We are all by now familiar with MGM's interpretation of Baum's "kindly philosophy." If at one level the

movie celebrates film's power to enchant and transport us, at another level it exposes the machinery

behind the enchantment as mere humbug and insists that we learn to contain our imaginations and desires.

The movie revises Baum's text most crucially by introducing a dream frame, the conventional device of

allegory that reduces Oz to Kansas's uncanny double and turns Dorothy's adventure into something like a

post-Freudian policing of family relations. Though Judy Garland's Dorothy may remark to Toto, "I have a

feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," the fact is that she has never really left home. Unlike Huck Finn,

Dorothy never quite manages to run away, if only because she has no territory to "light out for." She sets

out to imagine a world "over the rainbow," free from "trouble," work, and the law, but her unconscious

gives her only a nightmare version of her own reality. Just as her companions learn that what they already

have must and will suffice, Dorothy learns to embrace the comfortable enclosure of the whitewashed picket

fence and the domestic role it projects for her. The theme of containment is perversely underlined by the

casting of Garland, then sixteen, in the role of a seven-year-old, infantilized and all too obviously confined by

her costume and character. If her dream seems to betray an awakening sexual interest in the men around her,

it also allows her to reimagine that adolescent desire nostalgically as the simpler relation the child establishes

with her dolls and toys, a relation presented here as more maternal than passionate.

from Stuart Culver, “What Manikins Want: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and

The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows,” Representations 21 (Winter 1988): 99