The Weekend Economists travel the Yellow Brick Road, November 14-15.

[MattSh]

47. And even more Oz allegories and theories!

Everything here, including the Religious and Atheist Allegories posted yesterday, are from....

What Is Wizard of Oz Really About: 7 Theories -- Vulture

Feminist Allegory

First, consider the fact that anyone who actually has any real power in Oz — Dorothy and the witches — is female. And, perhaps just as important, note how the men are all lacking to some degree, be they wizards without power, lions without courage, tin men without hearts, or scarecrows without brains. This may not be incidental: L. Frank Baum’s mother-in-law was the influential suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, a colleague of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and many have noted how Matilda's radical feminism made its way into Baum’s Oz books. The author himself, who was very close to his mother-in-law, was the secretary of his local women’s suffrage club and edited a newspaper that made women’s rights its key crusading issue.

“The Jungian Thing”

Not unlike the way the characters in The Wizard of Oz correlate to important elements in the crusade against the gold standard, they also just happen to map out the various figures described in the psychoanalytic theories of C.G. Jung. Dorothy, the dreaming innocent, is on a quest toward individuation/self-actualization, and her companions correspond to the first three stages of Jung’s conception of the Animus — the male inner personality of the female. (The fourth stage, a mediator or messenger of “spiritual profundity,” is of course the Wizard himself.) Meanwhile, the Good Witch Glinda corresponds to the Jungian archetype of the Mother, Toto is the Trickster, and the Wicked Witch and her flying monkeys could be Jung’s Shadow, the repressed and potentially dark side of the personality.

The Inadequacy of Adults

Salman Rushdie, a noted fan of The Wizard of Oz who wrote a pretty amazing BFI Classics book on the film, believes that one of the things that makes Oz so powerful is that it lays bare the weakness of adults (as witnessed by Auntie Em and Uncle Henry’s inability to save Toto, and, of course, by the Wizard’s own powerlessness) and the need for children to do their own growing up: “As the Wicked Witch of the West ‘grows down,’” he writes, “so too is Dorothy seen to have grown up.”

The Glinda Conspiracy Theory

Thanks to the Internet, over the years many Oz fans have circulated opposing (and, of course, usually tongue-in-cheek) theories suggesting that Glinda the Good Witch might actually be the true villain of Oz. Some have pointed to the fact that Glinda gloats a bit too morbidly over the death of the Wicked Witch of the East, calling for celebrations and then actually taunting the witch’s sister. Then, of course, there’s the simple fact that Glinda, though she knows the ruby slippers will send Dorothy home, hides this fact from Dorothy and sends the unwitting girl off to do her dirty work for her, all so she herself can finally rule over the land of Oz. Interestingly, Oz the Great and Powerful seems to inadvertently nod to this reading a bit, in that in the new film the Wicked Witch of the East initially presents herself as a good witch, and sends the unwitting Oz off to kill Glinda the Good Witch.

Oooh, I really like the Glinda Conspiracy Theory! I'm wondering if Hillary and Glinda are one and the same.

-----> http://www.vulture.com/2013/03/wizard-of-oz-theories-gold-standard-feminist-religion-jung.html