The author of 'The Handmaid's Tale' and a new essay collection explains the 'woman problem' embedded within L. Frank Baum's 'Wonderful Wizard of Oz.'
Margaret Atwood unpacks the essays, speeches and appreciations in her deep and deeply entertaining new nonfiction collection, ‘Burning Question.’I’m not sure they’re in the film. They’re definitely in the book, illustrated, they look sort of like drum majorettes. So the Emerald City of Oz is a utopia. Everybody in it is happy. But it’s based on an illusion. OK. Let’s look at the male people in the book. They are the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow.
So is this turn-of-the-century insecurity about gender roles? I would say it is. Early on, when I was writing my thesis for Harvard in supernatural female figures in fiction, naturally I was interested in these witches. In 19th century fiction particularly, they always have to do with what they called “the woman question.”Now let’s just dial back in history, long, long ago before you were born. Women didn’t have, they didn’t have rights to higher education.
Each woman I know has seen at least one naked woman. I mean even in the Middle Ages, a woman would change her own clothes. You’d think! Think again. You could live a whole life without ever seeing your own body. Anyway, there was a big debate about, who wanted more relaxed clothing for women. It was actually seriously put forward that if you took away their corsets women, being so much like jellyfish, would just sort of subside into a puddle on the floor; they needed bolstering up.
These are just some aspects of it. How much power should women be allowed and if they got it, would they seriously misuse it? That was the argument. Would they turn men into these deficient creatures that you see in “The Wizard of Oz” with no magical powers? Who had to fall back on pretending to have magical powers? So to me, just as in H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” deep anxieties about the woman question were being expressed in these fantasies.
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