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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz one of Americas favorite pieces of juvenile literature. Children like it because it is a good story, full of fun characters and exciting adventures. Adults especially those involved in the study of history and related field adore it because they can read between L. Frank Baum's lines and see various images of the United States at the turn of the century.
An extensive analysis of this compelling book by conducted by many contemporary critics and historians shows that the story did not lose the sense of actuality and remains applicable to the modern events in America. The majority of experts assert that Baum touched important social events and changes that every society experienced repeatedly over the time. Symbolism in the story makes a book to be very peculiar and actual to the current events. Parable on populism of the most popular and controversial interpretations of Baum's famous book.
This theory belongs to Henry M. Littlefield who in 1963 used Baum's book to educate his class of History students about the turn-of-the-century Populist Movement. Littlefield alleged that Baum used to march in torch-light parades for William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Littlefield states that when Baum went on to write his classic fairytale in 1900 he dressed it up as a Populist allegory.
According to Littlefield The Wizard of Oz is a story of how Americas four major sociological elements can progress if and only if they adopt Ben Franklins aphorisms over the lessons of the Bible. God helps those who help themselves is the Aesopean moral to the story, and to get there, we follow the adventures of Industry (the Tin Man), Agriculture (the Scarecrow), Military (the Lion), and Citizenry (Dorothy) as they make economic progress down a street backed by the gold standard, to reach the city of Ounce (oz. ) which is green like money, wherein they find and then expose the fraudulent myths of Religion (The Great Oz) (Littlefield, 16). The Great Oz, it turns out, is a very bad magician, but a very good man, because his intentions are good despite his inability to actually effect any miraculous cure for what ails our heroes. By sending them on a quest to kill the Wicked Witch of the West - herself symbolic of the Catholic side of Christianity's by-then dual nature - the great Oz forces our heroes to look within and discover the strength they already possess. As the seventies rock group America put it, Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man, that he didnt, didnt already have (David, 283). In the story, the Wizard of Oz, the four companions, (Dorothy, the scarecrow, the tin man and the cowardly lion) each wanted a special boon from the great Wizard.
When they finally arrived at Oz and were ushered into the Wizards presence, he tried to intimidate them with the austere pronouncement, I am Oz as great plumes of fire issued forth. His image was very intimidating. But as the meeting progressed, the dog Toto went over to the side and started investigating someone behind a curtain. The great Oz then said, Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! but by then it was too late.
The truth came out. The whole presentation was just a sham, although the Wizard desperately wanted the people to believe in that sham (David, 284). From the critical point of view, today people are being subjected to the Wizard of Oz treatment. Images of what we are supposed to believe are presented to us time and time again until we finally accept them as the truth. That technique, like all of them, are not always successful but usually the majority of our populace winds up believing them. So they promote the coming war with Iraq each and every day as a continuation of the war on terrorism, but the truth is that Saddam Hussein, while certainly not a boy scout, is a man who is not controlled by the New World Order.
Therefore, he must be replaced with someone who will accept the leadership of the worlds elite who control the New World Order. The four heroes conquer their fears, realize their goals, and Dorothy is sent back home to realize her dream - that all of the characters in her story are locals in her daily life, and that they can only get beyond the backwater religiosity of Kansas by following Baum's lovely vision (Nathanson, 221). This interpretation by Paul Nathanson was also first conceived as a Doctoral Dissertation but later made available to the public as a book. Nathanson interprets Baum's story as follows: Formal and cultural analyses of The Wizard of Oz indicate that Dorothy's passage from Kansas through Oz and back to Kansas symbolically recapitulates paradigmatic stories of both America (the nations passage from utopian origin, through history, to utopian destiny) and Christianity (the cosmic passage from parisian origin, through history, to parisian destiny) (Nathanson, 224). In order to go home Dorothy must grow up; this link is also paralleled symbolically at both national and cosmic levels.
Further Nathanson adds that resonating profoundly with the collective ethos, this story has come to function in a modern society the way myths function in traditional societies. I conclude that popular stories may be effective replacements for the mythic aspect of traditional religion and that modern societies may appear to be more secular (hostile or indifferent to religion) than they actually are (Nathanson, 225). Baum's The Wizard of Oz is an excellent example of how a simple story can serve in two different ways. In the preface to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum stated that he wanted to write a new sort of childrens story: a modernized, American story, shorn of all the Old World images and motifs. He was tremendously successful in this, producing not only the first real American fairy tale, but one that showed American society and culture in all its wonderful diversity and contradictions, a story so rich it can be, like the books title character. Bibliography: Henry M.
Littlefield, The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism, American Quarterly, 1964 Nathanson, Paul. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America, State University of New York Press, 1991. David W. Van Clear and Charles W. Funkhouser, Inquiry, Oz, and Populism, Social Education, 1887
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Research essay sample on The Wonderful Wizard Of One Americas Favorite Pieces
