In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5. OZ AS AMERICAN MVTH Utopian novels are written in the indicative about the political subjunctive. They treat contemporary political and social conditions and raise questions about how they might or should be changed. Whether conservative or progressive, the narrative strategies of different authors intend to distance us from our present world so that we can explore change. Paradoxically, they remove us from our present situation to engage us with it. Their futuristic or otherworldly settings are deceiving, for they only set the framework for the author's political critique of the here and now, inviting readers to share the deception and confront the critique. It is within deception that the truth lies. It is within fantasy that the political unconscious can awaken and map out the space which it needs and had been denied. L. Frank Baum knew this intuitively when he first wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. However, he did not realize that his imagination was to become the funnel for a national political unconscious . Oz is everything America did not become, and it is why we keep trying to return to Oz. But returning to Oz is not going backward. It is a leap forward, a flight forward, a utopian gesture. It is our endeavor to recapture promises of the past and fulfill them by making our mark in the present. Oz is a marker. It sets apart the utopian imagination from the cynical. It is the measure of hope, a secular force of humanitarian hope. 120 W.W. De~slow. Illustration by W.W. Denslow, 1900. FAIRY TALE AS MYTH Illustration by W.W. Denslow, 1900. Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10:07 GMT) OZ AS AMERICAN MVTH 121 It is fascinating to see how Oz took on its force and captured the national imagination in America. As we know, Baum was an Easterner who traveled and experienced the Midwest during the 1890s, a period of upheaval, depression , and crisis. Settled, but really unsettled in Chicago, Baum, the wanderer, conceived the first narrative of Oz at a time when the American frontier had just closed. There was no more space to conquer in America, and whatever manifest destiny may have been, Baum had seen its spoiled fruits in the Midwest. Oz was what Kansas was not, what Nebraska , North Dakota, South Dakota, and Illinois were not. It was the ungray place where a young girl could come into contact with the qualities she would need (courage, brains, and heart) and realize her potential through nonviolent means in opposition to conmen and wicked witches. Only after a visit to Oz could Dorothy take on Kansas. Not accept Kansas, but take on Kansas to change it. Just as Baum himself sought to realize his dreams and visions in the Midwest and later the West. As we know, however, Baum failed, and America failed Baum. That is, Baum failed in numerous business enterprises , but he never really failed as a writer. He became the chronicler of America's failure, and in his series of fourteen Oz books, he depicted how Dorothy was gradually compelled to leave America forever and settle in Oz. The conmen , bankers, and cynical people envelop America, fix its boundaries, and as Baum died in 1919, the Wobblie movement was about to be annihilated in America. A new world order was coming into being. It was not communism, but the beginnings of a Cold War, the division of the world into good and evil zones, the so-called free world and the world of dictators. Binary thinking was celebrated. There were to be no in-betweens. And yet, there were many in-betweens, cracks in the settlement of the forty-eight states, fissures, places where one could still glimpse Oz, escape to Oz, and return to America with recharged hope. 122 FAIR\' TALE AS M\'TH So it was not by chance that various writers continued to write Oz books after Baum's death, and it was especially not coincidental that, during the years of the Depression, the cinematic version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was conceived and completed by 1939 with many of its co-creators associated with socialist and left-wing causes.1 Oz was resurrected out of the misery of the 1930s, an alternate vision of America, a mirror that reflected America's disgrace and promise. Somewhere over the rainbow there was a land we all dream of, and ironically it was realized through the cooperative efforts of numerous people and...

Share