Significance of the Study
In his life, Baum witnessed firsthand America coming to terms with the economic uncertainty of the Gilded Age as he traveled to Chicago and the Great Plains during America’s final frontier days.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new culture emerged in the United States. At its heart was the quest for wealth, security, comfort, and pleasure. Increasingly disconnected from traditional family and community life, and existing in opposition to old-fashioned religious and social values such as self-restraint and self-denial, hard work and delayed gratification, repression and guilt, this new culture emphasized luxury and indulgence. The circulation of money and the exchange of goods were at the foundation of its aesthetic and moral sensibilities. Acquisition and consumption thus became the means to achieve happiness, purpose, and even salvation.[1]
For centuries, Americans, to say nothing of Europeans, had looked upon the New World as a garden of plenty, a veritable heaven on earth, where all human needs would be fulfilled and all human desires satisfied.[2] By the late nineteenth century, this myth was changing. It still affirmed the idea that American life could be perennially renewed and thereby invigorated. But America was no longer the land in which men and women from the Old World might find political and spiritual freedom to accompany social and economic opportunity. Severed from both a religious and political consciousness, the vision of America as a “Land of Opportunity” had given way, in the words of historian William Leach, to a vision of America as a “Land of Desire.”[3]
Above all, perhaps, America was the “Land of the New.” Prepared by their history to accept the cult of the new, Americans paradoxically embraced change and novelty as the essence of tradition. “The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word `new’ in connection with our country,” observed Mark Twain, “that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it.”[4] However venerable, the past became a hostage to the present, obliged always to yield to evolving fashions and shifting tastes.
This new culture of abundance and consumption enabled, even encouraged, men and women to alter their identities as often as they pleased, and to do so without anxiety, fear, shame, or remorse. There was little about modern America that was fixed and stable. The inflation of desire, the longing for a greater number and variety of commodities in an expanding world of plenty, further diluted older values and customs. Americans found in the diffusion of money and possessions, the real, and enduring, promise of American life. Published in 1900, at this crucial moment of transition, L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz offers a vibrant, optimistic, and therapeutic tale designed to help Americans embrace the glamorous but unsettling world of delight they had entered.
The American Dream was it a Cutthroat Society to gain wealth? Capitalism was defined in the new world a Path down the Yellow Brick Road. Who was in Control? Was profit, or the Man Behind the Curtain, the politicians on Capitol Hill in Control ? The American Dream had become the working man, the politicians, and the Greed of the Rich exploiting and belittling the working man. That’s what America had become during the Industrial Era. Kanas represented the innocence of the American Dream where the working man strived for a successful life. “There’s no place like home” America’s build in dream from the beginning of the founding fathers.
Yellow brick road that Dorothy must take to reach Emerald city – It is hard not to think of my beloved Elton John‘s fabulous song, “Yellow Brick Road”, is there another yellow brick road in this world? It seems that Baum was instead referring to gold, and gold referencing the path of coinage.- Dorothy’s Silver slippers – She must take silver down a road paved in gold. In the early 1900s when the book was first published, the socioeconomic reference to silver gold again to economic freedom.
- Tinman and Scarecrow – The TinMan is representation of the rusted industrial worker and the scarecrow is the farmer. They must work together to be successful, and without one another, they cannot survive.
- The Lion – has more to say on this than do either me or Sina
- The man behind the curtain – From Sina: “This phrase originates from this book, if I’m not mistaken (haven’t researched fully), but the idea that there’s a controlling hand behind a set of events is one that has been reused thousands upon thousands of times ….an interesting piece of commentary on American political theater.”
- Emerald city – This might be a commentary on the American greed perhaps. The special glasses they had to wear simply to be able to see might have indicated we
might be blinded by our shiny capitalism or abuse of that capitalism.
