"Aunt Em: Hate You! Hate Kansas! Taking the Dog. Dorothy": Conscious and Unconscious Desire in <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>
1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/chq.0.0894
ISSN1553-1201
Autores Tópico(s)Social and Cultural Studies
Resumo"Aunt Em: Hate You! Hate Kansas! Taking the Dog. Dorothy":Conscious and Unconscious Desire in The Wizard of Oz Todd S. Gilman (bio) The quotation in my title-taken from a T-shirt popular in queer culture-bitchily suggests that in Victor Fleming's 1939 film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, the rosy resolution we are left with ("There's no place like home") is somehow at odds with the preceding portrayal of Dorothy's turbulent emotional life. Yet the film's happy ending has not failed to convince generations of viewers of its congruity with what comes before. Those satisfied with the ending see the events leading to it as growth-inducing conflicts that may reasonably be resolved. David Payne, for example, believes that Dorothy repeats "a basic, trustworthy moral about personal quests-one that is relevant for all of us who. . . sometimes wish to return home and to childhood and to the security of our families" (38). Jerry Griswold reflects on the text's consistency, stating that The Wizard of Oz tells us that "we already have what we sometimes think we lack. . . . That we cannot be given what we already possess. That we are already home" (475). By way of support, Griswold cites L. Frank Baum's son: "What we want, the moralist whispers, is within us; we need only look for it to find it. What we strive for has been ours all along" and Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West: "What the picture tells me . . . coincides with the wonderful lesson Dorothy says she has learned at last, about feeling she has lost her home. . . . If you can't find it, it is still somewhere-you still have it" (474-75). Those who conceived, designed, marketed, buy, and wear the T-shirt, though, have apparently sensed that Dorothy expresses darker desires in the film. Resisting a conventional reading, they seem troubled by the idea that Dorothy could return home to a child's bed, surrounded by the same ineffectual and patronizing family and friends whom she earlier needed to escape, convinced that she seeks no more than this. Nor is the T-shirt an isolated comment. Salman Rushdie expresses such a view in response to Dorothy's final interaction with Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, in which she resolves not to look any further than her own backyard: How does it come about, at the close of this radical and enabling film, which teaches us in the least didactic way possible to build on what we have, to make the best of ourselves, that we are given this conservative little homily? Are we to believe that Dorothy has learned no more on her journey than that she didn't need to make such a journey in the first place? Must we accept that she now accepts the limitations of her home life, and agrees that the things she doesn't have there are no loss to her? (56-57) Rushdie may not be a representative viewer, but still he has independently uttered sentiments consistent with the T-shirt, although he speaks in earnest while the shirt speaks the language of camp. Stuart Culver similarly comments that the film exposes the machinery behind the enchantment as mere humbug and insists that we learn to contain our imaginations and desires. . . . Just as her companions learn that what they already have must and will suffice, Dorothy learns to embrace the comfortable enclosure of the whitewashed picket fence and the domestic role it projects for her. The theme of containment is perversely underlined by the casting of Garland, then sixteen, in the role of a seven-year-old, infantilized and all too obviously confined by her costume and character. (99) Consider also Hugh Prestwood's popular song "Dorothy," recorded by Judy Collins on the album Hard Times for Lovers, which laments Dorothy's return to Kansas: "Dorothy was a fool to leave [Oz], she had it made" (qtd. in Payne 38). Finally, and most compellingly, in his brilliant recent novel WAS, Geoff Ryman portrays "Dorothy Gael" as a historical personage who lived as a child with her embittered Aunt Em and Uncle Henry...
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