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  1. TopTop #1
    Sara S's Avatar
    Sara S
    Auntie Wacco

    The orphan Dorothy, joyless kansas, and Oz....

    from delancyplace.com:

    In today's encore excerpt - the joyless gray prairies of Kansas, as depicted in
    Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz - the great American fairytale whose message
    was more "self-reliance" than "no place like home." Baum first lived in upstate
    New York, but visited Kansas on tour with his failing acting troupe in the late
    1800s, and viewed it as the bleakest part of the country. The middle of the country
    was forbidding long before the dustbowl days of the Great Depression. In the mid-1800s,
    the great railroad companies, in conjunction with the U.S. government, had attempted
    to populate new towns along the new transcontinental railway by recruiting from
    the East coast and offering free land. But they had limited success, so they supplemented
    their efforts by recruiting farmers from Europe. The farmers that moved to these
    regions faced an unforgiving climate and were hit hard by the depressions of 1873
    and 1893.
    In the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the bleakness of Kansas stands in contrast to the
    wonders of Oz, which was based on the dazzling world exposition held in Chicago
    in 1893. In the MGM movie based on the book, Dorothy's family was warmhearted and
    smiling. However, Baum's book depicted the orphan Dorothy's Uncle Henry and Aunt
    Em as sad, gray people who never laughed and lived in a cheerless one-room house.
    Here they are described in the very first pages of Baum's classic tale:
    "Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who
    was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for
    the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls,
    a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking
    cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the
    beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little
    bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar - except a small
    hole, dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case
    one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its
    path. It was reached by a trap-door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder
    led down into the small, dark hole.
    "When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but
    the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep
    of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had
    baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even
    the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until
    they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted,
    but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house
    was as dull and gray as everything else.
    "When Aunt Em came there to live she was a pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed
    her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they
    had taken the red from her checks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin
    and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to
    her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream
    and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy's merry voice reached her ears;
    and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything
    to laugh at.
    "Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know
    what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked
    stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.
    "It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her
    other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long, silky
    hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny wee
    nose. Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly."
    Author: L. Frank Baum
    Title: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
    Publisher: HarperCollins
    Date: 1900
    Pages: 11-13
    The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 100th Anniversary Edition (Books of Wonder)
    by L. Frank Baum by HarperCollins
    Hardcover ~ Release Date: 2000-10-03
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  2. TopTop #2
    theindependenteye's Avatar
    theindependenteye
     

    Re: The orphan Dorothy, joyless kansas, and Oz....

    Geoff Ryman wrote an extraordinary novel in 1992, "Was." (Say "Oz" differently . . .) One thread tells the fictionalized story of the real Dorothy, one is involved with the film-child who was Judy Garland, and the last is a man being brought to the end of his life by AIDS, obsessively searching for the exact spot where the real Dorothy's house had been. Astonishing. Moving. Just realized I gotta read it again.

    Elizabeth Fuller
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