Florida International University
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An American Tale: Incarnations of the Wizard of
Oz and the Negotiation of Identity, Race, and
Gender, in Popular Culture
Carly A. Orshan
Florida International University%#2-8023*#/).#+-%0.
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FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
Miami, Florida
AN AMERICAN TALE: INCARNATIONS OF THE WIZARD OF OZ AND THE
NEGOTIATION OF IDENTITY, RACE, AND GENDER, IN POPULAR CULTURE
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
ENGLISH
by
Carly A. Orshan
2012
ii
To: Dean Kenneth Furton
College of Arts and Sciences
This thesis, written by Carly A. Orshan, and entitled An American Tale: Incarnations of
the Wizard of Oz and the Negotiation of Identity, Race, and Gender, in Popular Culture,
having been approved in respect to style and intellectual content, is referred to you for
judgment.
We have read this thesis and recommend that it be approved.
__________________________________
Kenneth Johnson
_________________________________
Heather Russell
__________________________________
Steven Blevins, Major Professor
Date of Defense: July 13, 2012.
The thesis of Carly A. Orshan is approved.
__________________________________
Dean Kenneth Furton
College of Arts and Sciences
__________________________________
Dean Lakshmi N. Reddi
University Graduate School
Florida International University, 2012
iii
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
AN AMERICAN TALE: INCARNATIONS OF THE WIZARD OF OZ AND THE
NEGOTIATION OF IDENTITY, RACE, AND GENDER, IN POPULAR CULTURE
by
Carly A. Orshan
Florida International University, 2012
Miami, Florida
Professor Steven Blevins, Major Professor
The purpose of this study is to address the way in which several quite varied and
often commodified representations of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(1900) express and reproduce shifting notions of national identity within American
culture across the twentieth century and at the beginning of our own.
This thesis pursues the question of national identity that the American myth
perpetuates throughout the twentieth century and examines the shift in citizenship
through representations found in popular culture’s re-writings of the Wizard of Oz tale.
This thesis evaluates both original and contemporary adaptations of the Oz story and their
deconstruction for sociohistorical representations of racial, gendered, class, and national
identity. I argue, that the numerous historical and ideological comparisons from the Oz
tale reflect our own world in our discussions of identity, race, class, and gender and have
become significant reflections of our own imaginations and national identity.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION: “WE’RE OFF”: OZ AND ITS MANY ITERATIONS……………. 1
I. NO ONE MOURNS THE WICKED:
AMERICAN MYTH AND NATIONAL IDENTITY………………………...……….. 17
II. WICKED SHADES OF GREEN:
OTHERING AND RACE IN POPULAR CULTURE……...…………………...……... 37
III. THE WICKED CONSUMPTION OF GENDER ROLES AND IDENTITY….. 53
CONCLUSION: BEYOND THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD…...……………………... 68
LIST OF REFERENCES ………………….……...…..................................................... 72
APPENDIX .. ………………….……...………………………………........................... 76
1
INTRODUCTION
“WE’RE OFF”: OZ AND ITS MANY ITERATIONS
As a child, the Wizard of Oz
1
story and film was very present in my every day
life. Not only did my family participate in the ritual of watching the regularly televised
programming of the Oz film,
2
but also my loving mother and father would quote the film
repeatedly ingraining the oratory of the work into our subconscious. My mother’s
repetitively enthusiastic proclamations, “Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!” mocked
our anxieties over various small concerns. At times she would even say in a grainy high-
pitched voice, “I’ll get you my pretty…” as her own verbal enforcement for us to eat our
dinner or do our chores. Verbally and visually Oz was present in my upbringing. We
even spent summers at Emerald Mountain, a breathtaking space in Beech Mountain,
North Carolina that included a mock cottage of Dorothy’s home with a yellow brick road
filled with wonder to navigate on the warm summer days (see fig. 1). Our living room
even contained small porcelain figurines of the Scarecrow, Tinman, Lion, Glinda,
Dorothy and Toto. Near the characters lay the witch’s shoe: a ceramic Victorian black
pump with a limp black and red striped sock emerging from it. Ironically, we did not
1
The use of italics will be omitted when referencing the metanarrative of the Wizard of Oz. This
includes the references to all Oz stories and media representations that have developed from the
original text, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900).
2
The regularly scheduled showing of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz film can be traced back to CBS’s
first broadcast in 1956, however, it did not become and annual tradition until 1959 (McClelland
144-5). The broadcast rights to the film shifted from CBS to NBC briefly from 1968 – 1975.
Nevertheless, in 1976, CBS “reacquired the picture as an annual special under a five-year
contract,” all the while paying $4,000,000 for the five showings (McClelland 144-8). The story
and the characters soon became “so recognizable that they could serve as shorthand in the
marketplace,” with references to Dorothy and her friends appearing everywhere from car
commercials to record album covers and advertisements (Harmetz 291).
2
have the infamous silver or red shoes.
3
However, I have owned many pairs of silver and
red brightly shining shoes throughout the years – and admittedly to this day, I still
gravitate toward them because they remind me of a sweet sense of homeliness and
innocence.
With Oz ingrained in me throughout my childhood, I developed the idea to write
about the Wizard of Oz after seeing a performance of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie
Holzman’s hit Broadway musical Wicked (2003). The musical ignited something within
me – a desire and a passion to dissect, analyze, and breakdown the American tale I had
grown to love and accept with open arms. After seeing the wonderfully scripted and
3
The most influential magical artifact introduced in Baum’s story, and one which would
resurface in one form or another in every version that follows, is inarguably the pair of enchanted
silver shoes that holds the power to send Dorothy back home to Kansas. In the MGM film
adaptation, Judy Garland’s ruby slippers have developed a mythical status all on their own with
the artifacts being auctioned amid much fanfare for unsteady amounts of money.
Figure 1: The Yellow Brick Road from the Land of Oz on Emerald Mountain, NC, 2011.
3
richly melodic Broadway adaptation I was appalled by the mainstream “happily ever after
ending” that steered from Gregory Maguire’s original fictional story, Wicked: The Life
and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995). Since these two iterations diverged
from their representative endings I became invested in trying to understand why society
is in dire need of only accepting happy-ever-after moments specifically for mainstream
consumers to continue to reproduce and engage in the commodification of the story.
4
Wicked the novel and musical have at their premise a delightfully wicked idea:
what if instead of jumping into action audiences take a step back and ensure that they
have identified the good and bad guys correctly? If so, we might have to ask some
questions, maybe even give the bad guy a chance to tell us his side of the story. This
exact autonomy given to the “bad guy” is what I became increasingly puzzled with as I
soon sympathized and rooted for the epitome of evil, the Wicked Witch of the West. This
adaptation shows that the winner’s version of the story (Dorothy’s tale) obscures the
loser’s version (the Witch’s tale). Since Wicked explores the life and times of the Wicked
Witch of the West and retells her story, readers and viewers begin to empathize with her
and glorify the essence of evil from the original Oz tale.
Wicked along with the other adaptations of Oz allow consumers to unravel and
sift through the original tale by Baum creating new understandings of how the story can
apply to the current culture. These adaptations enabled me to question the idea of national
4
Maguire’s original text sold three-quarters of a million copies since its publication in 1995.
However, the novel is enjoying a more refined second life as a big-budget Broadway musical.
Currently in its 9
th
year on Broadway, Wicked’s North American and International companies
have cumulatively grossed over $2.5 billion and have been seen by 30 million people worldwide.
Since Wicked opened at the Gershwin Theatre on Broadway in October 2003, it has regularly
grossed more than $1.7 million a week, has been seen by over 6 million people and is already
“one of the most successful shoes in Broadway history” says The New York Times.
4
identity, gain a better understanding of social Othering that circulates American culture,
and see the variety of other perspectives that are given within the textual and visual
spaces that honor and illuminate the original Oz story. In the earlier iterations it becomes
easy for observers to hate the Wicked Witch when Glinda the Good and Dorothy tell us
to. Yet to see the world through the Witch’s eyes as Maguire’s text explores, it becomes a
lot harder to do so, ultimately fetishizing evil itself. As the Oz story permeates our
current culture, so too does the idea of Otherness which has become so polarized on a
national scale that it eradicates any possibility of understanding or any effort to see
perspectives from the other side. Wicked along with other later iterations deconstructs the
notions of Otherness through the Oz tale in relation to current sociohistorical events and
politics in order to expose these multiple perspectives.
Similar to Maguire’s retelling of the Oz tale, the modern incarnation of the
Wizard of Oz narrative develops new elements to keep the story compelling and
contemporary. The later iterations act as a deconstruction for sociohistorical
representations of racial, gendered, class, and national identity. The purpose of this thesis
is to evaluate significant adaptations of the Wizard of Oz story that have stemmed from
L. Frank Baum’s original children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and to
examine the negotiations of national, gendered, and racialized identity addressed in each.
In addition to Baum’s series of children’s books, the versions of the Oz tale I analyze
include the MGM film The Wizard of Oz (1939), Sidney Lumet’s African-American re-
casting of the film musical in The Wiz (1978), Gregory Maguire’s popular novel Wicked:
The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995), and Stephen Schwartz and
Winnie Holzman’s hit Broadway musical adaptation of Maguire’s novel, Wicked (2003).
5
I found an increasing need to address the several quite varied and often
commodified adaptations of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz and explore how each
iteration influences national identity within American culture across the twentieth century
and at the beginning of our own. Therefore, a problematic issue assessed in this thesis is
to reevaluate the concept of American myth. In doing so, I will navigate an understanding
of national identity and how the contemporary notions of what the American myth
implies has changed through time, specifically by the representations found in popular
culture’s re-writings of the Wizard of Oz tale.
The modern incarnations of the Oz narrative develop new elements to keep the
story compelling and contemporary. Therefore, I approach these texts as fluid rather than
fixed – changing with the development of the nation. This thesis facilitates an
interdisciplinary consideration of the various adaptations of the Wizard of Oz by bringing
children’s literature, popular fiction, music, film, and theatre together in a theoretically
multifaceted approach. Together these texts teach us about the lasting significance of
myth in American consumerism and American culture.
The discipline of American cultural studies has its foundation in the myth/symbol
school of theory. Cultural theorists have studied the idea that the winner’s version of the
story obscures the loser’s version. They use the word “myth” to describe the winner’s
story that has been used and misunderstood in modern times. Henry Nash Smith
pioneered the myth/symbol theory in his work, Virgin Land where he analyzes a variety
of cultural representations based on western expansion, initiating that the essence of
American culture could be culled by reading representative great individual works of
American imagination. Many people think of myths as powerful representations of the
6
inner workings of the human psyche. Popular authors writing about the myth of ancient
cultures such as the Greeks, Egyptians and Aztecs have described myths as springing
from the human imagination that are never connected to anything that actually
happened.
5
Witches, ogres, monsters or dragons can be described as being no more real
than the tales of creation that illustrate the world springing from the mouth of a god or
life being destroyed by catastrophic floods. For these authors, though, myths contain
certain truths about human psychology and should be studied as an ancient path to
knowledge about our inner lives and national identity.
Moreover, Smith studies the inner workings of society in his mythical studies. He
refers to mythical and symbolic patterns as “collective representations rather than the
work of a single mind,” arguing that the reoccurring themes and symbolic references
were reflective of the nation as a whole (Smith xi). In the preface of Virgin Land, Smith
contends that the terms myth and symbol describe “larger and smaller units of the same
kind of thing, namely an intellectual construction that fuses concept and emotion into an
image” (xi). Mythic discourse is rooted in the development of national identity because,
as Smith proposes, “the American ideology [is] made into a myth” (Smith 26). Symbols
of nationhood and myth-based narratives therefore are necessary imaginative
constructions that contribute to the development of collective identity and a sense of
5
This understanding of myth was popularized by the writer and lecturer, Joseph Campbell. He
published a series of books on the subject and was featured on the series, Moyers: Joseph
Campbell and the Power of Myth, 1988.
7
exceptionalism that validate the formation of social behavior and communal experience
within a culture.
6
The concept of “myth” can be defined as stories that get told by winners to
deliberately conceal the loser’s story. In a sense the story is a lie. Not only does it omit a
whole side to the tale but then it distorts the events to make the victor appear completely
virtuous and the loser wholly wicked. What a remarkable reversal – from paragon of evil
to a victim of persecution. René Girard and other cultural theorists emphasize that there is
more to the story than simply accepting the celebration of the victor as our own happy-
ever-after narrative.
7
These theorists wonder if the celebration is concealing a deeper truth that could be
revealed by observing the story of the “villain” creating a voice for the demonized Other
and marking a better understanding of American identity predicated on the “whole” myth
and not only the one sided stories in which consumers devour. In comparing these
revelations to the Oz story, observers of the 1939 Wizard of Oz film celebrate with
Dorothy and her friends when the first witch is crushed by Dorothy’s house and they
6
In American Studies as Cultural Criticism, Giles Gunn points out that a central aim of the
myth/symbol scholar “was not simply to differentiate those events that are mental from those that
are not but to clarify the way imaginative constructions contribute to the formation of social
behavior and [the way] social experience colors the nature of the communal as well as the
individual life of the imagination” (Gunn 159).
7
René Girard explains that this is exactly the reversal that the persecutors (the Heroes of fairy
tales and myths) want to avoid, and do so by telling of their glorious triumph excluding the point
of view of the victim (the Villain). Girard explains that if persecutors succeed in “reducing [the
victim] to silence, the persecutors’ belief in the [the victim’s] guilt would have been
unanimous…This belief would have prevailed so totally that every future account of the affair
would have been given by people sharing it…The accusations would be so powerful that they
would be raised to the status of truth.” René Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, trans. Yvonne
Freccero (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987) 34.
8
continue their celebration when the other witch is melted into oblivion. Similarly, the
opening scene of Wicked the musical shows the Ozians jumping for joy when they hear
about the Witch’s death. However, in the musical the only individual who begins to
reminisce as she tells the story of the “villain” displays a sense of melancholy.
Nevertheless, in the same celebratory way, Americans themselves rejoiced after
hearing the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. Although in this latter example the
delighted people know of bin Laden’s narrative as being liable for horrific acts of terror,
it is nonetheless a celebration over death. With the victim silenced and his version of
what happened lost – often because he has been killed, there is no one to challenge the
victor’s story. Instead those who hear the story immediately celebrate the loss. The
incomplete distorted story rises to the level of truth adopted by audiences, and a Myth is
born.
The discourse of symbol/myth created a national ideology adopted by citizens,
whether consciously or unconsciously that celebrated mythic narratives of what it meant
to be “American.”
8
These social ideologies and values that have taken a pervasive stance
within the culture are especially apparent in the assumptions embodied in folklores and
fairy tales, as well as literature, music, film and other works of popular culture.
8
Through myths and symbols national ideology is produced and represented as they are adopted
and adapted by citizens, consciously or unconsciously. The American cultural studies
myth/symbol discourse developed from Smith’s Virgin Land which served as a generative work,
a theoretical framework for a variety of scholars including R.W.B Lewis, John William Ward,
Leo Marx, Alan Trachtenberg, Daniel Hoffman, Charles Fiedelson, and other (Gunn 158). Each
myth/symbol theorist tried to develop “expressions of individual consciousness, forms of
collective mentality, and the social and institutional structures of lived existence” (157).
However, in sustaining a sense of national identity and American exceptionalism, theorists like
Smith turned their attention to establish the presence of specifically American myths. Smith
examines national identity through the narratives and symbolic discourses surrounding westward
expansion, which he called, “the vacant continent”(4). Later theorists would refer to the land west
of civilization as simply “the frontier.”
9
Contemporary literary critic Lauren Berlant situates the citizen at the center of
current national inquiries on shaping desire and national imagination in popular culture.
In positioning the citizen at the center of the myth/symbol construction Berlant sets up
the ideology adopted by citizens, whether consciously or unconsciously that mediates
national identity and the desire for inclusion. Berlant focuses on the lives and experiences
of racial, gendered, sexual minorities and the working class to position her theory of
infantile citizenship. “While citizens should be encouraged to love the nation the way
they do their families and their fathers, democracies can also produce a special form of
tyranny that makes citizens like children, infantilized, passive and overdependent on the
“‘immense and tutelary power’ of the state” (Berlant 27). Berlant’s theory of infantile
citizenship can be read as a trope in understanding the cultural expectations of the nation
on their citizens and the burden the nation places on these infantilized others.
In analyzing the multiple reconstructions of the Wizard of Oz and the characters
within these textual spaces or worlds, we can gain a greater knowledge of the current
cultural expectations of the American myth and a better understanding of how
constructions of racial and gendered identities continue to divide society into hierarchies
of power, ultimately infantilizing the subaltern bodies and identities. The Oz myth does
so, I argue, through the differentiation of the “good” towards that, which is deemed “evil”
or “wicked.” Thus, the binary of “good” and “evil” helps to deconstruct the
sociohistorical representations of racial, gendered, sexual, and national identity and how
these concepts all hinge together along the axes and regimes of power that get
reconfigured throughout the various adaptations of the Wizard of Oz.
10
Each chapter in this thesis will touch on the idea of good and evil in relation to
national identity. Chapter 1, No One Mourns the Wicked: American Myth and National
Identity discusses the roots of American myth from Baum’s original text and how the
ideas of homeliness have shifted through time specifically in relation to current ideas and
images of “evil” within popular culture. Chapter 2, Wicked Shades of Green: Othering
and Race in Popular Culture, discusses how each adaptation of the Wizard of Oz story
reimagines the Other in ways that highlight the social anxiety and tensions surrounding
the sociohistorical moment in which the reworking was created initiating a discussion
about historical and ideological discourses that signify identity, race, and Otherness.
Chapter 3, The Wicked Consumption of Gender Roles, evaluates the performative roles
set by the construction of gender, particularly in relation to fairy tale woes of princesses
and evil queens and how this narrow construction of gender has lead to demarcating the
range of culturally validated femininities and gender construction within our culture.
This thesis adopts a cultural studies approach to the Wizard of Oz myth
combining an analysis of the production, circulation, and consumption of the Oz myth
within American culture. My methodology is to engage in a targeted textual analysis of
the original text and various adaptations to critically analyze the children’s literature,
popular fiction, film, and theatrical representations of the Oz tale and show how these
representations redefine and re-imagine the current understanding of American identity.
When L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, he
was most certainly responding to the cultural conditions of America, the severe
depression that struck the nation in the 1890s and the shift from a rural to urban/industrial
society as the American frontier came to a close. Many adaptations of the Wizard of Oz
11
that materialize American culture manifest during cultural turmoil, just as the original
text acts as a political allegory of its time. Each time a re-release, reference, or retelling
of Dorothy’s American tale of innocence and homeliness floats across American eyes and
ears, the story is in effect drawing society back to the American hegemony of the 1900s,
a supposed simpler time in American culture.
By reinforcing the notions of homeliness the Oz narratives speak to their
spectator’s desires of building a national identity, allowing the story to enforce traditional
perceptions of American ideology and hegemony. In the early 1900s, American identity
shifted from the exploratory American frontier to a more settled domesticated unit. The
home became a heteronormative space for the nuclear family to nest within. An emphasis
on familial values and strong patriotic declarations became the ideal American image to
uphold. While strengthening the construction of American citizenship through the
framework of the home and the national homeland, citizens began to exclude those who
did not fit into the prescribed roles of domesticity. Throughout the progression of
American identity, American ideology has reinforced the notions of home against those
that are cast as being Other, that is, those who are marred as racialized bodies and who do
not fit into the suggested domestication by the social apparatus. This American
hegemony builds an exclusionary ideology igniting a sense of terror within Americans
and stages them against those who are segregated as Others.
In the midst of writing my thesis I found myself on an unexpected plane ride from
Miami to Chicago when I experienced first hand the sociocultural American
exceptionalism that has filtered our nationhood. I was flying in the middle of a work
week with my two older sisters and two older cousins– the five ‘girls’ from my mother’s
12
side to attend my grandmother’s funeral; the nature of the flight and journey was
intriguing to say the least. Just as the Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy was abruptly cast away by
the tornado, I too felt disconnected, confused and caught up in a whirlwind, yet humble to
be with the group of women I grew up with. We were raised together, as if five sisters.
When I was young, I used to envision us as the March sisters from Louisa May Alcott’s
classic American tale, Little Women. We each had our prescribed roles within the
domestic space – our grandmother holding the position of matriarch, our own Marmee.
9
We are now all in our late twenties or early thirties; I am the youngest of the group and
the quietest for sure. I usually turn within when caught off guard by tragedy and in my
introversion I felt orphaned from what had been an ideal American unit. This unique
situation of coming together to enjoy each other occurred because of my Grandmother’s
death and I knew it was an unexpected moment of contentment that could and never
would be reproduced.
As we made our journey to Milwaukee to say our goodbyes to our beloved
matriarch, the one element I was determined this mid-week traveling would not prevent
was my ability to continue reading and writing for my thesis. I knew this was something
my Grandmother would respect. After all, she too received her Bachelor of Arts in
English Literature, one of the many unique kinships that we shared. But, as my cousins
and sisters read their copies of Fifty Shades of Gray by E.L. James and People magazine,
I chose to take out the current book I was onerously working through: Terrorist
Assemblages by Jasbir Puar.
9
In Little Women, the mother of the family was referred to as Marmee.
13
Without hesitation, I simultaneously took off reading while the plane ascended
into the abyss; contemplating Puar’s contention that heteronormative ideologies that the
U.S. nation-state rely on are accompanied by homonormative ideologies that mirror
racial, class, gender, and national ideals. Puar unpacks the assumptions of normative
belonging within the domestic sphere and national ideologies. A space that young women
such as Dorothy, Jo March, and myself are always already working outside of as we
question the social apparatus. Puar focuses her argument on racialized terrorist look-
alikes, especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs – who become the scapegoats for those who
are marred as “other”. The American culture is currently one that initiates fear, mainly
through fearing terrorist bodies. Many in our society equate terrorism with the foresaid
religions and groups. This construction can be easily seen at airport screening through
TSA’s policing of “good” bodies toward those who are coined “bad” producing
American exceptionalism against the racialized Other. During the airport security
process the fear of terror is spread as citizens begin to police each other, a controversial
system that unfortunately does not rest until the plane has safely landed.
Within minutes I was being questioned about the current book I was “in to”. As I
casually flipped the cover to show my comrades the title of the novel they either rolled
their eyes or quickly hushed me to put the book down before another passenger saw.
There was a fear that if a passenger or flight attendant would see my text, I would be
placed outside the sphere of nationhood publicly, ultimately becoming the racialized
terrorist that everyone fears. This moment made me question one of the themes, which I
was developing in my own thesis – Why has it become increasingly uncomfortable for
people to discuss social politics openly without terrorism being part of the discussion?
14
Why is there so much desire to read and participate in a circulation of “happy” literature
(i.e., Fifty Shades of Gray or gossip magazines) versus reading and discussing cultural
theory? There is a social phenomenon taking place in popular culture through consumers
widespread interest in famous individuals. This is not a new revelation. However, the
increasing obsession over tabloid magazines skews the public’s perception of what is.
Why has it become more acceptable to discuss Lindsay Lohan’s latest DIU or James’s
erotic novel rather than the turmoil, the beauty, and the politics of what is truly going on
around us? Why do we focus on the fictional world we create or inhabit and cultivate
through this cult of celebrity?
Of course, I had no intention of having TSA escort me off the plane so my word
choice and explanations grew increasingly cautious and soft. As I tried to explain why
there were images of men in turbans that I was “studying” I became frustrated that no one
in my party wanted to engage in such rhetoric, especially since they are all bright women,
who have all received post-bachelor degrees or certifications. As I have always been type
casted as the quiet or shy one, this thesis is my true attempt to vocalize my own
interpretation and understanding of current popular culture and its barring of authentic
discussion in relation to a childhood story I have always held dear to my heart, The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900). In doing so, I hope to rectify the
disassociation that is practiced by many who honor the cult of celebrity in times of war,
death, poverty, and political upheaval while deconstructing the fear of terror circulating
our nationhood.
If the Land of Oz in the original book is a representation of other worlds and
communities far from home, the adaptations are both a representation of other times and
15
simultaneously a reflection of the political and social climate of the nation. Oz reflects
the myth of terror that propagates American culture through its reproduction and
distribution of the story, its reincarnations, and various references found transcribed
within popular culture. In Jay Scarfone and William Stillman’s foundational study on The
Wizard of Oz, they argue that,
There are few events in our popular culture that Americans have experienced
collectively as a people over generations. The Wizard of Oz bears such
distinction…Who among us doesn’t know who Dorothy and Toto are? Oz is a
common element in which we can all share the humor of its familiarity, whether it
be a parody on Saturday Night Live or the punch line in a comic strip (203-4).
The audience and viewers of the Oz story are responsible for projecting and creating
meaning toward the tale. The audience assumes the responsibility of constructing
meaning, of making, articulating, and responding to the story. The role of the audience is
particularly central to theorizing the implications of the Oz texts and performances. These
narratives are imagining and producing their own mythmaking in response to the
audience’s perception and the contemporary moment in which the adaptation was created
and then produced. The audience initiates and perpetuates the cultural status surrounding
the Wizard of Oz by continually engaging in its regularly televised showings and myriad
of references in popular culture.
The audience of Oz has had a variety of adaptations to interpolate. Oz’s visual
presence in American history was established early when the first Wizard of Oz visual
adaptation was created in 1910, a one-reel silent film written by Baum himself. The Oz
myth continues to circulate society through the variety of literary adaptations of the
narrative such as Geoff Ryman’s fantastical postmodern tale Was (1992), to other genres
such as John Boorman’s science fiction film Zardoz (1974), to more subtle references
16
found in modern day sitcoms.
10
Often caricatures of Oz are explored in political cartoons
such as Gary Larson’s “The Far Side,”
11
to cartoon shows such as South Park’s spoof on
Oz (2000), The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005), or the special, Tom and Jerry Meet the
Wizard of Oz (2011). Additionally, Oz is simultaneously situated in music as well, Elton
John’s album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973), Ozzy Ozborne’s Wizard of Oz tribute,
and Sara Evan’s song, “Born to Fly” (2000) each cite the Oz legend as their inspiration.
The widespread references to the book, characters, events, and places that appear in the
Oz narrative serve a significant role in all forms of entertainment, situating the story as a
cultural icon. Ultimately, the contemporary adaptations and references re-enforce the
evolving concept of American identity that has changed through time and continue to
evolve with each incarnation of the Oz tale.
12
10
Oz references in sitcoms are often spotted. A small Canadian TV series, Little Mosque on the
Prairie created by Zarqa Nawaz showed the disconnect between cultural references to the Oz film
when one Canadian-Muslim woman made a reference to the Wizard of Oz and then had to explain
the correlation because the other Muslim woman was from Africa and didn’t follow the reference.
This disconnect shows how this story is formally rooted in Western society. Oz is alluded to in
many television shows and movies, from Glee, Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory, Scrubs, and the
like, each show references Oz, placing the narrative as a cultural icon implying that modern
sitcoms need to reference Oz as a right of passage to be included in the American hegemony.
11
Many cartoonists have used images from the movie such as Gary Larson’s “The Far Side”. He
has a number of cartoons representing the Oz story. In one of them, there are three insects
strolling down the Yellow Brick Road who paraphrase the dialogue from the movie. Instead of
vocalizing, “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” they chant “Spiders and scorpions and
insecticides, oh my!”
12
There are a number of Blogs and Websites dedicated to Oz. Often these sites post daily
references to the Land of Oz found throughout the world.
17
CHAPTER 1
NO ONE MOURNS THE WICKED: AMERICAN MYTH & NATIONAL IDENTITY
On May 1, 2011, the threat Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden held against the
American nation was eliminated when Navy Seals conducted an operation to assassinate
him. The news of bin Laden’s death was perfectly scripted with mass media interrupting
regularly televised programs and waiting for the official recognition that the headline was
in fact true. The President addressed the country to confirm the announcement. While
doing so, he fought back a grin and perhaps his own jubilation. He expressed in his
speech that it was a good day stating, “[bin Laden’s] demise should be welcomed by all
who believe in peace and human dignity.” In reaction to such righteous news, the
American people cued patriotic music and embarked upon a joyful celebration including
dancing in the streets. A crowd of revealers appeared in front of the White House
displaying an impromptu sign riffing on the Wizard of Oz: “Ding, Dong, bin Laden is
Dead.”
These melodic words began to symbolically ring across America on the evening
and days that followed bin Laden’s death. The rhythmic tone resonated throughout our
society; seventy-two years after MGM studios coined the slogan to represent the demise
of a fictional character, the Wicked Witch of the East in the original 1939 film. This time,
the lyrical declaration, which has been infused in popular culture from literature to theatre
to film to television, was directed toward the very real al-Qaeda leader in numerous
forms of mass media.
18
The day following the assassination, satirist Stephen Colbert held a sketch titled,
“We got Bin Laden Party.” Colbert’s piece cued a variety of news anchors declaring the
announcement of the dictator’s death ending the segment with a clip from the MGM film
in which the Wicked Witch of the East is declared dead by several of the Munchkins
leading the occupants of the land to resounding celebration. Colbert’s placement of the
film in his sketch brought an authentic certification to all who were watching. Americans
that have trusted the Oz story and the MGM film that they grew up with, participated in a
similar celebration to that of the Munchkins when modern news anchors confirmed that
America’s ghost of evil perished.
As in the land of Oz, the Mayor and Coroner of Muchkinland had to certify that
the Wicked old Witch was positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably Dead – just as
news anchors from every station had to receive their own confirmation allowing the
authentic truth to come directly from the nation’s president. Since spectators were not
privy to seeing bin Laden’s body, some did not believe the words of the anchors or even
the president himself, insinuating that this could be a national conspiracy, reflecting the
epistemology of terror that permeates the nation. These parallel actions of the American
people to the Munchkin Landers of Oz displays just one of the many ways in which the
Wizard of Oz tale has been infused within American culture.
As an aside, some marginal theories allege that Obama is not a natural born
citizen and therefore, his presidency and words should be disqualified. These people even
view the president of the United States as an “other”. As such, to these individuals even
the statements of the president of the United States are questioned. Just like the
19
Munchkins required reassurances from more than just their leader that the Wicked Witch
was dead so too did the American people.
Most Americans have seen The Wizard of Oz film and are familiar with the tale of
wonder. However, relatively few have read L. Frank Baum’s children’s novel published
in 1900. The film, which initially did poorly at the box office, is now imprinted into each
American’s memory through its regularly scheduled television airings since 1954. This is
the main reason for its current popularity. The movie was probably received more openly
in the year of 1954 because of the focus on consumerism. Consumerism became glorified
as a tactic of the Cold War, in order to celebrate the consumption of All-American items
and products. The Oz story, situated as the representative American tale became an
American product for audiences to indulge in. During this time, the mass distribution of
televisions into the home initiated more advertisements and ways for Americans to
cultivate a sense of exclusion against anything that was not dubbed American.
Advertisements themselves brought to consciousness a way to happiness that could be
achieved by purchasing the desired commodity, negotiating the sentimentality that
purchasing American products bought you a sense of national inclusion. During this time,
the evolution of advertisements and televisions altered the temper of American society in
establishing an ideology of “Americanism” by excluding any thought or product that was
coined un-American by the government. Since the distribution of televisions expanded to
the masses, the regularly televised showing of The Wizard of Oz was received with open
arms. After all, Oz was an American tale – excluding the demonized Others for their
differences, just as America was demonizing those who were cast as communists.
20
The heart of the Oz story (both the original text and movie, though divergent at
some points) have been burned into American culture, commercialized, redistributed, and
adapted to various forms of media for all to consume. Moreover, consumers feel drawn to
the text, media adaptations and materialization of Oz because it produces a desire to turn
inward to a sense of true Americana and achieve a feeling of infantile citizenship within
the confines of an American myth initiated by the original story. Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer recognized 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” (The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 167).
The acceleration of consumption led to the phenomenal price of a disintegrating pair of
“ruby slippers” being auctioned off for $600,000 in 2000 (Jarrett)
13
and the
commercialized use of clips used by Stephen Colbert to show a connection for Americans
on homeliness and national comradery. These are just a few of the myriad adaptations
and references to the Wizard of Oz that arouse Americans to engage in the mass
consumption of the Oz tale. In doing so, this allows the reifications to mirror American
culture and construct new interpretations of national identity.
Each reiteration of the Oz story represents, redefines, and re-imagines the current
understanding of American identity and the political and social climate of our time by
igniting the American culture of consumerism with each reproduction. In doing so, the
reemergence of the Oz story often surfaces when there is rupture in American economy
and a desire to seek a sense of homeliness. To juxtapose the reaction of the American
13
The ruby slippers are one of the only pieces of clothing to have their own line of devoted fans
who are members of “The Ruby Slipper Fan Club.” A website maintained by Stephen Jarrett,
devoted to pictures of the authentic shoes, stories about them, and images of fan reproductions of
their very own ruby slippers.
21
people to the Munchkins is a contemporary application of the Oz narrative, revealing how
much media influences American consumerism and national identity, specifically through
mythical and symbolic discourse. Each reference and various incarnations of the Oz tale,
re-enforces the evolving concept of American identity that has expanded and continues to
spread through time because of the story’s mass production and lively appeal. The event
that took place on May 1
st
, 2011, with the death of bin Laden, marks yet another fissure
in the evolution of American identity and the deconstruction for sociohistorical
representations of racial, gendered, class, and national identity.
The Wizard of Oz tale and the characters who populate it are internationally
recognizable, and the narrative has a tendency to resurface at moments of sociocultural
change and tension in American culture, as it did on the day of bin Laden’s assassination.
Fleming’s classic MGM film occupies the historical space between the Great Depression
and the Second World War, while Sydney Lumet’s The Wiz (1978) embodies many of the
struggles of the civil rights and feminist movements. Maguire’s novel partakes in an
intellectual discourse demanding the questioning and rescripting of canonical narratives,
and Schwartz and Holzman’s Broadway production of Wicked is situated in the midst of
struggles over power and gendered image, on both the national and individual scale.
However, each cultural moment finds itself returning to the familiar story of a
homely little girl from Kansas and her fantastical adventures in the Land of Oz, drawn by
the omnipresent tensions of insider and outsider, inclusion versus marginalization, and
the shifting realities and representations of gender, race, and nationalism implicated in the
construction of mythic American identity, rooted in the ideals of home and nationhood.
Discourses of American myth facilitate understanding through the Wizard of Oz tale as a
22
cultural narrative, repeated and revisited over the span of more than one hundred years. In
addition, the significant changes in this traditional story reflect negotiations of individual,
cultural, and national identities, especially through representations of gender, race, home,
and nationhood.
Each reinvention of the Wizard of Oz narrative implores mythmaking as a
revisionist process in and of itself, constantly undergoing negotiation and adaptation in
order to effectively address contemporary cultural context. As Zipes points out, the aim
of these revisions are to “create something new that incorporates the critical and creative
thinking of the producer and corresponds to the changing demands and tastes of
audiences” with a goal of challenging or changing “the reader’s view of traditional
patterns, images, and codes” (Fairy Tale as Myth 9). The mythic framework of one
generation is not adopted wholesale by its successors; instead, the fairy tales and cultural
narratives that create the discourses of American myth are under constant negotiation,
continually being challenged, remade, and reinvented. Therefore, in order to update the
theoretical framework of the myth/symbol school, a critical understanding of American
myth must situate itself within the larger context of mythic discourse including an
understanding of mythmaking as a dynamic revisionist process. Positioning Baum’s
original text within the framework of American myth highlights the significance of the
stories early Americans were being told about themselves, tales from which they drew a
sense of communal identity and exceptionalism.
The naturalizing myth that the Wizard of Oz reveals, highlights the construction
of American identity and American exceptionalism by presenting the foreground of the
duality between Self (identity) and Other. Each adaptation of the Wizard of Oz story re-
23
imagines the Other in ways that illuminate the anxieties and tensions surrounding racial
differences and gender binaries in its own sociohistorical moment and context. For
example, by analyzing the construction of American identity in the Wizard of Oz
narratives in terms of race, gender, and social class we see that the Wicked Witch of the
West can be viewed as a trope for the racially based anxieties that pervade American
culture. This chapter will continue to broaden our understanding of national identity
within American culture. It will address the domestic space of the home and the way in
which readers continue to navigate identity through the experience of various
commodified adaptations of Oz as a founding myth, on both a national and individual
scale.
Central to mythic and cultural narratives is the figure of the hero. The heroic
character is a constant fixture in fairy tales, books, films, plays, and cultural narratives
around the world, and this figure offers a unique combination of flaws and familiarity in
the variety of adaptations of the Oz tale. Critics have variously interpreted the Wizard of
Oz, with most interpretations focusing on Dorothy’s heroic image and journey to find her
way home. In “homing” in on this one aspect of the story, critics tend to see Dorothy as
an American femalehero and her journey as a representative quest for national identity.
The return home and the reincorporation into the domestic sphere and the family unit
have been central to the Oz narrative since Baum’s first writing. One of the most striking
themes threading throughout each Oz story are the tensions themselves between a
romanticized home and the adventures of being away.
The shifting idea of home and nationalism in each adaptation is associated with
the sociohistorical and ideological representations that surround ideas of homeliness
24
within the confines of the domestic space and the larger national arena. In the original
depiction, Baum presented home as either destructive (after all, Dorothy’s house kills the
witch) or a romanticized space where inhabitants are content. Baum circulates these two
elements of home in his use of the now famous line, “There’s no place like home.” In the
first Oz book, however, Dorothy seems to say this phrase in jest. Still, in the book,
Dorothy only makes this statement in the book one time. In the classical MGM film, Judy
Garland repeatedly states the famous line while clicking her heals three times. Either way
Dorothy is clearly glad to go back home to Kansas. The preoccupation with home,
threading throughout each interpretation, is best epitomized by Garland’s ecstatic and
relieved proclamation that “There’s no place like home”. The film created a mantra about
home in this most famously re-quoted phrase. The emphasis on home established a
national belief in American exceptionalism inciting within Americans a connection to
their American homeland and a sense of autonomy. The idea of home is no longer
restricted to the confines of a household and the domestic sphere; instead homeliness
extends to individual American identity, as the nation becomes the nurturing space for
citizens. Americans are now able to romanticize their connection to the larger national
family by positioning themselves against the Other.
The relationship between the Self and Other is portrayed in the figure of the
female hero and her journey. Dorothy (and all female heroes journeys) have become
increasingly complicated over the past century. The female hero’s place within the home
and nuclear family has also required multiple negotiations and reinventions. Anxieties
surrounding the idea of home and family remain central to considerations of gender
25
representations and the quest of the female hero in popular culture, the structure of
American myth, and the continuing reinvention of the Wizard of Oz narrative.
The negotiation of the female hero’s journey and the complication of home and
family are significant elements to address in understanding the concept of home in each
version of the tale, as a way to define and understand national identity. As the Wizard of
Oz narrative has progressed over the past one hundred years, the nature of “home” has
evolved as well. Rather than being a space of domestic bliss and tranquility, the home
(including the nuclear family that occupies its space) has become fractured and
contentious. With the concept of home now representing a space of anxiety, tension, and
conflict for some people, the ideas of what home should be have changed. Further, the
complicated notions of home have expanded beyond the confines of the house and
immediate family to the more extended concept of national identity.
The MGM film further romanticized the longing for home. The threat of losing
home was especially present with 1930s spectators. This fear “was experientially
grounded for 1930s audiences in the demise of the family farm, the loss of family
fortunes, and the rampant rise of homelessness” (Mackey-Kallis 126). The sociohistorical
climate positions Dorothy and the family farm at the forefront, in order to historicize the
importance of her desire for a home she believes she may have lost and her pure joy at
returning to the potentially restrictive domestic sphere. After all, the comforts of home
are inextricably intertwined with ideal notions of femininity, “attachment to the home,
and particularly its redefinition in feminine terms (‘a women’s place is in the home’),
helped give rise to the nineteenth-century ‘cult of domesticity’ in which the ‘self-
contained private home, overseen by the wife/mother, presented the highest ideal of
26
American life’” (127). The safety and security of the family farm is dependent in part on
Dorothy’s acceptance of her place within the domestic sphere of home and family.
Lumet’s The Wiz places a shift in the meaning of home and family, ultimately
removing the idea of home from the domestic sphere. Dorothy (Diana Ross) lives in a
Harlem apartment with her Aunt Em (Theresa Merritt) and Uncle Henry (Stanley Green)
and audiences see the heroine assisting her aunt in the kitchen preparing for the larger
extended family holiday dinner. Dorothy is simple-minded in her task of caring and
cooking for others; however, she is problematically positioned outside the immediate
familial interactions. She is outside of the family because she has not chosen to marry and
reproduce yet. Dorothy is juxtaposed to her cousin, who has fulfilled these social
obligations. In doing so, her cousin is excused from having to participate in the meal
preparation whereas Dorothy is required to.
In these first scenes Dorothy hangs back wondering about her own insecurities
and loss of connection in not wanting to conform to the ideological construction of black
female domesticity and motherhood which include concepts of “‘the family’, ‘patriarchy’
and ‘reproduction’” (Carby 63). In an effort to persuade Dorothy to engage in the
domestic space, her aunt attempts to set her up with a male suitor, ignoring Dorothy’s
own western desire to be independent and choose the person she wants to have a
romantic courtship with. “Western nuclear family structure and related ideologies of
‘romantic love’ formed under capitalism are seen as more ‘progressive’ than black family
structures” (65). Dorothy’s conflict between making her individual decisions instead of
simply fulfilling the expectations of her family, evidence the struggle for black females of
that time in terms of domesticity, motherhood, and independence.
27
Instead of the Emerald City, the Oz of The Wiz is a decaying version of New York
City. Even in Dorothy’s real life she is intimidated by her home surroundings. As Lumet
comments, “I wanted the story of Dorothy to be the odyssey of a young black girl who
was afraid of crossing 125
th
Street, the border of Harlem, and who discovers New York”
(Ciment 100). As Dorothy follows the yellow brick road and gains confidence in her
surroundings and becomes enlightened to her own independence, she conquers the fears
that had debilitated her daily life. Her newfound independence reflected the liberation
that many black men and women felt during that time. Often restricted and segregated to
the confines of the New York Projects during the 1970s, these individuals began to
escape the social structure of their restrictive environment. The Wiz’s Dorothy is
specifically encouraged to venture beyond the domestic boundaries, both figuratively and
literally, established by home and family in order to find her autonomy as a young black
woman in America.
The portrayal of Dorothy’s relationship with the home evolves from the original
classic book, film, and The Wiz with the next incarnation of the story in Maguire’s book,
Wicked. In Maguire’s Wicked, the relationship between the primary character and her
home and family changes. Elphaba’s story constitutes an entirely different experience
than that of the Dorothy of Baum, Fleming, and Lumet. Elphaba is unable to hold a
sentimental attachment to the idea of home since her mother and father did not accept her
because of her green-skin. Unlike Dorothy who had surrogate mothers, the lack of
maternal love and nurturing left Elphaba devoid of feeling a connection to home. In fact,
once she is older she is unable to stay in any one place for a long period of time. The only
consistency in the many homes she makes for herself over the course of her abbreviated
28
life is her failure to connect to her home. Her refusal to allow herself to feel the sense of
“belonging” that are traditionally associated with the ideas of home, family and
nationhood that resonate in the earlier versions of the Wizard of Oz narrative are absent.
Additionally, in Wicked the focus of the stories on Dorothy as a primary character
disappears. We do not see Dorothy in the Land of Oz. She in not even included in the
musical – becoming a vague shadow, an undertone to the stage performance.
The relationship between Dorothy and Elphaba draw connections to nationhood
as each character situates herself as a cultural icon, a stand-in for the expectations
associated with females and the home. Additionally, Henry Littlefield reads the Wizard
of Oz as a symbolic allegory and emphasizes Dorothy’s universality extending her status
as a cultural icon. Littlefield remarks that, “Dorothy is Baum’s Miss Everyman. She is
one of us, levelheaded and human, and she has a real problem” (Littlefield 52). Dorothy
is a representative of the average American citizen and her quandary is relatable to young
readers as well as to adults. Therefore, Dorothy, even though she is a mere child,
becomes situated at the core of American nationalism. She is the iconic “Miss Everyman”
in which readers and viewers project their own nationalistic image onto.
As suggested earlier, adolescence itself is at the center of nationhood according to
Lauren Berlant, who positions the child at the center of the nation as an archetypical
figure known as the “infantile citizen.” Berlant criticizes American national dialogue that
enforces rigid codes of morality – the kind of authority imposed upon a child to mold
them into “good citizens.” This enforcement is reinforced by convincing arguments that
such disciplinary action is “for one’s own good” and that “kinds of domination are being
imagined as forms of social good” (Berlant 13). This patronizing statement would not be
29
widely accepted unless an archetypical citizen lies at the center of the debate. Berlant
explains that the fetal/infantile person is:
a stand-in for a complicated and contradictory set of anxieties and desires about
national identity. Condensed into the image/hieroglyph of the innocent of
incipient American, these anxieties and desires are about whose citizenship –
whose subjectivity, whose heroic narratives, will direct America’s future
(Berlant 6).
The infantile citizen embodies and encompasses the sum of debates over national
citizenship. It includes any racial, gendered, and working class minorities who bear the
burden of expressing a desire for the nation and national identity. The infantile citizen is
the mythical being that requires the nation’s complete collective protection, just like
Dorothy who receives the protection and guidance from the Wizard, Scarecrow, Tinman,
Lion, Good Witch, and Munchkins and others along her journey back home. Dorothy,
who has assumed the symbolic role of the infantile citizen, functions as the universal
“everyman” on her journey. In the name of the infantile citizen, borders are drawn, raids
are conducted, and laws are drafted. The infantile citizen only exists in the future and
adds more anxiety to the national discourse over questions of legacy and birthright
because the nation owes the infantile citizen both safety and comfort: the pleasures of
home. Therefore, Berlant’s conceptualization of the infantile citizen places the figure of
the child at the center of the discourse of the nation situating Dorothy, our widely
recognized infantilized female heroine, as a universal fantasy for all to consume.
Berlant proposes that “nations provoke fantasy” meaning that national identity is
a fantasy, an internalized relationship to a category that is externally produced. National
identity registers both cognitively and emotionally with national citizens and it is this
double significance of national identity, its ability to say something about both the
30
internal experience and the external labeling of national citizens that the Wizard of Oz
story speaks to. Just as Dorothy generates the role of the infantile citizen, the image of the
developing American citizen at the turn of the century, the Wizard of Oz molds the
definition of what being American means through its representation of its lead characters.
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book, the desire to establish the ideal American
citizen was embodied by Dorothy and her companions; their determination, intelligence,
empathy, working together to achieve mutual goals, and courage were presented as ideal
American traits, while the greed and manipulation of the Wicked Witch situated her
outside the realm of viable citizenship. Through these constructions, Baum’s story is a
uniquely formed American fairy tale, which clearly establishes who was included,
protected, and celebrated within the discourse of national citizenship and who was
excluded and therefore subject to threat of vilification, marginalization, destruction, and
otherness. As such, Baum’s story not only entertained children and instructed children on
basic moral issues, but also established a mythic and fantastical discourse of American
identity, codifying privileged positions of nationalism, race, gender, and American
identity.
The male characters of Oz, the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and Lion embody the
particular experiences and challenges of what being an American citizen at the turn of the
nineteenth century included or omitted, demonstrating the early negotiations of American
identity, inclusion and exclusion. In the 1939 film, each male character that is living in
Kansas is infantilized, dependent on their employment on the farm. These characters in
Dorothy’s “real” world are only included as part of the family during the tornado, but are
traditionally excluded from participating in everyday interactions outside their respective
31
farm duties. Class differentiation is depicted between the male workers on the farm as
they are separated from the family and others in Kansas. During this time as similar to
today, these workers were given certain considerations, however, there remained a
differentiation between classes – between the owners and the workers. This partitioning
is always already a negotiation of the relationship between the Self and Other, similarly
displayed in the later iterations of the Oz tale. When Dorothy lands in Oz these workmen
on Auntie Em and Uncle Henry’s farm become comically portrayed. While in Oz, they
are each further depicted being Other. The Scarecrow, Lion and Tinman do not have their
own domestic space, instead they relay on others to employ and care for them, further
infantilizing their dependency on society and their homeland.
The Scarcrow’s experience represents that of American farmers at the end of the
century when pioneer farmers were undergoing a drastic change. The extension of
railroads across the continent, especially between the 1870s and 1880s, stimulated the
rapid increase in population of new settlers on the frontier. Historian, Samuel Morrison
describes the migration of production to middle America, “virgin prairie land, and peak
prices of wheat and corn in 1881 had induced excessive railway construction…, and over
settlement of the arid western part of [Kansas] (Morrison 789). There was a significant
drought in 1887 that caused serious damage to the agricultural products in the west and
Kansas. This caused half of the pioneer farmers to leave Kansas. During this time, many
of the last acres of available farmland passed to private corporate hands. It was not until
later that the Homestead Act made it easier for individuals to regain access to these acres
of farmland (789-790).
32
The brainless Scarecrow of Oz represents these Midwestern famers, whose years
of hardship and subjugation to corporations had created a sense of self-doubt. However,
the initial description of the Scarecrow of Oz as being brainless was contradicted by his
remarkable common sense, resilience, and rectitude shown through his conduct during
his journey in Oz. He is not so dumb after all, and, despite doubts about his own
intelligence, he proves to be the most clever and resourceful of the group. The Scarecrow
was representative of the farmers of Kansas and other hard-working individuals in the
country who, although may not have been formally educated constituted the backbone of
the country. Living lives based upon common sense and hardiness.
In the book, the Scarecrow tells Dorothy that he cannot understand why she
would want to leave the beautiful Land of Oz to return to the admittedly dusty plains of
Kansas: “‘That is because you have no brains,’ says Dorothy. No matter how dreary and
gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any
other country, it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.” The Scarecrow
concedes: ‘“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”’ (Baum 42,
emphasis added). Here, readers embrace the wholesome naiveté of the Scarecrow and
perhaps of all American farmers who struggled in times of economic hardship but never
gave up their dreams of independence and land ownership.
While the Scarecrow represents the farmers of America, the Tin Woodsman
illustrates the changing of a country from an agricultural to industrial society. The
industrialization of the country is depicted by the Tin Woodman’s metallic armored body.
33
The Tin Woodsman is extremely proud of his physical mechanical appearance, as he
explains, “my body shone so brightly in the sun that I felt very proud of it and it did not
matter now if my axe slipped, for it could not cut me” (Baum 54). Oddly enough, instead
of feeling regret over the loss of his human body, the Tin Woodsman feels proud of his
shiny, metallic body of silver. The Wizard of Oz signifies the changing workforce in
America from frontier pioneers to factory workers in its representation of the Tinman’s
embrace of his silver, more glamorous physique. At the turn of the century, the role of the
Frontiersman was no longer as wholesome as it once was because of the rapid
industrialization and urbanization, which changed the conception of a man’s preferred
role in the workforce. The fact that the Woodsman loses parts of his body, one after the
other, because of the enchantment of the Wicked Witch of the East’s spell cast onto him,
reminds us that for many men, the roles in the workforce were changing. The Witch’s
spell highlighted the limits of machinery, which although strong and resilient at times,
required constant attention (oiling) to avoid breaking down. This exposed the
differentiation between men who worked the farm and those worked the factories. Yet,
the Tinman is ok with this evolution, up to the point that he lacks a heart, which he
deeply wants. The point being made by the story was to express the concern that heart
and humanity could be lost with the presence of machines though those machines could
be more resilient, glamorous, and efficient with human care. Thus, the Tinman represents
the changing nature of how many men in society earned a living, a change from
agricultural to industrial production. However, the Tinman’s constant longing for a heart
shows the nostalgic desire of a portion of society’s workforce to revert to the farming
34
home rather than the urbanized factory worker existence. The Tinman’s desire for a heart
evidences the detriment that industrialization caused to the psyche of many workers.
Unlike the Scarecrow who embodied the resilient farmer and the agricultural
focus of the American worker, or the Tinman who epitomized the factory worker and the
industrialization of the country, the Cowardly Lion embodies the anxieties created by the
shifting paradigms from the Scarecrow to Tinman. Sociologist Anthony Rotundo
explains that the number of blue-collar workers multiplied eight times between 1870 and
1910 due to increased industrialization (Rotundo 249). In big cities where the number of
corporations increased, a bureaucratic new order was emerging. Within the new order,
every businessman had to submit himself to his boss and answer to the hierarchical chain,
which created feelings of insecurity and a desire to prove oneself in the workspace.
Rotundo writes,
In the nineteenth century, middle-class men had believed that a true man was a
self-reliant being who would never bow to unjust authority or mere position. The
new structures of work and opportunity in the marketplace did not support such a
concept of manhood” (250).
American men’s sense of “manly” prerogatives became threatened by this new order.
Additionally, during this shift in history, women starting becoming more prominent in the
workforce. Women’s presence made a symbolic statement to men that the world of
middle-class work was no longer only for men, establishing some anxiety and insecurity
to many men. This, in addition to the problems caused by having a multi-leveled
hierarchal boss-worker paradigm, the inclusion of women into the male dominated
workforce established additional anxiety and insecurity to many men. The reality these
men had to face was that their workplace was not as masculine as it had been in the
35
Farmer/Frontier era where the individual man was his own boss and conceivably had all
the power, decision-making, and responsibility. In the new formation of the industrial
modern world, the new man had much less power having to take orders from the boss and
having to coexist with a stronger archetypal woman; thus creating a more timid
(feminized) American man. This began the continuing evolution of man’s role in society
and the ever-changing evolution of the relationships between men and women in the
workforce.
The feelings of insecurity of much of the American workforce that became more
prevalent when the focus of society changed from agricultural to industrial spilled over to
feelings of insecurity on greater levels for all Americans. This process has continued
through the present day. The contained view of the world that existed when The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written in 1900 has now changed and the growing
insecurities of the American citizen have continued to expand in today’s society. One of
the causes of this growing fear is the dread, trepidation and worry over terrorism.
36
Osama bin Laden attacked our home soil showing that outside terrorist forces
could maim and kill Americans at home. By eliminating bin Laden, the poster boy for all
things sinister since 9/11, the death of the symbol of evil against our country established a
symbolic victory for the American
people – recognition that justice
has been done or could be
achieved. Yet, bin Laden as a
symbol, was much more powerful
than the actuality of bin Laden the
man as an isolated and (to a certain
extent) irrelevant man holed up in
a compound without electricity or
media communication to the
outside world. Bin Laden became an illusion, a spectacle designed to simplify the
genuine tragedy of 9/11. As long as his simulacrum, a combination of blurry photos and
wonky videos existed publically within the mass media as a reproduction and
reaffirmation toward evil, the man who perished did not “exist”. Rather, he existed in our
hyperreality as the Wicked Witch. Bin Laden can be viewed as the Wicked Witch in
modern society whereas to his followers he may be viewed as the Wizard. As with most
audiences the perspective of the viewer influences the determination of what is
considered “good” and “evil”.
Paralleling the multiple reconstructions of the Wizard of Oz to modern claims of a
“Wicked Witch” known as bin Laden shows a contemporary application of the world of
Figure 2: Screen shot taken from YouTube caricature of
bin Laden which shows him dressed as the evil witch with
the infamous song from the MGM film, “Ding Dong The
Witch is Dead!” playing in the background.
37
Oz. In doing so, we can gain a greater knowledge of the current cultural expectations of
the American myth and a better understanding of how constructions of racial and
gendered identities continue to divide society into hierarchies of power. Bin Laden’s
assassination was just one moment in time in which America negotiated her authority
over the “Other,” thus, re-enforcing the notions of “good” and “evil”, re-defining
America the country, and re-imaging the role of American citizenship. Bin Laden’s
assassination – a historical event that took place on May 1
st
, 2011 reifies and
commodifies elements of the Land of Oz by perpetuating the American myth through the
“quintessential American fairy tale,” the Wizard of Oz (Riley 3). A result of the myth is a
precedent that rings true in all adaptation and “real” applications of the Oz tale: no one
mourns the Wicked.
38
CHAPTER 2
WICKED SHADES OF GREEN: OTHERING AND RACE IN POPULAR CULTURE
It’s the one who doesn’t lack me who is the Other. That is radical Otherness.
(Baudrillard 1999: 132).
The Wizard of Oz narrative is a story that addresses racial differences within
American society. As a distinctively American myth, the story addresses inclusion and
exclusion in society from characteristics based upon differences similar to those of race.
Representations of Otherness in terms of race are highlighted in Baum’s children’s book
and Lumet’s The Wiz, as well as MGM, Maguire, Schwartz and Holzman versions.
Robert Miles and Malcom Brown explain the significance of representations of the
Other,
14
as “images and beliefs which categorize people in terms of real or attributed
differences when compared with Self (‘Us’). There is, therefore, a dialectic of Self and
Other in which the attributed characteristics of the Other refract contrasting
characteristics of Self, and vice versa” (Miles and Brown 19). These representations of
the Self and the Other are inextricably engaged with a “dialectic of representational
inclusion and exclusion” (50). The Wizard of Oz narrative and the framework of
American myth position the representations of the Self and Other that are implicated in
the construction of American identity, including those who are deemed viable national
citizens and those who, on account of Otherness, need to be indoctrinated into the
14
The discourse of the Other as that which is different from the Self has a rich philosophical
theoretical history, addressed by Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacque
Lacan, and Michel Foucault, as well as others. Using this intellectual tradition as a foreground,
this thesis will continue to draw on theories of Otherness adapted to address issues of race
outlined by Miles and Brown in addition to those articulated by Kenan Malik in The Meaning of
Race: Race History, and Culture in Western Society (1996), where Malik argues that
contemporary representations “define racial difference in terms of the Other” (221).
39
dominant culture in order to neutralize the threat of difference. As a result, if such
assimilation proves impossible the Other must be excluded, marginalized and even
destroyed.
In exploring the figure of the Other within these multiple versions of the Wizard
of Oz tale, the sociohistorical context of each set of representations must be factored into
account. As Miles and Brown pitch,
Representations of the Other are holistically neither static nor unitary. They have
undergone transformation over time, in response to changing circumstances…The
characteristics attributed to the Other, the evaluation of those characteristics, and
the explanations offered for difference, have therefore been altered, though rarely
holistically (Miles and Brown 51).
Representations of the Other are constantly developed as contrary elements to the Self
and privileged identity. However, each adaptation of the Wizard of Oz story reimagines
the Other in ways which illuminate the anxieties and tensions surrounding racial
difference in its own sociohistorical moment and context.
The representations and images of race in the versions of the Wizard of Oz story
function in two categories, historical and ideological representations of race that register
within the same discourse. Historical discourse remains grounded in lived experiences of
discrimination and Othering – positioning historical representations of race within a
specific sociocultural moment and time. For example, Baum voiced his own opinions as a
proponent for segregation of Native Americans from the rest of the population. During
the westward expansion, Baum as well as others claimed the frontier as an established
space for Americans asserting dominance over the racialized Others (Native Americans)
and their land. Baum advocated ultimately forcing the natives from their land onto
reservations to designate a new space for the Native Americans as racialized bodies.
40
Baum’s participation in this historical discourse is reflected in the various parts of his
story. He establishes differentiations that are coded by race throughout the diverse
regions of Oz. Similarly, segregation and differentiation is also addressed in Lumet’s The
Wiz, which was positioned in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, and features
an all-African American cast. The Wiz touches on the historical problems with urban
expansion and urban decay by positioning the disenfranchised portion of the black
community into segregated projects. The film performed a dynamic appropriation of the
American myth through the Wizard of Oz narrative by claiming a new and personal
meaning for the African American community. The representations of race and ethnicity
within the works of Baum and Lumet are positioned within specific sociohistorical
moments of discrimination, exclusion, and privilege. Furthermore, the role of racial
difference in these versions of the Oz tale must be read within the context of the everyday
racial discourses surrounding these works of popular culture at the times that the versions
were brought into the public.
Although the representations of race in MGM’s Wizard of Oz and the versions of
Wicked by Maguire, Schwartz, and Holzman are grounded in the larger racial and social
realities of the cultural moments in which they were created, these works specifically
address race from an ideological standpoint, rather than initiating themselves in a
specifically historical representation. These versions of the tale address the visibility of
race, in part, through their representations of greenness, the skin color difference that sets
the Wicked Witch of the West apart from her follow Ozians. The Wicked Witches’ in
each adaptation stemming from Baum’s original text are literally colored in their
Otherness. MGM studios paints the evil witch as being green ultimately dehumanizing
41
her and establishing a new generation of an embodied evil archetype. Baum’s witch was
not described as green, and his illustrator William Wallace Denslow, did not draw her
that way; in fact, the similarities between the Witch
illustrated in Baum’s book and the Witch of the MGM movie
are few and far between (see fig. 3). This is in part due to one
of the main production goals of the Wizard of Oz film in
showing off MGM’s new Technicolor process by saturating
the film with multi-colors. However, the coloring of the
Witch also conveyed the negative Otherness associated with
this being. The Technicolor process which enabled color to
be differentiated not just between black and white but all the
shades in-between was used to demarcate a racial divide
within the confines of the motion picture. By coloring the
Wicked Witch as green, this cast her as an Other not only
because of her “wickedness” but most significantly, simply by her appearance.
The Wicked Witch has now become an iconic green image that viewer’s readily
associate with evil. The Witch, as a symbol of evil, represented through her greenness
holds a liminal space in our cultural history as a marker. The Witch is a symbol to all that
is different – an Other. Jean Baudrillard explains that “[e]verything which is symbolically
exchanged constitutes a mortal danger for the dominant order (Baudrillard 1993:188).
The Witch is a symbol of diversity and as the later iterations expose, the Witch’s
difference is predicated on defying the current social order including the Wizard’s
Figure 3: Baum’s
original Witch that
W.W. Denslow
illustrated in the first
Wonderful Wizard of
Oz novel, 1900.
42
regime.
15
In exploring Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange and radical otherness
through the Wicked Witch’s journey into Oz, we can see the ideological “otherness” of
the various adaptations, in the MGM film, The Wiz, Maguire’s text, and Schwartz and
Holman’s musical. Each adaptation influences the cultural particularity of their
audiences, inviting new understandings of social differentiation through these racialized
bodies. In doing so, the dominant order (in this respect the directors and creators of the
various adaptations) create a new representation of race in popular culture that viewers
consume.
Baudrillard’s theory of “symbolic exchange” differentiates concepts such as
human/animal, good/evil, and rational/irrational suggesting that these dualities are
imposed by society and the capitalist agenda rather than actually existing (Baudrillard
1993: 133, Pawlett 2007: 55-9). Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange applies to the concepts
15
Maguire speaks to the Witch’s alienation that resulted from her own desire to be an activist and
strive for a more equal community in Oz. There is particular attention drawn to Animal Rights in
the story and the Witch challenges the phrase, “Animals should be seen and not heard” (Maguire
90). Animals (with a capital A) were once equal citizens of Oz but are slowly being stripped away
of their rights, loosing their ability to speak. Similar to the Holocaust where a dictator determined
the destruction of so many lives, the nefarious Wizard in Oz tries to take control of the area with
restrictions on the Animals such as curfews, constraints to teaching in schools, and censoring
freedom of thought. Many are caged and confined in order for Oz leaders to take control over the
population. The Wizard dehumanizes the Animals and anyone that is Other and does not mold
into his world of emerald green splendor. The Wizard is silencing the Animals and turning the
public against them to inspire loyalty to his political regime. Doctor Dillamond who is an Animal
professor, a goat, is captured because he is an Animal regardless of the fact that he is an
intelligent and influential instructor at “dear old Shiz” college. Animals are no longer allowed to
teach under the Wizard’s ruling, mainly because these Animals held positions of authority in
regard to education – teaching the generations to come. Thought establishes a sense of power and
the Wizard does not want these Animals to have any faculty over the wondrous world of Oz that
he is creating. Throughout Wicked the Witch chooses to defy society but is quickly stopped from
doing so by the Wizard himself. The Wizard reprimands her by saying, “[t]he thing is, my green
girlie, it’s not for a girl, or a student, or a citizen to assess what is wrong. This is the job of the
leaders, and why we exist” (Maguire 175). It is through this partitioning between those who are in
power from those who are not, that Wicked delineates the complicated notion of the capitalist
agenda and the overcomplicated conviction of social politics.
43
established in the Wizard of Oz narrative unraveling these binary codes, specifically
those of good and evil. The later iterations of the Oz story deconstruct these binary
notions. This is accomplished by specifically drawing on a discourse of Otherness, which
address the visibility of race particularly by polarizing the Wicked Witch and her
greenness. In addition, Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz physically codes the Munchkins
who welcome Dorothy to Oz as their equal (after all they are her own size and stature).
However, the classic MGM film dramatically Others the Munchkins and emphasizes the
difference between them and Dorothy, racially situating these small-statured Ozians as an
Other against whom Dorothy, the infantilized citizen is positioned against.
In order to understand Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange as a principal structure
for society, William Pawlett and Meena Dhanda’s reading of the Wizard of Oz, describe
symbolic exchange in two distinct ways:
Firstly it is presented as the organizing principle of pre-industrial societies where
everything must be given and returned…Secondly concerning modernity, where
symbolic exchanges are dismantled, foreclosed or diverted into commodification
and simulation by the capitalist system (115).
Therefore, symbolic exchange can threaten the capitalist system of power by changing
perception about the binary oppositions and ordered exchanges upon which the system
depends. Each media reification of Baum’s text shifts these standard binary notions of
racialized Others, ultimately creating a new exchange of differentiation and allowing the
capitalist system to control and obtain power over its consumers, their ideas, and
perceptions. Just as Dorothy situates herself against the Munchkins in the MGM film,
Americans continue to differentiate similar physical coding because the capitalist system
(i.e., the films we consume) suggest doing so.
44
The Wicked Witch plays a specific role in understanding the demarcation of
social Others and the capitalist agenda toward class differentiation. In the original
adaptations of Baum’s text and MGM film, the Wicked Witch marks a traditional erasure
of all indigenous voices from the Oz narrative. The Witch’s character operates as a plot
object to further Dorothy’s story. However, Maguire’s back-story of the Wicked Witch of
the West helps to rupture the racialized Other’s story by giving the wicked witch a name,
Elphaba (after the first sounds of L. Frank Baum). The simple gesture of giving the witch
a name provides her with a tangible identity and immediately personalizes the witch and
limits her Otherness. The symbolic exchange that occurs when naming the Witch
transforms the Wicked Witch to a fictionally “real” person; Elphaba an activist for the
demonized Others of Oz.
Although the description of the Witch herself is different in both the original
novel and the MGM film, Maguire creates a hybrid between these two depictions of the
witch. In Maguire’s narrative, Elphaba Thropp, is presented as having been born a green-
skinned outsider. Even though Elphaba is born as a native of Oz, as a Thropp of
Munchkinland, she is later figured as a terrorist, creating assumptions about and
connotations of color, Otherness, and nativeness that resonate throughout the Oz series.
In Wicked, natives of Oz are portrayed as existing specifically outside the boundaries of
civilization and the culture. Elphaba’s lover, the Vinkus Prince Fiyero, is described as
being indigenous within his first introduction to the story. Fiyero is described as a “new
student, oddly dressed in suede leggings and a white cotton shirt, with a pattern of blue
diamonds tattooed on the dark skin” (Maguire 145). Fiyero is separated in his description
45
by his colored skin – an out casting based on his physical distinction. This partitioning is
a mutual demarcation that he and Elphaba share.
When The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written at the close of the nineteenth
century, the classification of separate ethnicities and races developed out of attempts to
justify the colonialism of expanding the western land and segregating the native people
from it.
16
In America, different races occupied specific territories though; this was slowly
merging due to the Frontier exploration of land in the west and the start of the Jim Crow
laws in 1890. Similarly, in Oz, different races in each region are coded by color itself.
The Munckins’ environment, landscape, and attire are blue; the Winkies are described as
yellow; and, the Quadling country and those that inhabit the land are red. In Wicked,
Maguire rearranges Baum’s original description where each color represents each country
of Oz and creates a “parallel racial colorism – an axis of oppression that figures
significantly in colonialist thinking, where race is delineated by physical features and
visible nonwhiteness essentialized to inferior traits” (Annabeth 36). This segregation
through land is a characteristic of “othering” deliberately creating the idea of an alien
other, a Wicked Witch, to reinforce difference and promote social and political
dominance over the one coined as “other” or “wicked”.
Nevertheless, since Maguire has given the Witch a name, the Othering, and
segregation cast onto Elphaba allows her to become sympathetic to readers of Wicked the
16
Baum often wrote editorials published in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, which “advocate[ed]
a genocidal policy against remaining Indians”. Baum’s dialogue surrounding race, resulted in
representations of Otherness and segregation within the magical land of Oz. His editorials
reflected his opinion that Native Americans should be excluded from participation as American
citizens because the white settlers had become “masters” of the frontier through conquest and
subjugation of the Native Americans. As such, Baum discounted them as not deserving of life
itself: they were not viable citizens and therefore, by extension, not viable human beings, always
already excluded in the pursuit of “life, liberty, and happiness”.
46
text, and viewers of the hit Broadway musical. Now a symbolic reference for all
racialized bodies and diversity, Elphaba redefines consumer’s imaginations to rethink the
original story – its one-sided mythical exposé of Dorothy’s tall tale. Maguire’s ability to
structure a narrative about the Wicked Witch allows consumers to negotiate the
problematic assumptions that are generally tailored to the Other, reconfiguring the
understanding of evil itself.
17
In current popular American culture, the demonization of the Wicked Witch can
be paralleled to the real and imagined threat of racialized bodies – specifically, Sikhs,
Muslims, and Arabs who have often been isolated from the American mainstream. These
individuals are often segregated from Americanness because of their physical
appearance. Readers and audiences judge the Witch because she is grounded in her
“wickedness” by her mere green appearance. Further, her identity is skewed as we only
receive the story from Dorothy who is the ultimate perhaps biased victor in this mythical
construction. Just as the Wicked Witch is hastily judged because of her greenness and
one-sided character evolution, those who are different from the cultural “norm” such as
17
According to Wicked: The Grimmerie, David Cote gives a behind the scenes look at the
production of the text and Broadway musical specifically explaining how Maguire developed the
idea for his novel as a way to wrestle with the question of evil. Maguire wrote Wicked during the
build-up of the first Iraq war when he “became riveted by how the British press vilified Saddam
Hussein to galvanize public opinion in support of the war” (Cote 19-20). Maguire described
himself as “a progressive liberal” (Ibid) who, under the influence of the press attacks against
Hussein, found that his “politics had shifted way to the right.” His transformation into an
advocate for war, any war, shocked him. “How,” he asked himself, did I lose my moorings so
quickly?” (Cote 20). He wanted to examine how someone like Saddam could become the
abhorrent human being that he so obviously was, and explore how he, Maguire, could slide into
the same evil place with so little provocation. He then chose as his vehicle a familiar childhood
story about wickedness, using the Wicked Witch as his stand-in for Saddam. However, what he
found out was that no matter how hard he tried to write wickedness into the character of the
Witch, whom he named Elphaba, she refused to comply. Although he began his project with
hatred toward his main character he began to have compassion for her.
47
Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs are also cast away for their physical differences, their own
greenness that equates to a wicked nature.
Just as the Witch is defined as a terrorist and outcast throughout her story, so too
is the perverse terror attached to Sikhs, Muslims, and Arab bodies. According to Jasbir
Puar, the invocation of the word “terrorist,” “always already betray[s] an implicitly
installed prerequisite of perverse sexuality, queerness, and gender nonnormativity beyond
the pale of proper citizenship sexuality, both heteronormative and homonormative” (Puar
169). These “terrorists” are initiated into terrorized bodies primarily because of their
visible differences from the societal norms.
18
The Othering of Muslims and Orientalist bodies are narratives that have been
carefully and steadily built upon since 9/11 by American conservatives and deserve
careful attention as to why these groups are being cast into an always already assumed
terrorist category. Puar questions the assumption that educating would-be attackers into
“seeing” the difference between Muslims and Sikhs is an effective project to rectify why
these groups are being partitioned into an assumed terrorist category (Puar 170). Sikh
Americans attempted to separate themselves from Muslims after 9/11 in response to a
number of murders and attacks. This included public relation campaigns that advocated
Americans to become more familiar with the different sects of Middle Eastern groups.
“These efforts were driven by a desire to inhabit a proper Sikh American
18
Puar says, “Visibility is an inadequate rubric because of an old liberal predicament – visibility
invites surveillance – but also because regimes of affect and tactility conduct vital information
beyond the visual. The move from visibility to affect takes us from a frame of misrecognition,
contingent upon the visual to discern the mistakes (I thought you were one of them), to the notion
of resemblance, a broader affective frame where the reason for the alikeness may be a vague or
repressed (You remind me of one of them): from ‘looks like’ to ‘seems like’” (187). Thus, visible
marks such as headscarves, hijabs, turbans, and the like differentiate part of the population as a
way to show the presence of the Other.
48
heteromasculinity, one at significant remove from the perverse sexualities ascribed to
terrorist bodies” (167). According to Puar, the terrorist is often attributed as being
homosexual because as an outsider, he delineates from societal norms in wearing the
turban. Therefore, when Sikh’s became mistaken for Muslims after 9/11, there was often
homosexual and/or sexual undertones associated with hate crimes against the Sikh
community. Furthermore, Sikh men wearing turbans are often mistaken for kin of Osama
bin Laden and have been disproportionately affected by backlash racist crimes because of
their religious commitment to wearing the turban.
In a YouTube video that sings, “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” the well known
image of MGM’s Margret Hamilton who played the Wicked Witch is replaced with
Osama bin Laden’s face, green and vilified (see fig. 2). The substitution for bin Laden in
this image shows an interchangeable affect between the turban and the Witch’s hat. The
turban has become an assemblage accruing the mark of a terrorist. In reproduced images
of bin Laden such as this one, he is depicted wearing a headpiece. The turban is imbued
with nationalist undertones, religious, and cultural symbolic notions of the Other.
Similarly, the Witch’s garb is incomplete without her tall hat that signifies her
wickedness to viewers. The symbolic exchange is further complicated by placing binary
notions of femininity and masculinity upon the terrorist, depicted him wearing a female
witch’s hat. Each appendage, the “hat/turban” delineates the racial body in which it sits
upon as being Other. In this image, however, the substitution of the turban to the witch’s
hat creates an interchangeable power, which audiences can project onto the symbolic
reference. Puar’s suggestion that it is not necessarily the “…actual turban itself, an
embodiment of metaphysical substance, that is the desired object of violence,” instead it
49
is suggested and understood as much more than an appendage (Puar 179). In replacing
bin Laden’s turban with the Witch’s hat, these objects signify the power in which
symbolic exchange can reproduce images and visual fissures of societal expectations of
the Other.
Puar further discusses Judith Butler’s treatment of the Rodney King
19
case and
Sara Ahmed’s analysis of racial hate crimes
20
to note that both of these pieces continue to
treat race as a primarily visual phenomenon, just as explored in the visual representation
of bin Laden as a witch. In examining the Rodney King case, Butler has written, “The
visual field is not neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an
episteme, hegemonic and forceful” (Puar 183). Suggesting, that “seeing” is a specific
interpretation of the visual, Puar continues analyzing Butler’s exploration of visualized
racist organization by defining what qualifies as visual evidence: “For when the visual is
fully schematized by racism, the ‘visual evidence’ to which one refers will always and
only refute the conclusions based upon it; for it is possible within this racist episteme that
no black person can seek recourse to the visible as the sure ground of evidence” (Ibid).
The visual field places the black (often) male body as always already the site of violence
19
Rodney King became well known in the public eye after being beaten harshly by Los Angeles
police officers during a traffic stop in March 1991. Much of the beating was videotaped showing
seven officers surrounding the solitary King; some repeatedly sticking him with their clubs while
the others idly stood alongside watching the incident unfold. The Los Angeles County Superior
Court initially acquitted all four officers who were tried for their participation in the beating. This
incident sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which thousands of people rioted on behalf of
civil rights violations.
20
Sara Ahmed explores hate and fear as an economic regime. “Hate does not reside in a given
subject or object. Hate is economic; it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference
and displacement” (Puar 184). The anxieties and tension toward the feared body occurs through a
“visual racial regime” meaning that fear can be materialized in any body within a particular
profile range (Ibid). Because the Wicked Witch of the West looks like a witch (wearing a black
cape, black hat, and carrying a broom) her body becomes the figure of a terrorist, a feared object
viewers want to escape from.
50
and a source of danger to whites and model minorities. Similarly, the turbaned Sikh is
always already circumscribed as a dangerous terrorist look-alike or aspiring terrorist.
Representations of race are always already grounded in the tensions and realities
of the surrounding culture, under constant contestation. In American, the turbaned Sikh
appears to be always already fixed and defined by his social struggle of being a terrorist
excluded as a viable national citizen on the account of Otherness. It is here that the active
engagement through the lived experiences of groups of Americans and the struggles they
are engaged in foreground the partitioning of the Self and Other. The displacement of
ethnicity onto the bodies of green-skinned witches, turban wearing “terrorists”, talking
Animals, and an African American cast position the depictions of Oz in a reality of
contemporary and historical discourses of race and ethnicity in American culture.
Sydney Lumet’s 1978 film, The Wiz explicitly addresses African American
experiences in the 1970s, positioning the familiar Wizard of Oz narrative in post-Civil
Rights Movement America. In this interpretation, Lumet attempts to dynamically reclaim
the mythic discourse for African American audiences. The Wiz marked an appropriation
of the familiar Wizard of Oz narrative to speak to the experiences of an African
American audience – a tale that had up to this point been an exclusively white
experience, with the notable exception of Hamilton’s green-skinned Wicked Witch in the
classic MGM film.
The Wiz highlighted the racially unmarked whiteness privileged within the
versions of the Wizard of Oz by Baum and MGM.
21
Toni Morrison argues that blackness
21
One of the significant noted pitfalls that killed the movie at the box office was, “simply the fact
that no longer were black hands in control. Instead the movie’s most important creators – the
directors Sidney Lumet and writer Joel Schumacher – were white artists, totally out of tune with
51
has historically been engaged in literature as a means through which to define the
whiteness that served the Self to its Other, with explicit ramifications for national
identity. Morrison specifically asks, “What parts do the invention and development of
whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely defined as ‘American’?” (Morrison
9). By resituating the Wizard of Oz narrative from an African American perspective, this
highlighted the always already white image of American identity represented in earlier
versions and continued to resonate in The Wiz itself. The Wiz is problematically
illuminated through the lens of white creators and those that perpetuate the construction
of normative white citizenship. Therefore, the national citizen developed through this
new iteration is constructed by positioning the citizen against that which it is not. Each
version of the Oz tale places Munchkins, Wicked Witches, and fantastical figures outside
the realm of viable citizenship – because they are “other,” they cannot be citizens.
Similarly, The Wiz speaks to this Othering exploring the struggles that surrounded
African American’s during this period.
In reinventing the traditional Wizard of Oz narrative, Lumet’s The Wiz
simultaneously creates space within the mythic discourse for the specificity of the
African American experience and claims a position within the distinctly American
narrative of identity – created by the story itself. While engaging in historically based
representations of race and Otherness, Lumet addresses lived experiences of
marginalization as well, such as not being able to hail a cab in New York City, to tension
the material (its built-in folkloric quality) and the style of its performers” (“The Wiz” 230).
Therefore, while the Broadway version of The Wiz was an African American version of Baum’s
fairy tale, created and nurtured by African American artists both on and off stage, Lumet’s film
version had an all-African American cast in front of the camera, but was filtered through the lens
and perspective of the white creators perched behind the camera.
52
and anxieties surrounding contemporary African American identity. In homing in on the
urban decay displayed during the 1970s, Lumet strategically placed a decomposing
“Nathan’s” hot dog restaurant at the core of Oz. In doing so, the story initiates the urban
blight of big cities during this time period. The economic restructuring, abandoned
buildings, employment challenges, fragmented families, and political disenfranchisement
that resonated at the time created a decrepit atmosphere that is reflected throughout the
film, The Wiz.
By positioning The Wiz in a role of historically grounded representations of race,
the film remains significant in terms of portraying the sociohistorical realities of racial
differences that permeate national diversity in American culture. As Daniel Bernardi
argues, “Race is conceived as both a social structure and a culture discourse…Anything
but an illusion, race as identity is meaningful, even if not biological or divinely
determined, because it has a real impact on everyday life, on social practice, and on the
stuff of representation” (Bernardi xvi). Therefore, contemporary discourses of race are
constructed at the intersection of historical realities and metaphors of racial differences,
building upon one another to create a wide range of representations of Otherness
throughout the myriad versions of the Wizard of Oz narrative. In this negotiation, later
versions of this narrative revisit and revise one of the central notions of this distinctly
American myth: who counts as a citizen in America and in Oz. This class differentiation
is not only based on physical representations but also biological and symbolic
representations of gender construction.
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CHAPTER 3
THE WICKED CONSUMPTION OF GENDER ROLES AND IDENTITY
“Once upon a time there lived a beautiful princess in a beautiful land…”
These enchanting words are a familiar first line to many fairy tales. These words
along with the fairy tales themselves have been passed from generation to generation,
almost as a rite of passage throughout western civilization. Whether it is the tales from
the Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, or Disney’s modern twists on enthralling
woes of princesses, fairy tales have permeated society for ages. The particular phrase
above signals the liminal space between storytelling and everyday life, not only by
ushering in the tropes of the tales themselves, but by introducing the structure of gender
that defines these stories, inviting the beautiful princess into the space. Gender
representations are particularly significant in mythic structures, in large part because they
outline the acceptable parameters of gender behavior within the larger social culture.
Moreover, fairy tale discourses codify individual behaviors, social structures, and cultural
value systems, making fairy tales especially instrumental in demarcating the range of
culturally validated femininities and gender construction.
In traditional fairy tales, female characters generally fall into categories of good
or evil, the beautiful princess or the evil witch. Characters that embody the first archetype
are coded as lovely and good with a sense of virtue through selflessness demonstrated by
a willingness to help others and passivity to the goals and desires of the more dominant
(often) male characters. This compulsion is also often seen in a propensity for self-
sacrifice of identity and agency. In short, the ideal “good girl” of fairy tales is relatively
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one-dimensional. This “good girl” gives up individual motivation to support the forward
motion of the fairy tale, a direction that is almost invariably dedicated to more active
male character counterparts.
In direct contrast, the figure of the “bad” woman, usually occupied by a wicked
witch or evil stepmother, is characterized by her self-serving manipulation of
circumstances to satisfy her own desires. From the evil queen who tricks Snow White
into eating a poisoned apple to the Wicked Witch of Oz’s obsession with Dorothy’s
magic shoes, these monstrous women are defined by their willingness to do whatever
they have to in order to get what they desire. Vilified in comparison to their virtuous
counterparts, these women are set apart by their agency and active longing, which
separates them from both the beautiful princesses and the men who fear their ruthless
power and non-conformity. In fairytales, the only female character that is perceived as
“good” is almost by default a young girl. “Bad” female characters are almost always
women in their sexual prime but who do not necessarily conform to social expectation of
reproduction. Female sexuality therefore is not only linked to evil but in some cases the
impetus for evil acts against the “good girl” because they are perceived to be sexual and a
social competition. The only caveat to this is perhaps the “good” mother, grandmother, or
godmother whose sexuality has been nullified by childbirth itself. As Phillip Cole points
out in The Myth of Evil, “The punitive treatment of deviance not only demonstrates the
control of rulers but also asserts the values of conformists. The advantage of [evil]
witchcraft over other crimes in this context is that it sums up all forms of non-
conformity” (Cole 88). The disparaging witch is therefore cast off as being a deviant by
not complying with societal norms. In obliging to the social expectations, the good girl is
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ultimately containable whereas her evil counterpart is marked as wicked by ambition,
power, and an uncontrollable nature.
Negotiations of mythic narratives such as the Wizard of Oz tale are notable in the
ways in which they validate, challenge, or reinvent such representations of gender in our
prescribed social order. This revisionist process often reflects shifts in notions of
acceptable femininity within the sociocultural discourses surrounding the stories and
society itself. The images of women offered by these variations of the Wizard of Oz
narrative become increasingly complicated as they are revised and re-imagined. While
early versions, such as Baum’s children’s tale and MGM’s classic film, provide
audiences with a dichotomous view of femininity populated by women as either good or
evil, later versions unsettle these polarized notions of gender identity. The later versions
of the tale instead represent complex and flawed female characters who fail to fit neatly
into clearly-defined categories, who participate in the construction of their social images,
and who highlight the performative nature of gender identities. In addition, femininity is
an embodied performance, as well as an enacted one and the physical appearances of
these women also serve to visually code, regulate, and represent their characters in each
of the adaptations.
Baum’s novel, and the film adaptation of Baum’s novel, each explore the Wicked
Witch of the West as a vile woman devoid of human emotion. In these interpretations, the
Wicked Witch of the West is a striking stereotypical figure with degenerating teeth, a
long diamond chin, black pointed hat with dark attire, and encompassing the full garb of
any witch, with an elongated cape and broom in hand. Readers and viewers are not
shocked by the Witch’s appearance or her demeanor that the characteristics adhere to; the
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image of a Witch and her representative badness that coincide with the stereotype. In
contrast, the good witch is colorfully gaudy in her garments and appearance. Although
this dichotomous organization is present in early versions, this structure unravels in later
iterations. Instead, the heroines of both versions of Wicked, the novel and musical, are
shown in positions of actively negotiating morality, public image and the performance of
gender roles to which characters identify and prescribe.
There is a strong polarization of female characters in each version of the Wizard
of Oz. By situating the wonderful beside the wicked the contrast between good and evil is
reflected blatantly throughout every adaptation specifically in aligning the various
character representations of the good Witch, bad Witch, and Dorothy. Dorothy can be
read as an active participant and hero in the Land of Oz, escaping the European
traditional fairy tale restrictions for a female heroine. Women in fairy tales have often
been assigned to passive positions such as awaiting rescue; however, Dorothy takes her
fate into her own hands becoming an active female hero. Feminists have claimed Baum’s
Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as one of their own and acknowledge Baum’s
novel as the earliest truly feminist American children’s book (Hearn 13). As a feminist,
Dorothy prescribes to the distinctly American trajectory of self-discovery and self-
determination within a culture that celebrates individuality and the mythic discourse that
allows individuals to achieve such self-realization. Nevertheless, Dorothy’s active
heroism is fixed on her position as a “good girl.” It is particularly interesting that the two
main actions she completes entirely on her own (even though her actions may have been
inadvertent) is the killing of both the witches – acts she is unable to take responsibility for
in other iterations. These actions are overlooked because Dorothy is the “good girl” so
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any misbehavior on her part is her quest to return home and becomes glossed over. Even
Dorothy’s behaviors that might have been punishable to regular children are overlooked
in Baum’s story and not only deemed permissible but heroic.
Baum creates a window for young girls to “misbehave” by establishing an
exception to Dorothy’s actions and ultimately celebrating those actions. When the Witch
refuses to return Dorothy’s shoe, the child has a temper tantrum and becomes “so very
angry that she picked up the bucket of water that stood near and dashed it over the Witch
wetting her from head to foot” an action resulting in the Witch’s death (Baum 225). Not
only is Dorothy not punished for her tantrum and perhaps accidental murder of the Witch,
she is rewarded and celebrated, a re-action echoing the joyful community of the
Munchkins when her house fell on the Wicked Witch of the East. Following the
discourse established by Baum’s text, any actions against the Witch that Dorothy is guilty
of, including the murders, become admissible because of the Witch’s status of being
“wicked.” Dorothy is similarly circumscribed by her positions as the “good girl”
requiring a balance of pursuit and passivity. By excusing any questionable action or
misbehavior on her part (as it does so in Baum’s tale) Dorothy is caught between two
worlds, literally and figuratively, as she tries to navigate the social expectations that her
new “power” has provided her. Even though Dorothy has more agency than the majority
of her fairy tale sisters, the representations of her gendered body and behavior neutralizes
her actions, creating a heroine who is constantly negotiating between activity and
passivity.
As previously suggested, in Fleming’s 1939 film version, Dorothy’s heroism is
quite accidental, and she even denies her participation in killing the Witches, refusing to
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take any responsibility for such an action. When the Wicked Witch of the West asks
Dorothy if it was she who killed her sister, Dorothy protests that it was an accident and
that it was not her intention to have her house fall on the Wicked Witch of the East and
kill her. Later in the film, when Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch of the West, she claims,
“I didn’t mean to kill her. Really, I didn’t. It’s just that [the Scarecrow] was on fire.”
Here, Dorothy altruistically acts to save the life of her friend. Her selflessness and her
goodness are praised and honored. Moreover, only after it is acknowledged that killing
the witch is a good thing does Dorothy “own” her act. Even with Dorothy’s inability to
claim her agency over her actions, this film reinforces the dualities of good and evil. Judy
Garland’s Dorothy disrupts the social order with sentimentality because she depicts the
sweet and innocent “good girl” stereotype. This further demonizing the Wicked Witch of
the West as the Other for all viewers to consume. This particular contrast is strongly
reinforced by the physical representations of the characters in the 1939 film.
The representation of good and evil is highlighted through the prescribed gender
roles permeating the Oz tale. The story becomes an instrument in demarcating culturally
validated femininities through the duality of that which is good versus that which is evil.
These binaries show up at the forefront of the film version when Glinda ethereally floats
in her bubble to meet Dorothy upon her arrival in Oz. In that first scene the following
conversation takes place:
Witch of the North: Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?
Dorothy: Why, I am not a witch at all. Witches are old and ugly! (Background
giggling)
Witch of the North: The Munchkins are laughing because I am a witch.
Dorothy: I’ve never heard of a beautiful witch.
Witch of the North: Only bad witches are ugly. (1939)
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The Wizard of Oz film reinforces the notions of evil being ugly and in turn praising good
as beautiful. In her statement to Dorothy, the Witch of the North poses a number of
problematic gender issues in reinforcing Dorothy’s comment that “witches are old and
ugly” but qualifying her statement as she separates those that are beautiful to being good.
Additionally, the comment that “only bad witches are ugly” posits additional problems in
terms of aesthetic expectations, which seem to convey an unrealistic façade of beauty
urging a set of social and cultural expectations imposed onto society and viewers of the
film. The two witches demonstrate the larger social concepts of “good” and “evil” and
the perception that beautiful equals good and ugly equals evil. These concepts are found
within gender roles and force that categorization onto Dorothy as she struggles to find her
balance in being the “good/beautiful girl” versus the “bad/ugly girl”.
The Wicked Witch of the West, on the other hand, is an embodiment of the
“monstrous-feminine,” a term coined by Barbara Creed who argues that “[a]ll human
societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about women that is
shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject” (Creed 1). Significantly, gender is central to the fear
inspired by the monstrous-feminine because “[a]s with all other stereotypes of the
feminine, from virgin to whore, she is defined in terms of her sexuality” (3). Therefore,
the figure of the monstrous-feminine is defined by her own power, desire, and sexuality.
The most dangerous aspect of this figure as Bonnie Friedman points out, is that the
Wicked Witch is a woman who wants (Friedman 23, emphasis added). The Wicked
Witch wants power, the shoes, and everything. The problem is that Dorothy’s perceived
innocence shields viewers from seeing that she too is a character who wants. “The shoes
represent the role, the social position that the young girl wants to fulfill and that society
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expects her to assume” (Jones 94), and Dorothy wants to oblige society. In Baum’s book,
when Dorothy and the Wicked Witch are each wearing one of the silver shoes, both the
good little girl and the big bad Witch are consumed by their desire to possess the silver
shoes and throw identical temper tantrums. The good girl and the bad Witch will stop at
nothing, not even murder, to obtain the object of their desire (in later iterations, this same
quest for desire of an object is mimicked in Maguire’s Wicked but the parallel is between
the Wicked Witch and the Good Witch). In Baum’s Oz, they become twins, sad doubles
of greed and hatred because of the want, they try to consume and ultimately become
consumed by a bejeweled pair of shoes.
Baum’s silver shoes and most notably MGM’s ruby slippers are the sparkling
nexus of femininity and serve as an American icon. Cultural icons, such as the slippers
represented in the various Oz films are considered “iconic” because of their reproduction
and manifestation in popular culture. In a general sense, an icon is a symbol or image, a
name, picture, face, edifice, or an article that is readily recognized as having some well-
known representation and significance to a particular group of people. In the case of the
ruby slippers, this icon evokes particular values and a national representation to
accelerate the prescribed roles of femininity found in these fairy tale worlds of Oz. Judy
Garland’s ruby slippers have developed a mythical status all on their own, with the
artifacts being auctioned amid much fanfare and staggering amounts of money. On May
24, 2000, collector David Elkouby bought the ruby slippers at an auction for $600,000
(Jarrett). The commodification and reproduction of these special shoes is very present in
society as is their representation of America’s domination when it has simply gone too
far, that is, when the ideals of economic integration, distribution of resources, mass
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production, cultural inclusiveness, and exuberant social and political exchange have all
become a fog or delirium feeding into the materialism of the culture. Similarly, when the
Witch and Dorothy become each other’s double, they too are amidst the haze and feed
into the American myth of consumerism.
In his short story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” (1994), Salman Rushdie
interpolates the myth of the Ozian magical slippers, which have been idolized as one of
the most revered iconic embodiments of emancipation, individualism, unrestrained
mobility, and femininity (Rushdie 46). Accounting for their misadventures in the modern
Oz, which has actually become another Disneyworld of production and mass-produced
products, Rushdie offers a wry commentary on the extremes of America’s neo-liberal
ethics and market oriented capitalism in his story. In doing so, Rushdie’s commentary is
just one of the many that discuss the commodification of American iconography of Oz
and the influence of the shoes as a potent symbol in our culture.
In Wicked, Gregory Maguire criticizes as well as glorifies the Witch’s relationship
to the shoes and her clear desire to remove them from Dorothy. Although Maguire’s
back-story allows readers to become more sympathetic in understanding why the witch so
desperately wants these shoes, the desire itself highlights a problematic critique on
American materialism. Elphaba’s desire for a relationship with her father becomes
materialized in the shoes meant for her sister who always received preference over her.
Elphaba’s desire for the shoes is simultaneously a righteous effort to reclaim family
“property” as much as a desperate desire to create a façade of familial kinship and the
desire for home which never quite exists for Elphaba. The shoes become representative of
her father’s love and although not meant for her, she is desperate to possess them. The
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standard representations of femininity are underlined by the glow of Cinderella’s famous
fairy tale: a pair of shoes can change your life.
Nevertheless, in Wicked Maguire offers a third version of Dorothy and the
Witches as a new portrait of iconic gender roles portrayed throughout the Oz adaptation
as a way to fissure the relationship between the “good girl” and “bad girl” dichotomy in
the fairy tale genre. Maguire situates Glinda, the Good Witch of the North beside
Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West to emphasize that good and evil collide even in
the simplicity of the first letters of their name, Glinda the Good and Elphaba the Evil.
These two strong female characters are therefore, fixed in their representations of their
names. The Wizard of Oz contributes to the tradition of equating morality with aesthetics
in both its stereotypical representation of beauty seen through Glinda’s material word and
non-beauty through Elphaba’s strong appetite for activism. The novel Wicked expresses
an apparent attitude towards these concepts praising the underdog, Elphaba. In doing so,
Maguire reinvents the common understanding of good and evil particularly through the
expression of beauty’s exaggerated depiction seen in Glinda’s simple gestures throughout
the novel. For instance, she demands to wear a ridiculous attire of a “green traveling
gown with its inset panels of achre musset” (Maguire 65). Glinda reasons that because
she is beautiful, she is important and therefore “good”. This, of course, indicates the
concept of beautiful equating to good. In juxtaposing the beautiful witch to the ugly one,
and further matching each figure with corresponding attributes of acute goodness or
excessive badness, a detrimental myth of what illuminates these binaries in relation to
femininity are imposed onto the interpreters of these images.
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Dress and masquerade have emerged to play a significant role in the negotiation
of feminine identity, not only seen in the Witch and Dorothy’s desire for a pair of shoes
but especially in the consumption of Elphaba and Glinda, where the clothes in fact make
the witch. In Wicked, Elphaba does not assume a specific role set in society and chooses
to defy social constructs by not adopting a sense of reference in terms of grandiose and
“girly” attire which Glinda subscribes to. Elphaba creates her own identity, which after
her birth her Nanny contemplates when stating, “little green Elphaba chose her own sex,
and her own color, and to hell with her parents” (Maguire 31). Elphaba is strong willed
from the onset showing her sense of difference from an early age. Elphaba refuses to be
known as one or the other in all aspects of her life, specifically in terms of her gender.
Therefore, Elphaba is a character who encompasses both male and female qualities, good
and evil attributes, beautiful and villainous, and submissive and dominating demeanors.
The construction and negotiation of identity highlighted in both versions of Wicked are
echoed in the appearances of Elphaba, described by Maguire and later embodied onstage
by Indina Menzel as gorgeous and sexually desirable fulfilling the monstrous-feminine,
an all powerful female figure.
In contrast, Glinda holds a strong preoccupation with her beauty and is thus
portrayed as foolish and silly. She is a vain girl who struggles throughout her education
and obsesses over her self-image and beauty making her less intelligent than Elphaba. In
doing so, the physical appearance of characters is less important than the ideas they offer
in Wicked. It is here that Maguire attempts to deconstruct the standard notions of
prescribed gender roles found in the land of Oz. The tone of the novel consistently
suggests an irrelevance of Glinda’s attitude toward beauty, especially as she grows older:
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Glinda approached slowly, either through age or shyness, or because her
ridiculous gown weighed so much that it was hard for her to get up enough steam
to stride. She looked like a huge Glindaberry bush, was all the Witch could think;
under that skirt there must be a bustle the size of the dome of Saint Florix. There
were sequins and furbelows and a sort of History of Oz, it seemed, stitched in
trapunto in six or seven ovoid panels all around the skirting. But her face: beneath
the powered skin, the wrinkles at eyelid and mouth, was the face of the timid
schoolgirl from the Pertha Hills…‘You haven’t changed a whit’, said
Glinda…The Witch took Glinda’s arm. ‘Glinda, you look hideous in that getup. I
thought you’d have developed some sense by now’ (Maguire 340).
Maguire retells the Oz tale from the inside out – essentially rebuilding the story through
the central character, the Witch Elphaba. She is no longer one dimensional, she is no
longer extreme in her evil actions of her ugliness, no longer silent, nor speechless or
frozen. In the section above, Elphaba’s humanity is seen in her teasing of Glinda’s
“hideous” garb. Glinda is hiding behind the clothing and makeup that is overly
extravagant which does not parallel who she is inside. Elphaba can see that Glinda
remains at her core a “timid schoolgirl” maintaining innocence and goodness on the
inside; however what she has become on the outside is nothing to be proud of according
to her dear friend. Maguire is alluding to the idea that social and cultural conformity such
as being consumed by appearances can shift an individual’s persona.
Maguire’s Wicked Witch is no longer wholly “wicked” just as his good Witch is
no longer fully “good.” He has effectively blurred the boundary between each image by
literally undressing them and erasing the need to define them in such polarizing female
identities. The differences of these characters are further juxtaposed when Elphaba
demands to Glinda that she wants the shoes from Dorothy; after all, it is her birthright.
Elphaba’s father had given the presumably magical slippers to her sister Nessarose (the
Wicked Witch of the East), so it is her heirloom that she seeks from Dorothy along with
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the power the shoes may possess. Elphaba fixates on getting the shoes back linking her
actions to a sentimental longing for acceptance from her father, but also fixates on
obtaining the object of her desire because she is afraid of what the Wizard, whom she has
spent her life fighting against in an underground revolutionary group, might do with
them. Because of the Witch’s obsession with the shoes, as suggested previously,
Maguire is perhaps responding to the commodification and consumption of the shiny
slippers and what can happen when material desires come before more spiritual relations,
such as friendship. Glinda jokingly pleads with the Elphaba to forget about the slippers
since they are “only shoes” convinced that they are unimportant, but Elphaba simply
cannot let go. In fact, although these two women are long time friends, it is this fight that
leads to the final collapse of their friendship, “They have too much common history to
come apart over a pair of shoes, yet the shoes were planted between them, a grotesque
icon of their differences. Neither one could retreat or move forward. It was silly, and they
were stuck, and some one needed to break the spell. But all the Witch could do was insist,
I want those shoes” (Maguire 347).
In Wicked the musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, the separation
between good and evil and the prescribed gender expectations that emphasize the
polarities is shown not only in the Witches garb but also in the value given to friendship
between the two Witches. When Glinda receives her nomination as “The Good” thinking
she would be happy with this honor, she cautiously sings, “happy is what happens when
all your dreams come true”; she soon learns that happiness comes with a price. She
laments that “There’s a kind of a sort of cost/ There’s a couple of things get lost” (Track,
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Thank Goodness). Glinda recognizes that she has become “The Good” by giving up and
undergoing a loss of some kind, the loss of friendship.
The friendship between these two main characters sets up a moral binary ordering
of subjects that underline “a logic of moral opposition with one of ethical relation”
(Shomura 18). Glinda and Elphaba realize an ethical lesson when they are joined
together. In “For Good,” a song the two sing expressing the contributions they each had
on one another, the audience feels the molding of the two as their voices collide. “Who
can say/ If I’ve been changed for the better?/ Because I knew you/ I have been changed
for good.” In his essay, “These Are Bad People” – Enemy Combatants and the
Homopolitics of the “War on Terror,” Chad Shomura explains that the meaning of this
“good” in the quotation above is ambiguous and questions if it carries temporal
connotations or ethical ones. The author suggests that,
within that ambiguity we may discover what Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak calls
an ‘eruption of the ethical;’ in the song, to ‘know’ is not to ‘construct the other as
object of knowledge’ but ‘to listen to the other as if it were a self’ by recognizing
one’s debts to alterity. The Other registers changes in the self such that
subjectivity must be understood through relationality (19)
This interpretation suggests that their friendship must come together as a single self,
joining both good and evil dualities in order to become one. Additionally, Schwartz and
Holzman address the homosocial conventions of female friendship and devotion, creating
spaces for addressing and embracing same-sex desire within the structure of American
myth. Therefore, foregrounding a previously marginalized perspective of the society
allowing their heroines to sing from a position often ignored by traditional mythic, fairy
tale discourses.
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The hybrid of good and evil
depicted throughout Wicked suggests that
these two concepts are essential to join
together in order for an individual to
become whole – further suggesting that
male and female qualities are necessary to
merge in order to be whole. Even in an
image for the popular adaptation of the
musical there is a representative hybrid force underlying the caricatures of the two
witches (see fig. 4). This image suggests that a little of good and evil is necessary to find
stability in society as the image of Elphaba and Glinda portray a yin-yang balance going
as far as to complete each other becoming a whole person in the process. Elphaba’s eyes
are not seen as her pointed hat covers them secretly but Glinda’s eye peers out. Glinda’s
mouth is hidden as she surreptitiously whispers to her counterpart in a stereotypical
gesture that girlfriends perform. Elphaba’s conspiratorial grin completes the image to
make one whole person, a single face with a mouth, nose, and eye suggesting that there is
a needed balance of all gendered dualities to become whole. Fusing Elphaba and Glinda
in song and visual representation encompasses the ultimate conflict of the story that
Maguire tries to discern.
The barriers that separate individuals (i.e., Dorothy, Glinda, and the Witch) all
rest on a fine line that is often blurred from the social ideologies, sociocultural
expectation and materialistic desires that create the American myth. The new
configuration of these social constructs portrays those who are wicked as misunderstood
Figure 4: This image is the main promotional
advertisement used for the musical Wicked,
2003.
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powerful heroines. As this progression of heroines demonstrates, these versions of the
Wizard of Oz tale have been instrumental in validating shifting notions of acceptable
femininity and gender roles within American culture.
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CONCLUSION
BEYOND THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD
Our American utopia may be somewhat crude in spots but there is not denying that it is
ours…Someday we may have better American fairy tales but that will not be until
America is a better country. Edward Wagenknecht. (Utopia Americana 156-57).
Each version of the Wizard of Oz narrative that engages in literature, film, theatre
and the like have worked over the past several decades to invite viewers into an
immediate identification with the familiar story and cast of characters. Salman Rushdie
comments on this self-identification, “In the case of the beloved film, we are the stars’
doubles. Our imaginations put us in the Lion’s skin, place the sparkling slippers on our
feet and send us cackling through the air on a broomstick…We are the stand-ins now”
(Rushdie, 46 emphasis original). Rushdie’s self-identification theory allows us to see
how much our perceptions and perspectives have been shaped by the Oz story, in
renegotiating our American Myth and American identity over time. Through the
numerous historical and ideological comparisons in the Oz tale that reflect our own
world, the discussions of identity, race, Otherness and gender have become significant
reflections of our own imaginations.
In the more than one hundred years since Baum’s first publication of The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, issues of national identity within this specifically American
myth have continued to be preoccupied with race, ethnicity and the Other, in demarcating
who counts as a national citizen and who is marginalized and excluded. As such, it is not
surprising that multiple reinventions of the Wizard of Oz tale have returned to these
issues time and time again. Baum’s support for racial segregation and clear-cut notions of
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the American citizen is reflected in the regimentation of his Oz, complicating the largely
multicultural discourse of his Oz series. Lumet’s The Wiz also participates in historical
representations of race, negotiating the African American appropriation of the Wizard of
Oz story in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, claiming a privileged position
within the discourse of this previously white American myth, as well as highlighting
anxieties surrounding other elements of African American identity, including problematic
notions of masculinity, femininity, and exclusion. The works of Baum and Lumet
position themselves within the historical moments of their individual creation, engaging
with the anxieties surrounding race and national identity of their contemporary moments.
In contrast, MGM’s Wizard of Oz and the versions of Wicked by Maguire,
Schwartz, and Holzman engage in ideological discourses of race, framing these
interventions through difference and Otherness. MGM’s classical film positions the Other
as subordinate (the Munchkins) or dangerous and worthy of destruction (the Wicked
Witch), with the dichotomy of Self and Other established to further validate Dorothy’s
heroism and identity as an ideal “infantile” American citizen. Resituating discussions of
Otherness through sentient Animals invites identification while simultaneously engaging
with discourses of biological differences and ideological representations of real-world
discrimination and abuse such as those who wear turbans being defined as terrorists or
bin Laden’s kin.
Moreover, both versions of Wicked further reestablish the Other as a figure of
self-identification by recasting Elphaba as a heroine rather than a villainess, highlighting
a discourse which embraces and celebrates those who are different and unique, a distinct
response to the segregation and vilification of the versions which have preceded it.
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However, Elphaba still faces destruction, achieved in Maguire’s novel and simulated in
the Broadway version of Schwartz and Holzman, suggesting that the discourses of
national identity, race, and gender are far from settled.
According to Zipes, these adaptations have “a utopian constellation, a reference
point, one that fortunately has not gone away and compels us to return time and again to
determine our national character and identity” (Zipes 122). Our continued participation
with the Wizard of Oz story allows Americans to renegotiate the American myth over
time inviting the numerous adaptations to structure a sense of American identity. As the
Oz story continues to situate itself in popular culture
22
, the tale will remain a reference
point and reflection of our own world and imaginations. The repeated return to Baum’s
fable will continue to position the Oz legend within popular culture as a way to discuss
and negotiate national identity, race, Otherness, and gender, beyond the confines of the
yellow brick road.
22
There are two new Oz movies that are on the horizon, Dorothy of Oz produced by Summertime
Entertainment is a computer-animated film in IMAX 3D to be released in 2012 and Disney’s OZ:
The Great and Powerful movie directed by Sam Raimi with an expected release in 2013. Dorothy
of Oz, which stars all-American Glee star Lea Michele, is a story of Dorothy’s return to Kansas to
save the devastated country that is in peril. OZ: The Great and Powerful focuses on the Wizard’s
story and how he arrived in the Land of Oz. Stars include Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle
Williams, Zach Braff, and James Franco as the Wizard.
72
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76
APPENDIX
Fig. 1. The Land of Oz on Emerald Mountains, North Carolina. 12 Aug. 2011.
Personal photograph by author. JPEG file.
Fig. 2. Ding Dong Osama’s Dead! YouTube Video. Web. 12 Nov. 2011.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SqwPb1Dbkc&feature=related>.
Fig. 3. The Wicked Witch Image. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
Illustrated by W.W. Denslow. The Reilly & Lee Co, 1900.
Fig. 4. Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz. Web. 12 Nov. 2011.
<http://www.fanpop.com/spots/wicked/images/6345797/title/witchy-secrets-
wallpaper>.
