Published in 1904, the big reveal-the-end of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz, is that the protagonist (a rather dickish young boy appropriately named Tip) is in fact the erstwhile Princess Ozma of Oz, having been magically transformed into a boy as an infant. According to some curmudgeon on Wikipedia:
“The detail of Tip/Ozma’s sex change, which can raise a range of psychological speculations in modern readers, made perfect sense in terms of early twentieth-century stage practice, since the juvenile male role of Tip would have been played by an actress as a matter of course.”
In other words, quit with your newfangled psychological speculations, you darned modern readers you! Get off my lawn! The thing is, they’re probably not too far off about the theatrical angle. According to Baum’s preface, it was the success of the stage version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—not necessarily the success of the book itself, nor any unanswered questions—which lead him to cash in with an equally adaptable sequel. The Jurassic Park / Lost World Effect, if you will. He even dedicates the book to the actors who played the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman on stage in an unsuccessful attempt to get them to reprise their roles.
Thus, I’m inclined to believe that the Tip/Ozma switcheroo was mostly a practical decision, though Baum probably also saw it as an opportunity to top himself. Oh, sure, there’s a talking scarecrow and a man made of tin and an anthropomorphic lion, but that’s all so 1901. A boy becoming a girl? Now that’s the most amazing, unpossible, incredible thing ever!
All the same, the reveal and subsequent transformation of Tip back into Ozma—described in glittery detail, complete with an illustration of the newly restored Ozma all tarted up like Jon Benet doing Stevie Nicks—can’t help but resonate with transgendered people. And by resonate, I mean “feel like a kick in the teeth.” In a good way. Reading it now for the first time at thirty-five, a decade after I began my own considerably slower and less glittery transition from male to female, it’s powerful stuff. I can only imagine what it would have been like when I was a child still trying to figure out what these weird feelings meant, and every image of crossing gender was a shock to my system, let alone one so straightforward.
Humans are starved for images of ourselves. We like to see our lives reflected, to identify with the characters on the page or on screen or wherever. We’d prefer them to be positive images, but, hey, beggars and choosers. If you’re a straight white American male, you’re pretty well covered. The farther away you are, the dicier it gets. Even though I was born a white American male and have always liked girls regardless of my own gender status, I never really saw myself in those particular images.
In The Celluloid Closet, Harvey Fierstein says the following: “All the reading I was given to do in school was always heterosexual, every movie I saw was heterosexual, and I had to do this translation, I had to translate it to my life rather than seeing my life.” Me, I can translate like nobody’s business, and a story doesn’t have to have tranny themes or a tranny character for me to enjoy it or get emotionally attached. Hell, I don’t even necessarily trust it when they do. I still haven’t watched Transamerica because I can’t get over my annoyance at the casting of a genetic female as the male-to-female transsexual character. Besides, I know I’m no more the intended audience of that movie than gay men were the intended audience of Brokeback Mountain or Philadelphia.
Anyway, I’ve always been hyper-conscious of such images, especially because most of them are played for laughs or scorn. Just last night I watched the execrable James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, and winced at a scene in which the bad guy is in drag. There’s a zillion other ways the flimsy plot could have progressed—and it was already plenty homophobic thanks to a pair of gay henchmen—but a man dressed as a woman is always funny, right? James Bond would never do something like that because he’s the hero, but humiliating the villain is not only fair game, it’s satisfying. That’s the sort of negative image we’re bombarded with, the constant reinforcement that crossing gender in any way is bad.
Which is why the Tip/Ozma scene is so powerful: it’s not played for laughs, and it’s not meant to belittle the character. Quite the opposite, since he becomes queen of the fucking universe. Sure, Tip is not pleased about it at first, described as “ready to cry” (like a bitch!) as he begs to not have to become a girl. Both the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow tell him that there’s nothing wrong with being a girl, and the Woodman even admits that he thinks girls are nicer than boys—only to be immediately contradicted by the Scarecrow, who downgrades it to “just as nice, anyway.” (Whew! That was close!) Though he consents, Tip is still cranky about the whole thing, which I choose to write off as some kind of Campbellian “hero’s journey” archetype. Don’t they always have to, like, refuse the initial call to adventure or something like that? And, let’s face it, most boys don’t want to become girls.
Except for those who do, who wanted at that age and every age which followed to be a girl rather than a boy, making that scene wish-fulfillment of the highest order. I’m ambivalent about traveling to a magical land with talking scarecrows and flying monkeys and little people who’ve based their municipal government around getting a sugar fix, but a no-fuss no-muss transformation into a beautiful girl, and a princess, no less? Yes, right now, please please please thank you. I doubt L. Frank Baum expected any boys to react that way. The shallow, shrewish portrayal of most women in the book gives me the feeling that the ol’ Baumster was a bit of a misogynist, but—hey, look, I’m already at a thousand words! I guess someone else will have to open that can of worms.
The Tip/Ozma storyline didn’t make it into 1985’s Return to Oz (a seriously great film which is far more faithful to the books than the original movie), but thanks to the magic of YouTube, here’s a nighmarish clip of the big scene from a stage version. If nothing else, it goes to show that some things work better on the page.
Sherilyn Connelly is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work can be found on paper in It’s So You by Seal Press, I Do / I Don’t: Queers on Marriage by Suspect Thoughts, More Five Minute Erotica by Running Press, Visible: A Femmethology, Volume Two by Homofactus Press, publications such as Girlfriends, Instant City, and Morbid Curiosity, and online at sherilynconnelly.com. She curates Bad Movie Night, a weekly show at The Dark Room in San Francisco.
1 • Cat C. said:
May 27th, 2009 at 5:42 pm, permalink
Awesome article, Sherilyn. I think reading that scene is kind of a headtrip for anyone that colors a bit outside the lines (or a lot outside the lines) when it comes to gender.
I think it’s interesting that it’s such a complete transformation, by which I mean that Ozma is as much of a “girly girl” as Tip was a “boy’s boy” – solidly at the two ends of the spectrum. I wonder if the book had been written now if Ozma would have come out with some tomboyish tendencies reminiscent of Tip, or if Tip would have originally retained some of the feminine aspects of Ozma. I wonder if Baum would have felt the need to present Tip/Ozma as such gender absolutes given that today it’s mostly acceptable to be a “tomboy” or a “metrosexual” or some variation in between. It would have been interesting to see kind of a mesh between the characters when Ozma is transformed back.
2 • Mari said:
May 28th, 2009 at 8:55 am, permalink
Great article.
The scene really resonated with me when I was a kid – partly because I started to wonder if I was secretly a boy that had been transformed into a girl, and mostly because I thought that it was utterly awesome that the boy had to become a girl in order to rule the country. I ended up gobbling up every Oz book I could get my hands on – including the later ones not written by Baum.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized how deeply subversive the Oz books were, especially for books written in the late 19th/early 20th century – and how much of an outlier the original Wizard of Oz is compared to the later 13 books, which depict a communist fairy paradise ruled by women, and where male rule is inevitably inept, evil or powerless – and swiftly overthrown by women.
Cat C. – to a degree, some of that “metrosexual” tendency does appear in the Neill illustrations of the later Oz books, where Ozma is always shown in a dress that hangs straight down or flares out behind her, concealing any potential cleavage or other “feminine” qualities. Since Neill does draw other more “feminine” women characters, this may be either a deliberate nod to the “Tip” factor (although I don’t remember Tip getting mentioned much in later books) or merely an attempt to follow Baum’s verbal descriptions of Ozma as a girl, and presumably, a pre-puberty girl. She’s never given a hint of romance in any of the books – although that’s true for most of the characters, and one of the reasons I liked the books when I was a kid was that they didn’t have any of that “stupid kissy stuff.” So that also could just be Baum understanding his nine year old audience.
3 • Sally Roesch Wagner said:
June 1st, 2009 at 2:45 pm, permalink
Great article – an additional thought: consider the possibility that Baum, influenced by his feminist mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was deliberately deconstructing gender — he did it in other writing. The 14 Oz books he wrote are a model of celebrating diversity, empowering women and living with social justice. Check out our website: matildajoslyngage.org
4 • Lynae said:
June 10th, 2009 at 4:25 pm, permalink
Mari–Neill did some drawings of Ozma as a more “adult” woman, more curvy, with a bit of cleavage, but I don’t think Baum liked them very much. Ozma’s supposed to be perpetually prepubescent, a “little girl” throughout all of Baum’s books, so that might explain the androgyny.
This is a great article, and what’s really interesting is how totally “in denial” the Oz fandom (there’s a HUGE fandom that predates “fandom” as we know it–there’s conventions, magazines, and a couple publishing houses dedicated to publishing NOTHING but books set in the Oz universe) is about the subversive elements of their books. I started a Livejournal community in like 2002 for the discussion and appreciation of queerness in Oz (Scarecrow/Tin Man, Dorothy/Ozma, etc.) and I got so many hateful comments and flame e-mails that I finally just shut it down.
I disagree about the misogyny, incidentally. There are a lot of really strong, admirable female characters in the Oz books, and he seems to have always made a point of having a few female heroes (including Dorothy herself) who aren’t really “pretty” but are still smart, sweet, clever, etc. Which is really remarkable for that time period in children’s lit.
5 • Sherilyn Connelly said:
June 15th, 2009 at 1:08 pm, permalink
Oh, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m wrong about Baum being a misogynist (I’m wrong a lot, and hardly ever surprised by it anymore); it’s just the impression I got from the book, which is the only work of his I’ve ever read.
By the way, be sure to click through to the actual YouTube page and revel in the brilliance of the comments. My personal favorite, from
maskedmosher: “dude looks looks like a lady – arosmith.” Wow. That’s a thinker, huh?
6 • voxygen.net » L. Frank Baum and Oz said:
July 12th, 2009 at 2:43 pm, permalink
[...] The character of Ozma always fascinated me the most, though. Ozma, the rightful ruler of Oz, was hidden as a child by the Wizard so that he could claim the throne. He gave Ozma to a witch named Mombi who turned her into a -boy- named Tip. The Marvelous Land of Oz is the story of Tip’s adventures and Ozma’s eventual transformation to girlhood and return to the throne. So, basically, Ozma is a transgendered character. [...]