Continuity

[mmcirvin]

Okay, now I'm reading the fourth Oz book, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. The title is somewhat misleading, as they don't actually get to Oz until near the end, when Dorothy finally uses the escape route we were told about in Ozma; most of the story is an adventure in various exceedingly bizarre countries in the interior of the earth.

The interesting thing that happens once they do get there is that Baum attempts, not entirely successfully, to patch up the mangled continuity of the previous books.


In The Wizard of Oz, Oz is said to have been first united by the Wizard (who also had the Emerald City built) and named after his initials.

In The Land of Oz, on the other hand, the history of the place becomes more a sort of Ruritanian adventure. Oz has a pre-existing royal line, and the (offstage) Wizard is described as a rather villainous usurper who schemed in collaboration with the unlicensed witch Mombi to depose the old King.

Ozma seems to continue the Land continuity, but doesn't dwell on it much, since it mostly takes place not in Oz proper but in the neighboring land of Ev and the underground Nome Kingdom.

Dorothy and the Wizard tries to reconcile all this in a conversation between the Wizard and Ozma about three-quarters of the way through. The Wizard is basically a nice guy again, if somewhat unscrupulous. The cargo-cultish veneration of the Wizard on arrival turns out to have been partly due to the coincidence between his initials of O.Z. and the family naming scheme of the old royal line, which was deposed by a conspiracy of the Wicked Witches (including then-Wicked Witch of the North Mombi, who later lost her title) some time before the Wizard arrived. Baum has to simply forget some stuff he wrote earlier (including the name of the last king), but at least he makes a game attempt to make it all make a fairy-tale kind of sense. I suppose he could paper over any remaining inconsistencies by attributing them to Prof. Nikidik's Wishing Pills.

You might think that none of this matters because kids don't care about this stuff. But actually they do. I suspect that the torrent of letters that Baum mentions in the forewords to all his sequels included a lot of continuity-cop nitpickery.

Comments

[thf2.livejournal.com]

Now that I think about, I vaguely recall reading somewhere that "The Land of Oz" was meant to be about a non-Oz kingdom, and it was a fairly late decision to tie it explicitly into the Oz series. That could explain the continuity problems.

Re: Continuity

[jwgh]

I remember reading all the Oz books multiple times when I was a kid ... critical reading came to me relatively late, so I do wonder a bit whether all of them would match my fond memories if I read them again now. I wonder if they're still at my dad's place somewhere? I'll have to have a look this summer ... must! read! more! books!

Once you've read all the Oz books you can try to track down 'The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People', also by Baum, which I believe was written before the first Oz book but which has similar sorts of stories (no visitors from non-magical lands, though). I believe one of the Oz books includes a visit to Mo, so I guess Baum decided they were part of the same universe at some point along the line.

Re: Continuity

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think Project Gutenberg has that one, too.