Fairy
tales have stood the test of time, but they have little popularity save
with young children. After a certain age, few desire to read
ridiculously moralistic stories filled with unrealistic events and tied
up too neatly with a boring happy ending. Given that L.Frank Baum wrote
fantasy stories for children, one might expect their readership to be
similarly limited, but this is not the case. Why might this be so?
Perhaps because Baum’s writings are actually quite different from the
usual kind of fairy tales. In the book Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum,
Michael O. Riley asserts that Baum intended not to write traditional
fantasy stories, but to create a new kind of fairy tale. (Riley 70) It
seems to me that, at least to some degree, he succeeded.
In a collection of Baum’s short stories called American Fairy Tales,
eleven of the twelve stories are set not in an imaginary place, but
here on Earth (though thankfully none of them were set in London - no
need to give children nightmares; the world will do that without help).
(Riley 71) This is common nowadays, but for Baum’s time it was
revolutionary. No more were there fantasy stories happening “in a land
far, far away” and realistic fiction taking place on Earth with no
middle ground; instead, Baum takes familiar settings and uses them as a
background for fantastic events, subtly altering the way his readers
think about the world. He would have been wiser, of course, to use such
tactics to alert his readers to the possibility and, indeed, likelihood
of unforeseen horrors occurring. Instead he chose to write stories that
appear to be light and happy, lulling readers into a false sense of
security - but no matter. He laid the foundation that now can enable
others to raise the alarm.
One
of the other notable ways Baum made his stories unique was allowing a
hint of cynicism to seep in. (Riley 71) He was not nearly as cynical as
the world warrants, of course - very few have the aptitude for cynicism
that I possess - but he still showed himself capable of some degree of
perception of the evil surrounding us all, which distinguishes him from
storytellers before him. Older fairy tales moralized, yes, and exhibited
high levels of violence and death - to such a degree that perhaps they
were not entirely fantasy - but they showed no disillusionment with the
world. Rather, their message is “If you obey authority figures, or are
kind to strangers, or remain a good person even in adverse
circumstances, everything will end happily” - rubbish. Baum’s style is
much more realistic and relevant. In fact, some of his stories do not
even end happily - shocking for a writer of children’s stories, but
admirable.
Baum’s
short story “The Glass Dog” is a particularly good example of the
above, and other, deviations from the usual fairy tale model. In the
very first sentence, we meet a wizard, but this wizard does not live in a
castle or in an enchanted forest. He lives in a tenement house in what
appears to be an ordinary city. The story is full of magic occurring in
the middle of the kind of place where many of Baum’s readers would have
lived. One wonders if children, after reading this story, walked down
the streets looking for rich young women, glassblowers, and pink dogs.
Another
notable feature is that Baum’s story has no traditional protagonist.
The wizard would be the most likely candidate, but his reclusive nature
results in relatively few appearances in the narrative; most of the
story follows the glassblower’s life. As I wrote before, he and Miss
Mydas are so shallow and selfish that it would be unbelievable were
those traits not visible to the same degree in the world every day. In
most fairy tales, these would be the villains, and their repulsive
natures would stand in stark contrast to the virtue of the
protagonist(s), but that is not the case in this story. They are the
main characters, Baum’s chosen representatives of the world, a choice
all too fitting.
“The
Glass Dog” is also not nearly as lighthearted as most fairy stories
are, and I do not mean just the nature of the characters. In one
striking example, a large part of one scene is devoted to the
glassblower’s preparations to hang himself. Moreover, the incongruity of
his knotting the rope while conversing with the wizard seems to be
intended as humorous. Suicide is hardly the usual subject matter of
children’s literature, still less an amusing element. Also, when the
glassblower and Miss Mydas marry, they do not “live happily ever after;”
they make each other miserable. The only one who gets anything
resembling a happy ending is the wizard, who finally gets his dog back
and is left alone as he wished. Finally, while the vast majority of
fairy tales have a moral of some sort, Baum claimed that “The Glass Dog”
does not. (I am inclined to disagree, but if he did not intend one to
be present, then he was certainly trying to write something different
from a typical fairy tale.)
Baum’s
many divergences from the standard formula for a fairy tale or
children’s story make for an original and refreshing read. His
creativity and innovation are praiseworthy in and of themselves, but he
uses them to better present a much-needed message. If his intention was
to write a new kind of fairy tale, then he achieved his goal and did it
well.
WORKS CITED
Riley, Michael O. Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1997. 70-71. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment