the symbol of a liberated woman: the first bikes were made in retooled corset shops, and gave middle-class women freedom of movement; bike makers, in turn, bolted together the first airplanes. Stays to spokes to wings). Miss Gulch is a gnarled skinny vixen stoked with a commanding fury. She trembles with energy. She will be satisfied.
Many of the scenes I was most drawn to, incidentally, are in the black-and-white section. These scenes form the back story that impels all the rest. When I watched them on that wintry afternoon, it was with a feeling of eerie unfamiliarity, as if I were seeing a reality that had been hidden in plain view.
“Ga-yle!” trumpets Miss Gulch, saluting Uncle Henry with his last name in perfunctory military fashion. “I want to see you and your wife right away. It’s about Dorothy.”
Uncle Henry stages a few jokes at Miss Gulch’s expense. She says she’s here because of Dorothy, but she keeps talking about the dog. She’s conflated the two! “Dorothy bit you?” he asks. “She bit her dog?”
He blinks, holding a whitewashing brush. He’s whitewashing the fence (walls and gates and doors of all sorts figure emphatically here). Miss Gulch claims she’s almost lame from where Toto bit her on the leg, but obviously she’s lying—she glances down and her face takes on an almost guilty look. Besides, she’s nowhere near lame; she’s one of the most vigorous, nimble women imaginable. She announces that Toto is “a menace to the community.” From the looks of him, he could hardly hurt a flea—he’s a yappy, bright-eyed terrier who extends a consoling paw when Dorothy feels blue. In fact, he is the only one who pays much loving attention to Dorothy at all—he is her all, her “toto,” her soul, as well as embodying her own instinctive animal spirits.
“He’s really gentle. With gentle people, that is,” Em points out.
Bizarrely, Miss Gulch does seem to have an impulsive shrinking terror of the creature—she drops way back in her chair when he’s near. It’s as if she fears he might recognize her when no one else does (it’s Toto, of course, who later drags the curtain away from the man operating the smoke-and-thunder machine). Dorothy would give up just about everything she has to save him (she proves that when she runs away). Yet Miss Gulch wants to “take him to the sheriff and see that he’s destroyed.” Why? Out of mere vindictiveness?
“Their magic must be very strong or she wouldn’t want them so badly,” the good witch later declares about the wicked one’s desire for the red shoes. Aunt Em also identifies the issue as power. “Just because you own half the county doesn’t mean you have power over the rest of us!” she exclaims.
But Miss Gulch does. She comes equipped with magic: a slip of paper from the sheriff. If they don’t give her the dog, she rants, “I’ll bring a suit that will take your whole farm. There’s a law protecting people from dogs who bite.” How fast the dog has transformed into the farm! No one questions this dream logic.
She claps open her basket (it seems like a torture device), and Aunt Em nods to Uncle Henry to pry the pooch from Dorothy, who stares from Henry to Aunt Em, then runs off weeping. Miss Gulch cycles away in triumph, what she wants contained, for the moment at least, in her woven box.
“Boxes, cases, cupboards, and ovens represent the uterus,” Freud had noted in what now seems an almost cartoonishly reductive analysis and yet one still pertinent in this context. Miss Gulch has Dorothy’s genie, her wild pleasure, caged up for herself. But her lock can’t keep Toto; her basket is not secure. Toto pushes free and gallops back to his rightful mistress.
This is a story about who owns what, about merging and splitting and boundaries, about the right to consolidate or not to consolidate one’s sovereign identity, as archetypal stories about women generally are. Historically disempowered, taught to exercise boundless empathy, women’s drama often enacts the story of the self absconded with—ravished, raped, invaded and annexed. Demeter and Persephone, Hera and Io, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, all are about self-possession and the struggle with a rapacious outside force. The Oz story, too, has to do with the control of one’s own animating spirit.
Toto leaps in Dorothy’s window (the window is one image for the mind here) and she embraces him. Quick, she realizes, “they” will be back: Her own home is in league with “them” (Aunt Em doesn’t even consider challenging the sheriff’s order or explaining her viewpoint to this invisible, commanding man. As with Oz’s diplomas, what’s on paper holds supreme magic). Dorothy heaves her suitcase onto her bed. She will run away.
Frog or dragon figures often begin archetypal stories, according to Joseph Campbell. “The disgusting and rejected frog or dragon of the fairy tale,” he writes, “is representative of that unconscious deep wherein are hoarded all the rejected, unadmitted, unrecognized, unknown, or undeveloped factors, laws, and elements of existence. . . . Those are the nuggets in the gold hoard of the dragon.”
What is Miss Gulch’s specific gold? The powers locked inside Dorothy that are yet unknown. Miss Gulch reveals Dorothy’s home’s fragility, its inability to keep Dorothy content; it is so much whitewash and cardboard before this woman’s roar. “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff. . . .” Miss Gulch sets Dorothy on her way.
At the end of a long, dry road, when Dorothy is merely a lonely figure, vulnerable and fatigued, she happens upon a caravan. It proclaims the presence of the celebrated Professor Marvel. The man is camped under a bridge, like the proverbial gnome. Clad in a threadbare cutaway and frilled shirt, and roasting wieners like a hobo, this fancy gentleman is obviously a fraud. Yet before Dorothy utters hardly a word, he gazes at her and proclaims that she is running away because “They don’t understand you at home. They don’t appreciate you. You want to see other lands. Big cities, big mountains, big oceans.”
“Why, it’s like you could read what’s inside me,” she exclaims.
So her motive isn’t just to save Toto! Or, perhaps her two aims are one: To save her animal spirit, she must go out into the world. She is one of a long tradition of midwesterners who want to come east to college or west to make his fortune—to leave behind the consuming farm.
Discussing why women through history hardly ever wrote, and why, when they did, they rarely achieved the free flight of genius granted men, Virginia Woolf invokes women’s confined experience. Women were kept home, and ignorant. “Anybody may blame me who likes,” she quotes Jane Eyre as saying. And why does Miss Eyre feel justifiably open to blame? Because she climbs up on the roof while the housekeeper makes jellies in order to look past the fields to see the more distant view.
Jane Eyre longs for “a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, town, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen . . . practical experience. . . . It is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say [women] ought to confine themselves to making puddings and embroidery bags.” Suddenly, though, in the midst of these thoughts, Miss Eyre is called back by Grace Poole’s mad laugh. It is like being interrupted, as Dorothy (whose last name also refers to air) so often is at the giddy height of her happiness, by the mocking glee of Elvira Gulch: the cackle of a woman who flew off over the horizon.
“Ah,” remarks the professor when Dorothy is amazed by his grasp of her innermost wishes. “Professor Marvel doesn’t guess. He knows.” He likely recognizes something of himself in her. But, a responsible gate guardian, he contrives to send her home. How?
He will read his crystal ball, he announces. He dons a turban with a central jewel reminiscent of the circular mirror doctors once wore above their eyes to help see inside you. He swipes from inside Dorothy’s basket a photo and looks at it in secret. Here are the girl and her aunt side by side at their front gate, smiling, both wearing fancy ironed
