I’m With the Witch. Kill Dorothy.

I read THE WIZARD OF OZ last week. I’ve seen the movie a dozen-plus times growing up, watched James Franco’s prequel, even saw THE WIZ on Broadway as a kid, but the time had come to travel to the literary headwaters and experience the source. I bought the complete Frank L. Baum collection of Oz tales for 99 cents on my Kindle.

This book isn’t the MGM musical. All the familiar characters are there: Tin Woodsman, Cowardly Lion, Wicked Witch, etc. They embark on the same quest to Oz. But the path is quite different, through many different lands, with far more challenges. Interestingly enough, in this version, the Great and Powerful tells all four individually that he will give each their wish if they kill Witchy Poo. It’s assigned as a solo task. They decide to collaborate on their own.

This is a children’s story, written at the turn of the 20^th Century, and it reads that way. No casting stones on that account. In my head, I imagined reading it aloud to the right age group of kids, and I’m certain that it would still work.

It’s Dorothy who doesn’t. A more passive and undeserving character would be hard to come by. Her killing of the Wicked Witch of the East is accidental. She pulls the Scarecrow from his post, oils the Tin Woodsman to life, and, well, humiliates the poor Lion with a swat on the nose. But past these self-serving actions, she adds no value to the group, takes almost no action at all until she waters the Wicked Witch to death. The Woodsman makes quick work of some attacking trees, the Scarecrow defends Dorothy and Toto from a murder of crows, the Lion kills an enormous spider. Dorothy? Nada. She demands food and shelter from any convenient house they pass, makes sure to wash her face every day, and spends so much time in the background during action scenes that you wonder why the Lion was the one deemed cowardly. When the Wizard of Oz tells her that she has to kill the Wicked Witch to earn a ride home, she pouts and cries, as if the ruler of the Emerald City owes her transportation just for the asking. And how does she return home in the end? Just wish for it. No wonder Auntie Em shut the storm cellar door with little Dot on the outside.

My critique group took me to task for this same error in my manuscript for Q ISLAND. I let a main character be the consistent recipient of rescue. My painfully honest Beta readers hated her, just as I was ready for the attacking trees to rip off Dorothy’s arms, because neither character had earned our sympathy. They need to try, and especially try and fail, for the reader to root for them to win. If a character doesn’t make some kind of effort, the reader sure isn’t going to.

Baum does reward the three real heroes. The Scarecrow replaces the balloon-hijacked Wizard. The Lion gets to succeed a dead lion as King of the Beasts in a section of the forest. The Woodsman is acclaimed leader of the Winkies once their enslavement under the Wicked Witch ends.

Now that I write that, all the folks in Oz look like they prefer some sort of totalitarian state to self-rule. I wonder if these three transitions will work about as well as Vladimir Putin taking the wheel from Boris Yeltsin?

Time to hit the rest of those Oz books.