#mari ness

Thompson not only indulged in far more wordplay and puns than Baum ever had, but also brought a new, often wistful or nostalgic touch to the Oz stores. Her tales typically focus on subtle questions of virtue and unsubtle questions of transformation. And since for Thompson, fairy tales, in Oz or elsewhere, apparently meant princes and princesses, she peppered her books with tiny Ozian kingdoms with delightfully merry names and plenty of princes and princesses. But despite her evident interest in European literature and culture, she was also writing in a world where many aristocracies had very recently come to violent ends. Her tiny kingdoms thus look back to a nostalgic past, and exist under surprisingly deep economic and internal stress. Thompson never outwardly denies the established concept of Oz as fairyland utopia, but her tales hint at the fissures beneath that surface. And apparently unable to conceive of any land, even a magical fairyland, completely without money and trade, she slowly began returning barter, trade and even coins to Oz.

The Tin Woodman admits that the head’s personality is not quite as he remembered it, but it still begs the question: how much of the Tin Woodman is the new tin man, and how much Nick Chopper, his old “meat” body? The encounter suggests that the Tin Woodman has only memories (and even those are suspect); almost nothing else of Nick Chopper is left. On one level, this is somewhat disconcerting, suggesting that personality and soul are created by appearance—in direct contrast to the themes of other books, which focus on how unimportant and deceptive appearances actually are. But on another level, Nick Chopper has not merely changed his face. He has undergone a radical transformation: he no longer eats or sleeps or drinks, and on a not so minor level, he is no longer a humble woodcutter, but the vain and wealthy Emperor of the Winkies.

One warning: many of these stories have decidedly unhappy or at best emotionally ambiguous endings.  [...] That was hardly unknown in the old literary fairy tales—about a third of Madame d’Aulnoy’s stories end tragically, for instance, and Hans Christian Andersen virtually perfected bittersweet or ironic endings. Still, tales written for children tended to have happier endings, and the unhappy endings of these tales were written for adults. I bring this up largely because I can’t help noticing the frequent connection between “adult” stories and “unhappy endings.” Children know and understand sorrow too, and adults can know and understand happiness. A different sort of sorrow, a different sort of happiness, true, but still.

It came from Mari Ness