Imaginary Worlds - Mother-in-Law of Oz

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

The Wizard of Oz is deeply ingrained into our culture. While many people can practically recite the 1939 movie, the original source material isn’t as well known. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum was published in 1900. There are a lot of theories as to what inspired Baum – but the answer may be who rather than what. Baum’s mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage was a groundbreaking writer and activist who could’ve been in every high school history textbook if she hadn’t had a falling out with the leaders of the suffrage movement. But her ideas live on in The Land of Oz. I talk with historian Sally Roesch Wagner and UNC-Charlotte professor Dina Massachi about the politics of gender in Gage’s works and Baum’s stories. And I talk with therapist Dr. Gita Dorothy Morena who has a very personal connection to the books. Go to https://hensonshaving.com and enter IMAGINARY at checkout to get 100 free blades with your purchase. Remember to add both the 100-blade pack and the razor for the discount to apply. Try Surfshark risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at Surfshark.deals/imaginary. Enter the promo code IMAGINARY for three extra months for free!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Every year, there's one movie trailer that I know is going to debut during the Super Bowl and I'm really excited for it. This year, it was a teaser trailer for the movie adaptation of Wicked. Don't be afraid. I'm not afraid.

It's the wizard who should be afraid of me. Wicked. The movie is adapted from the musical Wicked, which was adapted from a novel by Gregory Maguire. The story imagines what if the Wicked Witch of the West was a misunderstood and marginalized political renegade. That story isn't true to the original source material. The Wicked Witch of the West is usually a villain. But it may actually reflect the real source material for the Wizard of Oz, the person who inspired a lot of what's in the Oz books. Now, most people know the Wizard of Oz from the 1939 movie with Judy Garland, but it started with a children's book in 1900 by L. Frank Baum. He wrote over a dozen books that take place in Oz.

He also produced silent movies and theatrical shows about Oz. People just connected to this world from day one. But the real wizard behind the curtain, the person who may have sparked this entire franchise, was Baum's mother-in-law. Her name was Matilda Jocelyn Gage. And like the witch in the musical Wicked, Gage was misunderstood and marginalized, a political renegade. And learning about her made me completely rethink the world of Oz. Dina Masachi is an American Studies professor at UNC Charlotte. Matilda Gage is one of the most interesting historical figures

that most people have never heard of. She hung out with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They wrote together. They protested together. They bailed each other out of jail. They were in pretty deep together. Until protested together. They bailed each other out of jail. They were in pretty deep together. Until 1893. Matilda Gage wrote this book, Woman, Church, and State. Anthony and Stanton said she can't go after the church because they would never get the right to vote. And Gage chose to anyway. And that was really one of the major pieces that led to not only them sort of

breaking up, but also Gage being written out of the history books. And so if you Google the Matilda effect, this is now the term we use for when someone has disappeared from history. But Gage kept on fighting. That's how she was raised. Going back to her childhood, her family was part of the abolitionist movement in the Underground Railroad. She advocated for the rights of Native Americans. Sally Roche Wagner is one of the leading experts on Matilda Jocelyn Gage. Susan B. Anthony said about Matilda Jocelyn Gage that Gage had the best legal mind of anyone she had ever known. She also had five children. Her youngest child, Maude, was headstrong, like her mother, and Maude was part of the first generation of women to attend Cornell. Maude is going to finish at Cornell, and then she's talking about going to law school. This is a daughter that is living out Matilda's dream.

But when Maude was in college, she fell in love with L. Frank Baum. This was almost two decades before The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published. Back then, his career prospects didn't look great. He was not in college. He was trying to be an actor. Today, that would be a challenge. People might say politely, do you have a fallback career? But back then, Dina says, This would be like someone running off with a circus performer today, you know, just kind of shocking and not at all what a parent wishes for their child. This is also a century before dual-income families were a regular thing. Maude was going

to drop out of college to have a family with Frank. And we have almost a firsthand account of what happened next. Sally Roche Wagner grew up in Aberdeen, South Dakota. The Baum family lived there for a while. Sally knew Matilda Jocelyn Gage's granddaughter, Matilda Jewel Gage. And this is the story which has been passed down for generations. Maude and Frank were in the Gage family home. Matilda was working in the back parlor. Matilda was working in the back parlor. Maude opens the doors, comes in, closes the doors, presumably,

and tells her mother that she is going to drop out of college and marry an actor, L. Frank Baum. Matilda goes into a rage and hollers, No daughter of mine will marry an itinerant actor. And Maud says, well then, mother, we shall elope. She realizes, looking at her daughter, that she has raised her daughter well. This is a woman who has a mind of her own. And Matilda immediately switches and starts laughing. And the two of them are laughing. And Frank is probably just totally confused. The doors open. Matilda welcomes him into the family.

According to the family lore, Matilda embraced her new son-in-law quickly. But Dita wonders if it may have taken more time. And he had plenty of time to win her over because, after Matilda's husband died, she went to live with Frank and Maude every winter. She saw firsthand that he was a different kind of father and husband. L. Frank Baum believed in sort of nontraditional gender roles. He wrote this into his books quite a lot. And so in many ways, Maud got to, quote unquote, wear the pants in the family more often than certainly I think many of her contemporaries and their marriages would have. Their marriages would have, you know, she was really the one in charge of the finances. She was really the one who took on a lot of the male roles. Maude took control of the family finances because Frank couldn't really do it.

He bankrupted himself more than once. He was not a very practical thinker. And I think he had lots and lots of grandiose ideas with terrible execution. And so he emphatically and decidedly needed someone else to be in charge of the finances. And by all counts, they truly were in love with each other, which also is rather remarkable for the time. But there's one thing that Baum was good at, telling stories. He made up all these tales to entertain his children. Matilda was listening and observing. She's a published author.

She was at that point. She said to her son-in-law, you know, Frank, those stories that you tell your boys, you know, there's a market for those. You need to write them down. We don't know if those early stories were the Wizard of Oz. It's probably more likely he was telling stories that ended up in his book, Mother Goose and Prose. Matilda got to see that book published in 1897, but she didn't live much longer. Six months before her death, she writes to one of her grandsons, Harry. She says, we are more alive in death than ever we were in life.

We come back. She says, death is just a passage. Remember, Sally got a lot of information from Matilda Jocelyn Gage's granddaughter, Matilda Jewel Gage. She was 12 when her grandmother died. She went to the funeral. She said that she walked by the room where Matilda's body was lying in state. Maude was weeping over the coffin and said, Mother, I don't know how I can live without you. Maude went through another loss that year, and it started with a

sense of disappointment. Maude longed for a daughter. Her mother was so important to her, and that female companionship was so important to her. Frank and Maude only had sons. And then Maude became smitten with her newborn niece. Maude wrote to her sister, Dorothy was the most beautiful child I have ever seen. I could have loved her as my own. Yes, the baby's name was Dorothy. She was a beautiful child, and she was not a healthy child.

She lived only, I think, six months. Maude was so traumatized by the death of Dorothy that I think she had to be under doctor's care. Matilda Jewel Gage, one time when we were visiting and I was taping her, she said, turn the tape recorder off because I don't know about this. I don't know that this is true. She said, I sometimes wonder if Uncle Frank named Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz after my sister who died. Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz is one letter away from Dorothy Gage. Gail from The Wizard of Oz is one letter away from Dorothy Gage. The real Dorothy died as a baby.

The character Dorothy is an older child with a strong personality that Sally thinks is a combination of Maude and Matilda. And I thought about Matilda writing that letter to her grandson. We are more alive in death than ever we were in life. Sometimes we come back. Frank dedicates The Wizard of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz to my friend and comrade, Maud Gagebaum. What if Frank released the spirit of Matilda Jocelyn Gage into the world with giving Maude her Dorothy. But the influence of Matilda Jocelyn Gage doesn't stop there. Even though she died before the book came out, posthumously, she continued to have an influence on the Oz books and the way the story developed.

When I go to the supermarket, I often have sticker shock over the price of razor blades. Even after all these years, I'm like, how can these blades cost so much? Well, if you own a Henson razor, it's only about $3 to $5 per year to replace the blades. Henson shaving wants the best razor, not the best razor business. That means no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence. The Henson razor works with standard dual-edge blades to give you an old-school shave with the benefits of high tech. Henson Shaving is a family-owned business, and they're an aerospace parts manufacturer. They've made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars rover. And by using aerospace-grade machines, they make metal razors that extend less than the thickness

of a human hair. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash imaginary to pick the razor for you and use the code imaginary to get two years worth of blades free with your razor. Just make sure you add them to your cart. That's 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-e-v-i-n-g dot com slash imaginary and use the code imaginary. When I would mention to people that I was working on this episode, I was surprised how many of them said to me, did you know the Wizard of Oz is actually about the 1896 presidential election?

The whole story is an allegory for the debate around the gold standard. And when I'd say, yeah, I've heard that theory, a lot of people seem to believe it, but the evidence for it is kind of flimsy. They'd say, oh, no, no, no, it's true. No one mentioned Matilda Jocelyn Gage, which is amazing to me. Now, L. Frank Baum did not share all of her views on progressive issues, but when it came to gender, she seemed to have a big influence on him. And Dina thinks one of the reasons why is because not long after Gage went to live with the Bombs during the winters, Bombs' father died. He sort of lost his North Star in some ways, if you will.

And I think Matilda filled some of those roles for him. And so being able to overcome the stigma of don't marry the actor and be embraced by her, I think really was a goal. I think that she influenced him because she was brilliant and in many ways did the things he hoped to do. And so here is a woman who is traveling the country, giving speeches, writing and having her writing published. I think he really admired her.

And on top of that, he really loves his wife, who clearly admires her mother. And I think that there's a little bit of their love story playing out in being able to carry on Gage's memory. So how does Baum carry on Gage's memory? Dina says we can start with the character of Dorothy. She is, instead of being bound into the home, you know, if you think of Little Women, it all revolves around home and marriage and how they're going to keep the homestead sort of topics.

That is what girl fiction in the 19th century, by and large, was. Baum did not believe in that. Well, what girl fiction in the 19th century by and large was. Baum did not believe in that. Well, what about Alice in Wonderland? Because I mean, that had like a had a girl protagonist and she was not bound to the home and she goes on an adventure and that came out way before Wizard of Oz. So Alice travels alone and she spends a lot of time being confused, a lot of time crying. It is a bit of a novel of manners. And she spends a lot of time trying to figure out the rules and how to interact with these people. And the rules keep changing. Dorothy picks up friends along the way.

And so you have this little girl who's picking up people along the way and acting not just as a traveler and an explorer, but as a leader to the group. She's not lost. She cries very, very little. One of the activities I love to tell my students to do is track how many times Judy Garland cries in the MGM film and compare it to Bombs Oz. They are radically different. And Baum's Dorothy is much younger. Another influence that Gage had on Baum had to do with theosophy. Theosophy is a spiritual practice that combines Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and occultism. Gage became a theosophist several years after Baum came into the family, and then he became an active member years later. Gage used to do seances while visiting the Baums,

and so we know both Maud and L. Frank Baum were there doing seances with her, which echoes a bit of the witchcraft and the interest in witchcraft. But I also think just the kind of crossover between spiritual and supernatural is where we really see that convergence in Wonderful Wizard and the subsequent books. Let's go back to witches, because that is another connection to Gage. Gage was living with the Bombs during the time that she was exiled from the women's movement for criticizing the church in her book, Woman, Church, and State. In that book, she wrote extensively about the way the church had persecuted witches,

who she thought of as early scientists. She names that as the destruction of female power and authority. Again, here's Sally Roche Wagner. The witches, she said, were wise women. They were midwives. They were women who had control of reproduction. But she also is influenced by theosophy. And she, with that sort of Eastern tradition of you don't have good and evil, you have both. You know, it's that balance. And I think that when Frank writes about the good witches and the bad witches, that he's talking about that duality. And so Baum has this balance of good and evil witches. And that idea comes right from Matilda Gage's Woman, Church, and State. So she has a passage where she talks about the balance between white magic and black magic. And that passage is exactly what Baum does with his witches.

There is a balance in his land between the good witches and the evil witches. And Dorothy really inadvertently throws that balance off by destroying a couple of the evil witches. And this gets into kind of where it goes in the subsequent books. Here's where things get really interesting. Here's where things get really interesting. The book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, ends with Scarecrow running the kingdom in place of the wizard. Well, the Scarecrow era turns out to be very short-lived. In the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, a character named General Ginger leads an army of women against Scarecrow.

The women of Oz revolt. They're sick and tired of doing all the work and not being sufficiently appreciated for it. And so they take over Oz and they go up against the Royal Army of Oz, which is an old guy with green whiskers who has an unloaded gun because to have a loaded gun would be unsafe. And so they just, boom, take over Oz and they sit around eating bonbons. There's something interesting going on there. You know, ginger isn't any better roller than this man stuffed with straw. If the story stopped there, we could interpret it as a dig against the suffrage movement. But there's another storyline about a character in Oz named Tip.

The hero is a boy, Tip. He's a boy's boy. By the way, this is a big spoiler from 1904, if you haven't read the book yet. At the end of the book, Tip realizes, understands, is told that he is really a woman. That he is Asma, the rightful ruler of Oz. He has been transformed into a boy by the evil witch Mambi. And he has to choose. Is he going to continue as a boy,

or will he become his authentic self? And he goes, ooh, I don't want to be a girl. And his support system is the tin woodman, the cowardly lion, and the scarecrow. And they say, you know what? Girls are absolutely as good as boys. In fact, maybe they're better. We will love you just the same as a girl. And Tip becomes her authentic self, Ozma. Many people have interpreted Ozma as a transgender character. Dina isn't sure.

She says Baum saw the books as a launching pad for theatrical shows and silent films, so it's possible he was setting up what was called a trouser role, where an actress would play a boy in male clothing. But there is other evidence that Baum was interested in the fluidity of gender. Baum himself played with gender. So he wrote under a bunch of female pen names. And honestly, he was doing it before he started writing books. He wrote this entire column called Our Landlady, where he took on the persona of a boarding house owner and would write about, you know, kind of satirically about the town he

was living in through this female persona. And sometimes it would be a romance novel or something like that. But still, this is fascinating. Baum is already gender bending long before Oz. He continues gender bending throughout Oz. He gender bends with other things that he writes as a woman. I mean, I want you to imagine a late 19th century man writing as a woman. I completely understand why women write as men or write as androgynously as they can. An androgynous name will sell more books. Baum went the other direction completely. And the battle of the sexes continues as the series develops. In the third book, which is called Osma of Oz, Dorothy comes back. And Osma and Dorothy end up overthrowing the Gnome King, who is this evil hoarding capitalist. There's no other way to describe him. He has hoarded all of the gems underneath the ground and doesn't want to share them with anybody and wants everything kind of for himself. And the thing that defeats him is a

chicken egg. So this evil hoarding capitalist is defeated with the ultimate symbol of female fertility. And if that isn't Baum commenting on Gage's work, I don't know what else it is. And as the series continues on by the sixth Oz novel, The Emerald City of Oz, Oz becomes this very clear socialist feminist utopia. Everybody has their needs filled. So Gage's first chapter in Woman, Church, and State, she spends a whole bunch of time documenting all of these different matriarchies that existed previous to what we see as Western culture. And what Baum ends up doing is turning Oz into one of those matriarchies. And you have kind of the Holy Trinity of Glinda, Dorothy, and Ozma running everything.

And anytime anybody gets in trouble, the Holy Trinity of Glinda, Dorothy, and Ozma come along and save the day. I can imagine if Disney adapted these books word for word, social media would flame them for turning Oz woke. In fact, some of the Oz books were banned from libraries going back to the 1920s. But those ideas can't stay repressed. They've become part of our collective unconscious. I'm getting ready to travel abroad soon. Not to the land of Oz, although that would be cool. After a day of sightseeing, I like to unwind in my hotel room and watch shows that aren't available on US streaming services. But you actually don't need to leave home to do that. You can travel the world virtually with a tap of your finger if you have Surfshark.

Surfshark has a great VPN service that basically acts as a shield which hides your IP address. And unlike Dorothy, you don't need to travel by tornado. You can change your location virtually. Surfshark gives you over 100 countries to choose from, so you can keep finding new content on Disney+, Netflix, YouTube, and many other streaming services. It's even good for shopping. Not every deal is available in every location, unless you can virtually be in any location. And if you're in a hotel using public Wi-Fi, and you're worried about going into your bank account, no worries.

Surfshark encrypts your online data and keeps you safe from hackers. Try Surfshark today, totally risk-freefree with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals.imaginary. Enter the promo code IMAGINARY for three extra months free. That's surfshark.deals slash imaginary. Gita Dorothy Marina is a Jungian therapist in California. She's thought a lot about the place that Oz has in our collective unconscious, and she has a very personal connection to the books.

I remember when I was about three years old, my mother, we had all the first edition of a book in a locked cabinet. So she would unlock the cabinet. She took the book out and read me the story. And I was named Dorothy. I was called Dorothy for 34 years because that's what my mother named me. I said something to my mother like, you know, this is all about me. And she said, oh, no, this is just a fantasy story. Then I was probably five or six when we read it again. Again, I was thinking about this story that's all about me. And she said that my great grandfather had written the story. Her great grandfather was L. Frank Baum. Her grandmother was named Dorothy, but she was not Baum's daughter. Remember, he only had sons. One of his sons

married a woman named Dorothy. Their first child was my mother, and they had named her Frances. And then they took the baby to meet the parents, and L. Frank said, oh, no, her name's not Frances. Her name is Osma and gave her a locket with her name engraved on it. So my mother became Osma Frances. L. Frank Baum died when Osma Frances was very young. But Maude lived to be 91. She doted on her granddaughter. And Maude was a cool grandma. My mother was pretty close to Maude. So it was a time when Maude took my mother traveling. She

was a teenager and she had her first drink and she wore pants and, you know, things that were just sort of cutting edge out of the mainstream. So knowing your family legacy, did you read the, as you kept reading the later books, did you also feel a sense of identification once you, once Ozma started showing up in the later books? Oh yeah, of course. I mean, Ozma was the princess of Oz and she was the ruler of my family. And, you know, my mother and I did some, before my mother died, toward the end of her life, we did traveling together and we investigated Baum's life and went to different places where he had lived and went to Wizard of Oz gatherings and club meetings that they had. It was really felt like she was the one who commanded the land. And I was the adventuresome one who went out and met people

and had experiences and we would talk about them. And it really felt like we really did live out Osma and Dorothy. Having the name Dorothy inspired her to be independent. But to be truly independent, she couldn't live in the shadow of Dorothy. She looked for spiritual guidance and found a new name, Gita. I had to get out of the fairy tale and away from that whole sort of experience of being Dorothy and Asma and wrapped into it. I had to find my own self. I felt invisible for who I am underneath that. And as she tried to find out who she was underneath,

she became fascinated by her great-great-grandmother, Matilda Jocelyn Gage. So I found my connection to her was really important and helpful for me to recognize my place in a way. I have a bigger vision than just Oz. It's connected with Matilda. It's connected with bringing the voice of the feminine forward, finding really her call to liberty, her call to freedom for everyone, for anyone who's oppressed. And sort of my way of doing that is to work with the oppression that I see happening in the psyche itself. I mentioned that Gita is a Jungian psychologist. That means she uses talk therapy and other creative ways

to help her patients communicate with their unconscious minds. And in her private practice, she uses something called sand play. She has actual sandboxes in her office for her patients to use when they have trouble describing what they're going through. I have shelves with all kinds of miniatures of anything you can imagine in the world that gives you a chance to express yourself without words. That's one way I work. you a chance to express yourself without words. That's one way I work. And of course, I have Wizard of Oz figures on my shelves, and people will often create yellow brick roads, put figures on the road. As you do this over time, of course, it gives you a chance to tell the story the way you're experiencing it through the imagery. Would you be able to give me some examples,

just without mentioning names or details, of situations where awes would come up, like awes imagery and figures? Well, often, I have a tornado, for example, that's about 10 inches tall. And it gets used in all different kinds of ways when people are feeling really traumatized. They're feeling like their life has been disrupted. I've had people put things in the tornado at times when they feel really swept up in it or they have something that they're dealing with. Dorothy gets used a lot in different ways, you know, not always on a yellow brick road. I remember one where there was a spider coming into the tray and there were different little figures around. And Dorothy was there in that scene, trying to figure out how to deal with the spider. Dorothy in the book is the problem solver. She's

the one that, you know, sees what's not right and gathers together her thinking or her feeling or her courage. I remember one scene where a woman put a scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz in front of a treasure chest and her struggle with how to make sense out of her life and the issues that she was dealing with in her life and needing that thinking function to figure out what to do, that that was really hard for her. So it comes up in all different ways. Yeah. And I think that's so interesting to me because I feel like Oz is part of our collective unconscious. The know, like the iconography of Oz is so deeply embedded in our culture. Why do you think it resonated so well and resonates so much decade after decade, generation after generation? Children see The Wizard of Oz and it's like, bam.

I think it's really a universal story. I think it resonates with people, especially these last hundred years. You know, the turn of the century, around 1900, when the book was written, things were really starting to change in a big way. The world started changing and has been changing more and more rapidly. And I think in a way it's left us feeling very disoriented and very sort of lost a little bit about how do we catch up and how do we adapt to all these things that are happening so fast. And in a way, that's really what happened to Dorothy. She got thrown into a whole different world. It was a very different place that she had to adapt to and figure out how to get along and find a way back home to a place that made sense to her where she felt secure and safe. And I think that's a thing that we're all dealing with in the collective. The world has

changed so fast, it's very confusing. And we want to find where that place is for our own security and our own groundedness and our own connection internally, so that we can relate to each other and feel good about ourselves and what we're doing in the world. And I think The Wizard of Oz speaks to that. So I think Matilda's influence came through Dorothy and then infiltrated through this fairy tale, through the unconscious, into the collective in such a big way. In my conversations with Sally, Dina, and Gita, they all mention at some point that Oz is an American fairy tale. I've heard that before and I've often wondered what it meant. As Gita was talking about change, I started thinking about something that Baum and Gage had in common. They both embraced modernity.

Gage thought the modern world should be more inclusive. We should question old doctrines. Baum was an entrepreneur. He adapted very quickly to new technology in his career and his books. Today, Oz seems retro and quaint, but it was meant to reflect the real world of its time. Pushing for change is very American. Freaking out about change and worrying that it's going too fast is also very American. That's why we have Dorothy to help us navigate the road. You know the one.

That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Dina Masachi, Sally Roche Wagner, and Gita Dorothy Morena. If you want to hear more about L. Frank Baum's career as an entertainer, check out my 2014 episode. My third episode ever was called King Denslow of Oz. It looked at Baum's fraught relationship with his illustrator and collaborator, W. W. Denslow. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.

If you like the show, please give us a shout out on social media or leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. That helps people discover imaginary worlds. The best way to support imaginary worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you can get either free imaginary world stickers, a mug, a T-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also get access to an ad-free version of the show through Patreon, and you can buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.