[In the following essay, Flynn examines the Oz books as a consumerist boom.]

… that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.

(Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations 221)

Oz was first visited upon a kindly man who wanted to set children free from fear. Oz grew out of Alice in Wonderland, and out of Kansas and the people who settled there, and Baum's own life.

It also kept on growing. It grew out of improved Technicolor cameras and out of the MGM studio system, which meant the first footage directed by Richard Thorpe could be thrown out. … It kept growing, because of television; it kept on gaining meaning with each repeat. Oz came swimming to us out of history, because we needed it, because it needed to be. A book, a film, a television ritual, a thousand icons scattered through advertising, journalism, political cartoons, music, poetry. Had Oz been blocked, it would have taken another form in the world. It could have come as a cyclone.

That doesn't make it true.

(Geoff Ryman, Was 368)

I

In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, Jack Zipes follows a tradition of wishful thinking when he credits L. Frank Baum with “portraying a fairy-tale utopia with strong socialist and matriarchal notions to express his disenchantment with America” (121). Recent new-historicist readings of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Stuart Culver and William R. Leach find at best “a genteel critique of commodity fetishism” (Culver 97) in the children's classic, going so far as to characterize Oz itself as “Baum's Consumer Paradise” (Leach 180-82). It may be true that following Fredric Jameson, we can read the Wizard, like other forms of mass culture, as “faintly … critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity, it springs,” but an uncritical celebration of the “Utopian or transcendent function” of children's texts “abstracts them from their concrete social and historical situation” (29-30). Culver's account of the simultaneous composition of the Wizard with Baum's treatise on window-dressing suggests that the children's text is more celebratory than critical of the turn-of-the-century emergence of “the culture of consumption.”¹ And Zipes' depiction of Baum as “a naive writer who was disturbed by the Gilded Age” does not square with the reality of Baum the editor of “The Show Window” who advised his readers, “You must arouse in your audience cupidity and a longing to possess the goods you sell” (qtd. in Culver 106). Like his Wizard, Baum promoted illusion, theatricality, and humbug as essential tools both for children's fiction and for his The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows.

If Baum did “‘Americanize’ … and open up new frontiers for fairy tale discourse” as Zipes insists, and “pave the way for later writers to experiment even more with the potential of sequel fairy tales” (Zipes' emphasis), in terms of the long-running Oz series, this potential was hardly designed “to present radical alternatives to social reality” (121).² As Jerry Griswold points out,

What can't be ignored is how much of the land of Oz is a reflection of actual circumstances at the turn of the century. … Like some lucky spell, fortunes could be and were made overnight. Merchant princes of the Gilded Age built or bought castles for their private homes. P. T. Barnum, as much a master of hokum as Baum's wizard, was a national hero.

(463)

Indeed, according to Michael Patrick Hearn, Baum was the “first to admit” that his work in the bestselling Father Goose, His Book (1899) “was not good, but he used his phenomenal reputation to firmly establish himself in the children's book market” (“L. Frank Baum” 21).

I would argue that Baum not only “firmly establish[ed] himself in the children's book market” but did a great deal to transform it. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz itself is remarkable both as a commodity and a work of literature. Always the consummate salesman, actor, and window-dresser, Baum must have recognized that his and William Wallace Denslow's investment in the elaborate color plates and textual illustrations (in effect, a form of packaging) would pay off handsomely. Appealing to “progressive” desires and to fashion (“the old-time fairy tale … may now be classed as ‘historical’ in the children's library”), Baum claimed that The Wizard's primary aim was “to pleasure children of today”: “The modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales” (Wonderful Wizard 85). In order to facilitate this “pleasure of the text,” he invested in the most up-to-date techniques of mechanical reproduction available.³ Baum's interest in capitalizing on the success of The Wizard intensified after the book's publication, and he resorted to various spin-offs—musicals, films, comic strips, and even a planned but never completed theme park—designed to exploit its status as pure entertainment.⁴

By the time of the first Baum sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz, market forces had conspired to render the idea of an “original” Wonderful Wizard problematic at best. Indeed we might be tempted to view all the Oz sequels as “simulacra” in Jean Baudrillard's sense of “the reproduction of ‘copies’ that have no original” (Jameson 17).⁵ The bankruptcy of the Hill company and copyright disputes between Denslow and Baum had placed the text in a state of limbo; and the success of the 1902 musical had in some ways supplanted the book itself, so that in 1903 Bobbs-Merrill published it as The New Wizard of Oz, to avoid confusion with the musical that only peripherally resembled the children's story (Hearn, “Introduction” 44). The 1904 publication of The Marvelous Land sought to capitalize on the success of Fred Stone and David Montgomery's popular stage portrayals of the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, as well as to serve as advance press for the 1905 Baum musical The Woggle Bug.

Though The Woggle Bug proved a tremendous failure, the book was an enormous success. Thereafter, Baum's captivated audience came to expect a new Oz book every Christmas, and this (coupled with Baum's financial needs) perpetuated the series even after his repeated attempts to end it. Baum's inability to escape the Land of Oz he created has been well documented, even mythologized. Like the Wizard, he tried to escape Oz in a hot air balloon, only to be brought back tamed and chastened, as his preface “To the Reader” of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908) demonstrates:

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.

There were many requests from my little correspondents for “more about the Wizard.” It seems the jolly old fellow made hosts of friends in the first Oz book, in spite of the fact that he frankly acknowledged himself “a humbug.”

(ix)

Although the window-dresser had deliberately aroused the cupidity of the child consumers, he had, perhaps, underestimated their longing to possess his goods. That children clamored for the return of the Wonderful Wizard might well have been because of his humbuggery (the wonderful things he does—not), rather than in spite of it. In a sense, Baum unwittingly inspired a kind of brand loyalty; the “little tyrants” would accept no substitutes (like Ix or Mo), but only the genuinely counterfeit article.

Indeed, even Baum's death could not satisfy the desire for sequels. Since the erratic Denslow had been replaced by Frank K. Reilly and Sumner S. Britton's hiring of professional children's book illustrator John R. Neill, the subsequent Oz books increasingly took on an air of corporate continuity—exemplified by the circled “Z” Oz logo. If the collaboration between Baum and Neill was a publisher's marriage of convenience, then the hiring of the children's page editor of the Philadelphia Ledger Ruth Plumly Thompson after Baum's death completed the commodification of Oz.

The decision to continue the Oz books after Baum's death was economically motivated from the outset. The continued sales of backlist titles depended on the annual appearance of new Oz titles. The publisher (now called Reilly and Lee) was heavily dependent on the Oz series for its survival. And they hoped to get off cheap. But Ruth Plumly Thompson, whom Hearn characterizes as “always a shrewd professional” (“Ruth” 309), managed to parley an original flat-fee offer of ＄500 into a contract for a yearly Oz book for which she would receive two thirds of the author's royalty (310). As a product, Thompson's first Oz book, The Royal Book of Oz, is a wonderful artifact. The publishers decided to create the fiction that Thompson had merely “enlarged and edited” the book from notes left by Baum and had his widow, Maud Gage Baum, cook up a preface to support it:

Dear Children:

You will remember that, in the front part of Glinda of Oz, the Publishers told you that when Mr. Baum went away from this world he left behind some unfinished notes about the Princess Ozma and Dorothy and the jolly people of the Wonderful Land of Oz. The Publishers promised that they would try to put these notes together into a new Oz book for you.

Well, here it is—The Royal Book of Oz.

(preface; n.p.)

In addition, the book contains a publisher's afterword, “A Little Story About All of the Delightful Oz Books,” which demonstrates the simulative status of the Oz sequels. Since Reilly and Lee did not own the copyright to The Wizard, their promotion of the sequels erases the “original” from existence:

Nearly twenty years ago little girls, who are mothers today, were reading “The Land of Oz.” There are plenty of grown-up little girls who have read all of the wonderful stories of Oz—and “The Royal Book of Oz” is the fourteenth.

(306-7)⁶

Aside from the feminization and infantilization of the consumer implied here (grown-up little girls, indeed), the afterword unabashedly attempts to condition certain marginal consumers into approved modes of consumption. “Rereading,” writes Roland Barthes, is “an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (‘devoured’), so that we can move on to another story, buy another book, and [it] is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors)” (15-16). Susan Willis argues that children, more than adults, “recognize the utopian social dimensions in otherwise highly commodified situations” and that their “socialization into capitalism is a process of learning to substitute alienation and commodities for human relations” (33). Thus, the purveyors of child-culture learn to condition the marginalized desire for repetition (rereading) into the more acceptable desire for serial commodities (the sequel). And because this conditioning cannot take place without the complicity of adults, the commercial rhetoric of the publishers takes on decidedly nostalgic overtones in addressing a dual audience: “Imagination and the Happy Spirit are the foundations of all the Oz books. The natural child-impulse for adventure and the child's delight in invention are stimulated by the wonderful adventures of the quaint people of the Fairyland of Oz …” (Willis 305).

After giving teaser plot-summaries of each of their Oz books, Reilly and Lee offers a testimonial “from far-off Australia” by “The Allen Kids” whose father had brought them six Oz books from his trips to America. They write to Mr. Baum (their letter dated October 23, 1919—five months after Baum's death) enclosing a money order for L2-10-0 so that he may send the remaining titles. After the testimonial the publishers conclude their “little story”:

If you want to bring real happiness to any little girls or boys, anywhere, give them an Oz book. The only trouble that can possibly come to you is that you may have to buy more Oz books if you begin. But it will be worth any trouble that you may take—for the spirit of Oz is the Happy Spirit.

The Publishers (312)

Serial consumption is a small price to pay for “real happiness”—a small trouble, and well worth taking.

II

A cyclone carries us to 1939—the year of Thompson's final Oz book, Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz,⁷ and the MGM musical that would supplant the printed text of The Wizard in our cultural imagination. As Carol Billman states, the film becomes “the authoritative work to which all other tellings, even the original one, must answer” (92). The gilded age humbuggery of the Wizard becomes reified by the studio system. Dorothy, as played by Judy Garland, literally becomes a “grown-up little girl.” The rough edges of Baum's 1900 text are smoothed over, bathed in sepia and technicolor, tamed in the service of an overwhelmingly sentimental and nostalgic project calculated to exploit depression-era anxieties. As Aljean Harmetz's The Making of the Wizard of Oz and the 50th anniversary publication of the screenplay make clear, the MGM musical was a corporate product. In a sense it served as a gateway (rainbow bridge?) into the postmodern era of Oz.

Salman Rushdie, in his personal account of how the MGM film was his first literary influence, asks, “Who … is the auteur of ‘The Wizard of Oz?’” and concludes that the movie (with its several directors, writers and producers) “is as near as you will get to that will-o'-the-wisp of modern critical theory: the authorless text” (95). Rushdie's essay also testifies to the cross-cultural (or multi-national) appeal of the postmodern text that has replaced the modern one.⁸

Certainly the primacy of the MGM text was made obvious in 1989, when the new owner, media conglomerate Turner Entertainment Co., licensed various products to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the film's release—including the screenplay, an expensive coffee-table book, and a deluxe collector's edition videocassette. And it is no coincidence that 1989 also saw the publication of a new Baum Oz book—not by L. Frank but by great-grandson Roger S. Dorothy of Oz is a curious simulacrum, indeed.⁹ Roger Baum, a banker and “former vice-president of a New York Investment Brokerage Firm” says, according to the dust jacket,

When a friend suggested I write an Oz story, I thought it was a wonderful idea, but I worried that I would not be able to bring to life a new adventure with Dorothy and her friends. I truly believe, however, that my great-grandfather was looking over my shoulder and guiding me as I wrote.

On one level, Dorothy is a tribute to The Wonderful Wizard in that it resurrects some of Baum's now-obscure minor characters, such as the Munchkin Boq, Princess Gayelette and Prince Quelala, and the Dainty China Princess. There are also a number of in-jokes for Oz enthusiasts, such as a silver bell which, when enchanted, bears an inscription that reads “IN HONOR OF THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST” (67). When the spell is broken the inscription reads “IN HONOR OF THE TOWN OF PURPLEFIELD AND ITS CHILDREN,” signed and dated by “THE WIZARD OF OZ, May 15, 1856”—L. Frank Baum's birthday. However, from the very first chapter one finds that the cinematic representations of Oz are more central to the tale. At the end of Chapter One, Dorothy and Toto go “over the rainbow to Oz” (7); we are reminded of the MGM rainbow continually, even in the last sentence of the book: “The rainbow shimmered over the prairie with all the bright and true colors of Oz” (163).

Even more perplexing are the numerous references to Disney's 1985 movie, Return to Oz. Indeed, it is the basic plot of the Disney film (itself an amalgam of The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz) that supplies the dramatic conflict in Dorothy: a wicked Jester, with the aid of the magic want that had belonged to the Wicked Witch of The West, has transformed the important people of Oz into bric-a-brac. One of the most memorable images in the Disney film (which, along with the electro-shock sequence, is emblematic of the film's failure) is the yellow brick road in a state of utter devastation, and that image resurfaces prominently in Roger Baum's book. It does not seem far-fetched to say that Dorothy of Oz is at once a tribute to great-grandfather L. Frank and a savvy recycling by a successful investment broker of the more accessible images available at the video store.

Notes

1. Utopian readings of the Oz books, inspired by the first critical study of Oz, Wagenknecht's Utopiana Americana, have been the rule, rather than the exception. Many writers, like Brian Attebery, see Oz as an “agrarian promised land” (86). Culver's essay serves as a convincing corrective to such readings, pointing out that although Dorothy may be a “child of … Populism's Agrarian ideology” Oz itself is “a gaudy, artificial fantasy world that is given over entirely to the values of consumerism” (101). The Wizard, says Culver, “makes the Ozites content with just the appearance of the impossible value, capitalizing on their readiness to take the absolutely artificial as a substitute for the fundamentally unpurchasable” (104).

2. In his recent study Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale, Zipes amplifies his utopian reading of Oz and extends it to contemporary sequels, including Geoff Ryman's 1992 novel, Was. Noting that Baum knew “intuitively” that “it is within fantasy that the political unconscious can awaken and map out the space which it needs and has been denied,” Zipes continues to describe Oz as “a leap forward, a flight forward, a utopian gesture. … It is the measure of hope, a secular force of humanitarian hope” (119). As the epigraph from Ryman indicates, however, whatever utopian dimension of Oz that exists, exists in a kind of uneasy alliance with dystopian readings. The reading of Oz as a negative signifier is quite pronounced in David Lynch's film Wild at Heart, for instance, where the main character's thwarted pursuit of the American Dream is equated to getting “lost somewhere down the Yellow Brick Road.”

3. The complex ways in which technological advances affect the work of art are discussed in Walter Benjamin's famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” As the excerpt quoted in the epigraph to this essay shows, these advances change the nature of our concept of an “original” work to such an extent that it becomes problematic at best to speak of a work's authenticity, or, to use Benjamin's term, its “aura.” As Benjamin suggests, the loss of “aura” is not necessarily negative; indeed, it makes us aware that our reception of a work of art is dependent not on some transcendent “nature” of the art object, but on “historical circumstances as well” (222).

4. These spin-offs, many of them financial disasters, are well documented. See, in particular, Hearn's “Introduction” and Greene and Martin's The Oz Scrapbook.

5. Baudrillard's concept of the “simulacrum” demonstrates the way in which Benjamin's concept of mechanical reproduction has been superseded in postmodernity. Even in 1936, however, Benjamin recognized that the “cult” value of a work of art, in which the mere existence of the art object was invested with magical significance, was quickly giving way to “exhibition” value: “by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental” (224-25). From Baudrillard and Jameson's standpoint, the existence of the original has been erased altogether.

6. Of course, it is the fifteenth Oz book, if one counts The Wonderful Wizard.

7. Ozoplaning itself is both a commodity and a simulacrum. Thompson deliberately capitalizes on the MGM movie (in production at the time she wrote the novel) by reuniting the characters of The Wonderful Wizard. She begins her novel by summarizing, often inaccurately, the plot of the “original”; in essence, she writes the novel as a tie-in and sequel to the then as-yet unreleased film. As Hearn, as well as Greene and Martin, note, Thompson was involved by that time in bitter disputes with her publisher and with L. Frank Baum's estate. Reilly and Lee's rejection of “Thompson['s] … ambitious schemes for promoting the Oz stories as children's records, motion pictures, radio plays, and comic strips” (Hearn, “Ruth” 312) as well as their displeasure over her projects for the publisher David McKay (including the ghost-writing of several Walt Disney books) led to Thompson's decision to stop writing Oz sequels. The first chapter of Ozoplaning features, in miniature, “an exact model of the house in which she [Dorothy] blew from Kansas to Oz in a cyclone, the house that fell on the wicked witch of the West [sic] and destroyed her—all but her silver slippers” (18). The miniaturization of the house seems prophetic in light of the diminishment of Oz in print after the release of the 1939 movie.

8. MGM's Wizard of Oz, despite its pre-war production, is both historically and generically postmodern. The universal popularity of the film can be ascribed primarily to its annual televising far more than to its theatrical release. Nathanson has written an exhaustive account of the movie's centrality as “secular myth,” a myth most Americans know via that advanced form of mechanical reproduction—network television.

9. Peter Glassman's afterword makes the connection with the film's anniversary explicit: “It is … fitting that the first true Oz book written by a direct descendant of L. Frank Baum be published in this year, the fiftieth anniversary of the MGM film” (106). Thanks to Jan Susina for calling my attention to the works of Roger Baum.

Works Cited

Attebery, Brian. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1980.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974.

Baum, L. Frank. Dorothy and the Wizard In Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. New York: Del Rey, 1979 [1908].

———. The Land of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1904.

———. Ozma of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1907.

———. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Chicago: George M. Hill, 1900. Facsimile reprint in Hearn, ed. The Annotated Wizard of Oz. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973.

Baum, Roger S. Dorothy of Oz. Illustrated by Elizabeth Miles. New York: Books of Wonder/Morrow, 1989.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. and Intro. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217-51.

Billman, Carol. “‘I've Seen the Movie’: Oz Revisited.” Literature/Film Quarterly 9 (1981): 241-50. Revised and reprinted in Children's Novels and the Movies. Ed. Douglas Street. New York: Ungar, 1983: 92-100.

Culver, Stuart. “What Manikins Want: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows.” Representations 21 (Winter 1988): 97-116.

Glassman, Peter. Afterword. Dorothy of Oz. By Roger Baum. Ill. Elizabeth Miles. New York: Morrow, 1989.

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

Griswold, Jerry. “There's No Place But Home: The Wizard of Oz.” Antioch Review 45 (1987): 462-75.

Harmetz, Aljean. The Making of The Wizard of Oz. New York: Doubleday/Dell Books, 1989.

Hearn, Michael Patrick. “Introduction” to The Annotated Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, with an Introduction, Notes and Bibliography by Michael Patrick Hearn. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973.

———. “L. Frank Baum,” in American Writers for Children, 1900-1960. Dictionary of Literary Biography 22. Ed. John Cech. Detroit: Gale, 1983: 13-36.

———. “Ruth Plumly Thompson,” in American Writers for Children, 1900-1960. Dictionary of Literary Biography 22. Ed. John Cech. Detroit: Gale, 1983: 307-14.

Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York and London: Routledge, 1990.

Leach, William R., ed. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. American Society and Culture Series. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1991.

Littlefield, Henry B. “The Wizard of Oz: A Populist Parable.” American Quarterly 16 (Spring 1964): 47-68.

Nathanson, Paul. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Albany: State UP of New York, 1991.

Return To Oz. Dir. Walter Murch. Walt Disney Films, 1985.

Rushdie, Salman. “A Critic at Large: Out of Kansas.” The New Yorker 68.12 (11 May 1992): 93-103.

Ryman, Geoff. Was. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Thompson, Ruth Plumly. Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz. Ill. John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1939.

[Thompson, Ruth Plumly]. The Royal Book of Oz, “by” L. Frank Baum. Ill. John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1921.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Utopiana Americana. University of Washington Chapbooks No. 28. Seattle: U of Washington Bookstore, 1929.

Wild at Heart. Dir. David Lynch. Twentieth Century Fox, 1990.

Willis, Susan. A Primer for Daily Life. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

The Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming [with George Cukor, Richard Thorpe, and King Vidor]. MGM, 1939.

Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. New York: Wildman Press, 1983.

———. Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1994.