One famous American idiom is “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” The same can also be said of a parody. A parody is defined as a humorous or satirical imitation of a serious piece of literature or writing.1 This has been done numerous times over the years in both literature and film.
In order for such a parody to be successful it is important that a well-known piece of literature should be chosen. This piece of literature can be representative of a particular culture or is so well known that its content transcends a particular culture. The transcending of a given culture is largely based upon the theme of a given novel.
One theme which transcends a given culture is the hero’s journey or quest. Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) spoke about this in a series on the Public Broadcasting Company (PBS) which aired the year after Campbell died. He initially wrote about this The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).
This theme is present in numerous novels and such films as Star Wars (1977) which was directed by George Lucas. One classic novel where this theme is present was Virgil’s Aeneid. Considered one of the classics of Western literature, The Aeneid has been read by countless generations of students.
The summary of this classic tale is as follows. On the Mediterranean Sea, Aeneas and his fellow Trojans flee from their home city of Troy, which has been destroyed by the Greeks. They sail for Italy, where Aeneas is destined to found Rome. As they near their destination, a fierce storm throws them off course and lands them in Carthage. Dido, Carthage’s founder and queen, welcomes them. Aeneas relates to Dido the long and painful story of his group’s travels thus far.
Aeneas tells of the sack of Troy that ended the Trojan War after ten years of Greek siege. In the final campaign, the Trojans were tricked when they accepted into their city walls a wooden horse that, unbeknownst to them, harbored several Greek soldiers in its hollow belly. He tells how he escaped the burning city with his father, Anchises; his son, Ascanius; and the hearth gods that represent their fallen city. Assured by the gods that a glorious future awaited him in Italy, he set sail with a fleet containing the surviving citizens of Troy. Aeneas relates the ordeals they faced on their journey. Twice they attempted to build a new city, only to be driven away by bad omens and plagues. Harpies, creatures that are part woman and part bird, cursed them, but they also encountered friendly countrymen unexpectedly. Finally, after the loss of Anchises and a bout of terrible weather, they made their way to Carthage.
Impressed by Aeneas’s exploits and sympathetic to his suffering, Dido, a Phoenician princess who fled her home and founded Carthage after her brother murdered her husband, falls in love with Aeneas. They live together as lovers for a period, until the gods remind Aeneas of his duty to found a new city. He determines to set sail once again. Dido is devastated by his departure, and kills herself by ordering a huge pyre to be built with Aeneas’s castaway possessions, climbing upon it, and stabbing herself with the sword Aeneas leaves behind.
As the Trojans head to Italy, bad weather blows them to Sicily, where they hold funeral games for the dead Anchises. The women, tired of the voyage, begin to burn the ships, but a downpour puts the fires out. Some of the travel-weary stay behind, while Aeneas, reinvigorated after his father visits him in a dream, and takes the rest on toward Italy. Once there, Aeneas descends into the underworld, guided by the Sibyl of Cumae, to visit his father. He is shown a pageant of the future history and heroes of Rome, which helps him to understand the importance of his mission. Aeneas returns from the underworld, and the Trojans continue up the coast to the region of Latium.
The arrival of the Trojans in Italy begins peacefully. King Latinus, the Italian ruler, extends his hospitality, hoping that Aeneas will prove to be the foreigner whom, according to a prophecy, his daughter Lavinia is supposed to marry. However, Latinus’ wife, Amata, has other ideas. She means for Lavinia to marry Turnus, a local suitor. Amata and Turnus cultivate enmity toward the newly arrived Trojans. Meanwhile, Ascanius hunts a stag that was a pet of the local herdsmen. A fight breaks out, and several people are killed. Turnus, riding this current of anger, begins a war.
Aeneas, at the suggestion of the river god Tiberinus, sails north up the Tiber to seek military support among the neighboring tribes. During this voyage, his mother, Venus, descends to give him a new set of weapons, wrought by Vulcan. While the Trojan leader is away, Turnus attacks. Aeneas returns to find his countrymen embroiled in battle. Pallas, the son of Aeneas’s new ally Evander, is killed by Turnus. Aeneas flies into a violent fury and many more are slain by the day’s end.
The two sides agree to a truce so that they can bury the dead, and the Latin leaders discuss whether to continue the battle. They decide to spare any further unnecessary carnage by proposing a hand-to-hand duel between Aeneas and Turnus. When the two leaders face off, however, the other men begin to quarrel, and full-scale battle resumes. Aeneas is wounded in the thigh, but eventually the Trojans threaten the enemy city. Turnus rushes out to meet Aeneas, who wounds Turnus badly. Aeneas nearly spares Turnus but, remembering the slain Pallas, slays him instead.2
It is interesting that the first literary work ever published in the modern Ukrainian language was a 1798 epic poem entitled, Eneyida, which was parody of Virgil’s classic story. This epic poem was written by Ivan Petrovych Kotlyarevsky (1769-1838), who is considered the first modern Ukrainian author. In Kotlyarevsky’s poem, the main characters are no longer Trojans, but Zaporozhian Cossacks.3 These men had a profound impact upon Ukrainian history prior to being disbanded in 1775. It seems only fitting that a Ukrainian author would choose such a group of men for his parody. They were as meaningful to his culture as Aeneus was to the Greek speaking world.
An example of an American parody is the novel, The Wind Done Gone (2001) by Alice Randall. This novel is based upon Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 classic novel, Gone with the Wind, but is written from the standpoint of Scarlett O’Hara’s slaves. This is a very interesting approach to addressing the issue of slavery during the Civil War.
Ms. Randall wrote a book based upon a novel which went on to become an Academy Award winning film (1939) and gave a voice to those who would have been nameless, faceless people in their own time period. In fact, since they were slaves, they would not have been considered people, but property.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Ukrainian language is the fact that it exists at all in the modern world. It has been banned and discouraged several times by non-Ukrainian regimes, but always maintained its existence somehow, even by using informal methods of keeping the tongue alive, such as songs, folklore, and Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s Eneyida, which was the first book to be published in Ukrainian and has become a classic.
The Ukrainians have seen periods of substantial unrest and the current version of the Ukrainian language reflects the periods of trouble in the country. However, tracing the language back over time has often proved problematic, as until the 18th century, the spoken and written forms of Ukrainian differed immensely from one another. Before the 18th century the contemporary form of Ukrainian was a vernacular language which existed alongside Church Slavonic. It was mostly peasants and the bourgeoisie, who spoke this language, and there was also something of a linguistic hierarchy at the time, as a lot of literature, scientific texts, or any other sort of important writing was being produced in different languages, for example, Greek, Latin, or Polish. This is not to say that Ukrainian was in danger of dying out, for it was still widely spoken in Ukraine, but in terms of a written language, it was overlooked in favor of other tongues.4
The fact that Kotlyarevsky was able to publish his epic poem in the Ukrainian language actually help to maintain this Slavic language and likely served as an inspiration for future authors like Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) who would have been able to read this poem in his native language. The Ukrainian language is still spoken in modern day Ukraine, but it seems to be much more popular in western Ukraine than eastern Ukraine where many people speak Russian.
Parody certainly can be a sincere form of flattery, especially when it is based upon a classic piece of literature. Kotlyarevsky’s Eneyida has become a classic piece of literature and the people of Ukraine own him a debt of gratitude for helping to keep their beautiful language alive for future generations.
End Notes
1) “Parody” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/parody (accessed 6/3/12)
2) “The Aeneid” http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/summary.html (accessed 6/3/12)
3) “Ivan Kotlyarevsky” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Kotlyarevsky (accessed 6/3/12) “The Highest Manifesto Zaporozhian Sich Destruction” http://www.museum-ukraine.org.ua/index.php?go=News&file=print&id=1418 (written 12/14/06, accessed 6/2/12)
4) “The Ukrainian Language” http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/language/about/ukrainian.html (accessed 6/4/12)
Showing posts with label American literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American literature. Show all posts
Monday, June 4, 2012
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Profile of a Cultural Icon
There are certain people who have an impact which lasts long after they are gone. This person is almost synonymous with the culture in which they were raised. I have written articles about several classic Russian authors who would definitely be considered representatives of their culture.
In the United States there are several authors who are considered cultural icons. Men such as Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) [1835-1910] and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) would certainly qualify. Another author who would qualify as a cultural icon was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).
Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809. He was the second of three children. His brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister, Rosalie Poe, would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business. By the age of thirteen, Poe had compiled enough poetry to publish a book, but his headmaster advised Allan against allowing this.
In 1826 Poe left Richmond to attend the University of Virginia, where he excelled in his classes while accumulating considerable debt. The miserly Allan had sent Poe to college with less than a third of the money he needed, and Poe soon took up gambling to raise money to pay his expenses. By the end of his first term Poe was so desperately poor that he burned his furniture to keep warm.
Humiliated by his poverty and furious with Allan for not providing enough funds in the first place, Poe returned to Richmond and visited the home of his fiancée Elmira Royster, only to discover that she had become engaged to another man in Poe’s absence. The heartbroken Poe’s last few months in the Allan mansion were punctuated with increasing hostility towards Allan until Poe finally stormed out of the home in a quixotic quest to become a great poet and to find adventure. He accomplished the first objective by publishing his first book Tamerlane when he was only eighteen, and to achieve the second goal he enlisted in the United States Army. Two years later he heard that Frances Allan, the only mother he had ever known, was dying of tuberculosis and wanted to see him before she died. By the time Poe returned to Richmond she had already been buried. Poe and Allan briefly reconciled, and Allan helped Poe gain an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Before going to West Point, Poe published another volume of poetry. While there, Poe was offended to hear that Allan had remarried without telling him or even inviting him to the ceremony. Poe wrote to Allan detailing all the wrongs Allan had committed against him and threatened to get himself expelled from the academy. After only eight months at West Point Poe was thrown out, but he soon published yet another book.
Broke and alone, Poe turned to Baltimore, his late father’s home, and called upon relatives in the city. One of Poe’s cousins robbed him in the night, but another relative, Poe’s aunt Maria Clemm, became a new mother to him and welcomed him into her home. Clemm’s daughter Virginia first acted as a courier to carry letters to Poe’s lady loves but soon became the object of his desire.
While Poe was in Baltimore, Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, which did, however, provide for an illegitimate child who Allan had never seen. At that point Poe was living in poverty, but had started publishing his short stories, one of which won a contest sponsored by the Saturday Visitor. The connections Poe established through the contest allowed him to publish more stories and to eventually gain an editorial position at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. It was at this magazine that Poe finally found his life’s work as a magazine writer.
Within a year Poe helped make the Messenger the most popular magazine in the south with his sensational stories as well as with his scathing book reviews. Poe soon developed a reputation as a fearless critic who not only attacked an author’s work but also insulted the author and the northern literary establishment. Poe targeted some of the most famous writers in the country. One of his victims was the anthologist and editor Rufus Griswold.
At the age of twenty-seven, Poe brought Maria and Virginia Clemm to Richmond and married his Virginia, who was not yet fourteen. The marriage proved a happy one, and the family is said to have enjoyed singing together at night. Virginia expressed her devotion to her husband in a Valentine poem now in the collection of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and Poe celebrated the joys of married life in his poem “Eulalie.”
Dissatisfied with his low pay and lack of editorial control at the Messenger, Poe moved to New York City. In the wake of the financial crisis known as the “Panic of 1837,” Poe struggled to find magazine work and wrote his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
After a year in New York, Poe moved to Philadelphia in 1838 and wrote for a number of different magazines. He served as editor of Burton’s and then Graham’s magazines while continuing to sell articles to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger and other journals. In spite of his growing fame, Poe was still barely able to make a living. For the publication of his first book of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he was only paid with twenty-five free copies of his book. He would soon become a champion for the cause of higher wages for writers as well as for an international copyright law. To change the face of the magazine industry, he proposed starting his own journal, but he failed to find the necessary funding.
In the face of poverty Poe was still able to find solace at home with his wife and mother-in-law, but tragedy struck in 1842 when Poe’s wife contracted tuberculosis, the disease that had already claimed Poe’s mother, brother, and foster mother.
Always in search of better opportunities, Poe moved to New York again in 1844 and introduced himself to the city by perpetrating a hoax. His “news story” of a balloon trip across the ocean caused a sensation, and the public rushed to read everything about it—until Poe revealed that he had fooled them all.
The January 1845 publication of The Raven made Poe a household name. He was now famous enough to draw large crowds to his lectures, and he was beginning to demand better pay for his work. He published two books that year, and briefly lived his dream of running his own magazine when he bought out the owners of the Broadway Journal. The failure of the venture, his wife’s deteriorating health, and rumors spreading about Poe’s relationship with a married woman, drove him out of the city in 1846. At this time he moved to a tiny cottage in the country. It was there, in the winter of 1847 that Virginia died at the age of twenty-four. Poe was devastated, and was unable to write for months. His critics assumed he would soon be dead. They were right. Poe only lived another two years and spent much of that time traveling from one city to the next giving lectures and finding backers for his latest proposed magazine project to be called The Stylus.
While on lecture tour in Lowell, Massachusetts, Poe met and befriended Nancy Richmond. His idealized and platonic love of her inspired some of his greatest poetry, including “For Annie.” Since she remained married and unattainable, Poe attempted to marry the poetess Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence, but the engagement lasted only about one month. In Richmond he found his first fiancée Elmira Royster Shelton was now a widow, so began to court her again. Before he left Richmond on a trip to Philadelphia he considered himself engaged to her, and her letters from the time imply that she felt the same way. On the way to Philadelphia, Poe stopped in Baltimore and disappeared for five days.
He was found in the bar room of a public house that was being used as a polling place for an election. The magazine editor Joseph Snodgrass sent Poe to Washington College Hospital, where Poe spent the last days of his life far from home and surrounded by strangers. Neither Poe’s mother-in-law nor his fiancée knew what had become of him until they read about it in the newspapers. Poe died on October 7, 1849 at the age of forty. The exact cause of Poe’s death remains a mystery.
Days after Poe’s death, his literary rival Rufus Griswold (1815-1857) wrote a libelous obituary of the author in a misguided attempt at revenge for some of the offensive things Poe had said and written about him. Griswold followed the obituary with a memoir in which he portrayed Poe as a drunken, womanizing madman with no morals and no friends. Griswold’s attacks were meant to cause the public to dismiss Poe and his works, but the biography had exactly the opposite effect and instead drove the sales of Poe’s books higher than they had ever been during the author’s lifetime. Griswold’s distorted image of Poe created the Poe legend that lives to this day while Griswold is only remembered (if at all) as Poe’s first biographer.
Poe is known as “the Father of the Murder Mystery”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), creator of Sherlock Holmes, borrowed heavily from Poe’s writing when giving voice to his famous detective. This is also true of any later author who has written mystery stories. This is a very unique style of writing which Poe was very talented at producing.
Like many geniuses, Poe had his own personality quirks. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make having a relationship difficult. Based upon his biography, he had several difficulties in his relationships, but he was certainly a very talented man. His stories have been read by numerous generations. There have also been parodies made of Poe’s work.
For example, in the US television show “The Munsters” which aired in the 1960s, there was a cuckoo clock in the family’s living room which was actually the home of a raven. Instead of hearing “cuckoo” every hour, the family would hear the raven say, “never more”, which was clearly parodying Poe’s famous story, The Raven.
In the US, we would now refer to such works as “psychological thrillers”. This requires a certain writing style and an author who understands the working of the human mind. The human mind is a very interesting thing to examine and we really do not understand its workings.
What brought about the death of this famous writer? There is much speculation regarding this issue. Theories range from alcoholism to Poe being murdered. The University of Maryland Medical Center actually conducted an investigation into his death. In an analysis almost 147 years after his death, doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center believe that writer Edgar Allan Poe may have died as a result of rabies, not from complications of alcoholism. Poe's medical case was reviewed by R. Michael Benitez, M.D., a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center. His review is published in the September 1996 issue of Maryland Medical Journal.
"No one can say conclusively that Poe died of rabies, since there was no autopsy after his death," says Dr. Benitez, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "However, the historical accounts of Poe's condition in the hospital a few days before his death point to a strong possibility that he had rabies."
Poe was 40 years old when he died on October 7, 1849. He had traveled by train from Richmond, Virginia to Baltimore a few days earlier, on September 28. While in Richmond, he had proposed marriage to a woman who would have become his second wife. (His first wife had died). Poe intended to continue on to Philadelphia to finalize some business when he became ill.
He was discovered lying unconscious on September 28 on a wooden plank outside Ryan's saloon on Lombard St. in Baltimore. He was taken to Washington College Hospital (now Church Hospital).
Historical accounts of his hospitalization indicate that at first he was delirious with tremors and hallucinations; he then slipped into a coma. He emerged from the coma, was calm and lucid, but then lapsed again into a delirious state, became combative, and required restraint. He died on his fourth day in the hospital. According to an account published in the Maryland Historical Magazine in December 1978, the Baltimore Commissioner of Health, Dr. J.F.C. Handel certified that the cause of Poe's death was "congestion of the brain."
In his analysis, Dr. Benitez examined all of the possible causes for delirium, which include trauma, vascular disorders in the brain, neurological problems such as epilepsy, and infections. Alcohol withdrawal is also a potential cause of tremors and delirium, and Poe was known to have abused alcohol and opiate drugs. However, the medical records indicate that Poe had abstained from alcohol for six months before his death, and there was no evidence of alcohol use when he was admitted.
"In addition, it is unusual for patients suffering from alcohol withdrawal to become acutely ill, recover for a brief time, and then worsen and die," says Dr. Benitez, who adds that withdrawal from opiates does not produce the same scenario of symptoms as Poe's illness.
Dr. Benitez says in the final stages of rabies, it is common for people to have periods of confusion that come and go, along with wide swings in pulse rate and other body functions, such as respiration and temperature. All of that occurred for Poe, according to medical records kept by John J. Moran, M.D. who cared for Poe in his final days. In addition, the median length of survival after the onset of serious symptoms is four days, which is exactly the number of days Poe was hospitalized before his death.
Poe's doctor also wrote that while in the hospital, Poe refused alcohol he was offered and drank water only with great difficulty. Dr. Benitez says that seems to be a symptom of hydrophobia, a fear of water, which is a classic sign of rabies.
Dr. Benitez theorizes that Poe may have gotten rabies from being bitten by one of his pets. He was known to have cats and other pets. Although there is no account that Poe had been bitten by an animal, it is interesting that in all the cases of human rabies in the United States from 1977 to 1994, people remembered being bitten in only 27 percent of those cases. In addition, people can have the infection for up to a year without major symptoms.
The Poe case was presented originally to Dr. Benitez as part of a weekly meeting of medical center physicians, called the Clinical Pathologic Conference. It is an exercise in which a complex case is presented without a diagnosis, and physicians discuss how they would determine a patient's condition and course of treatment. Dr. Benitez did not know that the patient in question at this particular conference was Edgar Allan Poe.
The idea to analyze Poe's death came from Philip A. Mackowiak, M.D., professor of medicine and vice-chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
"Poe's death is one of the most mysterious deaths in literary history, and it provided us with an interesting case in which to discuss many principles of medicine," says Dr. Mackowiak, who runs the weekly Clinical Pathologic Conference at the medical center.
Dr. Mackowiak agrees with Dr. Benitez that rabies was the most likely cause of Poe's death, based on the available evidence. He adds, though, that after Poe's death, his doctor went on the lecture circuit and gave varying accounts of the writer's final days. "The account on which Dr. Benitez based his findings was more consistent with rabies than with anything else, but the definitive cause of Poe's death will likely remain a mystery," says Dr. Mackowiak.
Edgar Allan Poe is buried in a cemetery next to Westminster Hall at Fayette and Greene Streets, just one block from the University of Maryland Medical Center.2
It appears that art imitates life. His own death was certainly mysterious. He was an American cultural icon who has become synonymous with murder and mystery and left this world with people asking, “What actually happened to him?” I believe that Poe could not have written a better story than was written by his own life.
End Notes
1) “Poe’s Life” http://www.poemuseum.org/life.php (accessed 6/1/12)
2) “Edgar Allan Poe Mystery” http://www.umm.edu/news/releases/news-releases-17.htm (written 9/24/96, accessed 6/2/12)
In the United States there are several authors who are considered cultural icons. Men such as Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) [1835-1910] and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) would certainly qualify. Another author who would qualify as a cultural icon was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).
Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809. He was the second of three children. His brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister, Rosalie Poe, would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business. By the age of thirteen, Poe had compiled enough poetry to publish a book, but his headmaster advised Allan against allowing this.
In 1826 Poe left Richmond to attend the University of Virginia, where he excelled in his classes while accumulating considerable debt. The miserly Allan had sent Poe to college with less than a third of the money he needed, and Poe soon took up gambling to raise money to pay his expenses. By the end of his first term Poe was so desperately poor that he burned his furniture to keep warm.
Humiliated by his poverty and furious with Allan for not providing enough funds in the first place, Poe returned to Richmond and visited the home of his fiancée Elmira Royster, only to discover that she had become engaged to another man in Poe’s absence. The heartbroken Poe’s last few months in the Allan mansion were punctuated with increasing hostility towards Allan until Poe finally stormed out of the home in a quixotic quest to become a great poet and to find adventure. He accomplished the first objective by publishing his first book Tamerlane when he was only eighteen, and to achieve the second goal he enlisted in the United States Army. Two years later he heard that Frances Allan, the only mother he had ever known, was dying of tuberculosis and wanted to see him before she died. By the time Poe returned to Richmond she had already been buried. Poe and Allan briefly reconciled, and Allan helped Poe gain an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Before going to West Point, Poe published another volume of poetry. While there, Poe was offended to hear that Allan had remarried without telling him or even inviting him to the ceremony. Poe wrote to Allan detailing all the wrongs Allan had committed against him and threatened to get himself expelled from the academy. After only eight months at West Point Poe was thrown out, but he soon published yet another book.
Broke and alone, Poe turned to Baltimore, his late father’s home, and called upon relatives in the city. One of Poe’s cousins robbed him in the night, but another relative, Poe’s aunt Maria Clemm, became a new mother to him and welcomed him into her home. Clemm’s daughter Virginia first acted as a courier to carry letters to Poe’s lady loves but soon became the object of his desire.
While Poe was in Baltimore, Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, which did, however, provide for an illegitimate child who Allan had never seen. At that point Poe was living in poverty, but had started publishing his short stories, one of which won a contest sponsored by the Saturday Visitor. The connections Poe established through the contest allowed him to publish more stories and to eventually gain an editorial position at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. It was at this magazine that Poe finally found his life’s work as a magazine writer.
Within a year Poe helped make the Messenger the most popular magazine in the south with his sensational stories as well as with his scathing book reviews. Poe soon developed a reputation as a fearless critic who not only attacked an author’s work but also insulted the author and the northern literary establishment. Poe targeted some of the most famous writers in the country. One of his victims was the anthologist and editor Rufus Griswold.
At the age of twenty-seven, Poe brought Maria and Virginia Clemm to Richmond and married his Virginia, who was not yet fourteen. The marriage proved a happy one, and the family is said to have enjoyed singing together at night. Virginia expressed her devotion to her husband in a Valentine poem now in the collection of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and Poe celebrated the joys of married life in his poem “Eulalie.”
Dissatisfied with his low pay and lack of editorial control at the Messenger, Poe moved to New York City. In the wake of the financial crisis known as the “Panic of 1837,” Poe struggled to find magazine work and wrote his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
After a year in New York, Poe moved to Philadelphia in 1838 and wrote for a number of different magazines. He served as editor of Burton’s and then Graham’s magazines while continuing to sell articles to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger and other journals. In spite of his growing fame, Poe was still barely able to make a living. For the publication of his first book of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he was only paid with twenty-five free copies of his book. He would soon become a champion for the cause of higher wages for writers as well as for an international copyright law. To change the face of the magazine industry, he proposed starting his own journal, but he failed to find the necessary funding.
In the face of poverty Poe was still able to find solace at home with his wife and mother-in-law, but tragedy struck in 1842 when Poe’s wife contracted tuberculosis, the disease that had already claimed Poe’s mother, brother, and foster mother.
Always in search of better opportunities, Poe moved to New York again in 1844 and introduced himself to the city by perpetrating a hoax. His “news story” of a balloon trip across the ocean caused a sensation, and the public rushed to read everything about it—until Poe revealed that he had fooled them all.
The January 1845 publication of The Raven made Poe a household name. He was now famous enough to draw large crowds to his lectures, and he was beginning to demand better pay for his work. He published two books that year, and briefly lived his dream of running his own magazine when he bought out the owners of the Broadway Journal. The failure of the venture, his wife’s deteriorating health, and rumors spreading about Poe’s relationship with a married woman, drove him out of the city in 1846. At this time he moved to a tiny cottage in the country. It was there, in the winter of 1847 that Virginia died at the age of twenty-four. Poe was devastated, and was unable to write for months. His critics assumed he would soon be dead. They were right. Poe only lived another two years and spent much of that time traveling from one city to the next giving lectures and finding backers for his latest proposed magazine project to be called The Stylus.
While on lecture tour in Lowell, Massachusetts, Poe met and befriended Nancy Richmond. His idealized and platonic love of her inspired some of his greatest poetry, including “For Annie.” Since she remained married and unattainable, Poe attempted to marry the poetess Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence, but the engagement lasted only about one month. In Richmond he found his first fiancée Elmira Royster Shelton was now a widow, so began to court her again. Before he left Richmond on a trip to Philadelphia he considered himself engaged to her, and her letters from the time imply that she felt the same way. On the way to Philadelphia, Poe stopped in Baltimore and disappeared for five days.
He was found in the bar room of a public house that was being used as a polling place for an election. The magazine editor Joseph Snodgrass sent Poe to Washington College Hospital, where Poe spent the last days of his life far from home and surrounded by strangers. Neither Poe’s mother-in-law nor his fiancée knew what had become of him until they read about it in the newspapers. Poe died on October 7, 1849 at the age of forty. The exact cause of Poe’s death remains a mystery.
Days after Poe’s death, his literary rival Rufus Griswold (1815-1857) wrote a libelous obituary of the author in a misguided attempt at revenge for some of the offensive things Poe had said and written about him. Griswold followed the obituary with a memoir in which he portrayed Poe as a drunken, womanizing madman with no morals and no friends. Griswold’s attacks were meant to cause the public to dismiss Poe and his works, but the biography had exactly the opposite effect and instead drove the sales of Poe’s books higher than they had ever been during the author’s lifetime. Griswold’s distorted image of Poe created the Poe legend that lives to this day while Griswold is only remembered (if at all) as Poe’s first biographer.
Poe is known as “the Father of the Murder Mystery”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), creator of Sherlock Holmes, borrowed heavily from Poe’s writing when giving voice to his famous detective. This is also true of any later author who has written mystery stories. This is a very unique style of writing which Poe was very talented at producing.
Like many geniuses, Poe had his own personality quirks. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make having a relationship difficult. Based upon his biography, he had several difficulties in his relationships, but he was certainly a very talented man. His stories have been read by numerous generations. There have also been parodies made of Poe’s work.
For example, in the US television show “The Munsters” which aired in the 1960s, there was a cuckoo clock in the family’s living room which was actually the home of a raven. Instead of hearing “cuckoo” every hour, the family would hear the raven say, “never more”, which was clearly parodying Poe’s famous story, The Raven.
In the US, we would now refer to such works as “psychological thrillers”. This requires a certain writing style and an author who understands the working of the human mind. The human mind is a very interesting thing to examine and we really do not understand its workings.
What brought about the death of this famous writer? There is much speculation regarding this issue. Theories range from alcoholism to Poe being murdered. The University of Maryland Medical Center actually conducted an investigation into his death. In an analysis almost 147 years after his death, doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center believe that writer Edgar Allan Poe may have died as a result of rabies, not from complications of alcoholism. Poe's medical case was reviewed by R. Michael Benitez, M.D., a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center. His review is published in the September 1996 issue of Maryland Medical Journal.
"No one can say conclusively that Poe died of rabies, since there was no autopsy after his death," says Dr. Benitez, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "However, the historical accounts of Poe's condition in the hospital a few days before his death point to a strong possibility that he had rabies."
Poe was 40 years old when he died on October 7, 1849. He had traveled by train from Richmond, Virginia to Baltimore a few days earlier, on September 28. While in Richmond, he had proposed marriage to a woman who would have become his second wife. (His first wife had died). Poe intended to continue on to Philadelphia to finalize some business when he became ill.
He was discovered lying unconscious on September 28 on a wooden plank outside Ryan's saloon on Lombard St. in Baltimore. He was taken to Washington College Hospital (now Church Hospital).
Historical accounts of his hospitalization indicate that at first he was delirious with tremors and hallucinations; he then slipped into a coma. He emerged from the coma, was calm and lucid, but then lapsed again into a delirious state, became combative, and required restraint. He died on his fourth day in the hospital. According to an account published in the Maryland Historical Magazine in December 1978, the Baltimore Commissioner of Health, Dr. J.F.C. Handel certified that the cause of Poe's death was "congestion of the brain."
In his analysis, Dr. Benitez examined all of the possible causes for delirium, which include trauma, vascular disorders in the brain, neurological problems such as epilepsy, and infections. Alcohol withdrawal is also a potential cause of tremors and delirium, and Poe was known to have abused alcohol and opiate drugs. However, the medical records indicate that Poe had abstained from alcohol for six months before his death, and there was no evidence of alcohol use when he was admitted.
"In addition, it is unusual for patients suffering from alcohol withdrawal to become acutely ill, recover for a brief time, and then worsen and die," says Dr. Benitez, who adds that withdrawal from opiates does not produce the same scenario of symptoms as Poe's illness.
Dr. Benitez says in the final stages of rabies, it is common for people to have periods of confusion that come and go, along with wide swings in pulse rate and other body functions, such as respiration and temperature. All of that occurred for Poe, according to medical records kept by John J. Moran, M.D. who cared for Poe in his final days. In addition, the median length of survival after the onset of serious symptoms is four days, which is exactly the number of days Poe was hospitalized before his death.
Poe's doctor also wrote that while in the hospital, Poe refused alcohol he was offered and drank water only with great difficulty. Dr. Benitez says that seems to be a symptom of hydrophobia, a fear of water, which is a classic sign of rabies.
Dr. Benitez theorizes that Poe may have gotten rabies from being bitten by one of his pets. He was known to have cats and other pets. Although there is no account that Poe had been bitten by an animal, it is interesting that in all the cases of human rabies in the United States from 1977 to 1994, people remembered being bitten in only 27 percent of those cases. In addition, people can have the infection for up to a year without major symptoms.
The Poe case was presented originally to Dr. Benitez as part of a weekly meeting of medical center physicians, called the Clinical Pathologic Conference. It is an exercise in which a complex case is presented without a diagnosis, and physicians discuss how they would determine a patient's condition and course of treatment. Dr. Benitez did not know that the patient in question at this particular conference was Edgar Allan Poe.
The idea to analyze Poe's death came from Philip A. Mackowiak, M.D., professor of medicine and vice-chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
"Poe's death is one of the most mysterious deaths in literary history, and it provided us with an interesting case in which to discuss many principles of medicine," says Dr. Mackowiak, who runs the weekly Clinical Pathologic Conference at the medical center.
Dr. Mackowiak agrees with Dr. Benitez that rabies was the most likely cause of Poe's death, based on the available evidence. He adds, though, that after Poe's death, his doctor went on the lecture circuit and gave varying accounts of the writer's final days. "The account on which Dr. Benitez based his findings was more consistent with rabies than with anything else, but the definitive cause of Poe's death will likely remain a mystery," says Dr. Mackowiak.
Edgar Allan Poe is buried in a cemetery next to Westminster Hall at Fayette and Greene Streets, just one block from the University of Maryland Medical Center.2
It appears that art imitates life. His own death was certainly mysterious. He was an American cultural icon who has become synonymous with murder and mystery and left this world with people asking, “What actually happened to him?” I believe that Poe could not have written a better story than was written by his own life.
End Notes
1) “Poe’s Life” http://www.poemuseum.org/life.php (accessed 6/1/12)
2) “Edgar Allan Poe Mystery” http://www.umm.edu/news/releases/news-releases-17.htm (written 9/24/96, accessed 6/2/12)
Saturday, May 12, 2012
The Man Behind the Curtain
One of the most popular US films for both
adults and children is “The Wizard of Oz”.
This 1939 film is an adaption of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz written by
L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) in 1900. The
film is one of the first movies to be filmed in color (a brand new technology
in 1939). The first part of the film was
film in black and white, the majority was filmed in color, and the end of the
film was filmed in black and white.
As a children’s story, the premise is very simple. Kansas farm girl Dorothy Gale lives with her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and three farm hands, Hickory, Hunk, and Zeke. When Miss Almira Gulch is bitten by Dorothy's pet Cairn Terrier, Toto, she gets a sheriff's order and takes him away to be destroyed. He escapes and returns to Dorothy, who, fearing for his life, runs away with him.
Dorothy soon encounters a traveling fortune teller named Professor Marvel, who guesses she has run away and tells her fortune. He convinces her to return home by falsely telling her that Aunt Em has fallen ill from grief. With a tornado fast approaching, she rushes back to the farmhouse, but is unable to join her family in the locked storm cellar. Taking shelter inside the house, she is knocked unconscious by a window frame blown in by the twister.
Dorothy awakens to find the house being carried away by the tornado. After it falls back to earth, she opens the door and finds herself alone in a strange village. Arriving in a floating bubble, Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, informs her that her house landed on and killed the Wicked Witch of the East.
The timid Munchkins come out of hiding to celebrate the Witch's demise by singing "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead". Their celebration is interrupted when the Wicked Witch of the West (Miss Gulch) suddenly appears in a cloud of smoke and tries to claim her dead sister's powerful ruby slippers. However, Glinda magically transfers them onto Dorothy's feet and reminds the Witch of the West that her power does not work in Munchkinland. She promises Dorothy "I'll get you, my pretty...and your little dog, too!" before leaving the same way she arrived. When Dorothy asks how to get back home, Glinda advises her to seek the help of the mysterious Wizard of Oz in the Emerald City, which she can reach by following the Yellow Brick Road, and warns her never to remove the ruby slippers or she will be at the mercy of the Wicked Witch.
On her way to the city, Dorothy meets a Scarecrow (Hickory), a Tin Man (Hunk), and a Cowardly Lion (Zeke), who lament to her that they respectively lack a brain, a heart, and courage. The three decide to accompany her in hopes that the Wizard will also fulfill their desires, although they demonstrate that they already have the qualities they believe they lack: the Scarecrow has several good ideas, the Tin Man is kind and sympathetic, and the Lion, though terrified, is ready to face danger.
After Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion nearly succumb to one of the Witch's traps, the quartet enters the Emerald City and is allowed to see the Wizard, who appears amidst smoke and flames as a disembodied, intimidating head. In a booming voice, he states that he will consider granting their wishes if they bring him the Wicked Witch's broomstick.
They set out for the Witch's castle, but she detects them and dispatches her army of flying monkeys, who carry Dorothy and Toto back to her. When the Witch threatens to drown Toto, Dorothy agrees to give up the ruby slippers, but a shower of sparks prevents their removal. Realizing they can't be removed unless Dorothy dies, the Witch leaves to ponder how to accomplish this.
Toto escapes and leads Dorothy's companions to the castle. After overpowering some of the Winkie guards and disguising themselves in their uniforms, they find and free her. The Witch and the Winkies corner the group on a parapet, where she sets the Scarecrow's arm ablaze with her broomstick. Dorothy throws water on her friend and accidentally splashes the Witch, causing her to melt. The Winkies are delighted, and their captain gives Dorothy the broomstick.
Upon their triumphant return to the Wizard's chamber, Toto opens a curtain, revealing him to be an ordinary man (Professor Marvel) operating a console of wheels and levers while speaking into a microphone. Apologetic, he explains that Dorothy's companions already possess what they have been seeking all along, but bestows upon them tokens of esteem in recognition of their respective virtues. Explaining that he too was born in Kansas, and was brought to Oz by a runaway hot air balloon, he offers to take Dorothy home in the same balloon, leaving the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion in charge of the Emerald City.
As they are about to leave, Toto jumps out of the balloon's basket and Dorothy runs after him. The Wizard, unable to control the balloon, leaves without her. As she despairs of ever getting back home, Glinda appears and tells her that she always had the power to return home, but that she needed to learn for herself that she didn't have to run away to find her heart's desire. She bids her friends goodbye, then follows Glinda's instructions to close her eyes, tap her heels together three times, and keep repeating "There's no place like home".
Dorothy awakens in her bedroom in Kansas, surrounded by family and friends, and tells them of her journey. Although Auntie Em assures her it was all a dream, Dorothy insists it was real, especially since she saw all the people she knows in the Land of Oz, and promises never to run away from home again.1
There are some differences between this film and the original novel. For example, in the novel, Dorothy’s slippers were silver, not ruby. Also, Glinda, the good witch, was actually a collection of three characters in the novel. This film appears on US television annually and has been popular with numerous generations. In fact, I saw this film several times as a child and my nieces also watched this film when they were children. They are now 21 and 20.
While this novel and film can be understood as being a simple children’s story, there is also another dimension to the novel which is actually a social commentary of the time in the US. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of America's favorite pieces of juvenile literature. Children like it because it is a good story, full of fun characters and exciting adventures. Adults--especially those of us in history and related fields--like it because we can read between L. Frank Baum's lines and see various images of the United States at the turn of the century. That has been true since 1964, when American Quarterly published Henry M. Littlefield's "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism." Littlefield described all sorts of hidden meanings and allusions to Gilded Age society in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: the wicked Witch of the East represented eastern industrialists and bankers who controlled the people (the Munchkins); the Scarecrow was the wise but naive western farmer; the Tin Woodman stood for the dehumanized industrial worker; the Cowardly Lion was William Jennings Bryan, Populist presidential candidate in 1896; the Yellow Brick Road, with all its dangers, was the gold standard; Dorothy's silver slippers (in the film they were ruby red, but Baum originally made them silver) represented the Populists' solution to the nation's economic woes ("the free and unlimited coinage of silver"); Emerald City was Washington, D.C.; the Wizard, "a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a facade of Paper Mache and noise, . . . able to be everything to everybody," was any of the Gilded Age presidents.2
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was no longer an innocent fairy tale. According to Littlefield, Baum, a reform-minded Democrat who supported William Jennings Bryan's pro-silver candidacy, wrote the book as a parable of the Populists, an allegory of their failed efforts to reform the nation in 1896. "Baum never allowed the consistency of the allegory to take precedence over the theme of youthful entertainment," Littlefield hedged at one point; "the allegory always remains in a minor key." Still, he concluded that "the relationships and analogies outlined above . . . are far too consistent to be coincidental."3
It was an interesting notion, one which scholars could not leave alone, and they soon began to find additional correspondences between Populism and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Richard Jensen, in a 1971 study of Midwestern politics and culture, devoted two pages to Baum's story. He implicitly qualified Littlefield by pointing out that not all pro-Bryan silverites were Populists. But Jensen then proceeded to add two new points to the standard Littlefield interpretation, finding analogies for Toto and Oz itself: Dorothy's faithful dog represented the tee totaling Prohibitionists, an important part of the silverite coalition, and anyone familiar with the silverites' slogan "16 to 1"--that is, the ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold--would have instantly recognized "Oz" as the abbreviation for "ounce."4
A few years later, literary scholar Brian Attebery wrote that "it is too much to say . . . that The Wizard is a 'Parable on Populism,' but it does share many of the Populist concerns and biases." Like Jensen, Attebery cautioned against an uncritical acceptance of Littlefield; and again like Jensen, he went on to suggest an analogy of his own: "Dorothy, bold, resourceful, leading the men around her toward success, is a juvenile Mary Lease, the Kansas firebrand who told her neighbors to raise less corn and more hell."5
The most extensive treatment of the Littlefield thesis is an article by Hugh Rockoff in the Journal of Political Economy. Rockoff, who saw in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz "a sophisticated commentary on the political and economic debates of the Populist Era," discovered a surprising number of new analogies. The Deadly Poppy Field, where the Cowardly Lion fell asleep and could not move forward, was the anti-imperialism that threatened to make Bryan forget the main issue of silver (note the Oriental connotation of poppies and opium). Once in the Emerald Palace, Dorothy had to pass through seven halls and climb three flights of stairs; seven and three make seventy-three, which stands for the Crime of '73, the congressional act that eliminated the coinage of silver and that proved to all Populists the collusion between congress and bankers. The Wicked Witch of the East was Grover Cleveland; of the West, William McKinley. The enslavement of the yellow Winkies was "a not very well disguised reference to McKinley's decision to deny immediate independence to the Philippines" after the Spanish-American War. The Wizard himself was Mark Hanna, McKinley's campaign manager, although Rockoff noted that "this is one of the few points at which the allegory does not work straightforwardly." About half of Rockoff's article consisted of an economic analysis that justified Bryan and Baum's silver stance.5
While most people in the US would never consider that a children’s novel would have a secondary theme dealing with political issues, this idea is not limited to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1667- 1745) was also believed to have secondary theme based upon social concerns.
Jonathan Swift's ultimate satirical masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, scrutinizes human nature through a misanthropic eye. More directly, it examines the bastardization English society underwent. The brilliant tale depicts the journey of Lemuel Gulliver, an Englishman, and his distorted encounters. Examining the prominent political and social conflicts of England in the eighteenth century, Swift's critical work causes much controversy. Gulliver's travels leads him to places of opposite environments and presents him with different opportunities. Through Gulliver's journey, Swift ridicules Gulliver as an individual character, and also as a product of England's social practices.
First, Gulliver travels to Lilliput, a land of miniature humans. The culture and society of the Lilliputians is very similar to that of Gulliver's home, England. However, in this undersized environment, Gulliver's outlook is altered.6
This secondary theme is also present in Russian literature. There are some scholars of classic Russian literature who are convinced that Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was not only about the relationship between the Master and Margarita, but was also a social commentary about Soviet politics during the time that Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was the Soviet premier. In my article “Absurdity of Reality”7 I mention that some scholars believe that Woland, the devil in Master and Margarita, was actually a representation of Stalin. The fact that Bulgakov was unable to leave the Soviet Union by order of Joseph Stalin, even though he was very ill, seems to confirm that there is a connection between Stalin and this masterpiece. Bulgakov died at the age of fifty-one, but he could have possibly lived quite a bit longer if he had been able to go to Paris where the rest of his family (except for his third wife who remained with her husband). The medicine that Bulgakov needed was not available in the Soviet Union.
End Notes
As a children’s story, the premise is very simple. Kansas farm girl Dorothy Gale lives with her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and three farm hands, Hickory, Hunk, and Zeke. When Miss Almira Gulch is bitten by Dorothy's pet Cairn Terrier, Toto, she gets a sheriff's order and takes him away to be destroyed. He escapes and returns to Dorothy, who, fearing for his life, runs away with him.
Dorothy soon encounters a traveling fortune teller named Professor Marvel, who guesses she has run away and tells her fortune. He convinces her to return home by falsely telling her that Aunt Em has fallen ill from grief. With a tornado fast approaching, she rushes back to the farmhouse, but is unable to join her family in the locked storm cellar. Taking shelter inside the house, she is knocked unconscious by a window frame blown in by the twister.
Dorothy awakens to find the house being carried away by the tornado. After it falls back to earth, she opens the door and finds herself alone in a strange village. Arriving in a floating bubble, Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, informs her that her house landed on and killed the Wicked Witch of the East.
The timid Munchkins come out of hiding to celebrate the Witch's demise by singing "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead". Their celebration is interrupted when the Wicked Witch of the West (Miss Gulch) suddenly appears in a cloud of smoke and tries to claim her dead sister's powerful ruby slippers. However, Glinda magically transfers them onto Dorothy's feet and reminds the Witch of the West that her power does not work in Munchkinland. She promises Dorothy "I'll get you, my pretty...and your little dog, too!" before leaving the same way she arrived. When Dorothy asks how to get back home, Glinda advises her to seek the help of the mysterious Wizard of Oz in the Emerald City, which she can reach by following the Yellow Brick Road, and warns her never to remove the ruby slippers or she will be at the mercy of the Wicked Witch.
On her way to the city, Dorothy meets a Scarecrow (Hickory), a Tin Man (Hunk), and a Cowardly Lion (Zeke), who lament to her that they respectively lack a brain, a heart, and courage. The three decide to accompany her in hopes that the Wizard will also fulfill their desires, although they demonstrate that they already have the qualities they believe they lack: the Scarecrow has several good ideas, the Tin Man is kind and sympathetic, and the Lion, though terrified, is ready to face danger.
After Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion nearly succumb to one of the Witch's traps, the quartet enters the Emerald City and is allowed to see the Wizard, who appears amidst smoke and flames as a disembodied, intimidating head. In a booming voice, he states that he will consider granting their wishes if they bring him the Wicked Witch's broomstick.
They set out for the Witch's castle, but she detects them and dispatches her army of flying monkeys, who carry Dorothy and Toto back to her. When the Witch threatens to drown Toto, Dorothy agrees to give up the ruby slippers, but a shower of sparks prevents their removal. Realizing they can't be removed unless Dorothy dies, the Witch leaves to ponder how to accomplish this.
Toto escapes and leads Dorothy's companions to the castle. After overpowering some of the Winkie guards and disguising themselves in their uniforms, they find and free her. The Witch and the Winkies corner the group on a parapet, where she sets the Scarecrow's arm ablaze with her broomstick. Dorothy throws water on her friend and accidentally splashes the Witch, causing her to melt. The Winkies are delighted, and their captain gives Dorothy the broomstick.
Upon their triumphant return to the Wizard's chamber, Toto opens a curtain, revealing him to be an ordinary man (Professor Marvel) operating a console of wheels and levers while speaking into a microphone. Apologetic, he explains that Dorothy's companions already possess what they have been seeking all along, but bestows upon them tokens of esteem in recognition of their respective virtues. Explaining that he too was born in Kansas, and was brought to Oz by a runaway hot air balloon, he offers to take Dorothy home in the same balloon, leaving the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion in charge of the Emerald City.
As they are about to leave, Toto jumps out of the balloon's basket and Dorothy runs after him. The Wizard, unable to control the balloon, leaves without her. As she despairs of ever getting back home, Glinda appears and tells her that she always had the power to return home, but that she needed to learn for herself that she didn't have to run away to find her heart's desire. She bids her friends goodbye, then follows Glinda's instructions to close her eyes, tap her heels together three times, and keep repeating "There's no place like home".
Dorothy awakens in her bedroom in Kansas, surrounded by family and friends, and tells them of her journey. Although Auntie Em assures her it was all a dream, Dorothy insists it was real, especially since she saw all the people she knows in the Land of Oz, and promises never to run away from home again.1
There are some differences between this film and the original novel. For example, in the novel, Dorothy’s slippers were silver, not ruby. Also, Glinda, the good witch, was actually a collection of three characters in the novel. This film appears on US television annually and has been popular with numerous generations. In fact, I saw this film several times as a child and my nieces also watched this film when they were children. They are now 21 and 20.
While this novel and film can be understood as being a simple children’s story, there is also another dimension to the novel which is actually a social commentary of the time in the US. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of America's favorite pieces of juvenile literature. Children like it because it is a good story, full of fun characters and exciting adventures. Adults--especially those of us in history and related fields--like it because we can read between L. Frank Baum's lines and see various images of the United States at the turn of the century. That has been true since 1964, when American Quarterly published Henry M. Littlefield's "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism." Littlefield described all sorts of hidden meanings and allusions to Gilded Age society in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: the wicked Witch of the East represented eastern industrialists and bankers who controlled the people (the Munchkins); the Scarecrow was the wise but naive western farmer; the Tin Woodman stood for the dehumanized industrial worker; the Cowardly Lion was William Jennings Bryan, Populist presidential candidate in 1896; the Yellow Brick Road, with all its dangers, was the gold standard; Dorothy's silver slippers (in the film they were ruby red, but Baum originally made them silver) represented the Populists' solution to the nation's economic woes ("the free and unlimited coinage of silver"); Emerald City was Washington, D.C.; the Wizard, "a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a facade of Paper Mache and noise, . . . able to be everything to everybody," was any of the Gilded Age presidents.2
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was no longer an innocent fairy tale. According to Littlefield, Baum, a reform-minded Democrat who supported William Jennings Bryan's pro-silver candidacy, wrote the book as a parable of the Populists, an allegory of their failed efforts to reform the nation in 1896. "Baum never allowed the consistency of the allegory to take precedence over the theme of youthful entertainment," Littlefield hedged at one point; "the allegory always remains in a minor key." Still, he concluded that "the relationships and analogies outlined above . . . are far too consistent to be coincidental."3
It was an interesting notion, one which scholars could not leave alone, and they soon began to find additional correspondences between Populism and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Richard Jensen, in a 1971 study of Midwestern politics and culture, devoted two pages to Baum's story. He implicitly qualified Littlefield by pointing out that not all pro-Bryan silverites were Populists. But Jensen then proceeded to add two new points to the standard Littlefield interpretation, finding analogies for Toto and Oz itself: Dorothy's faithful dog represented the tee totaling Prohibitionists, an important part of the silverite coalition, and anyone familiar with the silverites' slogan "16 to 1"--that is, the ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold--would have instantly recognized "Oz" as the abbreviation for "ounce."4
A few years later, literary scholar Brian Attebery wrote that "it is too much to say . . . that The Wizard is a 'Parable on Populism,' but it does share many of the Populist concerns and biases." Like Jensen, Attebery cautioned against an uncritical acceptance of Littlefield; and again like Jensen, he went on to suggest an analogy of his own: "Dorothy, bold, resourceful, leading the men around her toward success, is a juvenile Mary Lease, the Kansas firebrand who told her neighbors to raise less corn and more hell."5
The most extensive treatment of the Littlefield thesis is an article by Hugh Rockoff in the Journal of Political Economy. Rockoff, who saw in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz "a sophisticated commentary on the political and economic debates of the Populist Era," discovered a surprising number of new analogies. The Deadly Poppy Field, where the Cowardly Lion fell asleep and could not move forward, was the anti-imperialism that threatened to make Bryan forget the main issue of silver (note the Oriental connotation of poppies and opium). Once in the Emerald Palace, Dorothy had to pass through seven halls and climb three flights of stairs; seven and three make seventy-three, which stands for the Crime of '73, the congressional act that eliminated the coinage of silver and that proved to all Populists the collusion between congress and bankers. The Wicked Witch of the East was Grover Cleveland; of the West, William McKinley. The enslavement of the yellow Winkies was "a not very well disguised reference to McKinley's decision to deny immediate independence to the Philippines" after the Spanish-American War. The Wizard himself was Mark Hanna, McKinley's campaign manager, although Rockoff noted that "this is one of the few points at which the allegory does not work straightforwardly." About half of Rockoff's article consisted of an economic analysis that justified Bryan and Baum's silver stance.5
While most people in the US would never consider that a children’s novel would have a secondary theme dealing with political issues, this idea is not limited to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1667- 1745) was also believed to have secondary theme based upon social concerns.
Jonathan Swift's ultimate satirical masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, scrutinizes human nature through a misanthropic eye. More directly, it examines the bastardization English society underwent. The brilliant tale depicts the journey of Lemuel Gulliver, an Englishman, and his distorted encounters. Examining the prominent political and social conflicts of England in the eighteenth century, Swift's critical work causes much controversy. Gulliver's travels leads him to places of opposite environments and presents him with different opportunities. Through Gulliver's journey, Swift ridicules Gulliver as an individual character, and also as a product of England's social practices.
First, Gulliver travels to Lilliput, a land of miniature humans. The culture and society of the Lilliputians is very similar to that of Gulliver's home, England. However, in this undersized environment, Gulliver's outlook is altered.6
This secondary theme is also present in Russian literature. There are some scholars of classic Russian literature who are convinced that Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was not only about the relationship between the Master and Margarita, but was also a social commentary about Soviet politics during the time that Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was the Soviet premier. In my article “Absurdity of Reality”7 I mention that some scholars believe that Woland, the devil in Master and Margarita, was actually a representation of Stalin. The fact that Bulgakov was unable to leave the Soviet Union by order of Joseph Stalin, even though he was very ill, seems to confirm that there is a connection between Stalin and this masterpiece. Bulgakov died at the age of fifty-one, but he could have possibly lived quite a bit longer if he had been able to go to Paris where the rest of his family (except for his third wife who remained with her husband). The medicine that Bulgakov needed was not available in the Soviet Union.
Whether or not
you accept the fact that these novels have a secondary theme, it is an
interesting idea to ponder. This will
allow the author to express his opinion regarding very important issues while,
at the same time, entertaining his readers with an intriguing or entertaining
story. If you have never read these
novels, I recommend that you do so. If
you have read them, this will give you a reason to re-read them and examine
them as social commentaries.
End Notes
1)
“The
Wizard of Oz (1939 film)” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz_(1939_film)
(accessed 5/12/12)
2)
Henry
M. Littlefield "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism," American Quarterly 16 (1964): 47-58
(quotation on 54); L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago,
1900).
3)
Littlefield,
"Parable on Populism," 50, 58.
4)
Richard
Jensen The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896
(Chicago, 1971), 282-83.
5)
Brian
Attebery The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le
Guin (Bloomington, 1980), 86-87.
6)
“Gulliver’s
Travels: An Altered Perspective” http://www.123helpme.com/gullivers-travels-an-altered-perspective-preview.asp?id=168678
(accessed 5/12/12)
7)
“Absurdity
of Reality” http://heideggerm1.blogspot.com/2011/06/absurdity-of-reality.html
(accessed 5/12/12)
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