The Concept of Oz

The Land of Oz, setting for L. Frank Baum's fourteen Oz books (published from 1900 through 1920), is for most readers a complete and believable fantasy world. In this respect, it ranks with J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, C.S. Lewis's Narnia, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain, and most recently Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea. Most scholarly discussions of Baum's creation have reached a relatively simple conclusion: Oz is a Utopia, reflecting an optimistic view of man's potentialities or at least an optimistic answer to the complexities of our own primary world and to the flaws in man's character.¹ I believe that Baum's secondary world is more complex than this view indicates. His basic themes necessitate a world which is quite other than Utopian.² These themes are the acquisition of self-knowledge and the importance of reality in the face of deception and self-delusion.

To be successful, a secondary world must be detailed and relatively consistent, and it must bear some resemblance to our own world, so that we will be able to suspend our disbelief toward it. In this sense, Lewis Carroll's worlds are unsatisfactory, which paradoxically is one reason for the greatness of the Alice books, since they are based on logical impossibilities. It is particularly difficult to use a sub-creation as a satisfactory literary device—as is all too apparent from many of the "sword-and-sorcery" paperbacks on the newsstands. Either the secondary world becomes central, and character and theme become subordinate; or the fantasy land seems unrelated to character and theme, or even competes with them. A sense of place is important in most fantasies, but too many writers seem to believe that all that is necessary for a good fantasy is a believable secondary world. A sub-creation must not only bring about a sense of wonder, it must also accomplish the difficult trick of being important to the events and characters without dominating them. On the whole, Baum's world is successful in both regards.

Baum's conception of his fairyland is frequently, though not always, technological. Several of Baum's best-known creations, for example, are mechanical men, including the Tin Woodman, who first appeared in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and Tik-Tok, a clockwork robot introduced in Ozma of Oz (1907). Oz magic is not so much an art as it is a science, arrived at through experimentation and often dependent on special equipment. Of the major authors of fantasy, Baum is the most willing to accept technology as basically beneficial; many other writers (Tolkien most strikingly) are either indifferent to technology or frightened by it.³

Geographically, the world of Oz is created with care. The four major divisions of Oz (the countries of the Winkies, Gillikins, Quadlings, and Munchkins) are delineated with a fair degree of precision, as is the Emerald City, situated in the middle of Oz (somewhat like the District of Columbia, the capital of Oz and its immediate environs are not part of any other political division). Oz is surrounded by the Deadly Desert, which has magical destructive properties. Outside the desert are various fantasy kingdoms—Ev, Ix, Mo, Merryland, and others—and surrounding the entire continent is the great Nonestic Ocean. The Ozian world is mappable and, indeed, has been mapped several times.

Oz is peopled by an astonishing variety of grotesques, magical and otherwise, including a man whose body is made of wood and whose head is a pumpkin, a living scarecrow, a woodchopper made of tin, a living sawhorse, creatures who are blown up like balloons, people who eat thistles, and many others. This strange melange is ruled by the Princess Ozma, who ascended the throne of Oz at the end of The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904).

The egotistical isolation of many groups and individuals throughout the Oz books produces a distorted perception of reality. Many inhabitants of Oz are unwilling to attempt to understand those outside their own small groups. They create their own views of others and hold to these views rigidly; their insularity...