[ SECRET POST #2317 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2317 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 048 secrets from Secret Submission Post #331.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Serious answer

[(Anonymous)]

I've never been remotely convinced by the claims Oz is a symbolic screed about Free Silver or any other political position. Baum did a certain amount of political activism in his day, including about the silver question, but nobody, least of all Baum, even mentioned the idea that the story could be allegorical until about sixty years after it was first published. If it was an allegory, it was a particularly bad one, since nobody even noticed while the question was even remotely relevant.

Also, most of these interpretations just slap labels on to various characters and objects like a bad political cartoon, without thinking of how they work together in the actual narrative. 'Okay, so the American everyman takes the silver standard and travels down the gold standard, along the way meeting American farmers, the steel industry, and the US's lackluster performance in the Spanish-American War (or possibly William Jennings Bryan). The four of them are tricked by a politician who lives in worthless greenback money to go kill the American West, who is served by Native Americans. The American West gets killed by getting water thrown on her American farmers get rewarded with fake brains, the steel industry gets a fake heart, and the Spanish-American War gets fake courage.' Etcetera.

I think Oz -- especially the books -- works much better as a straightforward fairy story. (And incidentally, none of the allegory theories I've heard ever account for the other thirteen Oz books Baum wrote...)

Well yeah, certainly.

[chardmonster]

American popular literature was way over hamfisted metaphor in the year 1900.



I doubt it's as pat as the original theory but you honestly think a story about a farmgirl from Kansas with silver shoes walking on a gold road and dealing with a fraudulent authority figure didn't have just a little to do with politics if it came out in 1900?

Re: Well yeah, certainly.

[(Anonymous)]

Yellow road, not gold. And I'd buy into the allegory a lot more if anyone ever tried to explain the parts of the book that *weren't* in the MGM movie version -- what do the Kalidahs stand for? The wolves? The Tin Woodsman becoming the king of the Winkies? The Fighting Trees? China Country? If gold's what the story's about, why not explain the one actual mention of gold in the book, the Golden Cap that controls the Winged Monkeys, which ends up being arguably more useful to Dorothy than the shoes are?

Seriously, the argument that Baum actually encoded political allegory into a children's book so well that it went completely unmentioned for sixty years, until a high school teacher finally cracked the code, is pretty much dead among both economic historians and literary analysts today. It just lingers on because people like smart-sounding ideas that can impress other people at parties, even if they don't hold up to scrutiny.