J.M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up would receive it’s American
debut in 1905. Its place in literature
is an integral text in the understanding of adolescence and the need for
children to grow up: at the end of the play Wendy Darling takes her brothers back
home while the emotionally stunted Peter Pan stays behind in Neverland. Peter Pan does not leave fairyland, he never
grows up and when he returns again to take her back she refuses to go because
being stuck in childhood means he forgets things left behind. He is stuck.
The Emerald City of Oz, published in 1910 is a different take on
leaving fairyland. L. Frank Baum proposes
that perhaps fairyland is a better place to be than the real world, that sometimes
childlike logic and especially kindness can have a better outcome than the
trials of adulthood and society. The
Emerald City of Oz, it is important to note, isn’t entirely taking on a
child who refuses to grow up, but adults who have lost their inner child. The inciting incident of The Emerald City
of Oz is that Dorothy’s Uncle Henry has lapsed payments on the farmhouse,
rebuilt after the cyclone in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Henry and Em don’t believe Dorothy actually
went to Oz multiple times, were happy to entertain her stories since despite
disappearing she always managed to turn up again safe and sound. They are adults, adults don’t believe in
lands of make believe where everybody gets along with everybody else and nobody
actually has to do work that they don’t want to. They get the grand tour of the country,
encountering wonderous people from living bread, to living utensils, and of
course cameos from the most famous of the Oz characters.
Going to the
fairyland of Oz means that the grey characters of Kansas have to relearn
exactly what it means to be a child. It
also means an escape from having to fend for themselves. The farm being taken away because of bad
crops and economic depression is explicitly stated in the book to be a problem
of capitalism as a system. Baum does not
give faces to the members of the bank which is an important detail,
dehumanizing something as grand as the system despite the adults initially
denying the existence of fairyland as a utopia where everybody is provided
for. Baum also does not forget the bank
taking the farm, when the Nome King invades Dorothy does propose everybody go
back to the farm so Baum can make a point that a good society isn’t one where
you abandon your fellow people in times of hardship. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry maintain disbelief
even while on the road throughout the Land of Oz, though Baum goes through
lengths to show how this disbelief unravels slowly. He keeps their reactions at this very adult
distance of people who won’t deny the reality of their eyes, but still have to
deal with the cognitive dissonance of seeing these fantastic things. There is also a point that life should be lived
doing things, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry do want to find some work in Oz even if
it isn’t for money. They cannot spend
their days sitting around doing nothing, even traveling is doing something like
building community with different peoples of Oz. Also the Wizard of Oz can now do actual magic
which is the closest thing to a character in Oz getting character development so
far.
The different
places and peoples of Oz is following the same structure as Dorothy and the
Wizard in Oz and The Road to Oz, becoming repetitive just before
Baum gives Dorothy a slightly longer adventure being lost from the party. Bunbury is a fun diversion, but the real
parallel is Baum swapping adventures with the protagonists by following the
Nome King, given the name Roquat the Red, allying himself with other creatures
who are not deadly afraid of eggs.
General Guph is the Nome sent out to recruit allies, but rhetorically
this gives The Emerald City of Oz this little edge of danger, a ticking
clock that there is an invasion coming that the protagonists don’t actually
know about until the final act. It is a
plot that also follows the structure of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and
The Road to Oz, but in reverse.
There’s actually a lot of humor in this telling, however, as Guph often
has to make these lofty promises to other armies of land and people under subjugation. Baum positions the Nome King as an
authoritarian once again despite some of the humor, he is wicked because he would
take away the autonomy away from the Ozites.
Guph promises some of the allied armies with as many as 20,000 slaves
which is particularly fascinating as Baum is an author who lambasted war in
general, this book concluding without bloodshed but trickery. This does contradict his views of the settler
colonialism of the American west of course, but people are complicated and
often hypocritical in his views. There
is implication that slavery is worse than death, something that likely would
have been instilled in Baum in childhood growing up in the Union during the
American Civil War.
Overall, The
Emerald City of Oz is a return to form after The Road to Oz. It is Baum’s attempt at replicating Conan
Doyle’s “The Final Problem”, to say goodbye and go out with a bang while
actively being in conversation with what it means to go to fairyland and away
from reality. The Emerald City of Oz
has several ideas around community building and making fairyland a place where
people are allowed to live together, safely, free from the oppressive nature of
selfish rule and by extension money. It
works best when it eschews the established formula, even if it does this by
paralleling the formula between protagonists and antagonists. Not quite the perfect return to form, but a
very close to it. 8/10.
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