The Marvelous Land of Oz by: L. Frank Baum

 

The Marvelous Land of Oz: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman is a ridiculously long title that will not be used throughout this review, we’re shortening it to The Marvelous Land of Oz.  This and Ozma of Oz are the only other two Oz books by L. Frank Baum I have any frame of reference for, being combined for the 1985 film Return to Oz.  Baum came to write this novel because he received a thousand letters from a thousand little girls wrote to him demanding further stories in Oz and in 1902 there was an incredibly successful stage production of The Wizard of Oz, though one that greatly diverged from the novel.  It’s incredibly clear that The Marvelous Land of Oz was written with the intention of conversion into a stage show, much of the plot being structurally similar to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and featuring the climax of a boy transforming into a girl that reads as if it is meant to be a costume change done on-stage as a magical effect.  There are characters written to be part of a larger ensemble, there are two armies in the back half of the book as the Emerald City is taken over by the all-girl army of General Jinjur and Glinda is once again responsible for saving the day with her female soldiers.  Jinjur believes that a girl should rule the land of Oz and is rebuked by the male characters, mainly the Scarecrow, believing girls need to go back to cooking and cleaning.  The plot is to restore the Scarecrow to the throne, the male characters are adamant that the Scarecrow is the best one to rule because the Wizard gave him the throne (though it is revealed the Wizard stole the throne from King Pastoria and gave his daughter Ozma away to be hidden by the evil sorceress Mombi).  The Marvelous Land of Oz is full of this sexist rhetoric.

 

And yet, the twist of The Marvelous Land of Oz in a sense is that General Jinjur is right, a woman should be on the throne (her design also indicates Baum means her to represent all four nations of Oz being dressed in blue, yellow, red, and purple).  Ozma is the rightful ruler and the book ends with her restoration to the throne of the Emerald City.  Glinda has worked out that Mombi transformed Ozma into the boy Tip and forced him to be her servant.  Lucky for Oz Tip is also the protagonist of The Marvelous Land of Oz, the first Oz book to take place entirely in Oz.  Now there is something fascinating about this plot development.  For the bulk of the novel, Tip is given more depth than Dorothy was in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: he is introduced playing a trick on Mombi by building a scarecrow out of wood and a pumpkin which he names Jack Pumpkinhead and then brings it and a sawhorse to life with Mombi’s Powder of Life to escape his situation.  Mombi for her part is an archetypal evil witch, living in the north Gillikin Country of Oz where everything is purple.  While she is essentially a secondary antagonist to General Jinjur, mainly being a problem in the first act, she gives a very different look at magic when compared to the other witches from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  Tip is an active protagonist, deciding where his companions shall go often and being the one to make decisions, and when it comes time to become Ozma again it is presented as not really a change for him.  He just hopes she won’t be treated any differently because she is the same Tip, only different.  While the gender change is clearly meant to be a theatrical trick as Tip would be played by a girl in drag were this on stage, it is fascinating to read Baum writing a character who textually is queer.  While the terminology for a transgender person did not really exist in 1904 when The Marvelous Land of Oz was published, queer people did in fact have their own sense of community and the text here is explicit in making Tip and Ozma a queer character.  A queer character who ends the book as the queen.

 

The actual plot of The Marvelous Land of Oz is just as episodic as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which is both a strength and a weakness.  It does mean that the structure in places feels especially like the previous book, especially at the beginning and once Glinda reenters the narrative almost as a replacement for the Wizard.  Tip only gets two companions to the Emerald City because as the subtitle states, the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman are also here to be the real stars when they show up.  The Sawhorse and Jack Pumpkinhead are fascinating in their own right, especially the latter who regards Tip as his father but not at all in a parental way.  Jack has this naïve outlook on the world throughout the novel that is particularly interesting (and helps make the Tip/Ozma switch really work in the end).  The Sawhorse is almost too happy of a character, he gets mutilated several times but feels no pain and is more annoyed by it.  There’s also a machine animated by the Powder of Life called the Gump which is more interesting in the 1985 film Return to Oz.  The trouble of course is that when the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman enter the narrative, they get some of the better episodes, the Scarecrow getting a particularly great one with Jack involving a little girl interpreter called Jellia Jamb who is insistent on ‘translating’ despite Oz having one language.  There is also a character called the Highly Magnified and Thoroughly Educated Wogglebug who appears in the back half of the novel and kind of steals the show just as it turns towards going to find Glinda.

 

Overall, The Marvelous Land of Oz is nearly as good as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the biggest issues really coming not from having things age poorly, the sexism is subverted by the end in Baum’s attempt to have a female ruler for Oz, but from being all too close to the previous novel in structure and at the climax when everything needs to wrap up.  The sad part, however, is that it is overshadowed so much by the first because the characters are just given more depth and the humor in particular actually holds up quite well throughout.  9/10.