As the most American of stories, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is endlessly malleable, the story of leaving home part of the national ethos, but also central to those who’ve been marginalized by that same national ethos. The story of Dorothy, in no small part due to the performance of Judy Garland, has long been a touchstone in queer culture, with the self-designation “Friend of Dorothy” a means of secretly signaling identity in a pre-Stonewall world.
The soul musical The Wiz, a 1974 Charlie Smalls musical adaptation of a novel by William F. Brown, gave Baum’s original an Afrocentric update for the age of Black Power. Meanwhile, feminist interpretations have noted that the major characters of Baum (a vociferous supporter of suffrage), from Glinda to Dorothy, are all self-sufficient women.
Alexander Doty recalls in Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon how as a still-closeted young man the camp of the story “fed into my developing ‘gay’ appreciation of The Wizard of Oz.” None other than Salman Rushdie in his BFI Classics introduction to the film describes the story as being was “my very first literary influence,” where the “journey from Kansas to Oz is a rite of passage” of self-invention, of discovery.
Whether the provincialism of Doty’s childhood Waltham, Massachusetts or the cosmopolitanism of Rushdie’s Bombay, the green spires of Oz beckoned. In this way, Baum did for the United States what his great inspiration Lewis Carrol did for England in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Yet The Wonderful Wizard of Oz wasn’t merely an attempt at constructing Yankee mythology, because Baum’s concern wasn’t the past so much as it was the future, first glimpsed in the White City.
Critics have tried to find contemporary resonance in Baum’s fabulism, looking to slot easy correspondences so that the munchkins become stolid American farmers, the Yellow Brick Road a comment on the Gold Standard, Dorothy’s silver slippers (they’re only ruby in the movie) an editorial on monetary bimetallism, and the Emerald City being the color of cash as a symbol of financial speculation, a parable about avarice.
