Ozma of Oz by: L. Frank Baum

 

For a second time, L. Frank Baum gives one of his Oz books a ridiculously long title that will be shortened for this review: Ozma of Oz: A Record of Her Adventures with Dorothy Gale of Kansas, Billina the Yellow Hen, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger; Besides Other good People Too Numerous to Mention Faithfully Recorded Herein shortened to the easy Ozma of Oz.  Baum is telling his readers who were perhaps sad with the absence of certain characters in The Marvelous Land of Oz while highlighting some of the new characters Dorothy meets in her second visit to Oz.  The title is also a bit out of place, while Ozma is in the book as a supporting character, it’s not really a book about who Ozma is.  She is there to rescue Dorothy from the captivity of the childish and narcissistic Princess Langwidere in the land of Ev, Oz’s neighboring country separated by the deadly deserts.  It does establish Dorothy and Ozma as quite good friends, both being kind hearted young girls who can’t stand to see people hurt.  The main plot of Ozma of Oz, and it is largely one plot preceded by smaller episodes leading to Dorothy’s capture after falling off a ship bound for Australia, is to save the Royal Family of Ev from the Nome King.  The Nome King is the first time in one of these books that Baum creates a central antagonist: he is a greedy rock creature who lives underground and turns people into ornaments.

 

This is the second Oz book to really be about restoring a monarchy, Baum as a writer clearly being interested in maintaining what he sees as the natural order of things.  There is at least a framework for what a ruler must be, Princess Langwidere as supporting protagonist isn’t evil but her vanity and disinterest makes her a bad ruler while Ozma rules by kindness.  The Royal Family of Ev, quite the large family consisting of the king, queen, and eight children, emphasize Baum’s ideas of a kind, loving family making for the best rule.  This isn’t particularly deep, the Royal Family exist for the plot resolution of discovering the purple ornaments.  Baum is interested in the natural order: Ozma and the Royal Family of Ev rule because it is their right, hinted at to be because of magical means as Oz and Ev are both described in Ozma of Oz as fairylands.  There is this sense that Baum believes the order of rulers is to actually serve their people as well: Langwidere and the Nome King are both poor to their people.  The Nome King’s evil nature is more towards the characters the reader is familiar with, but Langiwidere is cruel to the Wheelers, horrifying creatures with scary face masks and wheels for hands and feet, that are secretly just as scared and trying to survive.

 

What is particularly interesting about Baum’s ideas of a good ruler is that he clearly wants to reflect American democracy of the people being the source of power, but putting a democracy in fairyland would largely go against Baum’s aims at creating an American fairy tale.  Baum however is staunch in his need for order, Ozma of Oz features Dorothy insistent that the hen she travels with whose name is Bill, must be given a female name and is thus Billina.  The mechanical man Tik-Tok is also seen as lesser than the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman because he is what would fall under the definition of a robot despite being written as a person.  Baum stipulates that his thought processes and action are all mechanical, though the text has him act largely as a person and not an automaton.  It is an odd stipulation for an otherwise delightful and proper character, Tik-Tok being portrayed as nothing but a gentleman throughout towards Dorothy and Billina.  There is also the Hungry Tiger, a character made to defy his nature and unquenched desire to eat a fat baby, something his conscience could not allow, adding a weird layer to this idea of order.  Dorothy herself is a more fleshed out protagonist here, not motivated by a wish to go home and indeed only doing so when she sees Uncle Henry sad that she may have drowned on the way to Australia.  Oz is the endpoint of the novel, and not the place to escape from as was the case in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  This means Ozma of Oz can avoid the issues of The Marvelous Land of Oz following the same structure of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, instead it forms a more cohesive narrative even if getting to the resolution where our protagonists scare the Nome King takes far too much repetition of going through the palace to find the ornaments.

 

Overall, despite the oddity of Baum’s themes being present there is something freeing about Ozma of Oz.  Baum doesn’t have a stage show in mind while writing so he can take time to make the novel have a format, and by setting it in the land of Ev while it doesn’t further flesh out Oz, it does allow a different sort of logic to take place.  Dorothy is given more character traits to make her work slightly better as a protagonist for return appearances.  Having a different structure and just being a really fun little fairy tale gives hope that Baum won’t just be retreading the first book every time, shame about the weird politics of order.  9/10.