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DAMMIT, TOTO, WE’RE STILL IN KANSAS: THE FALLACY OF FEMINIST EVOLUTION IN A MODERN AMERICAN FAIRY TALE by Beth Boswell A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University May 2018 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Martha Hixon, Director Dr. Will Brantley Dr. Jane Marcellus This dissertation is dedicated, in loving memory, to two dearly departed souls: to Dr. David L. Lavery, the first director of this project and a constant voice of encouragement in my studies, whose absence will never be wholly realized because of the thousands of lives he touched with his spirit, enthusiasm, and scholarship. I am eternally grateful for our time together. And to my beautiful grandmother, Fay M. Rhodes, who first introduced me to the yellow brick road and took me on her back to a pear-tree Emerald City one hundred times or more. I miss you more than Dorothy missed Kansas. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the educators who have pushed me to challenge myself, to question everything in the world around me, and to be unashamed to explore what I “thought” I already knew, over and over again. Though there are too many to list by name, know that I am forever grateful for your encouragement and dedication to learning, whether in the classroom or the world. I would like to thank my phenomenal committee for their tireless support and assistance in this project. I am especially grateful for Dr. Martha Hixon, who stepped in as my director after the passing of Dr. David Lavery. Your willingness to take on my rambling in the midst of chaos was a welcomed retreat. Your encouragement, questions, direction, and criticism have, without compare, improved my work as a writer and scholar; without them this project would have been impossible. Thank you for not skipping a beat when I felt a bit like the world was stopping. I would also like to thank Dr. Jane Marcellus for her immediate enthusiasm for the subject matter and her honest and insightful editing and commentary, and Dr. Will Brantley for his incredible support, thoughtful editing, and gracious gift of time and dedication to this project. Without any member of this committee, this work would most assuredly not be what it is today. I would like to thank my extraordinary husband, Dave, for his unending love and support in all my crazy endeavors; my amazing mother and mother-in-law for an ungodly amount of babysitting and tireless encouragement; and, most of all, my darling daughter, Addie. Your love has pushed me through each and every day and all through the nights. I can’t wait to see what the next chapter in our lives holds. I love you most! iii ABSTRACT In a multi-disciplinary interrogation of L. Frank Baum’s “Introduction” to his 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this dissertation traces the historical, academic, cultural, and aesthetic definitions for the term “fairy tale” as both a generic categorization and an ideological representation of middle-class American culture at the time of the novel’s release and across its most significant film and stage adaptations. Beginning with a close examination of the author’s life, the work seeks to demonstrate the dedication with which Baum approached legitimizing his authorship of a “modernized fairy tale” at the turn of the twentieth century. By then considering that dedication within the context of the American literary market for children, the research situates Baum’s creation against an already complicated history of literature created specifically for young American readers. Placing his authorship against a backdrop of Chicago’s history, during a tenuous time for the city’s national and global reimaging following the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and amongst widespread public interest for folk and fairy tales, the study asserts that a definitional discord regarding the means of fairy tale creation allowed for popular understanding of the genre to ignore The Wizard’s literary origins in favor of placing that tale within the newly-defined tradition of American folklore. The dissertation addresses authorial generic intent, issues with popular consumption of “folk” ideology, traditional definitions for fairy tale authorship, and the ways in which those definitions should be challenged in the case of America and its specific historical, spatial, and technological construction. Additionally, consideration is given to the memetic life of Baum’s iv characters, specifically that of Dorothy, whose 118-year evolution highlights the ways in which popular affection for folk heroes can alter literary characterization in favor of textual character improvement. The work ends with an exploration of the ways that alterations in the social text of a fairy tale create the opportunity for gaps in social applications of important terms like “bravery,” “independence,” “strength,” and “feminism.” The implications of these gaps are explored with consideration given for the marketed age-group of readers for Baum’s original tale and for those tales which find inspiration in Baum’s legacy. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: A MODERNIZED FAIRY TALE, INDEED 1 Problematic Scholarly Perspectives 7 Riding the Cyclone 12 Finding the Author 24 Considering Children’s Literature in America 28 Finding Folklore and Fairy Tales in America 32 Questioning American Folk Genres in The Wizard 34 Tracing the Text, Forming the Wizard 37 Out of Oz 40 I. THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN(S) 43 Coming up Frankie 45 America: Open for Businessmen 49 Finding a Fancy 54 Calculated Creativity 84 II. AMERICAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE, 110 or THE IDEAL MARKET FOR IDEOLOGY Landing in America, Sinners One and All 112 Cleaning the Slate 117 Drill and Repeat 131 The Golden Years 141 Father Knows Best 153 vi III. WITH FOLKLORE AND FAIRY TALES FOR ALL 162 The Lure of Chicago 163 Folk-Lore Studies in America 169 Crossed Wires: The Chicago Folklore Society 188 Folklore under the Big Top 195 Selling the Fairy Tale of an American Fairy Tale: Baum Finds an “In” 209 IV. EXAMINING THE WIZARD: INTERROGATIONS OF GENRE 225 Folk, Fake, or Flop? 228 Finding the Fairy Tale in Oz 247 I Am Dorothy, the Didactic and Darling 275 V. THE WIZARD LEAVES ITS MARK: A MEMETIC PUZZLE 297 The Function of Genre in Oz 300 Constructing the Fairy Tale Text 307 The Shifting Sands of Dorothy 311 Jumping the Rainbow 342 The Selfish Meme Goes to Oz 356 EPILOGUE: VOLUNTEERING AS TRIBUTE: THE DANGERS OF MEMETIC ABSORPTION 365 WORKS CITED 371 vii 1 INTRODUCTION: A MODERNIZED FAIRY TALE, INDEED On May 15, 1900, with all the hope for success they could muster, author L. Frank Baum and illustrator William Wallace Denslow released the first run of their second major creative collaboration: a children’s book, lavishly printed in full color. The pair had achieved moderate success only two years earlier with a book of children’s verse called Father Goose, His Book and hoped this next venture’s success would surpass that of the first, propelling them into more lasting literary fame. In this new work, for which the final title listed was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum included an introduction he hoped would distinguish his story from the other works of the day. It reads: Folk lore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations. 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 incident devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks 2 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 pleasure children of today. It aspires to bring a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out. L. Frank Baum. Chicago, April, 1900. Despite its more than one hundred year history of having been reproduced with the novel in its various editions, the incredible significance of this introduction has received relatively little academic attention from scholars, and an acute analysis of Baum’s success in relation to his well-stated objective for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has yet to be performed. I would suggest that the attention the introduction does receive either indicates a lack of any formal knowledge in Baum of the fairy tale genre, thus dismissing any adherence to the tradition as being indicative only of the author’s natural storytelling ability, or acknowledges Baum’s work as a member of the fairy tale genre but fails to analyze it in the ways other fairy tales – even other literary fairy tales – are analyzed. And, yet, Suzanne Rahn insists “Baum’s introduction reads like a kind of manifesto” (27); while acclaimed Baum scholar Michael Patrick Hearn makes clear in his “Introduction” to the centennial annotated edition of the work, that “one cannot overemphasize Baum’s conscious development of the ‘modernized’ fairy tale” (xlix). 3 Following Hearn’s advice, this dissertation intends to critically examine The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in a new way: as a text with a firm foothold in the genre of fairy tales – a genre with significant cultural and historical implications which I will assert make the necessity of interrogating the texts we ascribe to that genre more critical than that work we do in other genres.

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