ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Surrendering Oz. Bonnie Friedman
Читать онлайн.Название Surrendering Oz
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780989753210
Автор произведения Bonnie Friedman
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Toto leaps in Dorothy’s window (the window is one image for the mind here) and she embraces him. Quick, she realizes, “they” will be back: Her own home is in league with “them” (Aunt Em doesn’t even consider challenging the sheriff’s order or explaining her viewpoint to this invisible, commanding man. As with Oz’s diplomas, what’s on paper holds supreme magic). Dorothy heaves her suitcase onto her bed. She will run away.
Frog or dragon figures often begin archetypal stories, according to Joseph Campbell. “The disgusting and rejected frog or dragon of the fairy tale,” he writes, “is representative of that unconscious deep wherein are hoarded all the rejected, unadmitted, unrecognized, unknown, or undeveloped factors, laws, and elements of existence. . . . Those are the nuggets in the gold hoard of the dragon.”
What is Miss Gulch’s specific gold? The powers locked inside Dorothy that are yet unknown. Miss Gulch reveals Dorothy’s home’s fragility, its inability to keep Dorothy content; it is so much whitewash and cardboard before this woman’s roar. “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff. . . .” Miss Gulch sets Dorothy on her way.
At the end of a long, dry road, when Dorothy is merely a lonely figure, vulnerable and fatigued, she happens upon a caravan. It proclaims the presence of the celebrated Professor Marvel. The man is camped under a bridge, like the proverbial gnome. Clad in a threadbare cutaway and frilled shirt, and roasting wieners like a hobo, this fancy gentleman is obviously a fraud. Yet before Dorothy utters hardly a word, he gazes at her and proclaims that she is running away because “They don’t understand you at home. They don’t appreciate you. You want to see other lands. Big cities, big mountains, big oceans.”
“Why, it’s like you could read what’s inside me,” she exclaims.
So her motive isn’t just to save Toto! Or, perhaps her two aims are one: To save her animal spirit, she must go out into the world. She is one of a long tradition of midwesterners who want to come east to college or west to make his fortune—to leave behind the consuming farm.
Discussing why women through history hardly ever wrote, and why, when they did, they rarely achieved the free flight of genius granted men, Virginia Woolf invokes women’s confined experience. Women were kept home, and ignorant. “Anybody may blame me who likes,” she quotes Jane Eyre as saying. And why does Miss Eyre feel justifiably open to blame? Because she climbs up on the roof while the housekeeper makes jellies in order to look past the fields to see the more distant view.
Jane Eyre longs for “a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, town, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen . . . practical experience. . . . It is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say [women] ought to confine themselves to making puddings and embroidery bags.” Suddenly, though, in the midst of these thoughts, Miss Eyre is called back by Grace Poole’s mad laugh. It is like being interrupted, as Dorothy (whose last name also refers to air) so often is at the giddy height of her happiness, by the mocking glee of Elvira Gulch: the cackle of a woman who flew off over the horizon.
“Ah,” remarks the professor when Dorothy is amazed by his grasp of her innermost wishes. “Professor Marvel doesn’t guess. He knows.” He likely recognizes something of himself in her. But, a responsible gate guardian, he contrives to send her home. How?
He will read his crystal ball, he announces. He dons a turban with a central jewel reminiscent of the circular mirror doctors once wore above their eyes to help see inside you. He swipes from inside Dorothy’s basket a photo and looks at it in secret. Here are the girl and her aunt side by side at their front gate, smiling, both wearing fancy ironed dresses. It is a posed picture—a startling photo, and it takes a moment to realize why. In all the scenes until now, not once have we seen Mrs. Gale actually looking happy.
The professor gazes into the cloudy ball. He does what his sign promised he could do. He reads her “Past, Present, and Future in His Crystal.”
He sees an older woman in a polka dot dress, he says. She has a careworn face. She’s crying, he says. “Someone has hurt her. Someone has just about broken her heart.”
“Me?” Dorothy asks.
“Well, it’s someone she loves very much. Someone she’s been very kind to, taken care of in sickness.”
“I had the measles once. She stayed right by me every minute.”
“She’s putting her hand on her heart. What’s this?! She’s dropping down on the bed. Oh, the crystal’s gone down!”
Dorothy leaps up. Her independence, it seems, will kill the woman who sacrificed herself, who allowed her own face to be worn away—who effaced herself—for Dorothy, the woman who literally runs about the farm from chore to chore. Why, she chose to be Dorothy’s mother when she didn’t have to (she’s Aunt Em—Aunt Mother. The use of mother surrogates in fairy tales, of course, allows the more frightening emotions to surface).
How weak Aunt Em suddenly appears! Before now, she’s been a powerhouse. It’s as if, in leaving, Dorothy stole her Toto, her soul. To have the world, apparently, the girl must steal herself from her mother. It’s tantamount to seizing the cornerstone of a house—the other person topples.
Rapunzel flees her mother’s prison tower and becomes an exile. For seven years she and her beau live in a Sahara. Devoid of mother, the world is punitive, desolate as the winter earth is when Persephone keeps her yearly liaison. Iciness is the punishment for sex: for each pomegranate seed the daughter savored, the mother bestows a frozen month.
Luke Skywalker, in comparison, is evicted. His family home is destroyed so that he’ll be forced to assume his manhood duties. He must relinquish home to save the world, like Hamlet or Superman, both of whom experience the destruction of their childhood abodes: they are thrust out to make the world right. Men leave home to restore it. If they don’t depart, sickness and rot result. Even the far more recent Sunset Boulevard, which depicts a young man who lives in what is symbolically the narcissistic mother’s mansion, selling his soul for a gold cigarette case, is about inner decay. The Graduate returns to his childhood home only to be corrupted by the parental femme fatale: he must go forth. Young men must give up home or home will sicken.
The professor reads Dorothy’s fears and knows just when to stop—at the brink of the unthinkable. The crystal’s gone down.
“I thought you were coming with me!” the wandering man says in mock surprise.
“I have to get to her right away,” Dorothy cries as she flees.
And now a curious thing happens. A tornado gusts up. Nobody seems to have predicted this. And the farm now really is in jeopardy. It’s not from Miss Gulch this time or because Dorothy is running away, but because Dorothy is coming back.
How does it feel to have to sacrifice the entire world for a parent’s happiness? Quite a squall is brewing. A twister is coming, in which everything—all objects, all meanings—will get twisted. It whirls across the horizon, a dark ascending coil like the probing mouth of a vacuum cleaner. The horizon is inhaled. Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and the farmhands vanish down into the storm cellar. Dorothy returns to a deserted house. She stamps on the door to the cellar; they won’t open up. They have walked down into the underworld, marched into a grave in the earth. In fact, this too may hold an unconscious wish: If they abandoned her, she would not have to feel guilty about abandoning them.
On the surface, though, Dorothy’s sudden solitude terrifies. Trees wrench up their roots and sail aloft. The front screen door blows off in her hand. “Aunt Em!” she cries. In a twist, her own life is now in peril. The house is what Elvira Gulch implied: balsa and paint, like the court in which Queens and Kings judged Alice in Wonderland only to watch Alice surge bigger and bigger until she declares, “Why you’re just a pack of cards!” while they whirl away.
But Dorothy’s return home might literally cost her her life: The house attacks. The frame of her window