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THE WIZARD OF OZ |
The Symbolism of Oz Characters and Images |
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| The Tornado |
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Salman Rushdie draws the connection that Dorothy's last name is "Gale," which is a very strong wind. According to Joey Green's Zen interpretation of The Wizard of Oz, "The cyclone becomes an physical manifestation of Dorothy Gale's inner struggle for self-awareness, the result of the 'gale' winds storming through her psyche."
[1]
According to Daniel Dervin, who analyzes The Wizard of Oz in Freudian terms, suggests that Dorothy witnesses the "primal scene". That is, she walks in on Mother and Father, or in this case Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, having sex. She projects her anxiety about this event onto the real world in the form of a tornado. To Dervin, the tornado is "a remarkably apt representation of the paternal phallus in its swollen, twisting, penetrating, state, which is part of the primal scene."
[2] Yikes! She is carried off to a world of dreams in which she recreates this conflict in more manageable ways. Characters in her real life appear in altered form in her dreamworld of Oz as Dorothy progresses down the path of sexual development. The Wizard is connected to the tornado in that he is a "wind bag", and he sends Dorothy to bring him the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West. In doing this, Dorothy restores the phallus to Father, which indicates her growing sexual knowledge. When the Wizard is revealed as merely human, Dorothy realizes that sex is natural. Dorothy's participation in helping friends achieve their desires, in effect becoming human, symbolically gives birth. Yes, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
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| Notes |
| 1. | | Joey Green, The Zen of Oz: Ten Spiritual Lessons from Over the Rainbow (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1998), p. 28. | | 2. | | Daniel Dervin. "Over the Rainbow and Under the Twister: A Drama of the Girl's Passage through the Phallic Phase," Bulletin of the Meninger Clinic, 42 (1978), pp. 51-57, quoted in Paul Nathanson, Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 63. |
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