sees an older woman in a polka dot dress, he says. She has a careworn face. She’s crying, he says. “Someone has hurt her. Someone has just about broken her heart.”
“Me?” Dorothy asks.
“Well, it’s someone she loves very much. Someone she’s been very kind to, taken care of in sickness.”
“I had the measles once. She stayed right by me every minute.”
“She’s putting her hand on her heart. What’s this?! She’s dropping down on the bed. Oh, the crystal’s gone down!”
Dorothy leaps up. Her independence, it seems, will kill the woman who sacrificed herself, who allowed her own face to be worn away—who effaced herself—for Dorothy, the woman who literally runs about the farm from chore to chore. Why, she chose to be Dorothy’s mother when she didn’t have to (she’s Aunt Em—Aunt Mother. The use of mother surrogates in fairy tales, of course, allows the more frightening emotions to surface).
How weak Aunt Em suddenly appears! Before now, she’s been a powerhouse. It’s as if, in leaving, Dorothy stole her Toto, her soul. To have the world, apparently, the girl must steal herself from her mother. It’s tantamount to seizing the cornerstone of a house—the other person topples.
Rapunzel flees her mother’s prison tower and becomes an exile. For seven years she and her beau live in a Sahara. Devoid of mother, the world is punitive, desolate as the winter earth is when Persephone keeps her yearly liaison. Iciness is the punishment for sex: for each pomegranate seed the daughter savored, the mother bestows a frozen month.
Luke Skywalker, in comparison, is evicted. His family home is destroyed so that he’ll be forced to assume his manhood duties. He must relinquish home to save the world, like Hamlet or Superman, both of whom experience the destruction of their childhood abodes: they are thrust out to make the world right. Men leave home to restore it. If they don’t depart, sickness and rot result. Even the far more recent Sunset Boulevard, which depicts a young man who lives in what is symbolically the narcissistic mother’s mansion, selling his soul for a gold cigarette case, is about inner decay. The Graduate returns to his childhood home only to be corrupted by the parental femme fatale: he must go forth. Young men must give up home or home will sicken.
The professor reads Dorothy’s fears and knows just when to stop—at the brink of the unthinkable. The crystal’s gone down.
“I thought you were coming with me!” the wandering man says in mock surprise.
“I have to get to her right away,” Dorothy cries as she flees.
And now a curious thing happens. A tornado gusts up. Nobody seems to have predicted this. And the farm now really is in jeopardy. It’s not from Miss Gulch this time or because Dorothy is running away, but because Dorothy is coming back.
How does it feel to have to sacrifice the entire world for a parent’s happiness? Quite a squall is brewing. A twister is coming, in which everything—all objects, all meanings—will get twisted. It whirls across the horizon, a dark ascending coil like the probing mouth of a vacuum cleaner. The horizon is inhaled. Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and the farmhands vanish down into the storm cellar. Dorothy returns to a deserted house. She stamps on the door to the cellar; they won’t open up. They have walked down into the underworld, marched into a grave in the earth. In fact, this too may hold an unconscious wish: If they abandoned her, she would not have to feel guilty about abandoning them.
On the surface, though, Dorothy’s sudden solitude terrifies. Trees wrench up their roots and sail aloft. The front screen door blows off in her hand. “Aunt Em!” she cries. In a twist, her own life is now in peril. The house is what Elvira Gulch implied: balsa and paint, like the court in which Queens and Kings judged Alice in Wonderland only to watch Alice surge bigger and bigger until she declares, “Why you’re just a pack of cards!” while they whirl away.
But Dorothy’s return home might literally cost her her life: The house attacks. The frame of her window (her own crystal) smashes her on the head. She swoons onto her bed. All at once a peaceful expression comes over her. Her face doubles into an overlay and an underlay; the twin images superimpose over one another, seesaw through each other, brows, noses, smiles nodding up and down, agreeing to something marvelous.
In Dorothy’s delicious dream her house sails high. It is a doll’s house, a toy house, although when it comes down to earth its landing is real enough: It kills. Dorothy’s first act in this new sublimity is to crush a faceless woman. “She’s gone where the gardens grow. Below, below, below,” just like Aunt Em. Of course, it’s an accident. But, as the Wicked Witch drolly observes: “I can cause accidents too, you know.” (Ironically, this is precisely what finishes her off: She incites an accident that dissolves her. Dorothy is capable of violence, apparently, only under the guise of an accident.) The murder implement of this first act? It’s death by house, as if the incarnated burden of housework could be hurled like a thunderbolt.
Yet, ring the bell! This is cause for celebration. The wicked old witch at last is dead! Who is this witch? Well, we can’t quite see yet; nothing is visible but her feet on which gleam the scarlet power slippers.
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