (8), which bears similarity to Dorothy's falling asleep in the one-room, cell-like farmhouse while being carried off by the cyclone. Bunyan begins part 2 by stating that his vision of Christiana's journey also came to him in a dream (174). Within these dream frameworks in Bunyan are yet other dreams (156, 178, 222), emphasizing this aspect of his allegory.

Dorothy is supposed to be five or six years old, but she appears more mature than this.¹⁸ Bunyan describes only one young girl, Much-afraid (282), who is timorous and so vaguely delineated it is impossible to imagine Dorothy being modeled after her. Baum's young heroine more closely resembles Christian and Christiana, despite their difference in age and purity. All three are optimistic, determined, resourceful, and compassionate; all are essentially alone, Dorothy orphaned, Christian separated from his family, and Christiana widowed; and both Christiana and Dorothy lead a band of travelers to a city. Whereas her adult counterparts possess spiritual weaknesses typical of adults who have grown up in the City of Destruction, Dorothy is an innocent and untainted child.

Dorothy's arrival in Munchkin Country suggests two representative groups of correspondences with Bunyan: the narrator's description of the Land of Oz, and Dorothy's encounter with three men and a witch. When Dorothy arrives in Oz, the sights and people appear “strange” to her (20, 26), as does the Land of the Winkies, where she is later held captive (155). The entire country, in fact, is described as a “strange land” (33). Baum's basic idea of transporting a young girl to a country alien to her, and describing it repeatedly as “strange,” may have come to him from Giant Maull's false accusation of Great-heart: “Thou practises the craft of a Kidnapper, thou gatherest up Women and Children, and carriest them into a strange Country” (244). Both Bunyan and Baum consider the regions through which their travelers pass to be odd, unfamiliar, and often hostile country in which they can never be entirely at ease. This view of the world is taught by most religious faiths, and Dorothy's eventual move to Oz with her aunt and uncle must be understood in this light: it is ever so much better than Kansas, truly “a family-style Utopia” (Nye 12), but not their eternal destination.

Landing in the Munchkin countryside, Dorothy is approached by three Munchkin men and a small old woman wearing a white hat and a gown sprinkled with little stars that glisten like diamonds (20). She tells Dorothy of the four witches in Oz: the Wicked Witch of the East, killed by Dorothy's falling house; the Wicked Witch of the West, a midget with an eye-patch and pigtails who later captures Dorothy; Glinda, the lovely Good Witch of the South, who later assists Dorothy in returning home; and herself, the Good Witch of the North. While she and Dorothy converse, the body of the East Witch disappears beneath the farmhouse: she was so old, says the North Witch, she dried up quickly in the sun. Only her silver shoes with pointed toes remain, so after shaking the dust from them, the witch presents them to Dorothy (22, 25). Baum's good witches are attractively dressed, whether old and wrinkled (like North), or young and beautiful (like Glinda). Both bad witches are old, repulsive, and tyrannical, the West Witch later forcing Dorothy to work in her kitchen as a slave (150-51). All these aspects are noteworthy, for they can be traced to the single Bunyan passage about a witch.

Bunyan's witch, named Madam Bubble, is associated with the Enchanted Ground, a dangerous region she has cursed (123, 301). Portrayed as tall and comely, Madam Bubble appears to pilgrims beautifully dressed, enticing them with her body and her purse. Sometimes she casts goldlike dust from her purse to tempt them. Despite her appearance, she is old and has brought many to bondage, the gallows, or Hell (300, 302). Baum's witches are similar: a contrast between youth and old age, the wearing of beautiful garments, an association with dust, the ground, and enslavement. Madam Bubble's positive and negative features may have given Baum the notion of creating good as well as bad witches, a feature of Oz that continues to provoke criticism. Such a reaction, in light of Baum's modeling Oz on a Christian allegory and its strong strain of moralism (Nye 5), now seems largely unjustified.¹⁹

The North Witch informs Dorothy that a charm is connected with the silver shoes, although she does not know what it is (25). Dorothy decides to wear them, her own being worn thin (32). Much later, she loses a shoe temporarily to the West Witch (153), and finally she is instructed how to use the charm of the shoes to return home, for they can carry her anywhere in the world (257). While she is being transported back to Kansas, the shoes fall off and are lost forever in the desert (259). Several Bunyan passages may have inspired these magical silver shoes. The armory at House Beautiful contains pairs of shoes that never wear out (54) and, like Dorothy's, will carry a person anywhere. Also, a Mr. By-ends boasts of being most zealous “when Religion goes in his Silver Slippers,” or when ostentatious (99).²⁰ Finally, when Christiana's company passes through the region cursed by Madam Bubble, some of her grandchildren lose their shoes in the mire (296), just as Dorothy loses hers over the desert.

Dorothy begins to comprehend the extent of her predicament when the North Witch offers her no hope of returning home, so she begins to cry, causing the Munchkin men to weep also (26). This prompts the witch to balance her cap upon her nose and count to three, whereupon the cap changes into a slate with the message “Let Dorothy Go to the City of Emeralds.” Determined to visit the city and ask the Wizard for help, Dorothy pleads with the witch to accompany her because the way promises to be dark and fearful at times, but she is gently refused (26-27). Yet the witch gives her a protective kiss on the forehead, assuring her that no one will dare injure a person who has been kissed by the Witch of the North, and her lips leave a “round, shining mark” (27). The Munchkins depart, and the witch whirls about on her left heel three times, then disappears (28).

This imagery comes from Bunyan, much of it associated with Hill Calvary and the Crucifixion. Beyond the Wicket Gate and Interpreter's House, Christian is observed weeping at the summit of Calvary (38). Earlier, Evangelist had given him a parchment roll (appearing in Oz as the invitation on the slate) enjoining him to flee the city (10) and return home to his heavenly Father. At Calvary he receives another roll that comforts and reassures him (38), which functions as a certificate when he arrives at the City (163). Evangelist had instructed him where to begin his journey (10), then after departing, reappeared to give him a kiss (24). On Calvary, Christian is approached by three “shining ones,” angels sent to prepare him for the journey, their raiment bright like the North Witch's glistening white gown. One of them places a mark on his forehead, like Dorothy's, to identify him as a pilgrim (38). When the angels depart, Christian takes three leaps for joy, similar to the witch's three revolutions, then proceeds to the bottom of the hill and discovers three sleeping men bound with irons on their heels. He then encounters two men who tumble over a nearby wall on the left side of the narrow path (39). Presumably these disparate references to the heel and the left side reappear as Baum's image of the witch's left heel. Bunyan's three “shining ones,” Christian's three leaps, and the three sleeping men possibly gave Baum the notion of using the number three, three times in the same scene.

Part 2 of Progress also contains images that pertain to Oz. Christiana's invitation to the City, although not on a slate like Dorothy's or a roll like Christian's, is similar in being delivered by an elderly, supernatural person, a heavenly messenger named Mr. Secret. He presents a letter inviting Christiana to the City, whereupon she (like Dorothy) begs to be accompanied but is refused (179-80). Shortly after embarking, Christiana, her children, and Mercy are kissed by the Keeper of the Wicket Gate (190), and at the Interpreter's House they each receive a sacred mark on their foreheads that makes them appear like angels (208), an image reinforced when Christiana and her granddaughters later have jewels placed on their foreheads (288).

The sacred or magic tokens (the forehead mark, scrolls, and letter of invitation in Bunyan; the silver shoes, forehead mark, and slate invitation in Baum) have four major symbolic functions: protection, reassurance, certification, and liberation. In Progress, the forehead mark, the roll, and the letter represent God's protection (50, 180). They comfort and reassure pilgrims, and the roll and letter certify the bearers at the City gate after their liberation from the world. Dorothy's shoes and forehead mark are protective, for when she is captured by the Winged Monkeys and the West Witch, the shoes and mark prevent them from harming her (148, 150). Dorothy is reassured by these charms, and only because of them is she allowed to speak with the Wizard (126). The slate also functions as a certificate, giving her an official invitation to the City, and the shoes eventually liberate her from the Land of Oz (258).

Departing for the City at last, Baum's “little girl” (19) follows the road through Munchkin farmland, “walking briskly [with] her silver shoes tinkling merrily on the hard, yellow roadbed” (33), an image that may owe its inspiration to Bunyan's prefatory allusion (part 2) to “little Tripping [nimbly stepping] Maidens [who] follow God” (172). The depiction of Dorothy may also have been influenced by Bunyan's observation that “a little Child might lead them” (281), meaning a group with two disabled pilgrims. Bunyan's allusion is to Isaiah 11:6, which depicts a child leading animals, including a lion.²¹ Dorothy leads a small band of travelers, including a lion, each claiming to have a disability, either of mind (Scarecrow), of body (Tin Man), or of spirit (Lion). The value of Dorothy's kindhearted assistance to them is made clear at book's end when each one attributes his progress and good fortune to the girl. Without her, Scarecrow would still be hanging on a pole in the cornfield, Tin Man still rusting in the forest, and Lion still fearing the forest creatures (257).

Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion owe many elements of their creation to Bunyan. Dorothy encounters Scarecrow high on a pole in a cornfield, his arms outstretched, his body stuffed with straw. He complains of not feeling well and tells Dorothy he yearns for some brains (36-38). As he accompanies her, he often stumbles because of holes in the road, requiring Dorothy to pick him up (43); later in the story he is pulled apart by the Winged Monkeys (148). Later still, Scarecrow reveals that the Wizard has appointed him ruler of the Emerald City, where he is already loved by the inhabitants (255).

This straw man appears to originate in several characters and situations in Progress. A pilgrim, Mr. Fearing, stumbled at “every Straw” that anybody cast in his way (249).²² A scarecrow on a pole calls to mind the image of the Crucifixion, particularly in a work, like Oz, based on a Christian allegory. Like Jesus, Scarecrow suffers on the pole and is a model of humility, compassion, and leadership, eventually ruling the City when the Wizard departs. Further, Dorothy encounters Scarecrow at a point in the story analogous to Christian's encounter with the Cross at Hill Calvary. Scarecrow's supposed lack of intelligence may derive from Mrs. Know-nothing or Mr. Feeble-mind (184, 266), the latter being one of seven major figures Christiana encounters on her pilgrimage (172-73). Scarecrow's being picked apart by flying monkeys bears a similarity to Mr. Feeble-mind's being threatened by a giant who intends “to pick his Bones” (266). In addition, Scarecrow's need of assistance is like that of Mr. Feeble-mind, a man of no strength at all who must be helped along the road (266-67).

After Scarecrow joins her, Dorothy enters a dense forest where a rusting Tin Man is encountered near his cottage. He explains that while enchanted by the East Witch he had chopped off his own legs and head, but when he had chopped himself in half, his heart had been lost forever (57-58).²³ Notwithstanding, he shows himself to be tenderhearted and joins the group as an axe-toting protector. Soon he is clearing the road where the trees and branches grow so thick nobody can pass (57). A Bunyan character with many of these traits is Mr. Great-heart, who also is associated with a house (being a servant to the Interpreter) and whose name describes Tin Man's essential nature. Like Tin Man, he is associated with metal, having a sword, helmet, and shield (208). He, too, cuts off arms and heads (of giants, 219, 245, 267, 282), guards women and children who are on pilgrimage, and leads travelers through a region overgrown with grass (218), analogous to Tin Man's clearing the Yellow Road. His association with the heart is also explicit, not only in his name, but also in his alluding to a character named No-heart (213).

Baum's Lion, while claiming to be king of beasts, admits he is a coward (68). When confronted by a ball of fire in the Wizard's Throne Room, he creeps “tremblingly” to a place near the door (134). Nevertheless, he roars on occasion (e.g., 66) and near the end of the narrative has gained the courage to kill an elephant-sized spider (239-41). Also, he loves flowers, “always did like flowers, they seem so helpless and frail,” and soon he is lying fast asleep in a field of poppies, overcome by their scent (93, 95). Cowardly Lion may derive, in part, from two lions encountered near House Beautiful that are harmless because they are chained (45-46, 218). Mercy spies another ineffectual lion following the pilgrims that promptly retreats when confronted by Great-heart (242).

In all likelihood, however, Baum's major source for Cowardly Lion is the insecure Mr. Fearing, Mr. Feeble-mind's nephew described at great length in part 2. His chief trait is cowardice, for everything “that had the least appearance of Opposition in it” frightened him, and Bunyan labels him “Chickin-hearted” (249-50). At the Wicket Gate he knocks timidly, but when the Keeper opens and asks, “Thou trembling one, what wantest thou?” he falls to the ground in fear (250). Bunyan associates Mr. Fearing with lions, another reason to believe Cowardly Lion is modeled after him: at the Slough of Despond he is heard “roaring” for more than a month before venturing across (249); Bunyan notes that he did not fear lions, as his fear was merely about his acceptance at the City (251, 254). When he anticipates rejection, Mr. Fearing weeps (251), just as Cowardly Lion weeps when Dorothy slaps him for threatening Toto (67). Finally, there is Mr. Fearing's love of flowers, a memorable correlation with Baum's beast in the field of poppies: while in the Valley of Humiliation, “he would lie down, embrace the Ground, and kiss the very Flowers” (252).

Dorothy and her companions next encounter two ditches. The road is disrupted by a “great ditch” that Baum describes as “very wide” and “very deep,” with many jagged rocks at the bottom and steep sides. With the travelers, one at a time, on his back, Lion leaps the chasm (77-78). They next confront a second ditch, which they find too wide for Lion to leap, so Tin Man fells a tree across it. While crossing, the party is startled by “a sharp growl” and discovers two Kalidahs, beasts with the bodies of bears and heads of tigers, bounding after them (80). Lion fears that the Kalidahs are apt to “tear us to pieces,” but he manages a mighty roar that causes the Kalidahs to pause, Dorothy to scream, and Scarecrow to fall over backward. Tin Man saves the day by chopping loose the tree-bridge on which the Kalidahs are crossing the wide ditch, sending the snarling beasts to their deaths, “dashed to pieces” on the sharp rocks below (81).

Approximately at this juncture in Progress, pilgrims encounter the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The sides of the first valley are precipitous (55-56, 236), and the second valley is deeper than the first, both details retained by Baum. Within the second valley, writes Bunyan, lies a “very deep Ditch” (62), most likely the source of Baum's depiction of the first chasm. The path through the second valley is “exceeding narrow,” and with the ditch on one side and a quagmire on the other, the way is hazardous, particularly since the valley is quite dark (62). This narrow pathway reappears as Baum's narrow tree-bridge across the second ditch. As Christian passes through the valley, he often fears he will “tip over into the mire,” perhaps Baum's source of Scarecrow's falling over backward when Lion roars.

In the first valley, Christian is attacked by Apollyon, a beast with wings of a dragon, feet of a bear, and mouth of a lion that makes a “hideous roaring” (56, 60). Doubtless Apollyon was Baum's impulse for the fearful, growling Kalidahs; his roar may be the origin of Cowardly Lion's roar. In addition, the Kalidahs may owe something to the group of Fiends Christian hears coming after him, “nearer and nearer,” in the second valley. At this same location, Bunyan's pilgrim fears “he should be torn in pieces” by creatures he cannot see in the dark, a description echoed in Cowardly Lion's fear the Kalidahs will “tear us to pieces.” When the fiends are nearly upon him, Christian cries out with a “most vehement voice,” much like the threatening roar of Cowardly Lion that causes the Kalidahs to retreat (63). Finally, at the end of the second valley Christian sees blood, bones, ashes, and the “mangled bodies of men” (65), and Christiana's group sees a man cast into the ditch “with his flesh all rent and torn” (243-44), images resurfacing in Baum as the bodies of the Kalidahs on the jagged rocks in the second ditch. Baum's phrase “dashed to pieces” also occurs in Bunyan with reference to the fall of Vain-Confidence into a deep pit (112). Like Bunyan's valleys, Baum's ditches present travelers with frightening obstacles threatening them with death.

After the episodes at the ditches, Baum's travelers arrive at a river. Scarecrow has found only nuts in the forest for Dorothy (76), but at the swift, deep river (88) Dorothy finds plenty to eat. The perennially green meadows are dotted with bright flowers, and the road is “bordered with trees hanging full of delicious fruits” (82). After a night by the river, Dorothy breakfasts on fruit, including plums (87). Each of these images has a counterpart in Bunyan. After Vanity Fair, Christian and his companion Hopeful arrive at the River of Life, where they discover green trees bearing all kinds of fruit on both sides of the river (rather than the road, as in Baum), and a meadow verdant all year long and beautified with flowers (110-11). Children eating nuts and fruit do not appear at this juncture, but they appear later in part 2 at Graius's Inn where Christiana's group is presented a dish of nuts; someone observes that nuts are especially harmful to children's teeth, prompting the innkeeper to recite a poem about nuts (263). The narrator recommends fruit as wholesome (280), and one of the boys relates an illness he suffered from eating green plums (194, 230, 263), probably Baum's source for Dorothy's plum breakfast.

The Oz travelers attempt to cross the river on a raft they have made, but they are carried swiftly downstream far from the Yellow Road, and Scarecrow becomes stranded on a pole midstream. When they manage to reach the opposite shore, they must pass through a dangerous region to regain the road. The river constitutes the only juncture at which they become sidetracked on their journey. Similarly, Christian detours only once, at a river where he and Hopeful turn aside onto a soft path that soon leads them astray. A thunderstorm swells the streams they had crossed, preventing their return to the road (112-13); they soon find themselves prisoners at Doubting Castle, an episode Baum re-creates as Dorothy's imprisonment at the castle of the West Witch.

Following Scarecrow's rescue from the river, the travelers seek to return to the road. Passing through a pleasant area near the Emerald City, they hear the singing of brightly colored birds and marvel at the flowers, eventually coming upon “great clusters of scarlet poppies.” Their way leads them through a large meadow of poppies so brilliant they dazzle Dorothy's eyes. Baum describes their “spicy scent” as poisonous and deadly (93-96). When Dorothy succumbs to the oppressive odor, Lion exclaims, “If we leave [her] here she will die” (92-93), but Lion and Toto are also overcome, so it remains for the nonmortals, unaffected by the flowers, to rescue the party. Scarecrow and Tin Man fashion a chair, with their hands as the seat, to carry Dorothy and her pet to a lovely place beside the river with soft grass and a fresh breeze (95-96). On a cart made by Tin Man, Lion is dragged from the field by thousands of mice.

The primary Bunyan source of these gardenlike scenes, excluding the field of poppies, appears to be the Land of Beulah through which pilgrims pass shortly before reaching the City. In this pleasant country, pilgrims hear the singing of birds, see a multitude of flowers, and find the air sweet and pleasant (154), the images (birds, flowers, air) re-created by Baum in the same order. The region of scarlet poppies seems to come from a Bunyan location immediately before the Land of Beulah and the City, the Enchanted Ground cursed by Madam Bubble. Although no flowers are mentioned growing in the area, the air “naturally tended to make one drowsy.” Christian warns his companion that if they fall asleep in the area, they will never awake because the air produces a state approximating death (136), so their strategy is to keep talking while they walk.

Even the lengthy religious discourse between Christian and Hopeful as they cross the Enchanted Ground appears to have impressed itself upon Baum. Hopeful alludes to Christ “upon a mercy-seat” (141), most likely the source of the chair and seat fashioned by Dorothy's friends to save her. Hopeful proclaims fervently, “Had I now a thousand gallons of blood in my body, I could spill it all for the sake of the Lord Jesus” (144), probably the origin of Baum's image of the field of red poppies (93). Bunyan's reference to vast quantities of blood and Baum's to vast quantities of scarlet poppies both connote death. The general import of Baum's poppy scene is similar to that of Bunyan's at Doubting Castle, namely, when travelers leave the “strait and narrow way,” as both groups do at a river, they risk being diverted permanently from their goal. Christian and Hopeful are imprisoned and threatened with death, and Dorothy and Lion are threatened with death without the aid of their friends.

After regaining the road, Dorothy's group spends a night with a poor farmer who has injured his leg (112). He tells the travelers the Wizard keeps “a great pot of courage in his throne room which he has covered with a golden plate, to keep it from running over” (114). The farmer is modeled, it would seem, after Bunyan's Mr. Ready-to-halt, a crippled pilgrim Christiana meets, also near the City, making his way on crutches. The Wizard's pot and the adjective “golden” probably come from this scene as well, for the angel who invites Mr. Ready-to-halt to the Celestial City says, “I have broken thy golden Bowl” (307); “broken” perhaps reappears as the broken leg of the Oz farmer.

Approaching the City of Emeralds, Dorothy's group is astonished at its brightness, which dazzles even the painted eyes of Scarecrow (115). To protect their eyes, the Gate Guardian places upon them green spectacles like those worn by all the City's inhabitants (117). Then he warns that if they are “on an idle or foolish errand,” the Wizard might destroy them, for he is quite terrible to dishonest persons (116-17). They discover the City to be studded with sparkling emeralds, the inhabitants seemingly dressed in green and having greenish skin (121-22). The atmosphere is distinctly fairlike, its many shops offering such commodities as candy, popcorn, and lemonade. Dorothy and her friends cause quite a stir in the streets (122). The City's magistrate, the Wizard, rules by benevolent deception; later, he departs in a balloon (207-08). Baum's metropolis, in short, is glorious, colorful, and festive, but to Dorothy it represents only bitter disappointment (211), for the Wizard fails to help her return to Kansas.

The striking appearance of Baum's Emerald City derives from Bunyan's Celestial City. The reflections of the sun render Zion so “extreamly glorious” that approaching pilgrims cannot look upon it without “an Instrument made for that purpose” (156, 223), presumably spectacles of tinted glass. Like the Emerald City, Zion is ornamented with precious stones (155). The matter of honesty at the City gate is raised in Progress (parts 1 and 2), as it is in Oz, in the following ways. Christian meets a young man named Ignorance near the gate who attempts to enter without credentials (162); in part 2, he is called “green-headed Ignorance” (294), a memorable description that may have led to the greenish skins of the Emerald City inhabitants, and a reaffirmation of the ignorance of the Oz citizens that has been fostered by the Wizard. When Christiana prepares to enter the City, she meets a pilgrim named Mr. Honest (308-09).

The Emerald City's festive atmosphere, however, derives from Bunyan's Vanity Fair, with its rows of streets where worldly commodities are sold (88). Pilgrims entering the town are questioned (90), just as Dorothy's group is, and they too cause a hubbub while passing through the streets (89). The magistrate of the Fair, Beelzebub, grants citizens whatever they desire, deceiving them into complacency with worldly pleasures. Although Beelzebub does not ascend into the sky like the Wizard, Faithful's soul ascends in a chariot from Vanity Fair to the Celestial City (97). In appearance, the Emerald City is based upon the Celestial City, but its atmosphere and its deceptive, fraudulent nature comes from Vanity Fair, that worldly and iniquitous town offering pilgrims no hope, as long as they remain, of completing their journey to their heavenly home.²⁴

Eventually Dorothy and her friends are admitted, one at a time, to the Throne Room at the Wizard's palace, where Dorothy meets a giant head, Scarecrow a lady with wings, Tin Man a grotesque beast, and Lion a ball of fire—each a mechanical trick performed by the Wizard (126-36). All but the last have counterparts in Bunyan. The giant head is reminiscent of the severed heads of giants slain by Great-heart, three of which are erected as warnings to pilgrims (245, 267, 283). The winged lady resembles winged spirits in the Celestial City (162). The beast, large as an elephant and having the head of a rhinoceros, five eyes, five arms, and five legs, is similar to Bunyan's dragonlike monster with seven heads and ten horns (277) that derives, in turn, from one of the Beasts of Revelation 17:3.

Having been promised assistance by the Wizard if they destroy the West Witch, Dorothy's disappointed party departs to find her. Seeing them approach her castle, the witch dispatches a wolf pack to “tear them to pieces,” but Tin Man kills the beasts and piles them in a heap (141-42). She sends a flock of crows to peck out their eyes and tear them to pieces, but these are likewise killed and piled up (143-44). When her enslaved Winkies reveal their fear of Lion, she beats them for cowardice (145). Only with the aid of the Winged Monkeys is she able to capture Dorothy, Toto, and Lion. When the latter proves incorrigible, she threatens him with starvation (151). She threatens to beat Dorothy with an umbrella, an article representing her fear of water, and she actually strikes Toto with it, causing him to bite her leg (151-52). She fears water because her blood has dried up many years before, rendering her only dry skin and bones (152). Consequently, when she robs Dorothy of a silver shoe and the girl throws a bucket of water on her, the liquid causes her to melt away, turning her into “a brown, melted, shapeless mass” that spreads over the floor and obliging Dorothy to throw another bucket of water over the mess in order to sweep it out the door (154).

These scenes at the witch's castle seem to have their origin in two episodes from Progress. The first occurs at Doubting Castle where Christian and Hopeful, after being benighted by a rainstorm, are imprisoned by Giant Despair. His wife Diffidence is probably Baum's model for the midget-sized West Witch, although opposite in size. Diffidence urges her husband to beat the pilgrims, which he does with a cudgel after berating them as though “they were dogs” (114), an incident that corresponds to the witch's threatening Dorothy and striking Toto. Christian and Hopeful, like Lion, are threatened with starvation (114). Many prisoners have their eyes put out by the giant (121), which probably prompted Baum to create a one-eyed witch who sends birds to peck out the eyes of Dorothy and her friends. Christian and Hopeful are shown piles of bones and skulls of prisoners (117), corresponding to Baum's heaps of dead wolves and crows. Diffidence urges Despair to tell the pilgrims he will “tear them in pieces” (117), a threat repeated by Baum's witch in sending wolves and crows to attack the travelers. Bunyan's thunderstorm probably inspired the witch's umbrella.

The melting of the witch, however, appears to have its genesis in an episode at Interpreter's House in which Christian is shown a parlor that is full of dust because it is never swept. A man called in to sweep it succeeds only in stirring up the dust, so a girl is directed to sprinkle the floor with water, enabling it to be swept and cleaned properly. The dust represents sin and corruption, and the sprinkling of water represents goodness and religious truth (29-30), Bunyan's point being that humankind cannot remove the effects of sin without divine assistance. Because Bunyan's dust becomes Baum's melted witch, and his girl becomes Dorothy, the Wizard must embody the ineffectual man who cannot clean the room alone; indeed, the Wizard admits he has lived in deadly fear of the wicked witches for many years and been unable to rid the Land of Oz of them (188).

Back at the Emerald City to report the death of the witch, the travelers discover that although the Wizard is thought to be immortal (27), omnipotent (114), and omniscient (182), he is actually none of these. When Toto knocks over a “screen” in the Throne Room, the Wizard is discovered to be merely a little old man with a bald head and wrinkled face (183). Dorothy later calls him the Great and Terrible Humbug (191). The Wizard's concealment behind the screen associates him with Bunyan's Mr. Fearing, who also hides behind a “Screen” at House Beautiful to take in conversation, being too ashamed and insecure to show himself (251). The Wizard, nevertheless, is a good man who tries to help Dorothy's company, but his incompetence is most apparent when he inadvertently leaves her behind when he departs in a balloon. That Baum conceived the Wizard as a parody of God seems unlikely, because he is shown to have no supernatural attributes at all. Nor can he closely represent Beelzebub, Lord of Vanity Fair, for he is not inherently evil, only deceptive and impotent, as males in the Oz series invariably are.²⁵ He cannot represent traditional Christian clergy, as Downing implies (28), because clergy make no claims of divinity as he does. Rather, he appears to represent the kindhearted men of the world as Baum perceived them: benevolent, patient, mechanically minded, yet, when confronted by evil, fearful, dissembling, and powerless.

When Dorothy and her friends leave the City for the last time, Baum's reliance on Progress dwindles, but he does include a final episode from Bunyan, that of the Fighting Trees.²⁶ En route to the palace of Glinda for help in returning Dorothy to Kansas, the company encounters a thick forest in which a tree grabs Scarecrow and flings him to the ground. Tin Man chops off the offending branch, allowing all to pass except Toto, who is caught by another branch and shaken until he howls (222-23). In a similarly chaotic scene at the Enchanted Ground, in an area overgrown with briers and thornbushes, one of Christiana's party tumbles over a bush, then a grandchild cries, “I am down,” and another child cries, “The Bushes have got such a fast hold on me, I think I cannot get away from them” (296).

Following four chapters of charming but tangential episodes unrelated to Progress, Baum's “bright and joyous” book draws to a close.²⁷ At the castle of the beautiful Glinda, Witch of the South, Dorothy learns how to activate the magic silver shoes. After bidding her friends farewell, she clicks her magic heels together three times and repeats the words “Take me home to Aunt Em!” (258). Baum's focus on returning home continues to the end, for when she is once again in the arms of her aunt, she exclaims, “I'm so glad to be at home again!” Unlike Christian and Christiana, however, Dorothy has only just begun her journey through life.

Despite Baum's considerable indebtedness to Bunyan and his attempt to replicate Progress's spiritual power, Oz displays a quite different independent style, mood, and character. It is addressed to children, particularly girls, and presents a distinctly matriarchal society.²⁸ It introduces automatons and benevolent witches who intermix with mortals, and it replaces the supernatural powers of God and Satan with that of good and bad witches. Yet Baum seems to have consciously tapped into the inherent power of Bunyan's myth to activate his own imagination. The number and nature of similarities between Oz and Progress suggests that Baum's imaginative faculties were so indelibly affected by Progress that he was continually predisposed to draw upon its episodes, characters, images, and diction, as though he sensed in them a power to bring his own creation to life. Plainly, the mythical land depicted in Oz owes much of its creation to the “strange blendings and fusings” (Lowes 55) of many elements of Progress that took place in his imagination. Baum's reliance upon Bunyan continues even beyond Oz, but much less extensively.²⁹

The essence of Oz thus lies close to religious allegory, which casts additional light upon Nathanson's assertion that the book exhibits signs of being ambiguously related to both religion and secularism (Rainbow 14). Baum began with a series of overtly religious episodes, removed the obtrusive religious trappings, and recast them. Inevitably many religious elements in addition to imagery remain: idealism, humility, morality, compassion, and the necessity of supernatural aid in human progress (the latter finding embodiment in Glinda the Good, Baum's substitute for a traditional male Deity).³⁰ Like religion, the book deals with the most fundamental problems of human existence, including origin, destiny, and identity (Nathanson, Rainbow 13-14). Baum's concerns, therefore, are more than psychological, and Oz is more than a juvenile story about “the power of positive thinking” (Billman 242). Baum once admitted to concealing “a wholesome lesson” behind each episode, and Nye believes one of the pleasures of reading Baum lies in its discovery: a spiritual theme evident in Baum's depiction of Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion, for example, is that all people have within them, in embryonic form, the positive attributes they seek (Nye 5).

Baum apparently hoped that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz would affect his young readers in much the same way The Pilgrim's Progress affected him as a child or youth, opening to him a vision of a spiritual journey from fear to reassurance, from discouragement to hope, from selfishness to compassion. We can be certain he knew he was retelling a Biblically based allegory, and it seems logical that his purpose in using Bunyan was a moral and spiritual one. Baum repeatedly stresses faith in supernatural benevolence, hope in the future, and love for others, but the greatest of these, the “first law” of Oz, is love.

Notes

1. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, shortened to The Wizard of Oz soon after its first appearance, has outsold all other American children's books. It was the author's tenth published title. Baum's lifetime output was about 85 books, including 13 Oz sequels; and after his death in 1919, six other authors produced 27 additional Oz books, the latest appearing in 1963. (For bibliographies of the Oz canon, see Gardner and Nye 201-08; Hearn, Annotated 363-81; Moore 182-94; and Greene and Martin 178-81.) Despite its immense and enduring popularity, Oz has received scant critical attention. The first serious study was by Edward Wagenknecht, Utopia Americana (1929) (cited as UA in text), supplemented by “‘Utopia Americana’: A Generation Afterwards” (1962). Subsequent essays worthy of note include those by Gardner and Nye in The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was (1957) and the useful collection in Michael Patrick Hearn's edition of Oz (1963). The only book-length studies of Baum's work are by Moore (1974) and Nathanson (1991).

2. The map of the Land of Oz first appeared in Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), presumably drawn to Baum's specifications by John R. Neill, illustrator of all the author's Oz books but the first, which was illustrated by William W. Denslow; a reproduction of the map is readily available in Greene and Martin 44-45. This map should not be confused with a recent map appearing in the Del Rey (Ballantine) Books edition of Baum's series (1979-85), on which the Yellow Brick Road is a winding one.

3. Like Baum's book, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) led to a sequel, part 2, published in 1684. Thereafter, both parts were regularly published together. I cite from the standard critical edition by Clarendon Press, ed. Wharey and Sharrock, without reproducing the edition's frequent italic type.

4. The edition of Baum used in this study is an “unabridged and unaltered republication of the first edition” by Dover Press, 1960, which includes Baum's introduction and Denslow's original illustrations. Oz was first published in Chicago by George M. Hill.

5. Progress, Darton asserts, “is a children's book, however you frame definitions” (65). Among those who point out Bunyan's strong influence on American literature for children is McMaster (103). Bunyan did write books specifically for children, such as Divine Emblems, A Book for Boys and Girls, and Country Rimes for Children.

6. Moore claims that Baum refers to the Arabian Nights, Aesop's Fables, and Pilgrim's Progress in sequels to Oz (47), but I have been able to verify only his reference to the Arabian Nights (Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz [1908], chap. 10). Littlefield (passim) proposes the American political scene as Baum's inspiration for Oz, claiming the book was intended as an allegory of America's emergence into the twentieth century. Gardner notes many parallels, but also profound differences, between Oz and Alice in Wonderland (1865), the most frequently cited Baum source (“A Child's Garden” 19; see also his introduction to Baum's Magical Monarch of Mo ix-x, as well as Moore 47, Beckwith 76, and Greene and Martin 47). The standard Baum biography acknowledges only the influence of Dickens in the creation of Oz characters throughout Baum's series (Baum and MacFall 24). Other suggested sources include the following: for the episode of the frozen heart in The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), Hawthorne's “Feather-top: A Moralized Legend” (Bewley 259-60); for Dorothy's journey beneath the earth in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) (Vidal 40); for an episode in Ozma of Oz (1907), Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat” (1898) (Bewley 256-59).

7. Wagenknecht is the first to claim that Oz is unique, and he focuses on Baum's ability to turn everyday material into folklore (UA 24-28). Carpenter and Prichard label Baum “the first writer to create an unforgettable full-length original American fantasy” (51), and Carpenter and Shirley claim Baum invented “a new kind of fairy tale, uniquely modern and American” (11). Hearn believes Baum to be “among the most experimental and purposeful of American writers for children” (“L. Frank Baum” 65).

8. Baum's statement was reported many years after his death by a friend, Rev. E. P. Ryland (Potter 12; Hearn, Annotated 73).

9. Notwithstanding Baum's disclaimer, Oz is the most brutal of the series, according to Hearn, dramatic tension deriving from the many “terrifying” dangers to be overcome (“L. Frank Baum” 63).

10. Wagenknecht's statement is typical: Baum's story, he writes, is the sort of romance that we get in Gulliver's Travels, in Pilgrim's Progress, and other satiric or allegorical travel literature (UA 11). Others who are vaguely reminded of Progress when reading Oz, yet do not recognize it as a Baum source, include Littlefield (50), Nathanson (Rainbow 208), and McMaster (103).

11. Baum omits such unsettling episodes as Faithful's torture and death by fire (97), Christiana's being threatened with rape (195), and Timorous and Mistrust having hot irons driven through their tongues (218).

12. From Baum's final seven (of twenty-four) chapters, the MGM screenwriters retain only the bout with the Fighting Trees and Dorothy's return home; in contrast, the only major episode from earlier chapters (those heavily influenced by Bunyan) that is excluded from the film is that of mice rescuing Lion from the poppy field. For an excellent discussion of narrative strengths and weaknesses of both book and MGM film, see the essay by Billman.

13. Barasch 56. In 1890 Baum published an attack on organized religion, and subsequent references in his works to churches and ministers are seldom favorable (Hearn, Annotated 73; see also 69-72). Downing calls the MGM film version “one of the most devastating exposés of institutional religion ever to reach the screen” (28). Nevertheless, all his life Baum believed strongly in God and the immortality of the soul (Gardner, “Royal Historian” 28-29).

14. In part 2 of Progress, Bunyan often focuses on issues important to children and women that would have been of great interest to Baum as a youth and an adult. An example is Graius's speech on behalf of women, whom he says are “highly favoured” of God and “sharers with [men] in the Grace of Life” (261); an example from part 1 is Bunyan's discussion of whether it is unmanly to be spiritually minded (72). Baum developed a lifelong concern for the welfare of children during a childhood troubled by chronic illness and two unhappy years at a military academy. His inclinations were never typically boyish. He married a strong-willed woman whose mother was a nationally known feminist, and he wrote 17 books for girls under a female pseudonym. For further information on his childhood and personality, see Baum and MacFall (chap. 2), Harmetz (310-21), and Carpenter and Shirley (12-16); on his interest in women's rights, see Nye (12), Gardner (“Royal Historian” 23), Shulman (33), and Nathanson (Rainbow 69). Gardner detects in Baum, however, a discomfort with the New Woman and finds “many sly digs at the suffragettes” in the author's works, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) being a satire on the movement (“Royal Historian” 23).

15. In Baum's second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), the child hero Tip (who is actually a bewitched girl) is also an orphan. Beckwith notes that in no other American children's books do there seem to be as many orphans as in the Oz tales (85). Moore points out, however, that orphan protagonists in juvenile literature are common (10). Orphans are alluded to in Progress (281), although none plays a significant role.

16. Crop failures, Baum later explains, prevent Uncle Henry from making payments on the farm, and the mortgage will shortly be foreclosed (Emerald City, chap. 3).

17. Baum claims to have envisioned an island in the South Pacific (Hearn, Annotated 99). In Emerald City Baum isolates the fairyland behind a Barrier of Invisibility.

18. Although Baum does not give Dorothy's age in Oz, evidence from his subsequent Oz books, according to Harmetz (39-40), suggests she is about this age at the time of her first Oz visit.

19. In European folklore, witches are always depicted as evil, their power thought to derive from Satan. For discussions of Baum's creation of good witches, see Baum and MacFall (280 ff.), and Carpenter and Shirley (chap. 15).

20. A reinforcement of this silver image appears when Christian passes Hill Lucre with its silver mine to lure pilgrims away from the road to Zion (106).

21. If Baum were unfamiliar with the Isaiah passage, he might readily have looked it up when reading Bunyan, since Biblical references appear in the margins of most pre-twentieth-century editions of Progress.

22. During a scene at the Interpreter's House, straw becomes a metaphor for people (202).

23. Baum's lifelong interest in mechanical gadgetry is noted by Hearn (“L. Frank Baum” 59). McClelland observes that his works display a “strange affinity for decapitation” (49), which may owe something to Bunyan's Great-heart, who decapitates giants, or to Carroll's Queen of Hearts, who is obsessed with chopping off heads.

24. Each of the Oz travelers is assigned a room at the Wizard's palace, Dorothy's containing a fountain spraying green perfume (124). The idea of perfume in the City may come from the letter Christiana receives from the King of the Celestial City, which smells of the “best Perfume” (180); it may owe something, as well, to Mr. Stand-fast's assertion that Christ's name has been “as a Civit-Box, yea sweeter then all Perfumes” (311).

25. As Moore points out (127), only four of the fourteen Oz books by Baum have male protagonists, and one of them (Tip in Marvelous Land) is really a girl bewitched. Women wield the power in Oz, for good or ill, and true love, according to Beckwith (84), is found only between girls “when one is a little older than the other, innocent, sterile, and uncompetitive.” Moore concludes there are no authoritative father figures in all of Baum's work (127). Others have noted that the men and boys are either ineffectual, wicked, or robotic (Nye 12; Nathanson, Rainbow 69). Because Baum's automatons are male, Beckwith is led to believe that Baum rejected the natural process of procreation (85; see also Moore 126-32; and Hearn, “L. Frank Baum” 64).

26. He repeats the episode, in slightly different form, in the tenth chapter of The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913).

27. This description comes from an anonymous review of Oz, “A New Book for Children” (605).

28. Nye observes, “Oz is beyond all doubt a little girl's dream-home. Its atmosphere is feminine … with very little of the rowdy, frenetic energy of boys.” He notes that the few boys in Oz are “girls' boys, drawn as little girls assume boys should be. Baum could not make Oz fit boys, nor was he capable of making boys who could fit easily and naturally into Oz society” (12-13).

29. For instance, the marginal summaries and comments in A New Wonderland (1900, revised as The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo, 1903) repeat a similar practice in Progress. So does Baum's custom of including poems in the text: e.g., one appears in Oz (232), fifteen in Patchwork Girl. Baum's penchant for proper nouns describing characters' attributes, such as Jellia Jamb, the “very sweet” housekeeper in Marvelous Land, or Squealina Swyne in The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), may have been inspired by Bunyan's allegorical practice of naming characters after their most notable traits. Baum often tinkered with spelling when coining proper nouns: General Jinjur (Marvelous Land) and the Nome (Gnome) King in Ozma (for names of over 630 characters in the Oz series [not all Baum's] and descriptions of each, see Snow). Other episodes in Baum's Oz sequels that appear to derive from Bunyan might be cited, such as Tip's box of “Wishing Pills” in Marvelous Land (chap. 18), a scene probably influenced by the box of “universal Pill[s]” prescribed for one of Christiana's boys (229-30). Another echo is Baum's creation of Billina, the Yellow Hen in Ozma, and an earlier hen in the thirteenth tale of New Wonderland, both of which may have been inspired by Bunyan's scene at the Interpreter's House of a hen and her chicks (201-02).

30. Glinda's transcendence in Baum's myth climaxes in his final Oz book, Glinda of Oz (1920), the final chapter appropriately entitled “Glinda's Triumph.” One of Glinda's sources of power, as explained in Tik-Tok, is “a wonderful magic Record Book, in which is printed every event that takes place anywhere, just as soon as it happens” (28), an obvious allusion to the Christian Book of Life (Revelation 20:12).

I should like to acknowledge the encouragement and generous assistance of Lester R. Dickey, Elizabeth Keyser, Roberta Trites, my wife, Jeanine, and our children in bringing this study to completion; and to dedicate it to our granddaughter, Kayla J. Franson.

Selected Works Cited

Barasch, Marc. “The Healing Road to Oz.” Yoga Journal Nov.-Dec. 1991: 54-57.

Baum, Frank Joslyn, and Russell P. MacFall. To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz. Chicago: Reilly, 1961.

Baum, L. Frank. Tik-Tok of Oz. Chicago: Reilly, 1914.

———. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Introduction by Martin Gardner. New York: Dover, 1960.

Beckwith, Osmond. “The Oddness of Oz.” Children's Literature 5 (1976): 74-91.

Bewley, Marius. “The Land of Oz: America's Great Good Place.” Masks & Mirrors: Essays in Criticism. New York: Atheneum, 1970. 255-67.

Billman, Carol. “‘I've Seen the Movie’: Oz Revisited.” Literature and Film Quarterly 9 (1981): 241-50.

Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come. Ed. James Blanton Wharey. 2d ed., rev., Roger Sharrock. 1960. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967.

Carpenter, Angelica Shirley, and Jean Shirley. L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz. Minneapolis: Lerner, 1992.

Carpenter, Humphrey, and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1984.

Darton, F. J. Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1966.

Downing, David C. “Waiting for Godoz: A Post-Nasal Deconstruction of The Wizard of Oz.” Christianity and Literature 33 (1984): 28-30.

Gardner, Martin. “The Royal Historian of Oz.” In The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was. By Martin Gardner and Russel B. Nye. East Lansing: Michigan State U.P., 1957. 19-45.

———. “A Child's Garden of Bewilderment.” Saturday Review 17 July 1965: 18-19.

———. Introduction to The Magical Monarch of Mo. By L. Frank Baum. New York: Dover, 1968.

Georgiou, Constantine. Children and Their Literature. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1969.

Greene, David L., and Dick Martin. The Oz Scrapbook. New York: Random, 1977.

Harmetz, Aljean. The Making of the Wizard of Oz. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Hearn, Michael Patrick. “L. Frank Baum and the ‘Modernized Fairy Tale.’” Children's Literature in Education 10 (1979): 57-67.

Hearn, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Wizard of Oz. By L. Frank Baum. New York: Potter, 1973.

———, ed. The Wizard of Oz. By L. Frank Baum. New York: Schocken, 1983.

Littlefield, Henry M. “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.” American Quarterly 16 (1964): 47-58.

Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. Boston: Houghton, 1927.

Mannix, Daniel P. “The Father of the Wizard of Oz.” American Heritage 16.1 (1964): 36-47.

McClelland, Doug. Down the Yellow Brick Road: The Making of The Wizard of Oz. 1976. New York: Bonanza, 1989.

McMaster, Juliet. “The Trinity Archetype in The Jungle Books and The Wizard of Oz.” Children's Literature 20 (1992): 90-110.

Moore, Raylyn. Wonderful Wizard: Marvelous Land. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green U. Popular P., 1974.

Nathanson, Paul. “The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America.” American Academy of Religion Convention. Kansas City, 25 Nov. 1991, as reported by Peter Steinfels, “Following the Yellow Brick Road, and Finding a Spiritual Path,” New York Times 28 Nov. 1991: A16.

———. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Albany: State U. of New York P., 1991.

“A New Book for Children.” New York Times [Saturday Review of Books and Literature] 8 Sept. 1900: 605.

Nye, Russel B. “An Appreciation.” In The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was. By Martin Gardner and Russel B. Nye. East Lansing: Michigan State U.P., 1957. 1-17.

Potter, Jeanne O. “The Man Who Invented Oz.” Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine 13 Aug. 1939: 12.

Shulman, Alix Kates. “Ozomania under the Rainbow.” Village Voice 3 Mar. 1975: 33, 35.

Snow, Jack. Who's Who in Oz. Chicago: Reilly, 1954.

Steinfels, Peter. “Following the Yellow Brick Road, and Finding a Spiritual Path.” New York Times 28 Nov. 1991: A16.

Vidal, Gore. “On Rereading the Oz Books.” New York Review of Books 13 Oct. 1977: 38-42.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Utopia Americana. 1929. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft, 1970.

———. “‘Utopia Americana’: A Generation Afterwards.” American Book Collector Dec. 1962: 12-13.