Readers of Oz: Young and Old, Old and New Historicist

Abstract

Readers of Oz:Young and Old, Old and New Historicist M. David Westbrook (bio) Before he published his first Oz book in 1900, L. Frank Baum spent much of his working life in sales. At various times during his pre-Oz career he ran a retail outlet for his father's "Oil Works," owned a five and dime in the Dakota territory, worked as a traveling salesman, and published a professional journal for window dressers (Baum and MacFall 53, 59, 79, 93). It is not surprising, then, that much of the academic writing on Baum highlights his consistent concern with economic issues and with the culture of consumption. Henry Littlefield and Hugh Rockoff have each developed interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a populist allegory that uses the images of the yellow brick road and the Emerald City to address the debate between advocates of the gold standard and advocates of "greenbacks." William Leach, in turn, has discussed Baum as a theorist of consumer culture. Focusing on Baum's professed ambition to write "a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out" (Wizard Introduction), Leach reads this goal as an attempt to counter the Puritan work ethic with a philosophy more appropriate to the pleasures of consumer culture (251). These approaches to the economic subtext of the Oz books could safely be classified as "historicist"; Littlefield, Rockoff, and Leach all use Oz to shed light on the economic philosophies and commercial cultures of turn-of-the-century America, devoting little attention to the questions of language or narrative form that might characterize a more "literary" approach. Thus while they perform the admirable work of placing Oz in a historical context, these authors run the risk of ignoring what is unique about Oz in particular and narrative more generally as a cultural form. Trends in the literary criticism of the last two decades ostensibly offer an antidote to the dangers of purely historicist use of literature. Drawing on poststructuralist literary theory, the tradition of twentieth-century radical critique, and the historian's breadth of contextual knowledge, new historicists portray literature's relation to a broader cultural history as a complex encounter between diverse but interwoven texts and discourses. While trying to avoid the ahistoricism of formalist new criticism, new historicists have generally attended not only to problems of language in literature, but also to the "literary" language (metaphor, rhetorical figures, plot, and so on) in nonliterary texts in an effort to bridge the gap between the literary and the historical. Oz has its own new historicist treatments, including two excellent articles by Stuart Culver entitled "What Manikins Want" and "Growing Up in Oz." Like some of the "old historicist" approaches to Oz, these treatments focus on the economic dimension of Baum's fantasies. Rather than viewing the Oz books as transparent reflections of history or doctrine, however, Culver shows Baum synthesizing contemporaneous discourses in order to construct narrative sense and forms of subjectivity appropriate to his position within a consumer economy. I would like to suggest, however, that a new historicist approach such as Culver's does not offer the only or the best solution to the problem of bridging the gap between the disciplines of history and literary studies. Nor does such an approach fully equip us to deal with the special issues and problems raised by children's literature. Through a critique of the first of Culver's two essays and through my own analysis of the economic subtext in Baum's stories, I hope to show that Culver's distinctly new historicist habit of stitching together economic discourse and Baum's own narrative discourse actually works to obscure the literary economy of the Oz books. With our critical gaze focused more closely on the local specificity of Baum's writing than on a textuality that encompasses all economy, we can see that Baum was exploring the discourses that shaped the specific industry in which he made his living—the business of producing and reproducing texts. In this context, Baum's characteristic plots and metaphors appear as literary forms that have material effects. In using his...