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Surrendering Oz. Bonnie Friedman
Читать онлайн.Название Surrendering Oz
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780989753210
Автор произведения Bonnie Friedman
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
The situation is the same with the rest in this dusty, grim world; the farmhands are all busy or give silly, heedless advice. “You going to let that old Gulch heifer buffalo you? Next time she squawks, walk right up to her and spit in her eye. That’s what I’d do,” advises Zeke.
“Aw, you just won’t listen, that’s all,” says Dorothy. Her sense of what’s crucial is so different from the adults’. Her aunt seems impatient for Dorothy to grow up and realize what matters (counting eggs; maybe it’s time for Dorothy to take notice of her own incipient fertility), to give up childish concerns and take responsibility for the womanliness her body suggests she already possesses. Dorothy wears a pinafore that crams her breasts against her and spills into a frothy white yoke of blouse while every other woman in the movie wears a dress. Dorothy seems to have outgrown her childish frock without noticing, or perhaps she’s installed in a sort of transitional training dress, like the training wheels on a bicycle before a child knows how to maintain her balance, or like a “training bra,” those concoctions of padding and lace meant to train—not one’s breasts, certainly. Well, then, one’s mind into an acceptance of one’s breasts. Or the boys in one’s class into an acceptance of one’s acceptability.
How tired Aunt Em looks. One of the characters describes her face as “careworn,” as if she’ll soon be erased, rubbed away. Perhaps Em would like Dorothy to fill in for her. Instead, the girl frolics, indulging her high spirits. In her exuberance, she tries idly walking the balance beam of the fence top between the animal enclosures, but tumbles right into the hogs’ slovenly pen. The big loud beasts start to trample her, and she shrieks. Finally a man rescues her; the other farmhands rush up. Their circle of warm laughter is descended upon by the irate Em.
Dorothy’s first fall is due to her carefreeness, her animal high spirits (like Toto, she wanders after “trouble”). Dorothy can’t keep her balance; she is not used to the weight of being a woman yet. And her burgeoning, fence-flouting femaleness lands her flat in the mire. The farmhands all come running. She gets them to show concern when Aunt Em won’t. Unrescued, though, wouldn’t she be a “Miss Gulch”?
The word gulch comes from the Middle English word meaning to gulp. It refers to “a deep or precipitous cleft or ravine, especially one occupied by a torrent” and “containing a deposit of gold.” The word gulch also meant “to swallow or devour greedily,” the way a glutton or drunkard might, and the act of “taking a heavy fall.”
A woman who is a gulch is a devouring, appetitive, carnal woman, a torrential woman who will swallow you up into her vacuumous cleft. (She recalls Shakespeare’s weird sisters on the “blasted heath,” that gashed, watery waste whose hags draw their power from arousing taboo cravings.) Kansas’s particular Gulch is an aging spinster, which in the era of the movie meant she occupied a certain realm of death—undesired, sterile and thwarted. And yet, unlike Aunt Em, she pays a lot of attention to Dorothy.
We know from the start that Miss Gulch is a wanting woman—it is her demands that set the world of the movie in motion, that set Dorothy rushing up that road of dust. The very first words of the picture are “She isn’t coming yet, Toto. Did she hurt you, Toto? She tried to, didn’t she?” with Judy Garland’s frightened face staring straight into the camera toward the impending, wrathful She. In fact, the real, scarcely noticed precipitating event is Dorothy’s decision to go past Miss Gulch’s house on the way home. Couldn’t she predict that Toto would once again invade Miss Gulch’s garden? When a farmhand suggests she simply choose a different route home, Dorothy exclaims, “You just don’t understand.” But what exactly doesn’t he get? That Dorothy wants to explore Miss Gulch’s garden?
When we see this appetitive female, she is anything but fat, as we might expect a ravenous “gulch” might be. She flies into the movie on her bicycle (historically the symbol of a liberated woman: the first bikes were made in retooled corset shops, and gave middle-class women freedom of movement; bike makers, in turn, bolted together the first airplanes. Stays to spokes to wings). Miss Gulch is a gnarled skinny vixen stoked with a commanding fury. She trembles with energy. She will be satisfied.
Many of the scenes I was most drawn to, incidentally, are in the black-and-white section. These scenes form the back story that impels all the rest. When I watched them on that wintry afternoon, it was with a feeling of eerie unfamiliarity, as if I were seeing a reality that had been hidden in plain view.
“Ga-yle!” trumpets Miss Gulch, saluting Uncle Henry with his last name in perfunctory military fashion. “I want to see you and your wife right away. It’s about Dorothy.”
Uncle Henry stages a few jokes at Miss Gulch’s expense. She says she’s here because of Dorothy, but she keeps talking about the dog. She’s conflated the two! “Dorothy bit you?” he asks. “She bit her dog?”
He blinks, holding a whitewashing brush. He’s whitewashing the fence (walls and gates and doors of all sorts figure emphatically here). Miss Gulch claims she’s almost lame from where Toto bit her on the leg, but obviously she’s lying—she glances down and her face takes on an almost guilty look. Besides, she’s nowhere near lame; she’s one of the most vigorous, nimble women imaginable. She announces that Toto is “a menace to the community.” From the looks of him, he could hardly hurt a flea—he’s a yappy, bright-eyed terrier who extends a consoling paw when Dorothy feels blue. In fact, he is the only one who pays much loving attention to Dorothy at all—he is her all, her “toto,” her soul, as well as embodying her own instinctive animal spirits.
“He’s really gentle. With gentle people, that is,” Em points out.
Bizarrely, Miss Gulch does seem to have an impulsive shrinking terror of the creature—she drops way back in her chair when he’s near. It’s as if she fears he might recognize her when no one else does (it’s Toto, of course, who later drags the curtain away from the man operating the smoke-and-thunder machine). Dorothy would give up just about everything she has to save him (she proves that when she runs away). Yet Miss Gulch wants to “take him to the sheriff and see that he’s destroyed.” Why? Out of mere vindictiveness?
“Their magic must be very strong or she wouldn’t want them so badly,” the good witch later declares about the wicked one’s desire for the red shoes. Aunt Em also identifies the issue as power. “Just because you own half the county doesn’t mean you have power over the rest of us!” she exclaims.
But Miss Gulch does. She comes equipped with magic: a slip of paper from the sheriff. If they don’t give her the dog, she rants, “I’ll bring a suit that will take your whole farm. There’s a law protecting people from dogs who bite.” How fast the dog has transformed into the farm! No one questions this dream logic.
She claps open her basket (it seems like a torture device), and Aunt Em nods to Uncle Henry to pry the pooch from Dorothy, who stares from Henry to Aunt Em, then runs off weeping. Miss Gulch cycles away in triumph, what she wants contained, for the moment at least, in her woven box.
“Boxes, cases, cupboards, and ovens represent the uterus,” Freud had noted in what now seems an almost cartoonishly reductive analysis and yet one still pertinent in this context. Miss Gulch has Dorothy’s genie, her wild pleasure, caged up for herself. But her lock can’t keep Toto; her basket is not secure. Toto pushes free and gallops back to his rightful mistress.
This is a story about who owns what, about merging and splitting and boundaries, about the right to consolidate or not to consolidate one’s sovereign identity, as archetypal stories about women generally are. Historically disempowered, taught to exercise boundless empathy, women’s drama often