SOURCE: Riley, Michael O. “Concentration on Oz: 1907-1910.” In Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, pp. 128-67. Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

[In the following excerpt, Riley focuses on Baum's numerous Oz sequels.]

To have pleased you, to have interested you, to have won your friendship, and perhaps your love, through my stories, is to my mind as great an achievement as to become President of the United States. Indeed, I would much rather be your story-teller, under these conditions, than to be the President. So you have helped me to fulfill my life's ambition, and I am more grateful to you, my dears, than I can express in words.

It's no use; no use at all. The children won't let me stop telling tales of the Land of Oz. I know lots of other stories, and I hope to tell them, some time or another; but just now my loving tyrants won't allow me. They cry: “Oz—Oz! more about Oz, Mr. Baum!” and what can I do but obey their commands?

—L. Frank Baum, “To My Readers” in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908)

J. R. R. Tolkien has been mentioned in this study in association with Baum not because Baum had any direct influence on the British writer, but because they had some basic things in common: a similar way of looking at fantasy, an instinctive understanding of the genre, and an ability to create an Other-world so real that their readers suspend disbelief almost without being aware of it. One great difference between them as creators of fantasy is that Baum's imagination was not naturally inclined, as Tolkien's was, toward the greater elaboration and development of a single Other-world.

Between 1896 and 1907 Baum created a large and varied repertory of independent imaginary countries and types of fantasies. Tolkien would later write: “Stories that are actually concerned primarily with ‘fairies’ … are relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting. Most good ‘fairy-stories’ are about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches.”¹ Baum had reached the same conclusion through experience with roughly six different forms of fantasy. He never theorized about it in print, as Tolkien did, but it is apparent from his published works. Before approaching the change in direction that his writing took in 1907, these six forms need to be briefly summarized, in order of appearance.

1. Stories that deal with marvelous machines and inventions of the future. These stories today would be classified under the heading of science fiction, but to Baum the inventions of his own day and the imagined possibilities of the future were too much like magic to be considered anything but fairy tales. His first uses of this form were not in stories for children, but in the “Our Landlady” column of 1891, which deals with future, household laborsaving inventions, and in his story “Yesterday at the Exposition,” which describes the exhibits at a world's fair in A.D. 2090. Machines make appearances in many of his children's stories, too, and this form reaches its fullest development in The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale (1901), in which Baum worked out the consequences, as well as the benefits, of unleashing limitless power onto mankind, and in which his attitude changed from one of optimism to one of caution. After The Master Key, this form of fantasy as a pure form disappeared from Baum's publications, although machines, as magical appliances, continued to appear in his stories.

2. Stories that take place completely in the imaginary world without the appearance of any character from our own world. Baum generally sidestepped Tolkien's conclusion that this kind of story is “as a rule not very interesting” by making children, citizens of that Other-world, the heroes. However, even that solution leaves a gap in the link of identification because only a character who is an outsider can fully appreciate the total otherness of the imaginary world. Baum's Adventures in Phunniland (1896) and The Enchanted Island of Yew (1903) are examples of this type of fantasy, and Queen Zixi of Ix (1905) was his last major use of this form.² Only one of his Oz books, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), falls into this category.

3. Stories that explain origins. The stories in Mother Goose in Prose (1897) fit under this heading because they attempt to provide backgrounds and explanations for the nursery rhymes. Baum's more mythical stories are also included in this category, and The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902) is his finest example of this form. In that book, Baum gave his own, fairy-tale version of the origin of Santa Claus, as well as hints about the mythical beginnings of the imaginary world described in that book—hints that grew in importance as his imaginary worlds were drawn together into one, great Other-world. This form of fantasy continued to play a secondary role in most of his later fantasies, especially in those about Oz, which as it developed needed more explanation about its history and beginnings.

4. The adventures of American characters “in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches.” Baum quickly found this to be the most popular form for his stories. His masterpiece, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), utilizes it, and all of Baum's full-length Oz stories—with the exception of The Marvelous Land of Oz—contain characters from America.

5. The adventures of fairies in our world. This form is a reversal of type 4. In it, fairies or other beings from an imaginary world are the main characters, and the stories relate their adventures in America, which appears to them just as strange, confusing, and wondrous as the imaginary worlds do to mortal characters. The form could be put to good use for satire, but seems to appeal more to adults than to children. Baum utilized it in some of his short stories, in the series of newspaper stories “Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz” (1904-1905), and in The Woggle-Bug Book (1905), but he did not use it in any of his major fantasies. It disappeared in his later writings, where the only hint of it is a fairy-land character's occasional reaction of surprise or wonder to mention of life in America.

6. The animal fairy story. In these tales, animals obey their own natural laws and do not act like humans, yet they have their own fairylands and fairies. Some of Baum's best stories, those in Animal Fairy Tales, make use of this form, but perhaps negative reaction to the strong morals and realistic portrayals of animal life discouraged him from developing it further. The Twinkle Tales (1906) and Policeman Bluejay (1907) are toned-down versions of this form, mixing human characters and animal fairylands.

The boundaries among these various types of stories are not always rigid, but elements from one type appearing in stories of another type still do not lessen the individuality of each one, nor does Baum's inventive and original device of loosely linking some of his stories together by means of the same hierarchy of immortals. Having the Forest of Burzee the source of magic in both The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and Queen Zixi of Ix in no way makes the stories similar or detracts from their individuality. Baum would also make use of elements from all these forms in his later books, but the boundaries among them almost ceased to exist as Oz emerged as his most important imaginary world.

TURNING POINT

After his “Laura Bancroft” books, Baum would publish fourteen more full-length fantasies, but David L. Greene quite rightly observed that with Policeman Bluejay Baum “concluded his experiments in writing fantasy for children.”³ That is, of course, hindsight, and it is certain that Baum felt that he was only temporarily bowing to his readers' demands by returning to Oz for a few more books, beginning with Ozma of Oz in 1907. He hoped that they would soon tire of that fairyland, but we know, also from hindsight, that Baum's readers have never tired of Oz and that for the rest of his life he was unable to break free from that most wonderful of fairylands. Thus although Baum himself did not know it, 1907 was the turning point for his Other-world.

Money was largely the reason that Baum returned to Oz with a third book. The failure of The Woggle-Bug had made it impossible for him to secure backing for any of the play projects he had worked on since then, and he needed capital because he had conceived an idea for a unique type of entertainment that he would have to finance himself. It was an economic fact that The Marvelous Land of Oz had sold better than any of his books since The Wizard [The Wonderful Wizard of Oz]. It is also highly likely that Baum's publishers, Reilly and Britton, had a great deal to do with his decision to write more Oz books. Because theirs was a new company, they were as desirous as Baum for more financially successful books from their principal author.

Baum knew from the letters from his readers that there was a large market for more Oz books. And although at first he did not quite comprehend the magic that the Land of Oz itself held for his readers, he was aware, also from their letters, that they considered Dorothy an integral part of an Oz story and that they also had great affection for the other original characters from The Wizard who had been absent from the second book. Some of the children even suggested plots, such as “Why don't you make Ozma and Dorothy meet, and have a good time together?”⁴ Thus his plan, as it evolved over the course of four books, was to reintroduce these popular characters, settle their fates satisfactorily, and make a definite end to Oz as a source for new stories.

Not surprisingly, the development of Baum's great Other-world was not smooth and logical; very often, the changes created glaring inconsistencies from book to book, but that is because Oz did not grow organically from a central idea. Rather, it developed in successive versions, each enlarging while superseding the one before and each reflecting Baum's current idea of what constituted the most magnificent and alluring fairyland in the world. That Baum's Oz does not exist continuously makes it impossible to speak of only one Oz—the version in The Marvelous Land (1904) is as different from the version in The Road to Oz (1909) as that is from the one in Glinda of Oz (1920).

One of the frequent complaints about series books is that the characters are usually two-dimensional and exhibit little complexity or development, but to look to Baum's Oz characters for three-dimensionality is to look in the wrong place. Fantasy has different rules from realistic stories; in fantasy, not only the characters, but also the backgrounds can be movable, changeable, and capable of growth. In the Oz books, it is Oz that is the real three-dimensional, developing main character.

It has been noted that Baum sometimes wrote too hastily and that he lacked the services of a vigilant editor. But, with the exception of The Marvelous Land, which had a different origin from the other books in the series, it is usually clear which changes from book to book were conscious and intentional and which were the result of carelessness. Part of the reason for the haste was Baum's very heavy writing schedule, but then, he depended on his writing for his income. Even if he had wanted to, he could not have written his saga of Oz in private; he could not have rewritten it in reverse, as Tolkien did The Lord of the Rings, to remove the inconsistencies before presenting it to the public in its perfected form.⁵ The stages of Oz's development are set out for all to see, but no matter how many discrepancies exist among the books, the Oz presented in each of them “works,” for even in the weakest there is still a very real sense of entering an authentic Other-world.

Baum's return to Oz was certainly not caused by any lessening of his creative powers; he still had many interesting countries and characters to create, but the emphasis changed, and almost all the new countries would be either borderlands of Oz or small lands inside Oz. Although he did not know it, he had created his last, important, independent imaginary country; therefore, before proceeding with the discussions of the books, it may be helpful to mention briefly the three primary methods Baum used to develop Oz: (1) the addition of information and details, as when Baum added the name and color of the northern Country of the Gillikins in The Marvelous Land of Oz; (2) the alteration of previously given facts, as when Glinda became a Sorceress instead of a Good Witch; and (3) the reinterpretations of the nature of Oz itself. This last, of course, had the most far-reaching effects. In addition, it should be mentioned that in the following years, Baum would also rob his earlier creations of their autonomy to enrich “the most attractive and delightful fairyland in all the world,”⁶ and, in the process, he would create his and America's great fairy continent.

OZMA OF OZ

Baum was forced by external pressures to develop Oz (unlike Tolkien, whose Other-world grew naturally of its own accord in his mind), which made for a dilemma because Baum's imagination was more geared toward creating new imaginary countries than elaborating previously invented ones. In his book for 1907, Ozma of Oz, Baum attempted to satisfy both his readers and himself by combining his Oz characters with a story that takes place outside Oz in a new fantasy country. By this device, he was able to construct a story and a background for it without having to take the “givens” of Oz into consideration; he was also largely able to avoid dealing with the confused state in which he had left that country in The Marvelous Land. The only part of the book that takes place in Oz is the final two chapters (out of twenty-one), which are in the nature of the celebration after the completion of a difficult adventure.

Yet even with so little of the story set in Oz, the development had begun, and Ozma is a milestone in Baum's writing career. In it, he began the process that would lead to his single Other-world, and in it he totally reversed the meaning and significance of Oz as it had first been created in The Wizard. It can be said that Ozma of Oz is the real beginning of the Oz series.

The main plot line of Ozma of Oz concerns the rescue of the queen of the seaside kingdom of Ev and her ten children from the Nome King, an underground monarch who is a combination of the benign Gnome King of The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and the wicked King Scowleyow of The Magical Monarch of Mo.⁷ The cruel king of Ev had sold his wife and children to the Nome King in exchange for a long life, but later, overcome with remorse, he had drowned himself in the sea. The Nome King has transformed his new slaves into ornaments for his magnificent palace. Although he and his subjects are immortals, his special magic comes from a magical jeweled belt he wears.

The ruler of a neighboring kingdom, hearing of the plight of the royal family of Ev, brings her army and closest advisers to Ev with the intention of rescuing the slaves. There they meet an American child and a yellow hen, Billina, who had been washed up on the shore, and a copper clockwork man, Tik-Tok, who had been discovered by the child. They all join forces in the rescue attempt.

In a show of good nature, the Nome King agrees to let the rescuers enter his palace one by one and try to guess which ornaments are the people from Ev. If a guess is correct, the person's true form will be restored; if no guess is correct, the rescuer will also be transformed into an ornament. The catch is that there are thousands upon thousands of ornaments in the palace, and one by one the rescuers fail and are turned into ornaments until Billina learns the secret and restores them and the royal family to their proper forms. The Nome King's true evil nature then emerges, and he assembles his army to prevent the people of the upper world from leaving. They defeat the king by cleverness and capture his magic belt, after which, they restore the royal family of Ev to their rightful position.

Ozma of Oz has one of Baum's most interesting and tightly constructed plots. He was careful to include enough necessary information early in the narrative to give the successive stages of the story a logic and inevitability that are lacking in the more arbitrary adventures in John Dough and the Cherub. He also delayed the full resolution of the plot until close to the end of the book to keep the return journey from the Nome King's domain from being anticlimactic. Throughout, the plot shows evidence of unusually careful thought and planning, and it probably contains less irrelevant material than any of his other books. I have, though, deliberately summarized the plot without mention of Oz to demonstrate how little the special attributes of that country have to do with it.

The Oz elements can be summarized briefly and separately: Dorothy and her Uncle Henry are on their way to Australia to visit relatives when Dorothy is swept off the deck of a ship by the strong winds of a storm. She manages to save herself by clinging to a large, wooden chicken coop that had been washed from the ship. The coop, with Dorothy and one of the hens, drifts to the shore of the Land of Ev, where the girl finds Tik-Tok and meets with Ozma and her old friends the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion from the Land of Oz. She also meets a new friend from Oz, the Hungry Tiger. They have come to Ev with Ozma's comic-operetta army to try to restore the royal family. Dorothy joins the expedition, and, after interesting and exciting adventures, they achieve their goal. Dorothy then goes to Oz with her friends and finally returns to her Uncle Henry in Australia by means of the magic belt captured from the Nome King.

Ev is one of Baum's more interesting creations; it contains unusual and clever characters, and its geography is more fully detailed than that of Ix, Noland, or any of the countries in John Dough [John Dough and the Cherub]; yet with the addition of the Oz elements, Ev becomes of only secondary importance. Although it appears in only two chapters, Oz dominates the book, and the primary interest of Ev shifts from its uniqueness to its position in relation to Oz. Whether or not Baum fully realized it at the time, he was conceding to the view held by his readers that Oz was the most important of his imaginary creations. Oz was emerging as the most powerful nation in his imaginary world, just as the United States was, during Baum's lifetime, emerging as one of the most powerful nations in this world.

In The Wizard the strange and beautiful, but illusory, Land of Oz is the place of danger and trial, the ordeal through which Dorothy has to go to reach her goal of home. Baum subtly changed all that in Ozma: the illusion is made reality, and Oz becomes not the ordeal but the goal, the place of the heart's desire and, in a very real sense, Dorothy's true home because Ozma crowns her a princess of Oz, thus making her a part of that land.

Baum's reversal of the nature of Oz is evident in the plot. If Baum had retained the structure of this book, but had made it a non-Oz fantasy, the final two chapters, which recount events that take place after the mission is accomplished, would have been anticlimactic, just as the Hiland/Loland section of John Dough is. But the significance of the final section in Oz is much greater than its role of concluding the story, because underneath all the exciting and interesting adventures encountered during the rescue, there has been the feeling that Oz is the real and ultimate goal. Once in Oz, Dorothy returns to the everyday world only with reluctance and only because a “magic picture” that Ozma owns shows her that her Uncle Henry's health has worsened because of his worry about her. And even though Dorothy returns to the real world, she does so only because of her love for her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. Ozma even promises to look at Dorothy in the Magic Picture at certain intervals in the event that she should ever want to return to Oz.

Once Baum had changed Oz from a place to escape from into a great and good place to be sought, he opened the way for a whole new kind of development, and Oz became the haven and the goal for almost all his American characters—in much the same way as America was viewed at that time as a place of haven and freedom by the downtrodden of Europe. The problem became not how to leave Oz, but how to reach it, and a new type of plot entered his fantasies—the quest for Oz.

BEGINNING OF THE CONTINENT

Ev is the first of the fantasy countries Baum created that border Oz. He would continue to invent countries to surround Oz, but their contributions would be, like those of the countries that adjoin Mo, to enhance and make more real the geography of Oz itself. In The Marvelous Land of Oz, the Gump and its passengers reach “the terrible outside world”⁸; while it is clear in that instance that Baum meant our world, even after Oz becomes surrounded by other fairylands, anything beyond the desert is sometimes referred to as the outside world. In Ozma he made it clear that the “line of enchantment,” or whatever separates our world from that one, is a good distance outside Oz. When Dorothy and Billina the hen are floating on the sea, Dorothy is surprised that the hen can talk—an indication, she realizes, that she is not in the everyday world. She remarks, “If we were in the Land of Oz, I wouldn't think it so queer, because many of the animals can talk in that fairy country. But out here in the ocean must be a good long way from Oz.”⁹ It is also significant that this is the first time that Baum referred to Oz as a “fairy country” within the text of one of his full-length stories.

Baum also made his usual comparison between civilized and uncivilized countries: Dorothy says about Ev that “this is a new, wild country, without even trolley-cars or tel'phones. The people here havn't been discovered yet, I'm sure.”¹⁰ Ev, though, is described as so beautiful and pleasant that there is little doubt about which Baum preferred. Ev may have lacked modern conveniences, but civilization lacked magic and wonder as Baum pointed out when he had Dorothy say to Billina, “[Y]ou wouldn't be able to talk in any civ'lized country, like Kansas, where no fairies live at all.”¹¹

Ev is a kingdom that bears many resemblances to southern California; the first trees Dorothy sees are punita, cottonwood, and eucalyptus.¹² On one side, Ev is bordered by the sea; on the other side is the desert that separates it from the Munchkin Country of Oz; and in the north, it contains rocky valleys and mountains, under which are the domains of the Nome King.

It was to the desert that forms the boundary between Ev and Oz that Baum made the first modification to his previous descriptions of Oz. Ozma and her followers cross it on a magic carpet that unrolls in front of them and that protects them from “the deadly, life-destroying sands.”¹³ Before this, there had been no indication that the desert is unusual. A normal desert is enough of a barrier to prevent Dorothy from leaving Oz on her first visit there, and in The Marvelous Land, Glinda actually chases the witch Mombi onto the sands of that desert. By this change in the nature of the desert (which is permanent), Baum made Oz even less accessible to the rest of the world and preserved its uniqueness by limiting contacts with the countries he was beginning to place around it. One wonders also if that desert is symbolic of some barrier that Baum would have liked to place around his own personal paradise—that of his lost childhood or of California—to protect it from insensitive and jaded intrusions from the real world.

The next modification that Baum made to Oz is clear when Ozma arrives in Ev and announces, “I am Ruler of the Land of Oz.”¹⁴ Baum had made that change in the newspaper stories “Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz,” and repeated it in Ozma of Oz without explanation. Later in the book, he went into more detail about the government of Oz:

For Ozma of Oz ruled the King of the Munchkins, the King of the Winkies, the King of the Quadlings and the King of the Gillikins just as those kings ruled their own people; and this supreme ruler of the Land of Oz lived in a great town of her own, called the Emerald City, which was in the exact center of the four kingdoms of the Land of Oz.¹⁵

The change in the structure of the government was an inspired one, being a type that was more familiar to his American readers. Ozma, however, is the absolute ruler and no elected leader; Oz is not a democracy. (The description of Oz's government, though, contains the only example of carelessness or lapse of memory, as opposed to conscious modifications, that appears in this book. Baum seems to have forgotten that the Tin Woodman rules the Winkies; Glinda the Good, the Quadlings; and the Good Witch of the North, the Gillikins.)

Baum, of course, had to have Dorothy brought up to date on what had happened in Oz during her absence, and it is interesting to note the ways Baum manipulated this information to correct and eliminate some of the confusion in The Marvelous Land. He wrote that Dorothy “was much interested in the story of Ozma, who had been, when a baby, stolen by a wicked old witch and transformed into a boy. … Then it was found that she was the only child of the former Ruler of Oz, and was entitled to rule in his place.”¹⁶ Baum conveniently dropped the role that he had given the Wizard in Ozma's abduction in The Marvelous Land; his readers had let him know that the Wizard was a more popular character than he had suspected. He also altered Ozma's father from ruler of the Emerald City to ruler of all Oz, making his position consistent with hers, and he said nothing about the Emerald City having existed before the Wizard's arrival.

By setting the majority of the story outside Oz, Baum was able to avoid making a decision about the color scheme of Oz or the exact shape of the country. He did mention “the green slopes” of “the Munchkin territory,”¹⁷ but said nothing else about color, not even concerning the Emerald City.

Baum's new characters—the Hungry Tiger, Tik-Tok, and Billina—were happy inspirations, fitting in well as new residents of Oz and becoming popular with his readers. He also reintroduced some of his characters from The Marvelous Land: the Sawhorse, which the Scarecrow rides to Ev; Jinjur, now married and ruling her husband as she had tried to rule the Emerald City; the Woggle-Bug, now president of the new College of Art and Athletic Perfection; and Jack Pumpkinhead, “a little overripe but still active.”¹⁸

Ozma of Oz is a transitional book. The story can stand alone without the section in Oz; the action is complete, and the place of safety and repose is reached in Ev. However, the visit to Oz at the end is the reward for both Dorothy and Baum's readers to whom the main point of the story is Dorothy's eventual return to Oz, but that return is not the main point of the plot. Only the readers' prior knowledge of Dorothy and of Oz as a desirable place gives Oz its dominant role and superimposes the larger, overarching goal onto the plot of the rescue of the royal family of Ev.

DOROTHY AND THE WIZARD IN OZ

Baum repeated the structure of having the dangerous or difficult adventures take place outside Oz and introducing Oz as the place of celebration at the end of the journey in his next two books, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and The Road to Oz, but with a difference. The attainment of Oz becomes more obviously the goal of the journey; Oz becomes the place of sanctuary as well as the place of celebration; and getting Dorothy to Oz is the plot of both books. From a structural standpoint, this makes both books far weaker than Ozma of Oz because the connecting link among the various, and sometimes unrelated, adventures of the journeys is solely the reason given in each story for the journey to Oz.

The “reason” given in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Baum's book for 1908, is a vital one—safety. Dorothy and her Uncle Henry have stopped in San Francisco on their way back from Australia. Uncle Henry has gone on ahead to Los Angeles to visit relatives, and Dorothy and her new pet, a kitten named Eureka, are taking an evening train to join him. The train has made very slow progress because there have been frequent earthquakes during the night,¹⁹ and it arrives only shortly before dawn. Dorothy and Eureka are met by her cousin Zeb, a boy near her own age, and his buggy and horse named Jim. As they start off in the ominous half-light, the earth continues to shake. Suddenly it splits into a large crack right under the horse, who falls in, drawing the buggy after him. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, Dorothy and her companions fall swiftly at first and then more slowly. Dorothy becomes calmer when she realizes “that she had merely started upon another adventure, which promised to be just as queer and unusual as were those she had before encountered.”²⁰ The impression of being in another fairy adventure is strengthened when they see different-colored globes of light below them and when Jim is suddenly able to speak.

The landscape toward which they are falling resembles that on the surface of the earth, but because of the colored “suns,” it looks as though it were lit by light coming through a stained-glass window. The country they come to rest in is the Land of the Mangaboos, which is inhabited by a race of beautiful people who are vegetable rather than flesh and blood and, therefore, have no hearts or human kindness. This underground world probably owes some of its inspiration to the underground world created by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his novel The Coming Race. Bulwer's race of people are so far advanced in logic as to be heartless where human emotions are concerned.

Dorothy and her companions are not the only mortals who are trapped underground by the earthquake. Her old friend Oz the Wizard arrives shortly after she does. After leaving Oz, he had again become a circus balloonist, and his balloon also descended through one of the great cracks in the earth. He has with him nine tiny piglets with which he does fake magic tricks, and one of the running jokes of the story is Eureka's desire to eat them.

The Mangaboos decree that the intruders must be killed, and even though Dorothy and the Wizard pick a new princess from the royal bush, the fresh ruler upholds her subjects' decision. Thus begins the flight of Dorothy and her friends from one danger to another in their effort to reach the surface of the earth. Through an upward-inclining tunnel, they reach the beautiful Valley of Voe, which contains vicious, invisible bears; by a stairway in Pyramid Mountain in Voe, they arrive in the Land of Naught where the dreaded, wooden Gargoyles live; escaping the Gargoyles, they continue their ascent in a dark tunnel where they encounter a “Den of Dragonnettes”; and finally, they end up trapped in an enormous, dark cavern where, far out of reach above them, they can see a single ray of real sunlight coming through a crack in the ceiling. Only then—when everything seems lost—does Dorothy remember that Ozma has promised to look at her periodically in the Magic Picture and to bring her to Oz if she makes a certain secret sign. Dorothy makes the sign, and she, and then her friends, are magically transported to the Emerald City.

During the festivities to celebrate the return of Dorothy and the Wizard, one of the piglets disappears, and Eureka is tried for murder. The piglet is found unharmed, but Eureka remains in disgrace because she had intended to eat it. She begs Dorothy to send her home; Zeb and Jim also feel that they do not belong in Oz; and Dorothy knows that she must return to her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, who again believe that she is dead. With the Magic Belt, Ozma sends Zeb and Jim back to California, and Dorothy and Eureka to Kansas, where Uncle Henry had returned. The elderly Wizard is given a home in Oz.

The only point in this story where both the plot and the imaginary world falter is in the transition from the underground world to Oz. Dorothy's too convenient recollection of Ozma's promise to look at her in the Magic Picture is not believable. Why did not Ozma do something to help them earlier? Baum created this problem himself: in Ozma of Oz, he stated that Ozma will look at Dorothy only “every Saturday morning,” but in Dorothy and the Wizard, he needlessly changed this to “every day at four o'clock.”²¹

The problem with the imaginary world is that after precisely detailing the geographical relationships among the underground countries, Baum gave no clue to the geographical relationship of Oz to them. For all the reader knows, Oz could be directly above or half a world away, and this failure to link the imaginary countries together damages the reality of the secondary world. However, Baum lessened the seriousness of the damage by continuing the themes introduced in the underground world in Oz: danger still threatens there in the possibility that Eureka may be executed, and Zeb and Jim's dissatisfaction with Oz make that country only another short stopping place in their struggle to reach home.

Very little of the story is set in Oz (six out of twenty chapters) and that part only in the Emerald City, but those final chapters are not anticlimactic because the reader's knowledge of Oz is not expected to be restricted to the information offered in that short section. Baum made no major changes to Oz, but there are some significant additions and alterations.

Baum made two noteworthy additions. First, Oz has definitely acquired the status of fairyland and is repeatedly referred to as a “fairy country” or a “fairyland.” And second, for the first time, Baum gave some indication of its shape and of the way the countries within it are arranged. He states that the Emerald City was built “just where the four countries cornered together,”²² which, since the four countries correspond to the four directions, can only mean that they are roughly triangular, like the four main kingdoms of Yew. He also described the royal flag of Oz as “divided into four quarters, one being colored sky-blue, another pink, a third lavender and a fourth white. In the center was a large emerald-green star. … The colors represented the four countries of Oz, and the green star the Emerald City.”²³ It is not stated, but the assumption is that the flag is the same rectangular shape as the American flag since Baum, in the same paragraph, named the Oz national anthem “The Oz Spangled Banner.” He was careless in his choice of colors: pink and lavender are shades of the red and purple that should refer to the countries of the Quadlings and Gillikins, but white does not work for the yellow Winkie Country. It is not a serious lapse, and it should be remembered that it had been four years since Baum had last mentioned the countries having special colors.

What is not carelessness is his mention of the characters wearing clothing of colors other than green in the Emerald City.²⁴ He was establishing a pattern that he would follow throughout the rest of the series whereby green predominates in the outward appearance of the city, but other colors appear in costumes and interiors. He also seems to have been in the process of toning down some of the more magical aspects of the city that he had introduced in The Marvelous Land. When the Wizard and Zeb arrive in the city, it is described as “bathed in a grateful green light”²⁵—not green sunlight, as he had said before, but merely “green light,” which would be expected in a city built of polished green marble and adorned with sparking emeralds.

The alterations that Baum made are in the histories of both Ozma and the Wizard, making them more consistent with The Wizard and farther from the confused version given in The Marvelous Land. In the process, he added to the prediscovery history of Oz.

The Wizard explains that the reason the people accepted him so quickly as their ruler was because his first two initials, which had been painted on his circus balloon, are O. Z. And he goes on to say:

“At that time … there were four separate countries in this Land, each one of the four being ruled by a Witch. But the people thought my power was greater than that of the Witches; and perhaps the Witches thought so too, for they never dared oppose me. I ordered the Emerald City to be built just where the four countries cornered together, and when it was completed I announced myself the Ruler of the Land of Oz, which included all the four countries of the Munchkins, the Gillikins, the Winkies and the Quadlings. Over this Land I ruled in peace for many years, until I grew old and longed to see my native city once again.”²⁶

Baum thus made it definite that the Wizard was ruler of all Oz, which had been only implied in The Wizard. And in Dorothy and the Wizard, he has presented the Wizard as the unopposed ruler, not as the loser of a war with the Wicked Witch of the West who was afraid or unable to leave his own city, as he was depicted in The Wizard. Baum also refuted his statement in The Marvelous Land that the Emerald City had been in existence before the Wizard's arrival by having the Wizard himself state that he built it. Baum further emphasized this point by mentioning three other times within the course of the story that the Wizard built the Emerald City.²⁷

In turn, Ozma tells the Wizard her own history:

“Many years before you came here this Land was united under one Ruler as it is now, and the Ruler's name was always ‘Oz,’ which means in our language ‘Great and Good’; or, if the Ruler happened to be a woman, her name was always ‘Ozma.’ But once upon a time four Witches leagued together to depose the king and rule the four parts of the kingdom themselves; so when the Ruler, my grandfather, was hunting one day, one Wicked Witch named Mombi stole him and carried him away, keeping him a close prisoner.”²⁸

When the Wizard reminds Ozma that there were two Good Witches in Oz when he arrived, she replies that “a good Witch had conquered Mombi in the North and Glinda the Good had conquered the evil Witch in the South. But Mombi was still my grandfather's jailor, and afterward my father's jailor. When I was born she transformed me into a boy.”²⁹ It will be noticed that the former ruler of Oz who was deposed is now her grandfather, thus making it even more impossible that the Wizard had a hand in kidnapping the rightful ruler.

The Wizard says that he grew old in the Emerald City—something he also said in The Wizard—and Baum has Ozma kindly say to him, “So, as you are now too old to wander abroad and work in a circus, I offer you a home here as long as you live.”³⁰ With this incident, and the mention of the deaths of Ozma's grandfather and father, Baum again emphasized that the people of Oz are not immortal and that time acts there just as it does in our world. There is still another suggestion of mortality in something he did not mention in this story. All the companions from The Marvelous Land, including the Gump, are reintroduced except for Jack Pumpkinhead, who is not mentioned at all. He had been described as “a little overripe” in Ozma, and the impression left in this story is that he finally spoiled. However, the illustrator, John R. Neill, confused the issue by picturing him twice, once on the “List of Chapters” page and again on the last color plate.³¹

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz is literally and figuratively one of Baum's darkest fantasies. Even the transition to the brilliant sunshine of Oz does not completely dispel the gloom, for in Oz he introduced the themes of murder and judgment. That darkness and those themes place this book among those of Baum's writings that seem to demand interpretation on more than one level of meaning. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the mystical Life and Adventures of Santa Claus are other full-length stories that come most readily to mind, but there are elements and episodes in just about every fantasy he wrote that transcend the stories and suggest richer levels of meaning that, as Tolkien noted, reach ahead toward the supernatural or back toward the world of men. In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Dorothy makes her third violent and life-threatening entrance into fairyland, and for the third time, her aunt and uncle assume that she is dead. This suggests that Oz is something more than a fairyland, and critics have speculated that it may even be a version of heaven.³² Of course, the idea of Oz as heaven throws an entirely different light on Baum's uses of “the journey to Oz” as plots for some of the stories, because the journey would then be more than an adventurous sightseeing trip: it would be the progress of the soul to heaven. Such a reading is almost impossible to avoid in Dorothy and the Wizard, which is in some respects Baum's Divine Comedy. And the surprising thing that supports such an interpretation is that the transition to Oz, which at first seems to be a flaw in the plot structure, becomes, instead, absolutely necessary and right. The reinterpretation of Oz in the following books make it very clear that if Baum did not come to view Oz as heaven, he did come to consider it an Earthly Paradise.

Baum would have been familiar with Dante's masterpiece. There was already the classic translation by H. F. Cary, which he could have read as a child, and in 1867, the most popular American poet of the time, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published his own translation. Also in the 1860s, Gustave Doré's enormously popular illustrations for The Divine Comedy made it one of the premiere “coffee-table books” of the era. No household with any pretense of culture could avoid some familiarity with Dante's poem.³³

Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871) has already been mentioned as a possible source for this Oz book, and Jules Verne's A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) is another probable influence. However, Dante's story provides the closest correlation to Baum's and makes Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz a particularly good example of “how Baum assimilated details, motifs, and themes from various sources … and reworked them.”³⁴ The story opens in darkness with cataclysmic upheavals of the earth; the dawn does not come because “the sky had grown darker again and the wind made queer sobbing sounds as it swept over the valley.”³⁵ Dorothy and her companions descend into an underground world where the cold, heartless vegetable people bring to mind Dante's frozen, lowest circle of hell. There they find a magician, the Wizard, to act as their guide and protector, and they begin their ascent through mountains, just as Dante and Virgil ascend the Mountain of Purgatory. They strive upward just as far as their human ability and their human guide can take them, but are finally left in a dark cavern gazing at a ray of sunlight still far above. It is then that Ozma (acting like a personification of Grace) lifts them the rest of the way to Oz. Once there, they are judged; the trial of Eureka is only the most obvious example. Jim and Zeb, to a certain extent, clearly do not belong in Oz, and they, like Eureka, are sent home. The Wizard is judged worthy and allowed to stay. Dorothy, of course, already belongs to Oz and could remain, but her love and sense of duty make her decide to return home. These differing judgments are Baum's first indication that Oz is not open to everyone; that to be a welcome visitor there, one must have special qualities of goodness and innocence. Oz is not for the masses.

THE FAIRYLOGUE AND RADIO-PLAYS

While Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz was in production, Baum had again been involved with the theater, this time in his most unusual theatrical experiment. His stage extravaganzas had been somewhat old-fashioned, but this new venture took advantage of the most advanced technology of the day; it was a two-hour combination of narration, original music, live actors, colored slides, and color motion pictures. The grandiose title of this unique form of entertainment was The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, and it presented the stories The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Land of Oz, and John Dough and the Cherub, with some scenes from Dorothy and the Wizard. It must have been a sumptuous production: Baum, dressed in a white formal suit and backed by an orchestra, provided the narration, and the stories were presented by live actors, 114 glass slides, and 23 motion-picture clips.³⁶ It had been only several years since motion pictures had first been used to tell a story, and D. W. Griffith would not direct his first film until 1909, but Baum already was presenting story films in color to his audiences. The films were made by the new Chicago studio of Selig Polyscope, and they had been hand-colored, frame by frame, in Paris by Duval Frères. Baum explained that the term “Radio” referred to Michel Radio, the inventor of the colored film process.³⁷

Baum's adaptations were faithful to his original stories, emphasizing again his belief that his stories would make good theatrical entertainments in their unaltered forms. The only major significance that The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays had for his imaginary world is that one of the glass slides represented the first map of Oz; it pictured a square land, surrounded by desert on all sides. Inside the country were the four triangular kingdoms corresponding to the four directions and colored their appropriate colors, with the Emerald City in the center.³⁸

The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays opened in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on September 24, 1908, and toured the Midwest and New York until the middle of December.³⁹ The venture was a success with audiences, but it was a financial disaster. The costs of paying a full orchestra and a cast of actors and of transporting them and the equipment from town to town made the entertainment lose money even while playing to full houses. And added to that deficit was the great initial cost of producing the films and slides. Unfortunately, the majority of the debt fell on Baum and wiped out any financial security he had been able to achieve. The complete extent of the disaster was not immediately apparent, but his writing became even more important to him because it was the only sure means he had to pay off the debts.

THE ROAD TO OZ

What is surprising is that none of the stress caused by Baum's financial difficulties is apparent in his next fantasy, The Road to Oz (1909), which was probably being written during this time. The story opens with a “shaggy” man asking Dorothy the way to Butterfield, Kansas. Deciding that it would be easier to show him than to try to explain the complicated directions, she takes him to the right road, but once there, the Kansas landscape looks unfamiliar to Dorothy also. She suddenly sees that roads are going in all directions from where they are standing, and she has no idea of how to return to the farmhouse. Finally she, Toto, and the Shaggy Man pick a road at random, and they soon find that they are in fairyland and much closer to Oz than to Kansas. Along the road they meet Button-Bright, a lost young American boy, and Polychrome, a daughter of the rainbow, also lost, and they have several interesting adventures before they reach Oz just in time to attend the birthday celebrations of Princess Ozma.

From the standpoint of plot, The Road to Oz is one of the weakest books in the series: only one of the adventures has any suspense to it; the mysterious object of the journey (the birthday celebration) is apparent early in the story; and Ozma's explanation that she confused the roads to bring Dorothy to Oz for the party is unsatisfactory. Why did she not use the Magic Belt? However, from the standpoint of the development of Oz, The Road to Oz is one of the most important books in the series.

There is a unity about the four Oz books published between 1907 and 1910 that indicates that Baum had in mind some sort of overall plan. After the further adventures of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman in The Marvelous Land of Oz, his readers had let him know that they also wanted to learn more about the other characters from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, especially Dorothy. This request probably also made him realize that it was his original story and not the stage play that had the most claim on his readers' affections, since he subsequently dropped the references to the plot of the play. All four books concern journeys that Dorothy makes to Oz, and after reintroducing the little Kansas girl as well as the Cowardly Lion in Ozma of Oz, the Wizard in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, and Toto in The Road to Oz, he attempted to round off and end the series in The Emerald City of Oz by having Dorothy and her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry go to live in Oz.

The amount of the story set in Oz increases in each successive book, almost as though Baum needed time to come to terms with the country that he originally had no intention of developing (in The Road to Oz, twelve out of twenty-four chapters are set in Oz). Within the framework of these four books, The Road to Oz fits beautifully. Its pastoral, sunny nature makes it a perfect foil for the darkness and danger of Dorothy and the Wizard and sets off, by giving a much needed breathing space, the serious and ominous story of The Emerald City. Thus, in context, the serenity of and absence of violent and threatening incidents in The Road to Oz are assets. The very lack of a strong plot enabled Baum to concentrate more fully on the nature of Oz itself, and the book, in addition to clearing up more of the past confusion, contains a radical reinterpretation of Oz and of Baum's entire imaginary world.

The alterations and reinterpretations are best seen in their proper places in the story. The first unusual thing that one notices about this book is that it contains Dorothy's first non-life-threatening entrance into fairyland, as though she has stepped across some line of enchantment. At first, the landscape seems no different from the familiar Kansas countryside, and it is not until she and her friends visit a city of talking foxes that she finds out what has happened. She asks the Fox King, “[W]e are in Kansas now, aren't we?” and is surprised to learn that Foxville “is nearer to Oz than it is to Kansas.”⁴⁰ This peaceful transition makes Oz seem closer to America than do the transitions in any of the other books in the series, and Ozma's later explanation that she enchanted the roads to bring Dorothy to the birthday celebration does little to dispel that feeling.

One of the strengths of the book lies in the three new characters whom Baum introduced: the Shaggy Man, Button-Bright, and Polychrome. They all became popular with his readers and reappear in later books. He had a genius for creating unusual and interesting characters, and one of his best is the Shaggy Man, who may have been inspired by James Whitcomb Riley's popular poems about “The Raggedy Man,” the hired man who is so good with children. “Hobo” and “bum” are the wrong words to use to describe the Shaggy Man because there are no indications that he was forced by circumstances or any deficiencies within himself to be what he is. Terminology from the 1960s best describes him: he has “dropped out” and is “doing his own thing.” He is a wanderer who wants only to love and be loved by everyone; he cares nothing for money, and his shaggy appearance is not a sign of his poverty, but a badge of his individuality. The society of Oz, as Baum reinterprets it in this book, suits the Shaggy Man perfectly, and he asks if he may be permitted to live there, a request that Ozma grants “for a time, at least. If he proved honest and true she promised to let him live there always, and the shaggy man was anxious to earn this reward.”⁴¹

Baum knew well that such an individualist was not often welcomed in American society: “In the big, cold, outside world people did not invite shaggy men to their homes, and this shaggy man of ours had slept more in hay-lofts, and stables than in comfortable rooms.”⁴² And it is a fine example of Baum's ideal of tolerance and understanding that in Oz the Shaggy Man is treated with as much respect and honor as the most powerful ruler. Baum is especially sensitive when he has Ozma, while providing the Shaggy Man with a new wardrobe of silks, satins, and velvets, respect his individuality and make those new clothes as quaintly shaggy as his old ones.

These are not sentiments that are peculiar to this one book; they run throughout Baum's writings—he had great sympathy for unusual and individual people. When Polychrome remarks, “You have some queer friends, Dorothy,” the little Kansas girl answers, “The queerness doesn't matter, so long as they're friends.”⁴³

The Shaggy Man, like the humbug Wizard, belongs to that class of Baum's adult male characters who could be labeled “misfits of society.” In fact, the majority of his good male characters fall either into that category or into the nonhuman one (the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman). It seems that Baum did not have much faith or confidence in the aggressive American male who was bringing “civilization” to this new country. It is obvious that Baum had somewhat advanced or unorthodox ideas about power and authority. More often than not, his rulers are women and children, and even though he poked fun at the suffragette movement in The Marvelous Land, Jinjur and her female army are opposed by Glinda the Good and her female army, and the rule of Oz is not restored to the male Scarecrow but given to the rightful ruler, the child Ozma. Baum's male figures provide protection for the children on their journeys, but the real authority belongs to the female characters such as Glinda the Good and Ozma. The Wizard, who had built and ruled the Emerald City, now stands “modestly behind Ozma's throne” in The Road to Oz.⁴⁴

Oz is more clearly the goal and purpose of the journey in The Road to Oz than it was in the previous two books, and Baum emphasized that other fairylands exist outside the borders of Oz, a change that he had introduced in Ozma. He also stressed the isolation of Oz among those other fairy countries by stating in even stronger terms the dangers of the desert surrounding Oz. When the road leads Dorothy and her companions to the edge of that desert, they find a sign that reads:

All Persons are Warned not to Venture upon this Desert For the Deadly Sands will Turn Any Living Flesh to Dust in an Instant. Beyond This Barrier is the Land of Oz But no one can Reach that Beautiful Country because of these Destroying Sands.⁴⁵

It is by the Shaggy Man's ingenuity that the travelers are able to cross the desert unharmed; it is another of his deeds that carries weight with Ozma when she comes to consider letting him live in Oz.

Once the characters are in Oz, Baum immediately tackled the problem of the color scheme of the country—which he had largely avoided since The Marvelous Land of Oz—and he arrived at a workable compromise among all the various statements he had made about color in Oz, including the illusory color of the Emerald City in The Wizard. Thus when they reach the Winkie Country, Dorothy explains “that most everything here is yellow that has any color at all,” and it is clear from the descriptions that Baum meant the blossoms on the trees and the flowers rather than the trunks, stems, and leaves.⁴⁶ The grass may be either green or “yellowish green,” but there is no doubt that anything that is naturally green in our world retains green as its base hue in Oz. This compromise, while avoiding the monotony of the color scheme in The Marvelous Land, also enabled Baum to include more color descriptions than appear in Ozma and Dorothy and the Wizard.

The exterior of the Emerald City is still basically green, but now gold is also present in its decoration, while the interiors and the clothes of its people can be any color.⁴⁷ Baum did give a subtle nod to his older ideas when he described the Little Guardian of the Gates as still wearing green spectacles, the only person so described.⁴⁸ The compromise, however, is not consistently used in the later books, although it is the version of the color scheme most often indicated.

Tik-Tok and Billina are sent to meet the travelers, and they escort them to the new tin palace of the Tin Woodman, the Emperor of the Winkies. At this point, Baum linked his modern fairy tales to the older tradition when he has Dorothy say at the sight of the new palace, “It's the fairy dwelling of a fairy prince,” and one realizes how well the enchanted Woodman fits that tradition.⁴⁹

Baum's reinterpretation of Oz in this book affects three major areas: the nature of the society of Oz, the nature of the people of Oz, and the nature of the fantasy world in which Oz exists. The Tin Woodman introduces the first of these subjects when the Shaggy Man remarks of the new palace that “it must have cost a lot of money.”⁵⁰ The Tin Woodman answers:

“Money! Money in Oz! … What a queer idea! Did you suppose we are so vulgar as to use money here?”

“Why not?” asked the shaggy man.

“If we used money to buy things with, instead of love and kindness and the desire to please one another, then we should be no better than the rest of the world. … Fortunately money is not known in the Land of Oz at all. We have no rich, and no poor; for what one wishes the others all try to give him, in order to make him happy, and no one in all Oz cares to have more than he can use.”⁵¹

Thus despite the fact that money has played a part in previous Oz books, Baum dispensed with it on his way to making Oz an ideal world. A little later in the Emerald City, the Tin Woodman elaborates on the way society in Oz is organized: “To be sure they [the people of Oz] work … this fair city could not be built or cared for without labor, nor could the fruit and vegetables and other food be provided for the inhabitants to eat. But no one works more than half his time, and the people of Oz enjoy their labors as much as they do their play.”⁵²

The second, and even more important, facet of Baum's reinterpretation is introduced shortly before the travelers reach the Emerald City. It is certain that Baum's readers had noticed the absence of Jack Pumpkinhead in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, and Baum reintroduced that popular character with the explanation that when his head spoiled, Ozma carved him another one. By this time, he has discarded three heads—all properly buried with markers—and he lives in the middle of a large pumpkin field to be near his source of supply. When the travelers reach “Jack Pumpkinhead's private graveyard,” Dorothy is quite surprised and says, “But I thought nobody ever died in Oz.” The Tin Woodman answers, “Nor do they; although if one is bad, he may be condemned and killed by the good citizens.”⁵³ In two sentences, Baum banished natural death from Oz. He soon pointed out that the people of Oz are still prey to accidents, and he would elaborate this reinterpretation and bring it more into line with his past statements about people dying in Oz in the remaining books of the series, but the great change occurs here: Oz has become more than a haven from danger; it has become a haven from death itself.

It is interesting that Baum made this modification to Oz in this particular story, for the plot contains no threat to any of the principals that would have made the change necessary; indeed, the portion of The Road to Oz that takes place in Oz is exceptionally sunny, happy, and trouble-free. The change actually creates major inconsistencies with the earlier books without explaining any previous discrepancies, but it may have been that Baum was looking ahead to his next book, in which the inhabitants' immortality is important to defusing the darker aspects of the story line and in guaranteeing the continued existence of his Other-world even though he planned for the real world and Oz to go their separate ways. Or perhaps, on his way to building an ideal world, Baum, with his intuitive understanding of fantasy, just felt that the change was right and natural.

Before going on to the third area—the nature of the fantasy world—several minor alterations in The Road to Oz should be mentioned: Oz is once again more rural, and the Emerald City is the only city in the country.⁵⁴ There are also the usual inconsistencies: the Tin Woodman is now counted among the four subrulers, but Glinda the Good and the Good Witch of the North have not been restored to their positions as rulers; in fact, the Good Witch of the North, a nebulous figure at best, just about disappears from the series after this book. Glinda's position, however, is very different. As the most powerful magic worker, she is second only to Ozma in the hierarchy of Oz, and she is developing into the real, maternal spirit of that fairyland. To be placed again among the subrulers would actually lessen her importance.

There is also one example of carelessness about direction that presages a major confusion about directions that occurs later. When the travelers enter Oz on the west side (the Winkie Country), they start for the Emerald City on “a fine road leading toward the northwest.”⁵⁵ That direction would, of course, take them in the opposite direction from the Emerald City. On the whole, however, the discrepancies are fewer than in some of the previous books.

The third facet of the reinterpretation occurs in the finale of the book. A birthday celebration that occupies the final fifth of a book and that is not supported by plot lines of mystery or suspense could make for dull reading. However, this is not the case in The Road to Oz. Baum wrote that “perhaps there has never been in any part of the world at any time another assemblage of such wonderful people as that which gathered … to honor the birthday of the Ruler of Oz,” and for once, an author did not overstate the facts.⁵⁶ Baum not only included among the guests all the important characters from the previous books in the series, as well as the new characters from this book, but also introduced characters who have hitherto had no connection with Oz. Thus with ever mounting pomp and circumstance, the foreign visitors begin to arrive to honor the Princess of Oz: “His Gracious and Most Edible Majesty, King Dough the First, Ruler of the Two Kingdoms of Hiland and Loland. Also the Head Booleywag of his Majesty, known as Chick the Cherub, and their faithful friend Para Bruin, the rubber bear”; “a band of Ryls from the Happy Valley,” “a dozen crooked Knooks … from the great Forest of Burzee,” and “the most Mighty and Loyal Friend of Children, His Supreme Highness—Santa Claus”; “Her Gracious Majesty, the Queen of Merryland,” accompanied by the Candy Man of Merryland and four wooden soldiers; and “Her Sublime and Resplendent Majesty, Queen Zixi of Ix! His Serene and Tremendous Majesty, King Bud of Noland. Her Royal Highness, the Princess Fluff.”⁵⁷

The presence of these characters, for the first time, places all of Baum's imaginary creations in the same fantasy world, while also affirming the premier position of Oz in that world. And the characters bring more than their birthday gifts to Oz; they bring their histories, their adventures, and their strange, exotic countries as well. The reader is fairly overwhelmed with all the memories and associations from the other books. Indeed, the effect is not so very different on first-time readers who are not familiar with Baum's other fantasies because these characters and the scraps of their histories that are given conjure up wonderful visions of unknown and fascinating countries stretching beyond the borders of Oz—a great fantasy world just waiting to be explored.

Once Oz has been elevated to the center of Baum's fairy world, the birthday celebration with its grand banquet, royal procession, and spectacular entertainments does not disappoint. At its climax, the Wizard sends the foreign visitors, including Button-Bright, home in gigantic, sparkling soap bubbles that are guided by Santa Claus, although Dorothy prudently chooses the Magic Belt as her means of returning to Kansas. The Wizard's feat is purely the result of his mechanical inventions, but to the people of Oz, it seems as much magic as that performed by Glinda and the Good Witch of the North. Finally, as the last soap bubble floats away into the distance, Polychrome's father lets down his radiant rainbow into the celebration to reclaim his daughter. Surely in the realms of fantasy there has never been a celebration to match it.

Baum's Road to Oz is a tour de force of place. With almost no plot and little danger or suspense, he created one of the most exhilarating and satisfying of his works of fantasy. John R. Neill enhanced the book with his most beautiful and detailed drawings, and although there were no color plates, the book was printed on various colors of paper that created a rainbow effect when leafing through the pages.

Baum began his introduction to The Road to Oz by writing, “Well, my dears, here is what you asked for: another ‘Oz Book’ about Dorothy's strange adventures,” indicating that he realized the strength of his readers' attachment to Oz. But he wanted to write other stories, and he concluded his introduction with the startling announcement: “Since this book was written I have received some very remarkable news from The Land of Oz, which has greatly astonished me. … But it is such a long and exciting story that it must be saved for another book—and perhaps that book will be the last story that will ever be told about the Land of Oz.”⁵⁸ That farewell to Oz was to be The Emerald City of Oz, and in it Baum unleashed his creative imagination.

THE EMERALD CITY OF OZ

In contrast to The Road to Oz, The Emerald City of Oz abounds in plots. For the first time in his fantasies, Baum utilized double, and sometimes triple, plot lines, alternately following separate sets of characters and bringing them all together at the end of the story. For the sake of clarity and ease of summary, the various concurrent and interconnected plots will be presented separately.

The first involves the Nome King, whose anger has festered and grown since his defeat in Ozma of Oz. He determines to conquer Oz, and to ensure the success of his goal, he sends his general to gather allies from the most evil creatures who live around Oz: the Whimsies, the Growleywogs, and the Phanfasms. To solve the problem of the desert—deadly alike to mortals and immortals—the Nome King sets his Nomes to building a large tunnel to the Emerald City, a task eminently suited to his underground subjects.

The second plot line follows Dorothy. In Kansas, a series of reversals, including the cyclone and ill-health, have forced her Uncle Henry into bankruptcy, and he is to lose his farm. When Dorothy learns the extent of their troubles, she makes the secret signal to Ozma and is transported to Oz with Toto, followed shortly by her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. In one of the realistic touches that Baum sprinkled throughout his books, the transition to Oz is not an easy one for Dorothy's elderly relatives. They are simple people used to hard work, and they have trouble adjusting to the splendor of Ozma's court and to having no useful work to do. While Ozma tries to find a solution to this problem, she sends the newcomers, accompanied by her Captain General, the Wizard, the Shaggy Man, and Billina, on a tour of some of the interesting and unusual places in Oz.

A third, subsidiary plot line follows Ozma in the Emerald City as she, via the Magic Picture, discovers and watches the progress of the Nome King's tunnel. All the strands converge at the end, when the Oz characters gather in the garden of Ozma's palace to meet the invading armies.

There is an air of tying up loose ends about The Emerald City of Oz: Dorothy, with her uncle, aunt, and Toto, at last comes to Oz to live; the Scarecrow, who has had no fixed home since he lost his throne, is given a corn-shaped mansion outside the Emerald City; and the humbug Wizard has begun a course of study with Glinda the Good to make himself a real wizard, thus transforming the last illusion remaining from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into reality. That this book was to end the series also seems to have freed Baum's inventive imagination and made him more willing to deal with the Land of Oz itself. So completely has Oz dominated the previous books that it comes as a shock to realize that there has been almost no exploration of the country since The Marvelous Land and that Baum had not added any strange and unusual areas and races to Oz since the China Country and the Hammerheads in The Wizard. As it had originally been created, Oz was, more clearly than any of his other worlds, a fantasy version of America; it took time and distance for Baum to work out a new conception of Oz and to change the illusions into reality. Not until The Road to Oz did the new Oz emerge in a fairly well developed form and become integrated with Baum's other fantasy worlds.

The reinterpretation of Oz in The Road to Oz is repeated without change in The Emerald City, except that it is discussed at greater length; Baum presented the most complete, detailed, and realistic picture of the Emerald City and the society of Oz in the series.⁵⁹ In that description, he implied that there are sections of Oz that are not as “normal” as the Emerald City and the usual farming areas of the country, and he introduced seven of them in the tour that Dorothy, her relatives, and her friends make: the Cuttenclips, a village of paper dolls created and ruled by a young-appearing girl; the Fuddles, people who come apart and can be put back together like jigsaw puzzles; the kingdom of Utensia, peopled by kitchen utensils; Bunbury, a town inhabited by live baked goods; Bunnybury, a city of rabbits; Rigmarole Town, in which reside people who can never say what they mean; and Flutterbudget Center, where live all the people who worry excessively about improbable things that have not happened. The genesis of these strange places is clearly the odd countries encountered on the journey south in The Wizard. Some of the new places, such as Cuttenclip Village and Bunnybury, have been set aside for the protection of the inhabitants by Glinda the Good, who, more than ever in this book, is the wise mother-figure of Oz; others, such as Utensia and Bunbury, are newly discovered; and still others like Rigmarole Town and Flutterbudget Center are “Defensive Settlements” established to protect the other inhabitants of Oz.⁶⁰

Baum sometimes had trouble keeping his creative abilities under control, and the tour section of The Emerald City could easily have disintegrated into a mere travelogue except that it is interspersed with chapters that recount the progress the Nomes are making in gathering allies and building the tunnel to Oz. In that context, the tour emphasizes the variety and richness of the land that the Nomes hope to destroy, and the reader whose sense of impending doom is mounting cannot help but contrast the peace and innocence of the Oz characters with the evil machinations of the Nome King.

In The Emerald City, Baum did not restrict his facility for the creation of unusual races to Oz; he also conceived three nations of evil allies—each more terrible and frightening than the last—for the Nomes. Not until Tolkien's Lord of the Rings would there be another mustering of evil to oppose good to match it in a fantasy. And in the confrontation between good and evil that was, Baum thought, to end the Oz series, he provided the finest moment of Oz.

Many of Baum's ideas and ways of viewing the world were not mainstream for his time—some of them are, unfortunately, still not mainstream—and one of his most radical departures from common opinion is occasioned by the confrontation in The Emerald City. Dorothy and her companions' tour is cut short when they learn of the threat to Oz, and they rush to the Emerald City in a show of support for Ozma. When her friends and advisers are discussing the possibility of rallying the four nations of Oz to form an army, Ozma interrupts them: “But I do not wish to fight. … No one has the right to destroy any living creatures, however evil they may be, or to hurt them or make them unhappy. I will not fight—even to save my kingdom.” She goes on to explain, “Because the Nome King intends to do evil is no excuse for my doing the same.”⁶¹ With the exception of the comic violence in Baum's earliest book, his works had increasingly expressed support for nonviolence and for the sacredness of all living things, and he made Ozma, the most important ruler in his imaginary world, the spokesperson for his strongest statement on the subject. Many times before, the sentiments had been expressed without any actual threat being imminent, but in this instance, the cost of upholding those principles is the destruction of Oz. Ozma offers to send her friends to Kansas and safety, but one by one, they decide to stand by her. Even Uncle Henry and Aunt Em throw in their lot with Oz. Dorothy proves her worthiness of the rank she has in Oz by saying that “if the Ruler of Oz must not desert her people, a Princess of Oz has no right to run away, either.”⁶² She has, in effect, finally reached her real home.

There is, of course, a happy ending, which reaches back to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz because it is the excellent brains given to the Scarecrow by the Wizard that come up with the means to neutralize the evil and save Oz by cleverness instead of violence. However, the ease by which Oz was almost conquered is a shock and casts an ominous significance on the various ways in which Dorothy and the Wizard have been able to enter Oz. These concerns are the impetus for the ending of the series. Ozma states the problem:

It seems to me there are entirely too many ways for people to get to the Land of Oz. We used to think the deadly desert that surrounds us was enough protection; but that is no longer the case. The Wizard and Dorothy have both come here through the air, and I am told the earth people have invented airships that can fly anywhere they wish them to go. …

… [And] if the earth folk learn how to manage them we would be overrun with visitors who would ruin our lovely, secluded fairyland.⁶³

These are concerns that Baum had expressed as far back as Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901). He had been living in Chicago when that city's population doubled in the short space of ten years; he had seen farmland, meadows, and forests paved over, and he had not liked the crowded, dirty city streets and slums that often took their place. To him, such unbridled growth was destructive, not creative. He could, at least, keep his imaginary world free of it.

Ozma appeals to the supreme authority on magic in Oz, Glinda the Good, who has anticipated the ruler's request by the use of the Magic Record Book, a new device that records all the events that happen, and it is decided to remove Oz “forever from all the rest of the world” by making it invisible to all outside eyes.⁶⁴ Once the enchantment takes effect, anyone coming to the edge of the desert or flying over Oz will see nothing. In the short last chapter, “How the Story of Oz Came to an End,” Baum “quotes” a note from Dorothy ending, “Toto and I will always love you and all the other children who love us.”⁶⁵

Even though Baum tied up many loose ends and provided what he believed was a satisfying conclusion to his series, there are still some problems with the text of The Emerald City. Having made the inhabitants of Oz immortals in The Road, Baum here referred to them as either “fairies” or “fairy people,”⁶⁶ unsatisfactory appellations because in Baum's other stories fairies are a separate immortal race and not the common inhabitants of a fairy country. He also provided Ozma, who hitherto has had no magic apart from the Magic Belt and the Magic Picture, with a magic fairy wand,⁶⁷ with no explanation of how she came to have it or any examples of its use. He also left the fate of the American characters up in the air and does not inform the reader whether or not they, by living in Oz, share the immortality of the regular inhabitants.

One blunder that was hinted at in The Road and is later to become more serious concerns directions. In The Emerald City, Baum wrote:

The mountains underneath which the Nome King's extensive caverns were located lay grouped just north of the Land of Ev, which lay directly across the deadly desert to the east of the Land of Oz. As the mountains were also on the edge of the desert the Nome King found that he had only to tunnel underneath the desert to reach Ozma's dominions. He did not wish his armies to appear above ground in the Country of the Winkies, which was the part of the Land of Oz nearest to King Roquat's own country.⁶⁸

The location of the Nome King's kingdom is exactly the same as that given in Ozma, except that the eastern country of Oz is the Munchkin Country. Somehow the positions of the Munchkin and Winkie Countries become switched in Baum's mind, probably as early as The Road to Oz because the northwesterly direction of the road to the Emerald City mentioned in that book would have been correct if the Winkie Country lay in the east. The switch could be dismissed as carelessness on Baum's part except that it continued for several more books and was the source of some confusion.

There is a possible explanation for the switch that also would add strength to the argument that Oz was located in Baum's mind in the midst of the Great American Desert. If Baum, writing in Chicago, placed Oz to the west of the Great Plains (he would have been well aware of the west being the traditional direction for magical worlds), he probably pictured Dorothy's house landing in the nearest part of Oz across the desert. That would be the eastern section, the Munchkin Country, and Dorothy enters Oz from that direction again in Ozma of Oz. Therefore, it would seem natural that it would become fixed in Baum's mind that the Munchkin Country was the area of Oz nearest to our world. However, Baum himself changed direction, spending every winter from 1904 in California (except the winter he spent in Europe); the introductions of the three Oz books after Ozma are signed “Coronado,” and in 1910, the year of The Emerald City, he and Maud moved to California permanently. If the Munchkin Country was still fixed in his mind as the side of Oz closest to him, it would now be, looking from California, on the west side of Oz, and the Winkie Country would lie on the east side.

This explanation is speculation, but it does reflect actual changes in his life that had a great effect on him. His fictional solution to Uncle Henry's money problems could very well have been wishful thinking, because the enormous debts incurred by The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays were becoming more pressing and probably influenced his and Maud's decision to move to California, where the cost of living was supposed to be lower than in Chicago. In some ways it was not a difficult decision because they both loved California, their children were grown, and the climate there was certainly better for someone in Baum's precarious state of health. Thus in 1910, they moved to Los Angeles, and soon after, with money Maud had inherited,⁶⁹ they built a house in a small suburb of Los Angeles, a lovely and peaceful place with more orange trees than houses. Its name was Hollywood.

Notes

1. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tree and Leaf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 9.

2. Queen Zixi was the last published use of this form; King Rinkitink was his last actual use of it.

3. David L. Greene, introduction to Policeman Bluejay (1907), by L. Frank Baum [Laura Bancroft, pseud.] (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1981), vii.

4. L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1907), [11].

5. J. R. R. Tolkien, foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 6.

6. L. Frank Baum, The Emerald City of Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1910), 29.

7. Also see Michael Patrick Hearn, David L. Greene, and Peter E. Hanff, “The Faltering Flight of Prince Silverwings,” Baum Bugle 18 (Autumn 1974): 9-10. The authors of this article believe that the Nome King's character was also influenced by the Gnome King in the play Prince Silverwings.

8. L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz, pictured by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1904), 211.

9. L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1904), 26.

10. Ibid., 38.

11. Ibid., 42.

12. Ibid., 39.

13. Ibid., 104.

14. Ibid., 112.

15. Ibid., 255-56.

16. Ibid., 135-37.

17. Ibid., 255.

18. Ibid., 260.

19. This was quite a topical reference, since the great San Francisco earthquake had occurred in 1906. The Baums were in Europe when it happened, but undoubtedly they saw the aftermath when they were in California again the next winter.

20. L. Frank Baum, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1908), 24.

21. Baum, Ozma of Oz, 267; Baum, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, 179.

22. Baum, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, 195.

23. Ibid., 218.

24. Ibid., 190-91.

25. Ibid., 185.

26. Ibid., 195-96.

27. Ibid., 180, 191, 195, 197.

28. Ibid., 196.

29. Ibid., 197.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., [11], 253 (the color plates are included in the pagination).

32. For an interesting discussion of this idea as applied to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, see Earle J. Coleman, “Oz as Heaven and Other Philosophical Questions,” Baum Bugle 24 (Autumn 1980): 18-20.

33. In the nineteenth century, many older books that had originally been written for adults were now considered “children's books.” Gulliver's Travels, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and versions of The Divine Comedy, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid would all have been familiar to an imaginative child reader. In fact, Louisa May Alcott in the first part of Little Women (1868) and Frances Hodgson Burnett in Two Little Pilgrims' Progress (1895) took for granted their readers' familiarity with John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Burnett's story, incidentally, uses the great White City of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago to represent the Celestial City and is a story Baum would have known. For Baum's possible use of Bunyan, see J. Karl Franson, “From Vanity Fair to Emerald City: Baum's Debt to Bunyan,” Children's Literature 23 (1995): 91-114.

34. Hearn, Greene, and Hanff, “Faltering Flight of Prince Silverwings,” 10.

35. Baum, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, 21.

36. Richard A. Mills, “The Fairylogue and Radio Plays of L. Frank Baum,” Baum Bugle 14 (Christmas 1970): 4.

37. Russell P. MacFall, “L. Frank Baum and the Radio-Plays,” Baum Bugle 6 (August 1962): 3.

38. Reproduced in Michael Patrick Hearn, The Annotated Wizard of Oz (New York: Potter, 1973), facing 32.

39. MacFall, “Baum and the Radio-Plays,” 3.

40. L. Frank Baum, The Road to Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1909), 42-43.

41. Ibid., 260.

42. Ibid., 196.

43. Ibid., 184.

44. Ibid., 206.

45. Ibid., 126.

46. Ibid., 143.

47. This is especially apparent in the description of the room in the palace given to the Shaggy Man in ibid., 198-99.

48. Ibid., 189.

49. Ibid., 161.

50. Ibid., 164.

51. Ibid., 164-65.

52. Ibid., 191.

53. Ibid., 172.

54. Ibid., 176.

55. Ibid., 152.

56. Ibid., 241.

57. Ibid., 222, 225, 230, 231, 234.

58. Ibid., [9-10].

59. L. Frank Baum, The Emerald City of Oz, illustrated by John R. Neill (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1910), 29-33.

60. Ibid., 238.

61. Ibid., 268.

62. Ibid., 269.

63. Ibid., 290.

64. Ibid., 293.

65. Ibid., 295.

66. Ibid., 31, 253.

67. Ibid., 45-46. In Chapter 1, it is also stated that Ozma “has certain fairy powers” (17). It is not clear if Baum meant the Magic Picture and the Magic Belt or some kind of inherent magic power; Ozma certainly does not display any personal ability with magic in this story, although it is an idea that Baum would take up and develop in a later book.

68. Ibid., 59-60 (emphasis added).

69. Frank Joslyn Baum and Russell P. MacFall, To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1961), 250.