Wizard of Oz: Hyped Children Friendliness?
L. Frank Baum on his preface for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz wrote:
Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.
Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.
Reading it, I smiled and really thought that there would be no blood whatsoever on the Wizard of Oz. However, from the very beginning Dorothy accidentally “killed” an evil witch:
… Dorothy said, with hesitation, “You are very kind, but there must be some mistake. I have not killed anything.”
“Your house did, anyway,” replied the little old woman, with a laugh, “and that is the same thing. See!” she continued, pointing to the corner of the house. “There are her two feet, still sticking out from under a block of wood.”
Two feet of a squashed person. Now that’s quite some graphic depiction…
And the story of the Tin Woodman is even more gruesome:
…the axe slipped all at once and cut off my left leg.
…my axe slipped and cut off my right leg.
…After this the enchanted axe cut off my arms, one after the other; …
…The Wicked Witch then made the axe slip and cut off my head, …
And because children likes blood, the author gives them this last treat:
… and made my axe slip again, so that it cut right through my body, splitting me into two halves.
Splitting into half??? That sounds very much like the fatality in Mortal Kombat, the game criticized for being very violent!
And when our lovely girl Dorothy asks the great Wizard of Oz to help her, what’s the answer of our kind Wizard?
“Kill the Wicked Witch of the West,” answered Oz.
I haven’t read all the story yet, but there are still many other bloody incidents I’ve found. Like when the Tin Woodman chopped a cat’s head (which was hunting a mouse), or when two beasts fell into a cliff and “both were dashed to pieces on the sharp rocks at the bottom” (does it really need to be described vividly???). Or how about the battle with the wolf legion, or when the Scarecrow twists the neck of the enemy crow?
All in all, I’m fine if someone wants to put violence in a story. However, deceiving the readers that the story will be without “nightmares” is quite bold.
To think of it, I’ve never thought the Harry Potter or Narnia series as being particularly violent. Is it because that the author of Oz promised that the story will be all wonder and joy, that my sense of violence became heightened when actually reading it? Is it even intentional, as a psycological trick to make the reader feel the richness of the violence more? Is the Wizard of Oz really more violent? Or is it really meek and docile as the author wrote compared to other stories before it?
At any rate, read it at the Gutenberg project, and enjoy the fun, uhm, horror…
Tags: blood, children story, classic, critic, literary critic, literature, violence, violent, wizard of oz