Posted on 07/10/2011 8:25:43 PM PDT by Bratch
L. Frank Baum claimed to have written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz solely to pleasure the children of his day, but scholars have found enough parallels between Dorothys yellow-brick odyssey and the politics of 1890s Populism to suggest otherwise. Did Baum intend to pen a subtle political satire on monetary reform or merely an entertaining fantasy?
The story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to pleasure children of today (Dighe 2002, 42). So wrote L. Frank Baum in the introduction to his popular childrens story published in 1900. As fertile as his imagination was, Baum could hardly have conceived that his modernized fairly tale would attain immortality when it was adapted to the silver screen forty years later. Though not a smash hit at the time of its release, The Wizard of Oz soon captured the hearts of the movie-going public, and it has retained its grip ever since. With its stirring effects, colorful characters, and memorable music (not to mention Judy Garlands dazzling performance), the film has delighted young and old alike for three generations. Yet, as everyone knows, The Wizard of Oz is more than just another celluloid classic; it has become a permanent part of American popular culture.
Is Oz, however, merely a childrens story, as its author claimed? For a quarter of a century after its film debut, no one seemed to think otherwise. This view would change completely when an obscure high school teacher published an essay in American Quarterly claiming that Baums charming tale concealed a clever allegory on the Populist movement, the agrarian revolt that swept across the Midwest in the 1890s. In an ingenuous act of imaginative scholarship, Henry M. Littlefield linked the characters and the story line of the tale to the political landscape of the Mauve Decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at independent.org ...
What? No mention of the Lollipop Guild or the Lullaby League?
:-)
I always thought it was a remarkable religious allegory.
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