The Universe of Oz: Essays on Baum's Series and Its Progeny (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Universe of Oz: Essays on Baum's Series and Its Progeny Walter Squire (bio) The Universe of Oz: Essays on Baum's Series and Its Progeny. Edited by Kevin K. Durand and Mary K. Leigh. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. In "Ask the Clock of the Time Dragon," Randall Auxier's contribution to The Universe of Oz, the author asks, "Why does the Marvelous Land of Oz keep re-inventing itself in our culture?" (121). Auxier's answer, "we love to remember Oz, we love to re-experience it, and we love to anticipate it" (134), seems to depend upon an already existing multiplicity of Ozian texts, a multiplicity well represented in the seventeen essays comprised by The Universe of Oz. Versions of Oz covered in those essays include L. Frank Baum's 1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as well as his sequels to this novel; the 1939 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz; the 1975 stage musical The Wiz and its subsequent 1978 Motown film adaptation; Tina Landau's 1994 play 1969; Shelley Jackson's 1995 hypertext Patchwork Girl; Gregory Maguire's The Wicked Years trilogy (now a tetralogy); Wicked, the 2003 stage musical based upon the first of Maguire's Oz novels; and Tin Man, a 2007 miniseries broadcast on the Syfy channel. The range of Ozian texts covered in The Universe of Oz is matched by the diversity of critical approaches taken by contributors. For instance, Ronald [End Page 513] Zank examines Landau's 1969 and Emily A. Mattingly looks at Jackson's Patchwork Girl through the lens of queer theory, whereas Paula Kent considers the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Jené Gutierrez deems the movie The Wizard of Oz examples of Joseph Campbell's monomyth. Most complexly, Randall Auxier reveals the parallels between Gregory Maguire's treatment of time in The Wicked Years and the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead, and Henri Bergson. Another significant contribution is Kevin Tanner's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Religious Populism and Spiritual Capital"; after providing a quick summary of Oz history, Tanner covers arguments regarding the degree to which The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a populist allegory. Noting that current critical consensus rejects any link between this book and late nineteenth-century populism, Tanner shifts to a spiritual reading of the novel, stressing Baum's Methodist upbringing and his later participation in theosophy during the 1890s, the decade previous to The Wonderful Wizard's publication. Considering that several contributions to The Universe of Oz attempt to connect Oz to a philosophy or another text, the book resembles The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy, a 2008 volume edited by Randall E. Auxier and Phillip S. Seng, the latter work composed of essays connecting Ozian texts to philosophers ranging from Socrates to David Lewis. In his preface to The Universe of Oz, editor Kevin K. Durand indicates that a possible pitfall of such an approach of linking texts with other texts or with philosophies is that "one uses [The Wizard of] Oz or any other popular culture artifact as a vehicle for illustrating a text other than itself" (6). The best essays in The Universe of Oz avoid this pitfall by not merely using Oz as a starting point to discuss something else, instead revealing how particular Ozian texts themselves embody principles and tendencies applicable to other texts and to genres overall. This approach is best exemplified by "Dorothy and Cinderella: The Case of the Missing Prince and the Despair of the Fairy Tale." Coauthors Agnes B. Curry and Josef Velazquez move from noting how the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz deviates from Vladimir Propp's morphology of folktales to establishing a generalized taxonomy of modern fairy tales, revealing that the latter frequently include a nonmagical heroine within a magical world. A second trend Curry and Velazquez extrapolate from The Wizard of Oz is that "the Prince will not be available to" (40) the nonmagical heroine, thus indicating a shift away from marriage in modern fairy tales with female protagonists. While this shift might seem connected to increasing gender equality over the past century, whereby females have become less defined by their...