[In the following essay, Culver examines Baum's depiction of the emerging consumerist culture of his time in both The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows, which Baum wrote simultaneously.]

The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their bodies, but many of man's are loose, and lie about detached, now here and now there, in various parts of the world.

—Samuel Butler, Erewhon

In the closing moments of MGM's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1939), the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion enter the Wizard's throne room to receive the material objects that symbolize the spiritual qualities they have so long pursued. By now, of course, Dorothy's three companions know the Wizard is a “humbug,” but they are nonetheless willing to take up his cheap substitutes as if they were indeed magic charms. And we enjoy this spectacle of reward even as we acknowledge the movie's conventional wisdom that all such immaterial values are essentially unpurchasable. The scene dramatizes powerfully what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would recognize five years later as the peculiar logic of “enlightened” consumerism: “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use products even though they see through them.”¹

L. Frank Baum was particularly interested in the vagaries of consumer desire in 1900 when he sat down to write The Wizard of Oz. He was at the same time at work on a treatise entitled The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows, a vademecum for would-be window dressers that culminated Baum's brief career as the editor of The Show Window, the official journal of the National Association of Window Dressers.² If his fairy tale advances a genteel critique of commodity fetishism, it was nevertheless the curious by-product of Baum's effort to promote this new advertising technology by cataloging strategies for provoking and manipulating the window shopper's desire.³

Recently, Fundamentalist Christians in Tennessee cast a new light on Baum's conflicting loyalties to consumerism and its critique when they challenged his place in the public school curriculum. The Fundamentalists found The Wizard of Oz objectionable not only because it suggests that crucial human virtues are “individually developed rather than God-given” but also because it portrays “good Witches.”⁴ From this perspective Baum seems doubly perverse: not content simply to insist on the possibility of human perfection, he goes on to offer an obviously fictitious substitute for the necessary divine supplement. Not ready to live the contradictory lives of Adorno and Horkheimer's “enlightened” consumers, Tennessee's Fundamentalists are scandalized by the suggestion that we are willing to accept substitutes we know to be false, a willingness The Wizard of Oz depicts all too clearly.

While it isn't particularly surprising that these parents can read a simple children's story as a strange but powerful statement of secular humanism, it is nevertheless remarkable that they believe they can protect their children from Baum's dangerous message simply by keeping his book out of the classroom. Although The Wizard of Oz is arguably the greatest American fairy tale, it has never been regarded as a classic text of children's literature and has only recently appeared in the classroom. But Baum's characters are familiar to us all, largely because the MGM film has been so often screened, broadcast, and quoted that we feel as though we have always already read the book. Baum's text has in effect been thoroughly supplanted by its spectacular reproduction.⁵ Despite the universal popularity of the film, the book has been the subject of more than one controversy among parents, teachers, and librarians. In 1956, as the movie began its extraordinarily successful run of annual appearances on television, Baum's Oz books were being removed from the shelves of children's libraries on the grounds that they promoted communism, “negativism,” and “a cowardly approach toward life.”⁶

It is tempting to recognize in the diametrically opposed receptions given the movie and the book yet another example of our different attitudes toward the two media: while we are in general still reluctant to see in film anything more than a superficial play of images, we insist on taking our books hard, even our children's books. But in this instance it is the movie that explicitly announces a didactic purpose, claiming in a prefatory note that “time has been powerless” against the moral truths of Baum's “kindly philosophy.” Baum, on the other hand, prefaces his “modernized fairy tale” with the claim that he writes “solely to pleasure children of today,” and he goes on to say that, “since modern education includes morality” as a distinct discipline, the storyteller is now free to address himself exclusively to “the child's wholesome and instinctive appetite for the manifestly unreal.”⁷ In a world in which the labor of education has been rigorously departmentalized, Baum offers a simple literary commodity that appeals to a natural appetite for the mere form of linguistic communication. Since children will get their bitter medicine elsewhere, the fantasist can offer them the sugar coating alone. Wanting the fantastic tale just because it is “manifestly unreal,” Baum's projected audience takes the perversity of Dorothy's companions one step farther as the fantasist, like the Wizard, establishes a community of bad faith with his readers. While his plot seems to articulate a conventional criticism of the commodity fetish, Baum's understanding of the form of fantasy naturalizes consumer desire; thus a text that has been widely read as an unequivocal assertion of human autonomy and integrity proves to be at the same time the dramatization of an inescapable desire for an object that is manifestly a substitute, that is nothing but an image.

We are all by now familiar with MGM's interpretation of Baum's “kindly philosophy.” If at one level the movie celebrates film's power to enchant and transport us, at another level it exposes the machinery behind the enchantment as mere humbug and insists that we learn to contain our imaginations and desires. The movie revises Baum's text most crucially by introducing a dream frame, the conventional device of allegory that reduces Oz to Kansas's uncanny double and turns Dorothy's adventure into something like a post-Freudian policing of family relations. Though Judy Garland's Dorothy may remark to Toto, “I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore,” the fact is that she has never really left home. Unlike Huck Finn, Dorothy never quite manages to run away, if only because she has no territory to “light out for.” She sets out to imagine a world “over the rainbow,” free from “trouble,” work, and the law, but her unconscious gives her only a nightmare version of her own reality. Just as her companions learn that what they already have must and will suffice, Dorothy learns to embrace the comfortable enclosure of the whitewashed picket fence and the domestic role it projects for her. The theme of containment is perversely underlined by the casting of Garland, then sixteen, in the role of a seven-year-old, infantilized and all too obviously confined by her costume and character. If her dream seems to betray an awakening sexual interest in the men around her, it also allows her to reimagine that adolescent desire nostalgically as the simpler relation the child establishes with her dolls and toys, a relation presented here as more maternal than passionate.⁸

Baum's text describes a different relation between fantasy and reality. His Dorothy doesn't try to run away and isn't dreaming; instead, she confronts by accident a fantastic world contiguous with and just as real as Kansas. If the dream allegory imagines two worlds that correspond exactly while remaining ontologically distinct, Baum's fairy tale doesn't rigorously distinguish the space of fantasy from that of the real but leaves the two worlds standing side by side. At the same time, Baum treats with surprising detachment the sentimental ideology the movie so unreservedly endorses. His Dorothy lives in abject, not genteel, poverty. Her world is not black and white but an indifferent gray, and her home is a bare enclosure:

There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds.

(91)

This one room shanty stands alone on a “great gray prairie” that stretches endlessly and vacantly in every direction. Once the house had been painted, but the Kansas sun and wind have long since blistered and blown the paint away. Nature on the plains reduces everything to the same gray indifference, not just the buildings but the people themselves. Even Aunt Em and Uncle Henry seem to Dorothy more like gray automata than human companions.

The scene was one Baum himself had witnessed when, in the early 1890s, he lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota. As owner and editor of the local weekly, The Saturday Pioneer, he reported the financial and natural disasters that led disgruntled farmers to articulate in the Populist platform a distinctly agrarian critique of American political and economic institutions. The farmers' revolt, which was particularly militant in Kansas and South Dakota, attacked the emerging corporate organization of farming and its supposed distortion of natural values, blaming this economic restructuring for the demise of so many family farms on the plains. Writing in the aftermath of Populism's failure, Baum could only regard with ironic detachment the sentimental cliché that serves as the film's moral. The phrase “There's no place like home” appears only once in his text, when the Scarecrow, certainly the most relentlessly logical if not the most intelligent of Ozites, questions Dorothy's preoccupation with getting home:

“I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas.”

“That is because you have no brains,” answered the girl. “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There's no place like home.”

The Scarecrow sighed.

“Of course I cannot understand it,” he said. “If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”

(124-25)

To the Scarecrow's mind, having a brain is just what makes one human, but being human in Kansas means being imprisoned, bound inextricably to one's property and relations. Reporting from Nebraska in 1895, Stephen Crane used similar terms to explain why farm families remained on the plains after its “furnace winds” and “swirling tempests of dust” had turned their land into “a virtual desert”: “The magic of home held them from travelling to the promise of other lands.”⁹

Dorothy's house fails notoriously to keep her from traveling to other lands. Instead, in a very unhomelike fashion, it drops her down on top of the Wicked Witch of the East and involves her directly in the affairs of a country she can never call home. Though Dorothy would like to deny her agency in the witch's death, she is expected to take responsibility for her property's odd behavior: “I haven't killed anything,” she insists, but, as the Good Witch explains, “Your house did anyway and that is the same thing” (102). You are your house in Oz, not because it is the uniquely inalienable property that holds you in place but, rather, because in this world your self flows freely into and is defined by your property no matter how you have come by it or what it does. Dorothy wants to be taken only for what she knows herself to be, “an ordinary little girl who had come by chance of a cyclone into a strange land,” but the objects she accidentally acquires and displays as she travels across Oz and the deeds she unintentionally performs along her way identify her to the Ozites as a witch (115).

As a child of the plains and of Populism's agrarian ideology, Dorothy envisions home, the family farm, as an alternative to this bothersome dislocation of the self. If her house itself has demonstrated an uncanny tendency to displace her, the home to which she returns at story's end promises stability and a more comfortable relation between self and property by establishing a secure distinction between what she essentially is (what properly belongs to her) and the identity constructed for her by the things she has acquired only by chance. Despite Dorothy's insistence on her home's geographic locality, however, she returns to a newly rebuilt shanty and a reconstructed family: home, it seems, is a transcendent ideal never exhaustively identified with any specific material object yet somehow more definitely embodied in the family farm.

Readers of Baum's fairy tale have recognized in Dorothy's love of home a certain allegiance with the lost cause of the Populists.¹⁰ The agrarian reformers argued that the family farm offered a model of economic and social relations antithetical and morally superior to those of industrial production. The troubles on the plains were caused, they believed, less by nature or the homesteaders' extravagant love for their land than by the nation's failure to acknowledge the centrality of agricultural production. Populists regarded farming as the exemplary instance of individual labor producing value out of nature and marketing commodities that found their value in an inescapable, unfluctuating need. If only small-scale agricultural production could be preserved and protected, the Populists argued, the nation could organize its economy around a stable hierarchy of values grounded in a sense of what is most crucial. Food is, of course, the one thing the body must have, and it is also the commodity most definitively appropriated: its value exhausted in its use, it is the one acquisition that becomes quite literally inalienable from the body. Thus the family farm becomes a model of morally autonomous production and consumption governed by need and ending ideally in satiation. More importantly for Dorothy, this agrarian understanding of home grounds the distinction between what she is and what she only appears to be in the critical difference between things, like food, that she really needs and completely consumes and those, like the magic slippers, that she only desires and never truly possesses.¹¹

Dorothy's search for the home imagined by Populist theory takes place in a gaudy, artificial fantasy world that is given over entirely to the values of consumerism. Oz's green capital city, lying midway between the yellow wastes ruled by the Wicked Witch of the West and the blue land of the Munchkins, is a place of mixing and exchange:

Many shops stood in the street, and Dorothy saw that everything in them was green. Green candy and green pop-corn were offered for sale, as well as green shoes, green hats and green clothes of all sorts. At one place a man was selling green lemonade, and when the children bought it Dorothy could see that they paid for it with green pennies.

(202)

The residents of the Emerald City buy and sell incessantly as if commercial activity alone can protect them from the witchcraft outside the city walls. But instead of the necessary foodstuffs grown on the plains, they purchase popcorn and candy, supplemental commodities that seem to be desired just because they are green. In this economy the object's potential value in use is secondary to its merely visible aspect, an extraneous feature that turns out to be not just superficial but absolutely fictitious. Before she can enter the Emerald City, Dorothy must put on a pair of green spectacles, ostensibly to protect her eyes from the brilliance of everything inside the city walls; in fact, the spectacles serve less to filter out a glare of reflected light than to project the supplemental feature, the desirable color, onto the items offered for sale. Everyone in the city wears the spectacles and consequently every object and person appears invested with the magical value of greenness.

Baum borrowed the green spectacles from a traditional folk jest he had rehearsed ten years earlier in his “Our Landlady” column in The Saturday Pioneer. Speaking through the comic persona of “Mrs. Bilkins,” Baum reported that a salesman had passed through the county offering the latest innovation in animal husbandry, green spectacles that, when placed on a horse or mule, turned everything the animal ate into food. Naturally, Mrs. Bilkins bought several pair: “I put the green goggles on my hosses an' feed 'em shavings an' they think it's grass but they ain't gettin' fat on it.”¹² The jest, as Baum tells it in 1890, insists on the agrarian distinction between food that is truly nutritious and the shavings that only appear to be of value. The confidence game works because the horses and the yokels who own them, believing they know what they need, mistake a contingent, visible feature for the necessary sign of food's presence. The jest warns its audience not to confuse the external mechanism that makes value apparent with value itself; even in the case of food, material form and value don't fully coincide.

Joseph Kirkland's local color novel, Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County (1886), employs the spectacle jest to make a more complicated point about animal physiology and the relation of need to desire. In the course of Zury's campaign for the state legislature we learn that political speeches on the frontier cannot be delivered in a plain style; the members of the backwoods audience require a theatrical supplement if only because they have come so far and given up so much to hear their candidates. Zury likens them to mules who, after eating corn exclusively, have become “hay-hungry.” These animals need to ingest some “filler,” roughage of no particular nutritional value that will enable them to digest the richer food. But what, asks Zury, do you do when the standard fillers—grass or hay—aren't available? “I'd put green glasses on them and feed them shavings,” someone correctly responds.¹³ For Zury, then, the shavings aren't simply devoid of value; they are in fact necessary to the natural process of consuming “real” food. The straightforward opposition that confronted Mrs. Bilkins collapses here as Zury's spectacles give the mules what they want in order that they might swallow the shavings they really do need. The point for political discourse is precisely that the theatrical supplement, the excess of linguistic performance over message, is not something merely added on to an already meaningful speech but is essential to the digestion of meaning: no message can be conveyed without its attendant filler. In Zury's analogy, value is defined relationally, not intrinsically, but the green spectacles supply a necessary fiction and restore our faith as voters or mules in the existence of intrinsic values and literal meanings. If Mrs. Bilkins's “hosses” mistake what they want for what they really need, Zury's mules are allowed to go on believing that green is the natural sign of food. Zury doesn't really depart from agrarian ideology here; rather, he describes through the jest an economy grounded ultimately in real needs and values, imagining the spectacles only as a strategic deception, a means of mastering the linguistic or digestive system by acknowledging and containing the necessary presence of the valueless filler. In this version of the jest, the supplemental green value is simply a necessary evil; real needs lie elsewhere, beneath the deceptive colorful surface.

In Oz, however, the green spectacles play a different role. Popcorn and lemonade are not naturally green, and the citizens are not mistaking the greenness around them for the outward sign of an intrinsic value. Green is not for them the color of food; it is rather the color of gems.¹⁴ In the Emerald City a profoundly insatiable appetite for an evanescent quality, for color alone, has supplanted the unavoidable but always satiable need that grounded the agrarian critique. The people in this antipastoral fantasy land want something that is both unnecessary and unobtainable, and they prize things only as the screens against which the ineffable green value appears. Thus consumption, under the influence of the green spectacles, becomes an endless cycle of visual fascinations and mistaken appropriations; desiring green, the Ozites pursue value in the abstract, which is manifest only in the moment before one consumes the thing or puts it to use.

Both con artist and fantasist, the Wizard has introduced the spectacles and their unique economy into Oz. Realizing that his authority rests on his ability to give the people something that they want but can never really have, he asks himself, “How can I help being a humbug when all these people make me do things they know are impossible?” (279). The question echoes that of Adorno and Horkheimer: Why do the people want what they know they can't have? The Wizard may not have an answer to this question, but he is nonetheless a master at promoting this desire for an abstract value and satisfying it after a fashion. He 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.

Unlike Dorothy, the Wizard is more than willing to become whatever the Ozites fortuitously take him to be. Eventually he disappears altogether as a human agent, reappearing as a series of spectacular projections in an effort to master the dislocations Dorothy finds too disconcerting. When Toto knocks down the Wizard's screen and exposes him desperately pulling levers and throwing switches, unable to control his own machine, we are meant to see that all such projects of self-staging are doomed: having given himself over to image-making machinery, the Wizard is no longer his own master. With the screen down and the Wizard's ineffectual mastery so thoroughly exposed and discredited one would expect the enlightened Ozites to take off their spectacles, to see things as they really are and to restore the agrarian distinction between real and projected values. Yet the green spectacles remain in place even after the Wizard departs and the Scarecrow replaces him. It seems that their power is perfected and not compromised by the scene of exposure and enlightenment. Like the consumers described by Adorno and Horkheimer, the citizens of the Emerald City continue to want the green value even after it is exposed as a hoax. The Ozites are happy to accept their new ruler and boast that “there is not another city in all the world ruled by a straw man,” reminding us by the way that the Scarecrow is literally a straw man who only holds the Wizard's place (292). Portraying human agency as effect rather than cause, the Scarecrow completes the process the Wizard began and presents a new model of personhood. An assemblage of detachable parts, the Scarecrow has no interior, originating center. His body refuses the agrarian distinction between need and desire if only because it displays an uncanny ability to become whatever it acquires, refusing to separate essence from accident.

The Scarecrow's ascension to the throne of Oz represents a parodic restoration of the farmer to the seat of power. The figure of an agrarian producer becomes the model of the consuming self.¹⁵ In their analysis of the “culture industry,” Adorno and Horkheimer describe the model as a form of “pseudo-individuality,” a figure of the fully realized self that reduces individuality itself to a product of imaginary differences. The consumer, in this account, wanting to be like the model, aspires to become nothing more than a “proficient apparatus,” a complete assembly of working parts.¹⁶ But if the Scarecrow serves as a model of sorts for the Ozites and for Dorothy, he comes to life only insofar as he feels a certain lack; it is his desire to have a brain that gives rise to his personhood even as it threatens to undermine it. Baum's fantastic figure seems less like a proficient apparatus than a type in crisis: the Cowardly Lion, for instance, lacks the feature that is most essential to his type. On the one hand, the fantastic creature projects the picture of a self organized around a lack; on the other, the green spectacles triumph over the possibility of a transparent encounter with commodities and their values. The Wizard of Oz represents, therefore, a significant departure from the agrarian sympathies Baum voiced in The Saturday Pioneer, a departure that was, I believe, the inevitable consequence of Baum's move from the plains to Chicago in 1893 and his subsequent transformation from frontier journalist to theorist and promoter of modern advertising technologies.

At home, in Omaha, the Wizard had been an advertiser of sorts, “a man who goes up in a balloon on circus day to draw a crowd of people together and get them to pay to see the circus” (266-67). In his treatise on the show window Baum notes that a “balloon ascension” is essential to every fair; the spectacle of weightlessness epitomizes the collective wizardry that transforms everyday transactions into forms of entertainment in their own right. The fair is, according to Baum, a strategy for making the town “popular to the farming and outlying communities tributary to it” by capturing the hearts and minds of the rural population.¹⁷ In Oz, the Wizard oversees just this sort of triumph of advertising when he makes the people of Oz come together and pay by projecting a fictitious, supplemental value onto the everyday articles around them. But the green spectacles do successfully turn the Emerald City into a haven from witchcraft, and the Wizard is something more than the con artist of Mrs. Bilkins's story. The confrontation between country and city is no longer presented as a straightforward contrast between an economy governed by necessity and one given over to desire.

According to family legend, Baum's move to Chicago was inspired by a visit to the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. The Chicago fair was the exemplary instance of a city selling itself by advertising a new urban experience grounded on a new relation between production and consumption. If he responded typically to the Columbian Exposition, Baum would have been struck by the Court of Honor, the famous White City, which housed the latest marvels of technology in a central array of buildings neoclassical in design. These buildings were not as substantial as they seemed at first glance; made to look like marble temples of industry, they were in fact only plaster. Despite the false fronts, visitors saw in the White City the promise of a Bellamy-like utopia that would reconcile the machinery of industrial production with the genteel tastes for harmony and order.¹⁸

But while Paderewski played Chopin in the White City, Scott Joplin played rags on the Midway, a region of rides and amusements that supplemented and contradicted the central display of cultural and industrial harmony. The Midway was conceived originally as a space for exhibiting exotic, non-Western cultures that had been excluded from the Court of Honor, providing the fair with an ethnographic margin. In the event, however, the Orient was represented by Little Egypt's danse du ventre, and the Midway was informed less by non-Western values and tastes than by new, Western ones that were at once central to the world of mass production and repressed by the White City's dream of classical harmony. As Philip Fisher has noted, the Ferris Wheel presided over the Midway introducing into the fair the rhythms of the new urban life in the form of a pleasure taken in the act of going up and coming down.¹⁹ Cotton candy was developed for this fair, providing, as the green popcorn does for the Emerald City, the commodity one consumes simply to be consuming when consumption is the preferred mode of participation.

Henry Adams called the Columbian Exposition “the first expression of American thought as a unity,” but Adams was interested only in the White City; the Midway seems to have made no impression on him.²⁰ The unplanned division of the fair into two distinct representations of the modern, however, exposed a conflict between two understandings of how the interests of art and industry cohere: the classical imperative to discover and impose a balanced order was directly contradicted by the art forms of the Midway, which sought simply to make people and things circulate. If the White City tried to purge itself of the chaotic movements of modern life, the Midway, in a return of the repressed, took pleasure in those movements for their own sake. In the Emerald City, Baum seems to resolve the tension between the fair's two regions by collapsing them together, placing the pleasures of the Midway at the heart of the capital city and amidst the machinery of production.

In The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows Baum asks his audience of would-be window dressers, “Who can forget Chicago in 1893?” (166). The fair is not, of course, Baum's real concern in the treatise. He wants instead to explain how the competent window dresser can achieve the same effects of wizardry in the midst of everyday urban life. The show window, an eruption of theater into the centers of commercial activity, becomes for Baum a distinctly new medium of artistic expression, one characterized by a unique tension between commercial and aesthetic interests: the dresser must have both the talent “for letting objects tell some legible story” and the knack for “inducing trade,” and, in Baum's treatise, strategies for bringing out the aesthetic value of commodities are not always compatible with the tactics of good salesmanship (223). The dresser faces yet another difficulty: he must somehow transform the “passive throng” on the city streets into an audience of absorbed spectators. “You must arouse in your audience cupidity and a longing to possess the goods you sell,” Baum instructs his pupil; though he aims at this powerful affect, he must practice his skill on a largely indifferent audience of passersby (8). Baum's solution is the “illusion window,” which recycles the trickery and humbug of carnival sideshows and dime museums. A particular favorite is “the vanishing lady,” a trick done with mirrors and preferably a live model, “a young beautiful woman, the lower half of whose body is invisible to the spectator,” who at regular intervals will “disappear into the pedestal” only to “appear with a new hat, waist, gloves, etc.” while “everyone wonders where is the rest of the person” (83). The example is typical not only in its recourse to the hackneyed tricks of would-be Barnums but also in its presentation of the human, characteristically female, figure as uncannily dismembered. The changing articles of clothing seem oddly to compensate for the missing lower half of the model's body.

Throughout the treatise, Baum praises displays that put fragmented human forms—both live models and manikins—into mechanical motion. The figure becomes the dresser's essential tool, a machine that simultaneously attracts the gaze of passersby and locates the items on display in a specific narrative, letting them tell their “legible story.” The simplest device, and the one most frequently employed, is the half-revolving bust that turns constantly toward and away from the shopper, a human form reduced exactly to what the clothes require as a frame. Baum, however, spends more time on the more elaborate manikins; what seems to be at stake is his idiosyncratic understanding of how the manikin mediates between consumer and commodity by tempting people to confuse themselves with things. Gazing at the mobile, fragmented manikin, the shopper confronts a human form that is simply the aggregate of detachable, replaceable parts for which the clothes on display are necessary bodily parts. The window becomes a stage for the performance of a specific drama of desire; its cast is just the uncanny, mechanical double. Like the green spectacles in Oz, the plate glass of the store front, aided by the manikin, invests commodities with a certain supplemental value that, like greenness, can't be purchased or consumed because it is just the value the object has for the surrogate in its drama of dismemberment and transformation.

The founding premise of the art of window dressing is that goods can't be made to go if they are simply and transparently displayed; they require the supplement of representation that for Baum means the presence of the machine. “Machinery is a necessary adjunct,” Baum contends, but he also warns that the manikin can be a dangerous distraction. Although a “business window that has no attractive quality is not really a business window,” nevertheless “you must not catch your hare by beautiful, artistic and mechanical displays” (146). Baum remarkably identifies aesthetic interest with an interest in machinery for its own sake: “People are naturally curious. They will always stop to examine any thing that moves and will enjoy studying out the mechanism or wondering how the effect has been maintained” (87). Learning how to see through the advertiser's machine is part of the pleasure one takes in the window, but this is a pleasure Baum regards as potentially subversive. The dresser engages his audience in a game of one-upmanship and thereby threatens to undermine his job of making commodities sell. Indeed Baum's treatise describes a struggle between the innovative window dresser and store management, and Baum makes this conflict of interests vivid when he advises the dresser to put up a screen whenever he changes displays and to post on the screen a sign, “Watch this window!” (16). The screen advertises the advertiser himself or, more accurately, his ingenuity and wizardry, advertising the power of advertising without promoting any specific line of goods. As he hints that what advertisers really sell is advertising itself, Baum demonstrates the impossibility of keeping the supplementary presence of theatrical machinery properly subservient to the needs of commerce.

The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows is simply a how-to manual and does not offer Baum a forum for discussing the significance of the manikin's peculiar form or for sorting out the window dresser's conflicting commitments to aesthetics and commerce. On the other hand, Baum seems to have used his fiction to explore these and other issues raised by the show window even though he wrote almost exclusively to an audience of children. One could argue that Baum's distinctive contribution to children's literature is his imagination of an encounter between child and manikin that dramatizes the relations between consumer desire and modern beliefs about human identity. The year after The Wizard of Oz and The Art of Decorating appeared, Baum included among his American Fairy Tales a story unimaginatively entitled “How the Dummy in Mr. Floman's Department Store Window Came to Life,” but already in his most famous work he had introduced characters fashioned after the manikin. The sequence of Oz books reveals Baum's attachment to the most manikinlike figures: while Dorothy and the Lion disappear for several volumes, the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman dominate the first sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), which introduces several characters of the same type, most notably Jack Pumpkinhead, his Sawhorse, and the flying Gump.

For the most part those readers who have taken Baum's work seriously have regarded his manikin-based characters as humorous but critical personifications of commodity fetishes. These readers suggest that Baum's fantastic characters wrongly believe that bodily organs can quite literally become detachable and purchasable commodities, and so they incorrectly assume that the Wizard's facsimiles of these organs are in fact living embodiments of the ideal qualities brains and hearts conventionally represent. Viewed from this perspective, the manikins err by assuming that a crucial human quality that ought never to be alienated (i.e., their personhood itself) has somehow been thrown outside their bodies and is now lodged in some otherwise insignificant object. They are comical, then, just because the humanity they desire so poignantly is, like greenness, immaterial and unpurchasable, but fortunately (so this familiar interpretation goes) this quality, unlike greenness, is something they have always possessed. There is, at least for these readers of The Wizard, an ineluctable difference between the manikin's foolish and impossible desire and Dorothy's very real and realizable demand; this reading privileges the agrarian child's request simply to be at home over the others' hopeless quest to possess personhood as if it were a tangible thing.²¹

This popular interpretation of Baum's tale seems inadequate exactly to the extent that it fails to consider Baum's position within the advertising profession. I don't want to suggest that the fairy tale is an unproblematic complement to the treatise on window dressing; certainly one could read The Wizard as the daydream of a guilty conscience or the return of Baum's repressed sympathies with the agrarian values of the Populist revolt. But it seems to me more fruitful to approach the story as a unique, perhaps even bizarre, attempt to explain how the manikin functions in the art of advertising by picturing the conditions under which it comes to life.

The case of the Tin Woodman is exemplary. Nick Woodchopper was once a creature of flesh and blood; engaged to be married, he began to build a home for his incipient family, but the Wicked Witch, opposing the marriage, charmed his axe so that he cut off a piece of his body every time he started to work on his house. Eventually he finished it, but only after each of his bodily parts had been replaced by a tin facsimile. The last piece to go was his heart and with it, or so he believes, his capacity to love and hence his humanity. Desiring a heart, the Tin Woodman desires humanity understood as the ability to feel desire. There is, however, a curious passage in Baum's text that reveals an important flaw in the Tin Man's logic. As the party travels along the Yellow Brick Road, the Woodman

walked very carefully, with his eyes on the road, and when he saw a tiny ant toiling by he would step over it, so as not to harm it. The Tin Woodman knew very well he had no heart, and therefore he took great care never to be cruel or unkind to anything.

“You people with hearts,” he said, “have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful. When Oz gives me a heart of course I needn't mind so much.”

(152)

Not surprisingly, when he does get his heart, the Woodman forgets his love and home, and his body now complete, wants only to keep his tin surface polished. When at last he gets the thing he always wanted, he loses precisely the quality he had hoped it would embody. Reified in the artificial heart the Wizard has given him, the Woodman's humanity disappears altogether. Baum seems to be suggesting that Dorothy's companions come to life not because they inalienably possess crucial spiritual qualities but, rather, because they feel a certain desire. Humanity in Baum's fantasy is identified with the experience of a fundamental lack, with, in other words, the sense that one's body is not yet complete.

The chapters of Baum's fairy tale begin and end with Dorothy's search for food and shelter, biological needs the movie denies as it compresses the action into a single day. The reader is forced repeatedly to confront the fact that Dorothy's human body is always open and in need, only temporarily satiated. She is, moreover, always in the company of others and experiences life vicariously through the extra bodies of her new-found friends and her pet. Indeed, Toto's presence (his name itself suggests that the person is an additive whole) serves as a reminder that even in Kansas Dorothy inhabited more than one body and was able to feel desires not properly her own, which came to her mediated through the bodies of others. The human body emerges in Baum's tale as the site of an infinite desire: the need for food and shelter is experienced as a recognition that the borders of the body are fluctuating and permeable, that the inside must incorporate the outside, and Dorothy takes this insight farther when she desires to incorporate the feelings and experiences of others. Dorothy's companions, however, neither eat nor sleep, and, as we have seen, they don't require others once they are complete. They are human only insofar as they desire, but they desire only the crucial missing piece, the one thing necessary, they think, to complete their manikinlike bodies. The problem, therefore, is not that their desires are impossible or fictitious but that they aren't impossible enough: the companions are too easily and definitively satisfied. Having obtained at last the crucial missing piece, resting content, they have ceased to be human: becoming autonomous, they have become automata. To remain human they must continue to feel a lack; therefore they require neither a purchasable article nor an unpurchasable, metaphysical thing but a value that appears only under the aspect of desire. In the Emerald City the green glasses project just such a value, something that is always apparent but never possessed.

The lesson for the window dresser is two-fold: he needs the mechanical surrogate to awaken the shopper's desire and point it toward a specific line of goods, but the manikin will work only if it can project the image of a complete body while simultaneously dramatizing a present lack. Baum's story suggests that the successful manikin mediates between consumer and commodity by performing that lack in a certain posture. Like the Tin Woodman, the manikin recognizes the crucial missing piece but does not yet possess it. Hence Baum implicitly advises the window dresser to put his manikin in motion, making it rock back and forth mechanically in front of the desired thing in order to capture the impossible, almost Keatsian moment when desire encounters its good object. However, poised before its object, the desiring machine is on the verge of a mistake, not because it is about to acquire the wrong thing or to acquire the right thing for the wrong reason but, rather, because this acquisition threatens to bring desire to an end. The image of a complete body is also the picture of death or dehumanization. Still, the mechanical figure organizes the desire it awakens by translating the shopper's desire into a need for this or that particular article, promising her transformation as long as she is willing to imagine her body as, at least potentially, a loose aggregate of detachable parts. The risk is always that the manikin will fail to portray desire and be taken for exactly what it is, an empty frame on which objects are displayed in a complete but meaningless array.²² The “art” of window dressing is, therefore, nothing more nor less than the ability to pose one's manikin so that it projects the possibility of bodily integrity without erasing desire, so that it depicts the self's closure but covers up its consequences. “Home” is the name Baum's fantasy gives to the impossible reconciliation of animation with closure; the promise home holds is that there one can remain human while dwelling amidst a complete array of necessary parts, content yet still desiring.

From the moment she arrives in Oz Dorothy tries to find her way home, hoping to repossess a self that keeps slipping away from her. As the story opens, she imagines home as an agrarian paradise; her experience in the fantastic world, however, leads her to rethink the meaning of home, just as Baum was himself compelled to rethink the spectacle jest. Dorothy's intimacy with the manikins and her discovery of the Wizard's humbug issue in a new anti-agrarian notion of home that is most clearly expressed in a scene omitted from the MGM film and, perhaps consequently, completely ignored in critical accounts of the fairy tale.

After her companions have been satisfied and the Wizard has departed, Dorothy begins a third journey through Oz, heading south towards Glinda, the Good Witch, and the promise of a way back to Kansas. Along the way she stumbles upon a miniature world made entirely of porcelain, inhabited by china figures representing a fragile, aristocratic pastoral. There are, among the cows and sheep, a milkmaid, a Touchstone-like clown, and a princess. In this artificial green world within a green world the Populist dream of home reaches its ironic fulfillment, embodied in commodities that are absolutely useless except as items of display, commodities that are nothing more than theatrical representations. Dorothy is particularly attracted to the figurine of the princess: “Won't you let me carry you back to Kansas and stand you on Aunt Em's mantel-piece?” she asks.

“That would make me very unhappy,” answered the china princess. “You see, here in our own country we live contentedly, and can talk and move around as we please. But whenever any of us is taken away our joints at once stiffen, and we can only stand straight and look pretty. Of course that is all that is expected of us when we are on mantel-shelves and cabinets and drawing-room tables, but our lives are much pleasanter here in our own country.”

(313-14)

Dorothy grants the princess her request and leaves the figurine untouched in this windowlike world of objects. If Dorothy were to purchase the figurine and remove it from the display, the princess would, like the satisfied manikin, become a dead object. What was once the living habitance of value would become mere souvenir, signifying a past experience of presence, a reduction all the more drastic in the case of the figurine, which has no value or use outside the moment of display. Like green popcorn and cotton candy, the figurine is an essentially supplemental commodity, but it doesn't offer the pleasure of immediate consumption. When she grants the princess her request Dorothy acknowledges the other's desire for home; thus, like the mythical farmer of Populist ideology, the princess, left in her “own country,” represents the possibility of life reconciled with closure, of autonomy coexisting with contentment. As she acknowledges this representation of the desire for home, however, Dorothy forgets her own Kansas home, imagining a mantelpiece where before there was only a rusty wood stove. The journey through Oz ends with this revision of the homestead into a bourgeois interior where the child of Populism, who at first abhorred the power of things to reconstitute persons, tries to create her own display. Home becomes finally a way of advertising the self.

Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz at a moment when the American home was being transformed from a scene of production to one of consumption and the roles of women and children in the home were being recast. The new domestic labor of consumption required an artistic homemaker who could envision the home as both a stage for social performance and a collection of objects expressing the personality and power of the absent male owner. Threatened by a fate similar to that awaiting the careless window dresser, the woman struggles to keep her interior from dissolving into a mere accumulation of dead, insignificant knick-knacks. She must simultaneously display her husband's wealth and let her objects tell a story of their own. Dorothy, however, refuses to perform this labor of consumption when she chooses not to purchase the china princess.²³ Apparently she has learned from her companions that consumption doesn't offer access to real values and that only within the interval of display can the figure of desire come to life. This resistance to consumption is linked to an aesthetic interest in advertising: Dorothy wants the figurine, but she wants it in the window as a useless commodity in the most useless of situations. It seems that Dorothy has learned not only to accept the inevitability of humbug but actually to desire the theatrical supplemental commodity just because it is a blank screen against which the pure value of the window appears, awakening a desire that is not referred to any need.

In a significant revision of the consumerism described by Adorno and Horkheimer, Dorothy wants this supplemental commodity exactly because it is useless and only after she has been enlightened. Moreover, the figurine she desires is not just a supplemental commodity but also a version of the manikin and hence the essential device in the machinery of display. In short, Dorothy loves the mechanism that turns display into a narrative of desire and enables her to experience the pastoral idyll vicariously. When she assents to the doll's request, Dorothy responds to a representation of humanity as if it were actually human, with human claims on her; she projects her own deepest desire onto a mere thing or, more accurately, exercises her desire through the representative figure and so manages to take up “home” after a fashion. My point is not that she takes up the representation as a substitute for real gratification; she doesn't want what the model wants but wants to feel the model's desire. Loving the figurine, Dorothy loves neither her own alienated essence nor the integrity of another self; rather, faced with and indeed living in a world of commodities on display, she comes to love the inescapability of advertising and the useless article and, in loving that, she loves also the possibility of desire purified of all need, no longer subject to satisfaction. She desires the figure that represents desire, recognizing in that image her own capacity for infinite desire.

Dorothy may be the window dresser's best audience, but she is by no means the ideal consumer. The aesthetic interest she takes in commodities on display simultaneously serves and undermines commerce. She refuses to purchase, however, not because she shares the agrarian's respect for real needs nor because she feels the bourgeois imperative to postpone gratification for the sake of accumulation; rather, she wants to appease a decadent taste for spectacle in its purest form. But, though he insists on the connections between the modern phenomenon of window shopping and the child's natural appetite for the “manifestly unreal,” Baum does not announce the birth of a culture of narcissism. On the contrary, Dorothy responds to the manikin as a mechanical surrogate, a broken body organized around a lack, and not as a reified image of her own possible integrity.²⁴ Baum's fairy tale registers a certain anxiety about the art he practiced and promoted as it acknowledges the unfortunate consequences of the shopper's willingness just to look, her desire as it were to let green values accumulate in the moment of display. The artist of the window, Baum suggests, never quite manages to domesticate the desire he provokes. So, like the Wizard of Oz, the window dresser and the fantasist are at the mercy of their own representational machinery, while the shopper and the child perversely find themselves at home in front of the spectacle of the manikin's frustrated desire for closure.

Notes

1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; reprint ed., New York, 1972), 167.

2. The most complete biography of Baum is Michael Patrick Hearn's introductory essay to his edition of The Wizard: The Annotated Wizard of Oz (New York, 1973), 11-86.

3. It has become commonplace in recent discussions of late-nineteenth-century American culture to suggest that genteel resistance to the emerging consumer society actually (and unfortunately) served to further its advance. See in particular T. J. Jackson Lears's influential No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981). I argue here, however, that Baum's fairy tale describes a more complex interaction between the traditional values of genteel idealism and those of the new consumerism. For more on this see note 15 below.

4. The Washington Post, 25 October 1986, A1, A7.

5. Baum played an active role in this displacement of his text. In 1902 he collaborated with Julian Mitchell on a vaudeville revue loosely based on The Wizard, and, several years later, he produced a number of short “special effects” films depicting moments of spectacular transformation from the Oz books but not presenting any story in its entirety. See Frank J. Baum, “The Oz Film Co.,” Films in Review 7 (August-September 1956): 329-33.

6. The remarks cited here were made by Ralph Ueveling, city librarian of Detroit in the mid-1950s, and are quoted by Gore Vidal in “The Wizard of The Wizard,” New York Review of Books, 29 September 1977, 12. The debate over the fairy tale first surfaced in 1938, just prior to the release of MGM's film version, when Stewart Robb noted that the New York Public Library had removed Baum's books from its Children's Reading Room; Robb suggested, half seriously, that this amounted to political censorship; see Robb, “The Red Wizard of Oz,” New Masses, 4 October 1938, 8. For a discussion of Baum's fate in the 1950s see Martin Gardner, “The Librarians in Oz,” Saturday Review, 11 April 1959, 18-19; and “Why Librarians Dislike Oz,” The American Book Collector 60 (December 1962): 14-16.

7. Hearn, Annotated Wizard, 91. All quotations are from this edition. Subsequent page numbers are given parenthetically in the text.

8. My account of the film is indebted to a discussion with Gillian Brown. For a somewhat more complex account of the significance of dolls by one of Baum's contemporaries see G. Stanley Hall, Aspects of Child Life (Boston, 1907).

9. Stephen Crane, “Nebraska's Bitter Fight for Life,” Stephen Crane: Poetry and Prose, ed. J. C. Levenson (New York, 1984), 689-90.

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

11. The most recent complete treatment of the Populist movement is Lawrence Goodwyn's Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York, 1976).

12. The “Our Landlady” column is reprinted in part by Hearn (268) and appears in its entirety in a collection of Baum's South Dakota writings published in 1941 by the South Dakota Writers' Project.

13. Joseph Kirkland, Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County (Boston, 1886).

14. Green is also the color of money, and, for Baum, the spectacles provide a tool for criticizing the Populist assumption that paper money (greenbacks) alone would restore the crucial distinction between real value and the means by which value is expressed and exchanged. Populist theory held that paper money, exactly because it was a valueless, neutral signifier, would allow the value of necessary articles like food to express itself transparently, unaltered by the means of representation. In Baum's story, greenbacks, or green spectacles, do just the opposite: instead of keeping things of value distinct from money, they turn everything into a form of money.

15. The Scarecrow seems to provide a parodic literalization of the phenomenon T. J. Jackson Lears has called “weightlessness,” the “feeling of inner emptiness” that emerged in late-nineteenth-century America as production became increasingly automatic and consumption more mediated. Having lost the sense of autonomy in their work, Lears contends, Americans sought fulfillment through consumption even though the commodities they were purchasing were actually “insulating people from primary experience” and offering instead false images of a lost autonomy. Thus Lears uncovers what seems to him a scandal: “The reaction against weightlessness produced more weightlessness” as the false values projected onto commodities by the new arts of advertising distanced the autonomy and fulfillment they promised. It is for Lears, then, only typical that the Scarecrow would be at once the figure of the agrarian producer and the representative of a new order in which the self no longer produces but is produced. Baum's Scarecrow, however, is something more than a representation of modern “weightlessness” if only because his “feeling of inner emptiness” is less the result of a fall from integrity and autonomy than the essential element of his personhood. One might even say that his feeling of emptiness is just what makes it possible for him to care about being integral or autonomous. I want, in other words, to suggest that the relation between the search for individual autonomy and consumer desire the Scarecrow embodies differs significantly from that described by Lears, that even in its early years consumer desire was characterized by an appetite for the unreal, not a dread of it. I am quoting here from Lears's “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,” in The Culture of Consumption, ed. Richard Wrightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York, 1983), 8, 7, and 16.

16. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154, 167.

17. L. Frank Baum, The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows (Chicago, 1900), 13. Subsequent page numbers will appear parenthetically in the text.

18. See Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The World's Columbian Exposition and American Culture (Chicago, 1979).

19. Philip Fisher, “Acting, Reading, Fortune's Wheel: Sister Carrie and the Life History of Objects,” in American Realism: New Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (Baltimore, 1982); reprinted in Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York, 1985).

20. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Boston, 1973), 343.

21. See, along with Littlefield's essay, S. J. Sackett, “The Utopia of Oz,” Georgia Review 14 (Fall 1960): 275-91; and Fred Erisman, “L. Frank Baum and the Progressive Dilemma,” American Quarterly 20 (Fall 1968): 616-23.

22. In his For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Jean Baudrillard rejects the familiar terms of Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism—the difference, that is, between exchange and use values—and suggests that consumers are actually interested in the “sign value” of commodities, their place in the overall system or code of objects. In Baudrillard's account this “passion for the code itself” leads consumers to desire a complete, closed statement made in or through objects on display: “What fascinates us is always that which radically excludes us in the name of its internal logic or perfection: a mathematical formula, a paranoic system, a concrete jungle, a useless object, or, again, a smooth body without orifices, doubled and redoubled by a mirror, devoted to perverse autosatisfaction”; trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis, 1981), 96. Baudrillard finds an alternative to this sort of commodity fetishism in the asyntactic, anti-economic exchanges of gift giving, a relation that, he believes, concerns “symbolic” and not “sign” values and that actually subverts the logic of the code. But Baum's description of the machinery that makes the code appear in the first place suggests that symbolic and sign values aren't so easily distinguished: it appears that the manikin body is in a way already symbolic, not a smooth body without orifices but a human figure fragmented and incomplete.

23. I want to thank Lynn Wardley for helping me see the significance of this moment in Baum's text. Susan Stewart's On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore, 1984) offers a persuasive account of the role of the miniature in the world of objects. Stewart suggests that the dollhouse is simultaneously a model of absolute possession and a substitute for unavailable real luxuries, offering only “the frontal view” and not the whole object (62). Dorothy, it seems, views the china world as less a luxury item than a stage where impossible desires are performed; the miniature, therefore, offers her a form of possession that is anything but absolute, that differs radically from the ownership of real estate.

24. In Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York, 1981), a study of the new phenomenon of window shopping, Rachel Bowlby suggests that the manikin is in fact a machine for objectifying and fragmenting the female body, for subjecting the shopper's desire to the interests of male managers. The shopper, in Bowlby's view, sees in the manikin her own identity reified and alienated, presented as a false totality, and she becomes “hooked on images which she takes for her own identity but does not recognize as not of her own making” (30). For Bowlby, then, the strong consumer is the one who can recognize the interests at work behind the display, who can “see through” the art of the window dresser. What I am suggesting here is that such “seeing through” does not lead inevitably to a rational mastery over desire nor to a rediscovery of things as they are; more importantly, the manikin Baum describes does not project a false totality but performs a break in the self's integrity. Baum's powerful consumer, therefore, continues “just looking” not out of a narcissistic attraction to images of wholeness but in order to feel desire in its purest form, a desire that is potentially but not necessarily subversive of the interests of store management.