Introduction: “You are most welcome, noble sorceress”
https://i0.wp.com/www.writerandthewolf.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Painting-the-town-green-1-7.png?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024 683 Siobhan O'Brien Holmes Siobhan O'Brien Holmes https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e13fe604611de8ab95f8fa1e5862d0115e805367dd2bb462c28ba4013cebfee7?s=96&d=mm&r=gIf you know me, or have ever read this blog before, you probably know I love The Wizard of Oz movie – like, a lot. To complete my Master’s in Children’s Literature a few years back, I wrote my dissertation on L. Frank Baum’s Oz books and I had so much fun doing it (and I got a first, which was a bonus!). I thought about trying to get the dissertation published afterwards but the subject was so incredibly niche I didn’t think I stood much chance. So instead it sat on my computer, ignored and rusty like Tik-Tok in Return to Oz.
Well, wake up Tik-Tok! Dorothy’s here to wind you up. I’m going to share it, bit by bit, here on the blog in the hope that it will get a new lease of life. There was so much more I wanted to say in my dissertation but that blasted wordcount kept getting in the way. So, I’m going to add to it and annotate it as I go, and dive deeper into certain topics that interest me. I also plan to talk a bit more about the film, something I tried not to do too much in the dissertation as it wasn’t really the point of it but I was so desperate to do!
The original essay was about the use of colour in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and how a deep analysis could uncover truths about a whole manner of ideologies and schools of thought, from feminism to Marxism. But perhaps what interested me the most was the intertextuality, the stories that inspired and were inspired by Oz and how just one colour – red or orange or blue – could magic up deep connections with age old fairytales, religious texts or modern day movies.
I hope you’ll find something interesting here and, if you’re a children’s book author yourself, I hope this series will help you see how powerful your words can be. And maybe more importantly, how much reading and analysing texts – both widely and within your specific genre and readership – can and will transform your own writing craft.
Please excuse the formal, fancy schmancy academic tone here!
Abstract
L. Frank Baum and W.W Denslow changed the face of children’s literature in 1900 when they published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, an expensively produced, full-colour book incorporating intricate colour plates and an innovative colour scheme, far beyond the simple, polychromatic texts children were used to at the time. Through close reading and visual analysis, exploring how words and illustrations interact and impact on one another, this dissertation will argue that colour is absolutely central to both The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s success and to any significant reading of the text.
I will draw from several critical approaches, all underpinned by a structuralist methodology: In Chapter One I will explore semiotics and picturebook theory, arguing that meaning can be revealed in Denslow’s artwork through discovering links with picture books and their use of colour signs and connotations. Chapter Two focuses on Marxism and how structures in Oz – highlighted by colour – might uncover consumerist ideologies and economic allegories in the text. Chapter Three concentrates on the story’s fairytale elements, establishing how colour is used to emphasise key themes and create convincing associations with classic European folktales.
My conclusion finds that colour is particularly crucial in reflecting mood, revealing religious and political undertones and demonstrating Dorothy’s psychological development, and that the connotative function of colour is more important in creating meaning than its denotative function.
You Are Most Welcome, Noble Sorceress 1
When L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900, its first run of 10,000 copies sold out within two weeks² and it went on to be named the most successful children’s book of the year. One month after publication, the following review appeared in The New York Times³:
The drawing as well as the introduced color work vies with the texts drawn, and the result has been a book that rises far above the average children’s book of today. [The characters] have experiences that seem in some respects like a leaf out of one of the old English fairy tales that Andrew Lang or Joseph Jacobs has rescued for us. (1900)
The above succinctly identifies the key selling points of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Wizard 4). First and most crucially, never before had such a beautiful, lavish book been created for children! Baum and illustrator William Wallace Denslow produced a text to which colour was fundamental: the story follows an intricate scheme that sees Denslow’s artwork change hue as the characters travel through colour-coded countries across a magical land whose geography obeys the laws of colour theory.
Fig. 1 This map first appeared in the eighth book, Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), but Wizard follows its geography and colour scheme (although Gillikin Country does not feature).
Just three of its page openings are image-free and black and white. The remaining 304 pages consist of polychromatic, illustrated double-spreads as well as 24 vibrant, tipped-in colour plates. In fact, Denslow’s artwork was so extravagant that publishers refused to pay for printing, so he and Baum agreed to cover the cost of the colour plates themselves when the George M. Hill Company took on the book. So stunning was the finished product that it “revolutionized the design of American children’s books”, according to Michael Hearn’s introduction to his The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1973:xlvii)5:
“They would never be so wan and boring again. Baum and Denslow proved that novelty could sell”.
Thirty nine years later, the story would also influence the film industry. MGM’s phenomenally successful The Wizard of Oz (1939) directed by Victor Fleming was so drenched in colour and made such unique, renowned use of technicolour technology that it is often mistakenly thought of as the first ever colour film (Edit: the first colour movie to hit cinemas was actually British short film A Visit to the Seaside in 1908). Its striking transition between the sepia tones of Kansas and the glorious, highly-saturated hues of Oz astonished the film-going public, particularly as it was released during the Great Depression. Knowing how essential colour was to Baum’s story, the studio spared no expense and paid more than $250,000 for the bright lights required for the technicolour process (rumoured to have caused permanent vision damage in several cast members). Edit: Margaret Hamilton famously suffered third-degree burns on her face and body during an accident with a trapdoor when her green makeup caught fire – another example of the film’s dedication to colour posing health and safety risks.
They even turned Dorothy’s silver slippers ruby, because their vibrancy against the yellow brick looked more impressive. The adaptations did not stop there; Oz has been reimagined in countless celebrated books, films and stage shows, such as Lumet’s Oscar-nominated, Motown-inspired The Wiz (1978) and Maguire’s Wicked (1995), later adapted into an award-winning Broadway musical. Edit: Unlike the original book or MGM film, the Wicked franchise focuses heavily on the wicked witch’s green skin. At the time of writing my dissertation, I had seen the stage musical but the film starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba hadn’t yet come out so I wasn’t super familiar with the story and therefore didn’t explore it much.
In this essay, I will investigate why Baum and Denslow featured colour so prominently in Wizard and how that colour speaks to concealed connotations or ideologies. I will also explore several visual representations of Baum’s narrative in adaptations which approach the story creatively while remaining sympathetic to the original colour scheme, as I believe these interpretations will reveal new meaning and, in places, highlight the uniqueness of Denslow’s own choices. Baum wrote a further 13 Oz books after Wizard, thanks to letters from readers which convinced him it might make a successful series, but as there is not space to analyse all 14 books here, I will take Wizard as my only primary text. Baum had not planned to continue the story when he wrote Wizard, so it stands alone as a complete work, independent of later character and plot developments. Furthermore, Denslow was replaced by John R. Neill as illustrator after the first book, so this feels like a natural point of evolution.
Another attraction for children was Wizard’s straightforward narrative style and lack of didacticism, which Baum promised in his introduction:
“Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to pleasure children of today.” 6
Baum intended his book to be a more joyful, “modernized fairy tale” which omitted “horrible and blood-curdling incident”.
Edit: It’s funny to imagine what Baum might have thought of the Disney movie Return to Oz, which is anything by joyful (but still one of my favourite films of all time).
Whether he achieved that is debatable (Wizard contains several scenes which might be labelled blood-curdling) but the fairytale elements in the text are certainly successful, particularly its narrative style. Wizard offers less substantial characterisation than we might expect from a children’s story of this length;; though Dorothy’s actions show her to be brave and kind, she exhibits limited emotional depth (for instance, she does not much care what becomes of her new friends provided she returns home safely) due to Baum’s sometimes direct, unembellished language.
Her dialogue is less charged with irony, bewilderment and frustration than that of Lewis Carroll’s character Alice (1865), for example, though both girls find themselves in similarly perplexing situations. This minimalism is evocative of classic European fairytales, with which Baum actively engages throughout the text. In these early stories, characterisation was typically limited and female protagonists were often nameless. For example, the title character in the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap” (1812)7 is introduced as “a dear little girl. If you set eye on her you could not but love her” (13), with no further description given. In their “The Frog King” (1812), the princess is simply described as
“so beautiful that even the sun, which had seen so much, was filled with wonder when it shone upon her face” (47).
In his book The European Folktale: Form and Nature (1982), fairytale scholar Max Lüthi describes this trend: “The folktale siphons off all three-dimensionality from objects and phenomena and shows them to us as flat figures” (23). This is why symbolism and imagery in fairytales are significant: Snow White’s pale skin, dark hair and red lips tell us she is innocent but womanly, in a way that the Grimms’ sparse text does not (1812). In Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” (1697), red evokes danger, blood and, according to Jack Zipes (Why Fairy Tales Stick 2006), sexual promiscuity: “First, she is donned with a red hat… making her into a type of bourgeois girl tainted with sin, since red, like the scarlet letter A, recalls the devil and heresy” (35).
Edit: I’m a huge fan of Little Red Riding Hood – it’s my favourite fairytale – and I talk about it a lot in this dissertation. I think this point about the original folktales being so sparse and open to interpretation is a crucial one because it leaves so much room for illustration and colour to completely transform or even create meaning in a story. Think of your favourite picture books: would you or the child reader take so much away from them without the artwork doing so much heavy lifting?
In literary analysis, colour is often treated as a background feature of a text, its value overlooked in favour of plot and character. As children, we are taught to understand books in concrete terms rather than through symbols, but in fairytales, symbols are crucial to interpretation: colour symbolism can contribute to theme, mood and characterisation, and can signpost a tales’ moral overtones and ideologies. I will demonstrate that colour carries out this same important function in Wizard.
I will ultimately aim to prove that colour symbolism is used in a very deliberate, central way by Baum and Denslow, establishing links with a wide range of texts, from picturebooks to the Bible, and that colour is at the heart of many significant readings of this groundbreaking children’s book. Like observing Oz through the filter of the Wizard’s green spectacles, I ultimately hope that presenting the text through the theoretical lens of colour will uncover ideas and interpretations of Wizard that have not been presented before.
Notes
- Baum, L Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Chicago: George M. Hill Company, 1900. Page 21. All page numbers in future citations of the text refer to the Library of Congress’ electronic copy of this George M. Hill 1900 edition.
- From Michael Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz, xli
- No page number available.
- I will henceforth refer to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz using its shortened title, Wizard. This is a common abbreviation amongst academics and often appears in The International Wizard of Oz Club’s journal, The Baum Bugle. Oz researcher Atticus Gannaway, former editor of the journal, confirmed via email (included in Works Cited) that this abbreviation is appropriate here.
- Unless otherwise stated, all future Hearn quotes are taken from the 2000 edition of The Annotated Wizard of Oz.
- Baum’s introduction does not have a page number.
- Quoted here from Tatar’s 1999 collection.
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