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Burger, Alissa . "Trajectory of American Myth: Race, Gender, Home, and Magic from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ to ‘Wicked’," American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University, February 2008. Advisor: Dr. Ellen Berry
The Wizard of Oz story has been omnipresent in American popular culture since the first publication of L. Frank Baum’s children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz at the dawn of the twentieth century. Ever since, filmmakers, authors, and theatre producers have been returning to Oz over and over again, from the first silent film adaptation in 1910 to the SciFi Channel’s original miniseries Tin Man (2007), the latest incarnation of the magical land of Oz.
However, while literally hundreds of adaptations of the Wizard of Oz story abound, a handful of transformations are particularly significant in exploring discourses of American myth and culture: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900); MGM’s classic film The Wizard of Oz (1939); Sidney Lumet’s film The Wiz (1978), Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995), and Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Broadway musical Wicked (2003). A close consideration of these five versions of this canonical tale reveals the enduring significance of American myth in popular culture, narrative repetition, and the themes of race, gender, home, and magic.
While all five versions of the Wizard of Oz narrative to be addressed in this dissertation have met with some measure of popular and critical acclaim, they have not yet been brought into conversation with one another. This dissertation addresses that current lack by making connections and highlighting the interactions between these texts, bringing them into critical dialogue. In addition, this project works to update the conversations surrounding the Wizard of Oz narrative and American myth by engaging with more recent reinventions of the narrative in the Wickeds of both page and stage, as well as establishing the connection between these works to demonstrate a trajectory of this American myth from Baum to Broadway.
In addition, this project critiques theories of fixed or prescriptive American myth, instead developing a theory of American myth as active, performative and even, at times, participatory, achieved through discussion of the fluidity of text and performance, built on Diana Taylor’s theory of the archive and the repertoire. By approaching text and performance as fluid rather than fixed, this dissertation facilitates an interdisciplinary consideration of these works, bringing children’s literature, film, popular fiction, theatre, and music together in a theoretically multifaceted approach to the Wizard of Oz narrative, its many transformations, and its lasting significance within American culture.
In the process of addressing these myths, this dissertation explores themes consistent within these five versions of the Wizard of Oz narrative, looking at the shifting significance and representations of race, gender, home, and magic in these works. These themes have been central to establishing the national identity of the citizen throughout American history; as such, their popular representations tend to reflect the values espoused by the surrounding culture at the time of creation. For example, while Baum’s Dorothy privileges her domestic position within the sphere of home and family, a later heroine, such as Maguire’s Elphaba, may choose to identify through her own power and place within the volatile culture which surrounds her. This significant shift in representation points towards a corresponding change in cultural values of acceptable femininity and gender roles. Therefore, a close examination of the recurring themes of race, gender, home, and magic in these five versions of the Wizard of Oz story provides significant insight into the negotiation of these issues, their representations, and their corresponding moments in American culture.
Finally, this dissertation makes the argument that these transformations of the familiar Wizard of Oz tale do more than reflect the values of their surrounding societies. Instead, the negotiation of this canonical text provides fertile space for struggling with these issues, serving as an indicator of the conflicts preoccupying those cultures at each unique socio-historical moment. As such, The Wiz addresses tensions in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement and Broadway’s Wicked focuses on a tyrannical and manipulative ruler, playing to packed theatres in immediate concurrence with a period of political unrest in America. So not only do these multiple versions of the Wizard of Oz narrative reflect the significance of the themes of race, gender, home, and magic within American culture, but they also speak to the struggles surrounding their highly-contested meanings.
Through an examination of American myth, text and performance, and key themes in these five versions of the Wizard of Oz, this dissertation contributes to theoretical and popular discourses surrounding this story. In addition, it also situates the cultural significance and actively revisionist role of this tale within American culture and works to consider why the Wizard of Oz in particular has been continually revised and reimagined over the past century as a significant narrative of American culture and values.
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