Boys And Girls Forever

by Alison Lurie

  In all three films the Hollywood demand for stars also affected the casting of the four sisters. Alcott presents Jo as definitely plain: she is “tall, thin, and brown”16 and still coltishly awkward at sixteen, in an age when the ideal woman was petite, rounded, pink, and graceful. In the 1933 version Katherine Hepburn was not only ten years older and absolutely wonderful-looking, she obviously came from another and more aristocratic background than the rest of the family. June Allyson, who played Jo in 1949, was thirty-two and looked it. In the most recent version, Jo’s long, thick chestnut hair is described, as in the book, as her “one beauty,”17 a remark that makes no sense, since Winona Ryder was one of Hollywood’s most striking young actresses.

  When the book begins, Amy is twelve and in despair over her flat nose, which she tries to improve by wearing a clothespin on it. In the 1933 version she was played by Joan Blondell, who was not only very pretty but twenty-four and pregnant. In the 1949 film version of Little Women Amy was the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, possibly the most perfectly beautiful teenager in America at that time, with a nose that thousands of girls would have died for. In the new film Amy is still very pretty, but at last she is a real child actress, Kirsten Dunst.

  The further we are from the nineteenth century, of course, the more Little Women seems a period piece. The 1933 film could still present the Marches as an idealized version of the contemporary American family. By the end of the twentieth century they were clearly a vanished species. Perhaps that is why attempts were made in the recent film to update the story. The gap Louisa May Alcott created between her own life and that of her characters, for instance, was collapsed, and bits of Alcott biography and literary history were shoehorned into the film. Jo asks Professor Bhaer if he knows what transcendentalism is (he does, of course); and we are informed that Mr. March’s school, like Bronson Alcott’s, was closed after he admitted a black student. And Susan Sarandon (looking lovely but somewhat uncomfortable in a hoop skirt) speaks on the importance of rights for women, and against slavery and the constrictions of the corset, expressing the radical opinions of Louisa May Alcott and her mother rather than those of the more pious and proper Marmee of the book.

  As usual in movies set in the American past, the film Little Women is wonderful to look at, full of Currier and Ives New England landscapes, picturesque nineteenth-century costumes, horse-drawn carriages, log fires, and loving relatives gathered round a Christmas dinner table or dancing on the grass at a summer wedding. It is not surprising that reactionaries should see it as propaganda for family piety, reverence for established institutions, and the domestication of women. But under its old-fashioned disguise, the film, like the book, still recommends quite another set of values.

  THE ODDNESS OF OZ

  THE year 2000 was the centenary of a famous and much-loved but essentially very odd children’s classic: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Those who recall the story only from childhood reading, or from the MGM film, have perhaps never realized how strange the original book and its sequels are.

  For one thing, the Oz books are far ahead of their time both scientifically and politically. They are full of inventions that would not appear on the market for most of the century, among them a robot man, an artificial heart and limbs, a television monitoring system, antigravity devices, and a computer-type news service. Oz is also, as several critics have noted, both a sort of socialist utopia and a deeply matriarchal and occasionally transsexual society.1

  Some of the reasons for this may lie in Baum’s own history—and also in that of his wife. As a child in Chittenango, New York, Frank Baum (he disliked his first name, Lyman, and never used it) did not go to school; instead he remained at home under his mother’s care and was educated by tutors. But when he was twelve, his father, a successful banker and oil executive, hoping to toughen Frank up and cure him of his “daydreaming,”2 sent him to the Peekskill Military Academy. Baum was miserable there for more than a year, and the only results of the experiment were a physical (and possibly also psychological) breakdown, and a lifelong aversion to both formal education and the military.

  Back home on the family estate, Rose Lawn, Baum continued his studies. He also read widely, published a neighborhood newspaper on his own printing press, and put on plays with his brothers and sisters. Gradually he developed an intense and lifelong fascination with the theater, and in 1878 he began to work as a professional actor. Four years later his father bought him a small dramatic company, and Baum was soon adapting and starring in a romantic melodrama, The Maid of Arran.

  In 1881, when Baum was twenty-five, he fell in love with a twenty-year-old Cornell sophomore. Maud Gage was the youngest daughter and favorite child of one of the most famous feminists in America, Matilda Gage. Together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Matilda had just begun to publish a groundbreaking three-volume History of Woman Suffrage (1881–89). She was prominent in the radical wing of the suffrage movement, and for years had spoken out not only for women’s right to vote and the abolition of slavery, but against unrestrained capitalism, established religion, and ethnic and racial oppression. She was especially concerned with the wrongs suffered by Native Americans, and enthusiastic about the system of government practiced by the Iroquois Confederacy, in which men and women were near-equals. (Eventually, in gratitude for Gage’s efforts on their behalf, the Mohawk nation adopted her into their wolf clan and gave her the name She-Who-Holds-the-Sky.)

  Matilda Gage’s husband, Henry Hill Gage, appears to have been something of a nonentity. He was a successful merchant, able to provide his family with an impressive white-columned mansion in Fayetteville, New York; but I could find no record of what he thought of his wife’s political and literary activities.

  As time passed, Matilda Gage’s ideas became too radical for both Anthony and Stanton, and in 1890 she was forced out of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which she had helped to found in 1869. Later she was partially written out of feminist history: a recent PBS documentary on Anthony and Stanton hardly mentioned her.

  Frank Baum met Maud Gage in 1881 at a Christmas party, and he soon began calling on her and courting her. A few months later he proposed, and Maud accepted him at once, without first consulting her parents—an unusual step at the time. When Matilda Gage heard the news, she was not pleased; she exclaimed, “I won’t have my daughter be a darned fool and marry an actor.” Maud replied, “All right, Mother, if you feel that way about it, good-bye.”3 Faced with a stubbornness equal to her own, Matilda laughed and backed down. The couple was married in the family home in Fayetteville, near Syracuse, in November 1882, less than a year after their first meeting.

  In a sense Matilda Baum was right; from a practical point of view it was a foolish marriage. It would be many years before Frank Baum began to be financially secure, and at first he failed or barely survived in one occupation after another: theater owner, newspaper editor, dry-goods merchant, traveling salesman, and trade-magazine publisher. After Baum’s father lost most of his fortune and died in 1887, Frank and Maud were often on the edge of poverty. Fortunately, where Baum was dreamy, easygoing, and impractical, Maud, like her mother, was what at the time was known as a New Woman: independent, freethinking, strong willed, and clearheaded. She also had a quick temper. Later in her life she maintained that the couple had always lived in peace and harmony, but as one of Baum’s early biographers reports,

  . . . those who knew the family best felt that this was true only because Frank, from the time of their marriage until his death thirty-seven years later, allowed her to have her own way with the household, the children, and the family purse.4

  After the marriage Matilda Gage and her daughter remained close, and when Baum and Maud moved to Chicago in 1891 with four small boys, Matilda came to stay with them every winter and help take care of the children. But she did far more than this for Baum. It was she who first encouraged her son-in-law to write down the tales he had been telling the neighborhood children,
and send them to a publisher. According to Angela Carpenter, “Frank could not believe anyone would want his stories, but Maud said firmly, ‘Mother is nearly always right about everything.’”5 So he sent off the manuscript of his first children’s book, Mother Goose in Prose; it was accepted at once and became a best-seller.

  Possibly these events convinced Baum of the value of his mother-in-law’s opinions; or perhaps he was already convinced. Earlier, when he was editing a failing newspaper in South Dakota, he published Maud Gage’s “Manifesto” of women’s rights, and wrote in favor of votes for women. Later, his books for children, especially the fourteen Oz books, would reflect many of Matilda Gage’s most radical ideas.

  Among Matilda Gage’s striking and original views was her belief in a prehistoric matriarchal society, the “Matriarchate.” In Woman, Church, and State (1895), partly written when she was living in Chicago with Baum and his family, she declared that all ancient communities had been ruled by women.

  A form of society existed at an early age known as the Matriarchate or Mother-rule. Under the Matriarchate, except as son and inferior, man was not recognized in either of these great institutions, family, state or church. A father and husband as such, had no place either in the social, political or religious scheme; woman was ruler in each.6

  In this golden age, according to Gage’s biographer, Sally Rosch Wagner, “Far from woman using her power over man oppressively, Gage maintained that never was justice more perfect, never civilization higher than under the Matriarchate.”7

  Like other radical feminists in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matilda Gage believed that if women held political power the world would be a better place. Women leaders would be kind, wise, just, fair-minded, and nonviolent. Today, in an era that might be designated as AMT (After Margaret Thatcher), this belief seems naive, but at the time it was widely accepted in feminist circles. In 1915 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a contemporary of Matilda Gage, published a fantasy novel called Herland, which portrays a peaceful and happy all-feminist society.

  In Frank Baum’s Oz, women rule all the good societies and some of the bad ones. At the start of the series the Emerald City is governed by a man, the Wizard of Oz, but it presently becomes clear that he is an incompetent phony with no magical powers. For a short time after volume 1 the Emerald City is governed by Dorothy’s friend the Scarecrow, but by the end of the second volume, and for the remainder of the series, not only the capital but the entire Land of Oz has a female sovereign, Princess Ozma: a pretty little girl who began life under an enchantment as a pretty little boy.

  For Matilda Gage witches were not necessarily evil. Even after the triumph of patriarchy, she maintained, some women continued to observe the beliefs and rituals of earlier times. The witches of the late medieval and early modern age, she claimed, were pagan priestesses, skilled in healing. (Gage’s views on this subject, according to an excellent recent study by the British historian Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, would have a formative influence on the early-twentieth-century revival of paganism and witchcraft in Britain.)

  When Dorothy first arrives in Oz by cyclone, the land is divided into four countries, two governed by good witches and two by wicked ones. Ozma is aided and advised by a beautiful young woman, Glinda the Good, originally known as the Good Witch of the South. (Later, after objections from readers, Baum referred to her only as “a powerful sorceress.”) Their relationship is that of a wise, affectionate mother and her daughter. Like Matilda Gage, Glinda is nearly always right about everything, and when there is a crisis she has the magical solution. Troubles and dangers occur in all of Baum’s fourteen Oz books, of course: if they didn’t there would be no plot. But in every case, whenever things look darkest, either Ozma or Glinda or Dorothy, or more than one of them, is there to rescue the good characters, administer justice, and restore order.

  As some critics have suggested, from a religious point of view the Land of Oz is ruled by a female trinity, all of them eternally young and beautiful: Glinda, who appears to be in her early twenties; Ozma, who in The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918) is said to be fourteen or fifteen; and Dorothy, who is “much younger” than Ozma.8 As in the Christian Trinity, it is the junior member of the group, Dorothy, who most often goes out into the world to help people in trouble. The senior member, on the other hand, sometimes takes a position of benevolent detachment. There is an interesting scene in Baum’s final book, Glinda of Oz (1920), in which Glinda suggests that Dorothy and Ozma should forget about the two warring kingdoms whose problems they have heard of, remarking:

  “Had you not learned of the existence of the Flatheads and the Skeezers, through my Book of Records, you would never have worried about them or their quarrels. So, if you pay no attention to these peoples, you may never hear of them again.”

  “But that wouldn’t be right,” declared Ozma. “I am ruler of all the land of Oz, . . . it is my duty to make all my people—wherever they may be—happy and contented and to settle their disputes. . . .”9

  In the world of Oz, at least half of the many eccentric sub-societies also have female rulers. Not all of them are benevolent, but their faults are, in early-twentieth-century terms, more feminine than masculine. Some are willful and greedy; others are vain, idle, and self-centered like Queen Coo-ee-oh in Glinda of Oz or Princess Languidere in Ozma of Oz (1907), who devotes most of her time to trying on the thirty beautiful heads she owns and admiring herself in the mirror. Here too there may be a feminist message. When the book appeared, it was just becoming possible for a respectable woman to use rouge and powder and hair dye in order to alter her appearance temporarily. But many radical feminists of the time, like those of our own era, scorned this sort of artifice, and Baum seems to have shared their views.

  Dorothy, like Matilda and Maud Gage, is clearly a New Woman. Her virtues are those of a Victorian hero rather than a Victorian heroine: she is brave, active, independent, sensible, and willing to confront authority. In Ozma of Oz the vain Princess Languidere becomes interested in Dorothy’s head:

  “You are rather attractive,” said the lady presently. “Not at all beautiful, you understand, but you have a certain style of prettiness that is different from that of any of my thirty heads. So I believe I’ll take your head and give you No. 26 for it.”

  “Well, I believe you won’t!” exclaimed Dorothy. . . . “I’m not used to taking cast-off things, so I’ll just keep my own head.”10

  In Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz (1908) Dorothy and her cousin Zeb are caught in an earthquake and fall through a crack in California into a magical world. Zeb is terrified, but Dorothy remains calm, and talks back to the evil Sorcerer of the Mangaboos, unfeeling vegetable beings covered with thorns.

  The Sorcerer . . . looked towards the little girl with cold, cruel eyes. . . .

  “Why have you dared to intrude your unwelcome persons into the secluded Land of the Mangaboos?” he asked, sternly.

  “Cause we couldn’t help it,” said Dorothy. . . .

  “Prove it!” cried the Sorcerer.

  “We don’t have to prove it,” answered Dorothy, indignantly. “If you had any sense at all you’d known it was the earthquake.”11

  Later Dorothy is equally unimpressed by a caveful of baby dragons who boast of their long aristocratic pedigree:

  “Well,” said Dorothy, “I was born on a farm in Kansas, and I guess that’s being just as ‘spectable and haughty as living in a cave with your tail tied to a rock. If it isn’t I’ll have to stand it, that’s all.”12

  In The Emerald City of Oz (1910) Dorothy comes to stay in Oz permanently; she is made a princess and given elegant and luxurious quarters in the palace (lovingly described by Baum, who adored theatrical display). Yet in spite of the delights of the Emerald City, Dorothy is soon bored and eager to go on new adventures.

  Betsy and Trot, the little American girls who are the heroines of two later Oz books, are equally adventurous and confrontational: Betsy, like Dorothy, even stands up to t
he evil Nome King. After their adventures are over, they also get to stay in the palace and are assigned jewel-trimmed suites near Dorothy’s. The only boy hero of the series, Ojo, in The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), however, receives merely “a nice house just outside the walls of the Emerald City,”13 though his companion, the Patchwork Girl, is allowed to live in the palace.

  Like Dorothy, these alternative child heroes are always accompanied by what folklorists call Animal Helpers. Baum’s remarkable powers of invention are in evidence here: Betsy has her mule, Hank; and Trot has a four-legged bird with a helicopter tail, the Ork. Ojo is joined on his travels not only by the Patchwork Girl, but by a clever, coldhearted Glass Cat and a good-natured square wooden dog called the Woozy. The boy Tip, who later becomes Ozma, not only has the good-natured and tireless Sawhorse for a companion, but a strange flying creature called the Gump, who has been put together out of two sofas, a collection of feather dusters, and the stuffed head of an antelope.

  One of the themes of the early feminist movement was the presentation of housework as oppressive, since it was unpaid, underappreciated, and physically exhausting—far more exhausting, of course, in an era before frozen food, washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners, when vegetables had to be canned, clothes and floors scrubbed, ice chopped, and carpets beaten by hand. Baum seems to share this view. In the first volume of his series, The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West, as Osmond Beckwith puts it, “‘tortures’ Dorothy by making her do housework.”14 In Glinda of Oz Dorothy refuses to sweep and dust and wash dishes for The King of All Spiders, even under severe threat.