oz: an excerpt

[egypturnash]

"The Glass Cat, which Dr. Pipt lawlessly made," continued the Wizard, "is a pretty cat, but its pink brains made it so conceited that it was a disagreeable companion to everyone. So the other day I took away the pink brains and replaced them with transparent ones, and now the Glass Cat is so modest and well behaved that Ozma has decided to keep her in the palace as a pet."

"I thank you," said the cat, in a soft voice.

-L. Frank Baum, Oz #7: The Patchwork Girl of Oz


...and somehow I immediately thought of radiofreecatgrl upon reading that passage.

---

The magical land of Oz is weirdly nasty if you really start looking at it. All animals talk and are intelligent: what do carnivores eat? Nobody ever ages, and yet there are people young and old (I believe this is because everyone in Oz was frozen in age when it became a magical fairy kingdom). How'd you like to be a baby for eternity? Or a teenager? All magic-making is outlawed; any magicians, sorcerers, wizards, witches, etc, encountered during the course of an Oz adventure will invariably stripped of their powers in the last few chapters, unless it's the state-sanctioned wizardry of the Wizard or Glinda. Naturally magical creatures such as fairies are allowed to retain their magic, but no humans may be spell-casters. Study for decades, hone your spellcraft, hunt down arcane knowledge, then Ozma the girl-queen takes it from you with a wave of her wand because you might not be"good"... which in this case mostly means "uses your magic solely to support the Queen's rule". Nobody can die... but you can be locked up without food, to writhe in starvation; you can be chopped into bits; you can be tortured endlessly. The more you look, the less shining it seems.

Of course, you could take the tack that Philip José Farmer took in his A Barnstormer in Oz, wherein he suggests that much of this was embroidery, and everything after the first book is purely Baum's fantasies (in Barnstormer, the son of Dorothy discovers that The Wizard of Oz was based on his mother's adventures, but much bowdlerized by Baum; the subsequent thirteen books Baum wrote were, here, solely his invention)... but even that has its problems along these lines.

Oz isn't as wonderful as Baum wanted you to think it is.

Comments

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

The book "Wicked: The Life And Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" hinged on just those elements--Oz was a land of terrible political strife, the talking animals were second-class citizens subjected to pogroms and lynchings if they didn't keep their place, magic was taboo, disenchanted aristocrats were everywhere, the munchkins were starving and enduring terrible famine, but couldn't leave their state-ordered reservations...really bizarre but gripping book. And of course the WWotW was the heroine, a sort of weird anti-hero who began as a revolutionary, and having seen her efforts come to nothing, eventually retired to the waste and got strange and hermitlike, lavishing affection on her flying monkeys, before finally meeting her inevitable end. She wasn't exactly a GOOD character, but she was a very sympathetic one, and it was a really interesting book--generally much superior to the authors other fairy-tale retellings.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*nod* Gregory McGuire. (Macguire?)

He's kind of made dark fairy tale reworking into a career; he's since given similar treatment to Cinderella, some other familiar story I can't quite remember in my current stretched-out mental state (Scrooge, maybe?), and just recently came out with a rendition of Snow White which I saw in the bookstore the other day.

I seem to recall that "Wicked" also pretty definitely suggested that the Wicked Witch was a lesbian. *grin*

I don't remember too many specific details as I've only read each of his books once.

---

That's what stories like this are for, I think. The original versions, I mean. There to be a simple skeleton to hang something stranger and darker upon.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

I think this is why I never really got into the books. It was so rigidly structured, it made Disneyland look like downtown Detroit.

And pink brains... These days there would be some busybody or another calling that passage discrimination. I'll take my brains creamed on toast, thanks.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

"Bob" says "down" with "pink" "brains"!

[radiofreecatgrl.livejournal.com]

I thank you.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

♥

The history of Bungle, the Glass Kitten: Made from glass by the reclusive wizard Dr. Pipt, she was intended to be a mere mouse-catcher. But she came out too vain, obsessed with staring in the mirror and admiring her cold ruby heart, with watching her pretty pink brains whirl as she thought. Named for what the wizard felt she was - a horrible bungle - she tagged along on a lengthy quest for spell components self-discovery and ultimately ended up part of the ever-growing menagerie of artificial creatures that surrounded Ozma, girl-queen of Oz.

"[...] the conversation of your fat wife and of yourself bores me dreadfully."

"That is because I gave you different brains from those we ourselves posess—and much too good for a cat," returned Dr. Pipt.

"Can't you take 'em out, then, and replace 'em with pebbles, so I won't feel above my station in life?" asked the cat, pleadingly.

-Ibid, chapter 4 this time.

[rainwing.livejournal.com]

Now I want to read these books!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I have all fourteen, plus a few of the lesser ones people wrote after Baum's death, and some of Baum's other fantasy! You could easily read one in a day. More, if you can tolerate that much whimsey at once. (innocently:) All you'd have to do is come visit for a couple weeks!

[rainwing.livejournal.com]

The promise of books may prove too tempting for me to resist. *c.c*

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

tempt♪

[gwynbones.livejournal.com]

Did Baum want us to believe it was so sweet, though? I think one of the reasons I loved those books as a child was because of the darkness ... come on, the woman who collects pretty girls' heads? That's the stuff of real, bloody fairytales before sweetening. It's been a long time since I read them, though. I really should get my hands on them again.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Ah, Princess Langwidere. (Yes, I remembered the name off the top of my head, though I had to check the spelling - I had an erratic few of the earlier Oz books as a kid, which I re-read many times, and Ozma of Oz was one of them.)

Yeah, the earlier Oz stories were generally nastier; they get nicer and more pseudo-Utopian as they go along. Baum's other stuff varied in niceness, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the niceness levels pretty much align with the Oz books, getting sugarier (and occasionally horribly punny, almost at Xanth levels) as he aged.

[hydra-velsen.livejournal.com]

That movie "Return to Oz" always scared me. Just the simple fact that you actually saw "people" die in it was enough to terrorize me as a kid. People dont die in Oz, Do They? Well they did at several points in that movie, but they werent really gone! They sunk into the Deadly Desert, and became sand, but they were still conscious and *there*. That's worse thand eath.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

Oz is the back forty of Interzone.