Thinky Thoughts about Oz, Glinda, and the O.Z. of Tin Man

[jedibuttercup]

Sorry I haven't been writing this week. I never get trivial colds-- unless I KO my immune system by spending a couple of weeks in a manic daze, getting too little sleep and expending too much energy on mental tasks. Should have remembered the other consequence of college finals week when I was comparing it to Yuletide writing season.

*blows nose* Yeah, so I'm a little under the weather.

Anyway. I'm seven books into the Oz series now, and seriously curious about whether there is any analytical commentary available about them. I mean, fan-level commentary, not scholarly works attempting to frame them as political allegories, or whatever. Attempts to explain (in-world) the wobbly inconsistent elements of Baum's fourteen-book canon (not including the rest of the "Famous Forty", or the multitude of Oz-ian apocrypha written since they started going out of copyright, ranging from additional children's books to more adult entries). Even attempts to real-world-ize them-- to come up with "reasonable" (as far as you can get with magic) explanations for the weirder bits.

Because right now? My brain keeps insisting that Glinda has to be sneakily evil, and thanks whatever source she gets her powers from every morning that Dorothy dropped in and eliminated her only serious competition, thus paving the way for a young girl with every reason to be grateful and attentive to Glinda's advice to take the throne and start running Oz the way Glinda wants it. I like Ozma. Lots. But some of her decisions, especially in Patchwork Girl, made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and her attitude has definitely shifted since her introduction in the series.

The next seven books might change my opinion again. But right now? Yeah, I can definitely see how the tarnished O.Z. of "Tin Man" evolved from the "perfect" fairy-tale world of Baum's books.
~

Comments

[aella_irene]

Have you read 'Wicked' by Gregory Maguire? It's a prequel to the Oz series, and I've heard that it goes behind, and makes the characters rather more nuanced.

[cat-77.livejournal.com]

I was just going to suggest the same thing. I freely admit I have not read all of the original OZ books, but my partner swears "Wicked" is a wonderful addition to the "cannon" of the series. I think she just loves that Glinda is not the perfect princess she tries to appear to be.

[jedibuttercup]

I've heard about it, but I'm not sure whether to pick it up. It's about the Wicked Witch, obviously, and thus must end in tragedy; and from a quick skim of the man's books when I picked one of them up, Mr. Maguire tends toward the satire/dystopia side of fairy-tale storytelling. I like serious treatments of fairy-tales, but not when the point is to spork or titillate or make angsty excuses for villainy, and no-one on my f-list has yet read it and advised it to be otherwise.

I'll probably just go ahead and read it one of these days to be complete about things, but not while I'm trying to build a Baum-based explanation for how the world would evolve after his books.

[jedibuttercup]

Can you point me at a detailed review? Every time I've walked past his books in the store I've got the impression that Mr. Maguire writes in the satire/dystopian side of the fairy tale genre, and that's not really to my taste. If it doesn't get too wangsty about the evil witch's excuses for turning into a villain, however, I might be interested in checking it out sometime.

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

I've never read the books, but just based on the movie I've always suspected Glinda of being a manipulative witch. I mean, she tells Dorothy that she has to travel the Yellow Brick Road to see the Wizard if she has any hope of getting home again. Dorothy does, and her adventures lead directly to the death of the (second) Wicked Witch at her hands.

And what does the Wizard tell Dorothy? She's had the power to go home all along--just click the heels of the ruby slippers together three times and wish! She could have done that in the beginning! But that wouldn't have served Glinda's purposes....

[the-jackalope.livejournal.com]

I've read it, cause I am a huge OZ fan and have been for a while and I hated it. I think it's the weakest of his novels, and just not well done at all. Plus the place he was talking about felt nothing like OZ while the O.Z. in Tin Man kinda did.

[the-jackalope.livejournal.com]

Well, technically she had to really mean the wish. So her journey to the Emerald City was also an inner journey back home. And in the novel it is Glinda who tells her that. And totally unrelated to this, but to jedibuttercup did you notice how the good witch of the north just kinda disappears? Or does she come back somewhere?

[jedibuttercup]

Different as in having unfamiliar locations/characters? Or different as in different atmosphere?

One thing I appreciated about Tin Man is that it kept the fairy-tale atmosphere. It was a tarnished world and there were dark doings afoot, but the point was the heroine overcoming the dark with the help of those she encountered along her journey, with plenty of wonder mixed in and a hopeful ending. (The atmosphere wasn't quite as quirky as Princess Bride or Stardust, both of which movies I also loved, but I'd class them in the same "more grownup, yet still magical" fairy-tale genre).

[jedibuttercup]

> Well, technically she had to really mean the wish. So her journey to the Emerald City was also an inner journey back home. And in the novel it is Glinda who tells her that.

Glinda who also didn't warn her she'd lose the shoes in the Deadly Desert, thus stranding her in Kansas. (Of course, Dorothy's persistent, and likely a bit magical herself, and returns within the year, and then befriends Ozma, so there was no way to keep her out after that).

Glinda also gets Ozma to outlaw all magic in Oz but her own by the seventh book-- the reasoning being that of course they can't trust anyone but her (and her apprentice) to do wholesome, nonharmful spells! (Which, to me, completely explained why there were no living creatures made of straw or wood or actual tin or whatever in Tin Man; they'd lost the knack after magic was limited to the royal circle).

> And totally unrelated to this, but to jedibuttercup did you notice how the good witch of the north just kinda disappears? Or does she come back somewhere?

She resurfaces very briefly in the fifth book, Road to Oz, which centers on one of Ozma's birthday parties-- and never again, according to Wiki. That's one of the things that got me to thinking; the Tin Woodman is set up as the Emperor of the Winkies in the East, and of course Glinda has control of the South quadrant of Oz, but the witch of the North disappears and goes completely un-mentioned when they talk about Ozma outlawing all magic but Glinda's in Patchwork Girl of Oz.

And then there's the West; as Patchwork Girl opens, we learn that Unk Nunkie, who would otherwise have been King of the Munchkins, had bolted for a completely unpopulated forested area of Munchkinland after Ozma reclaimed the over-throne of Oz, taking only his baby nephew Ojo (whose parents are never mentioned) with him. After Nunkie gets accidentally turned to stone by Dr. Pipt (whose magical powder incidentally helped enable Ozma to escape her captors and reclaim her throne back in book two), Ojo goes on a quest to collect magical ingredients to save him. When the quest dead-ends in Winkie-land on the last ingredient three hundred pages later, Glinda reveals that she could have saved him the trouble all along, uses the mess to reinforce the ban on magic other than her own (to the extent of destroying all of Dr. Pipt's magic-related possessions!!!), and "gives" the restored Nunkie and his nephew a cottage right under Ozma's nose in the Emerald City.

....Tell me that isn't at least slightly suspicious.

What!?

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

You mean to tell me that...Hollywood changed the story when they made the film?

I'm shocked--shocked!--to discover that! :D

Re: What!?

[jedibuttercup]

Er, more than just a little, though most of the elements are still congruent. So: Hollywood per usual.

Dorothy of the book is also maybe nine years old, her house only had one bedroom (making the tornado transportation more plausible), and most importantly, does not wake up from a dream at the end. =)

That said, I do adore the movie. I loved that the Tin Man miniseries made several veiled references to parts of it that were not in the books, in addition to references from the books that were not in the movie.

[the-jackalope.livejournal.com]

Different as in different atmosphere. The fairy tale element was totally gone.