Ozma
Administrator
Posts: 36
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Post by Ozma on Mar 28, 2005 4:53:32 GMT -5
Your Gracious Ruler is pleased to declare this topic open
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Post by Blogzapper on Apr 17, 2005 20:02:37 GMT -5
I would just like to say Stuart Culver's piece about the retail origins of Baum's work diminishing and condescending. How easy for cricics to rip up a real writer's work. So much for academe, hundreds of millions of kids wordlwide can't be wrong.
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Post by curlitop on Apr 19, 2005 22:26:09 GMT -5
This one is even worse:
Oz and Sexuality Daniel Dervin, who analyzes The Wizard of Oz in Freudian terms, suggests that Dorothy witnesses the "primal scene". That is, she walks in on Mother and Father, or in this case Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, having sex. She projects her anxiety about this event onto the real world in the form of a tornado. According to Dervin, the tornado is "a remarkably apt representation of the paternal phallus in its swollen, twisting, penetrating, state, which is part of the primal scene."[1] Yikes! She is carried off to a world of dreams in which she recreates this conflict in more manageable ways. Characters in her real life appear in altered form in her dreamworld of Oz as Dorothy progresses down the path of sexual development. The Wizard is connected to the tornado in that he is a "wind bag", and he sends Dorothy to bring him the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West. In doing this, Dorothy restores the phallus to Father, which indicates her growing sexual knowledge. When the Wizard is revealed as merely human, Dorothy realizes that sex is natural. Dorothy's participation in helping friends achieve their desires, in effect becoming human, symbolically gives birth. I'm not making this up.
According to David Payne, The Wizard of Oz is about Dorothy's "transformation into womanhood," as her journey is a coming-of-age rite of passage.[2] Harvey Greenberg emphasizes the formative experiences of adolescence and suggests that The Wizard of Oz serves as metaphor for the psychological process everyone must go through as they come of age. Adolescents have ambivalent feelings as they move from dependence to independence. Dorothy wants to leave the farm but she is apprehensive about being on her own. Greenberg suggests that because Dorothy is an orphan, she fears losing her surrogate parents. He notes that "Em" (that is, the letter "M") alludes to Mother. According to Greenberg, the focus of this story is on Mother, as the men in the story are all ineffectual. Dorothy has ambivalent feelings toward Auntie Em, which are played out in Oz. Her feelings are split between the Good Mother, Glinda, who encourages Dorothy to figure out on her own what she needs to do, and the Bad Mother, the Wicked Witch of the West, who tries to keep Dorothy in a dependent state. Through the friends she meets in Oz, Dorothy struggles with her own feelings of inadequacy. When Dorothy returns to Kansas, she has come to accept Auntie Em as fully human.[3]
In Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture, Alexander Doty interprets Dorothy's journey as a young lesbian's search for identity. The female characters she encounters represent the extremes of identity, with Auntie Em and Glinda representing the traditional and the feminine, while Almira Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West represent the butch.[4]. The Wizard of Oz has particular significance for the gay and lesbian community. The rainbow flag was first used in the 1978 San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade. The rainbow flag has connotations of diversity and multicuilturalism, but perhaps the most important association with this symbol is with Judy Garland, who sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in The Wizard of Oz and has become such an icon for the gay community.[5]
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