Читать книгу Surrendering Oz - Bonnie Friedman - Страница 11
ОглавлениеI was always stricken, as a child, at the moment when the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz cried, “I’m mellllting!” The shocked anguish on her face, the way she crumpled to the floor—guilt overcame me. As much as I’d hated her before, suddenly, to my surprise, remorse washed over me, and painful sympathy: She was my own mother, dissolving!
Quick, she mustn’t be let die! Prop her up! A terrible mistake must have been made. And the moment I had expected to feel thrilled triumph (as we would have if this were a boy’s story: We’re glad the knight slays the dragon) turned out to be spiked with a baffling sense of betrayal. But wasn’t the girl supposed to win? Wasn’t the Wicked Witch evil? And how had my mother snuck into it all?
The boy’s coming-of-age story is about leaving home to save the world. The girl’s coming-of-age story is about relinquishing the world beyond home. It is about finding a way to sacrifice one’s yearning for the larger world and to be happy about it. At its center is the image of the hungry woman, the desirous, commanding, grasping woman who shows herself, with a blow to our heart, to be the woman we love most.
Or is she?
As a child, I wasn’t sure. Watching the witch dissolve, I knew I’d glimpsed something. I was snagged. Distracted. The story stopped for me right there; I was no longer immersed. Because, wasn’t one meant to vanquish the dragon? Should one have despised that witch so much? Maybe, maybe . . . and a sort of unraveling happened—one had misunderstood, one had got one’s signals crossed, one was too impulsive, eager, girlish. Precisely because it never got looked at—in girls’ stories and in my own life the plot rushed on—that unease remained: a suspicion of one’s flaring impulses. A tendency to go vague. The sort of dubiousness that makes a student shoot her hand up in class, but then, quite slowly, lower it, and afterward trail home unsettled, head bent.
At a certain point in my own life, everything partook of this same confusion. I had gotten something I craved—a writing contract, a broomstick of my own—only to find, to my dismay, that apparently it wasn’t what I’d wanted, after all. I was blocked, locked, grounded. After ten years of writing, suddenly I could not work. Why had my yes turned into a no? How had I learned to be paralyzed? In the absence of any pertinent memory, I found myself obsessed with the great cultural memory of Dorothy in Oz. Besides the moment the witch’s face alters, I kept thinking about the scene in which Dorothy is imprisoned in the witch’s keep. “Auntie Em!” she cries, in Judy Garland’s signature throbbing voice, while Em, in the crystal ball, calls “Dorothy! . . . Where are you? We’re trying to find you!” peering and turning and vanishing into Kansas.
“Oh, don’t go away,” moans Dorothy. But it’s too late. How far the daughter has traveled from her mother—into realms unimaginable, like a girl who leaves home for verboten erotic love and can’t return, or a daughter whose ambitions transport her far from her mother’s values. “Oh, don’t go away!” rang in my mind, and my eyes dripped. Locked in my own situation, I identified, not understanding quite why. It was late November, a month since I’d signed the contract, and still no words came, or rather no words came and stayed. I seemed under a spell. I crossed everything out; nothing was what I meant anymore.
I was living at the time in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, on Pickman Street, a narrow, weathered passageway of saltbox houses near Collins Cove. Each morning I hunched at my keyhole desk as if wedged in a kayak. I set down words, then retracted them, ignoring the visitors who strolled past my first-floor window hauling chaise longues to the curve of beach at the end of the street. Even in winter people sunbathed on the mudflats and dug for crabs in shallows that extended for a mile when the tide was out. One late-November dusk after a particularly frustrating day, a day when more words than ever presented themselves but were always the wrong ones, the ones that didn’t lead where I needed to go, I abandoned my cross-outs and wandered to the shore.
It looked freshly troweled, it was so smooth. A plump woman lay on a pink lawn chair in the gusting wind, beach towels covering her from toes to chin, eyes fixed on a fluffy-paged bestseller. Beside her on the sand sat a dirty-haired child who glanced up at me with the triangular, sullen, pretty, kittenish face of a minx. I liked her instantly, and smiled. She stuck out her tongue. Then, clasping her red metal shovel, she returned to her labors, digging restively in the sand. There was no one else. The shore was so saturated that it shimmered a reflective sky blue, inducing an upside-down sensation. The low sea here sloped deeper by the most infinitesimal degrees; you could walk out to the horizon, and still be wet only to your knees. Across the muck near my sneakers tiny beasts had dragged unwieldy claws, leaving momentary gnomic communications. It seemed to me for an instant as if the girl herself, isolated beside her mother, bored and in a rage, had forced up onto the sands themselves the thwarted message, this scrambled rune.
I sighed, and the solitary woman glanced up blindly and flipped her page, then continued reading, a Picasso goddess pursuing the gossip of Olympus, incurious about meager mortals. The child heaved a heap of dirt over her shoulder. An oily, metallic tang arrived: rife, fulsome, making my gorge rise. I dug my hands deep into my pockets, and walked back to the sidewalk. When I regained it, I turned. A trail of footprints held the precise waffle grid of my sneakers. Within seconds the prints blurred, though, already beginning to be subsumed by the smooth sand, and inducing a panic within me. I walked quickly home.
The next day was even worse. A headache split my skull. After an hour I thrust the page of cross-outs away and grabbed my coat. I would go to Blockbuster Video. Perhaps seeing the Oz story again would help me understand what was wrong. The day was again cold. It came as a relief, as I shut the door behind me, to step into raw, stinging gray air.
I’d been inside too much. Now I trod hastily past the historic federalist brick manses that framed the town green. A neighborhood realtor in a silk scarf and earrings, her face heavily but expertly powdered, coasted by at the wheel of a Mercedes. Her car seemed not to roll so much as eventually migrate past, bearing clients who gazed steadily out at the museum-like edifices with their hoop-skirt chandeliers and ponderous, tasseled curtains. Soon the streets descended. Far beneath us lay the remnants of the town’s weary commercial district. Here a Greek-temple-front post office presided over a central parking lot, adjacent to which stood a decaying grocery store that sold iceberg lettuce and tough tomatoes packed three to a box under crackly cellophane, and where, in the aisle, I’d once, memorably, seen a pudgy pink man wearing a T-shirt that read: “Is that your face or did your neck throw up?”
A particular flinty population shared the town. They interested me, as they were so at odds with both the showcase element and the sunny, touristic day-trippers. I had no proper context for them—the Bronx didn’t seem to have a precise equivalent. Some of these people (my landlady, a gaunt, quivering woman, among them) often seemed to be seething. Many survived the dark New England hours aided by alcohol. It was not uncommon to see a pallid person rattling a shopping cart piled impressively to the brim with empty beer cans over the cobblestones to the redemption center. Many people had bumper stickers on their old beaters: EXPECT THE RAPTURE. The town, which was becoming ever more discernible to me, had at least four distinct districts—the patrician boulevards lined with the first millionaires’ mansions in America, their existence due to the pirating of British ships and to the whaling trade; the funky weather-beaten wood houses huddled by the sea and now subdivided into picturesque if idiosyncratic apartments such as the one I occupied; the underclass of white townies and Dominicans in rotting, ramshackle multistory dwellings behind the Walgreen’s; and a new, young, burgeoningly healthful business-school element living in spiffy renovated condos, all permeated by a daily influx and outflow of tourists, and all cheek by jowl. I was always glad to have a reason to walk through; the sheer amplitude was heartening, the sense that there were myriad ways one could live. Now, as I walked, something punitive and exacting—something that seemed to hold life itself as the enemy—eased in me.
The Blockbuster was a vast, blue-carpeted space that seemed to have few videos, and favored the very most recent. Still, it did have what I’d come for. I rented it, and bought a packet of stale, brittle, brilliant orange peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers, then began to wander back through the bluish slate streets, munching as I strolled. An optimism took me—simply from holding the movie. A cardinal perched on a picket fence, I noticed, its triangular crest bright in the gray air. A black-and-white cat with a jingling collar crouched down and then slunk into a busted basement window. I smiled. Somehow I’d been recently myopic, gazing into dull gauze, lost in a troublesome middle distance. Now charming particulars glinted out—the yellow beak of the bird, the hunch of the cat. For an instant I felt as if the world itself were the key to a giant, encoded cipher. That cardinal was both itself and a signifier of something else—something that was, somehow, also only itself, the cardinal. You needed to go no further than what was before your eyes. It was all here.
The truth of the world is inherent richness, I felt. There isn’t one right way! I can get where I need to go by myriad paths, myriad sentences—for I suddenly understood that, as soon as I’d received the writing contract, I’d craved to write something truer than I’d written before, something more significant and odd.
This was why my permission had turned to prohibition! There was something more important to me than the book I’d outlined, although I hadn’t quite known it earlier. Once I sold the proposal, though, this more important thing, to my surprise, announced itself and demanded expression. It was a relief now finally to realize this. Here was my problem. I momentarily had the mad sensation that the cat had told it to me, and the cardinal. Tomorrow would be different when I sat down to work.
At this thought, a jolly creaking rose to my ears. It had been accompanying me, I suddenly realized, for quite a way. Companionable. Cheery. There it was. There! It sounded like the rasping meow of a very old cat. It made me want to dance. I moved my leg, and there was the creak. I stopped, and all was silence. Why, it came from the rollers of the cassette! They were loose, and wobbly, and registered each step, as if I were being accompanied by a companion made of jointed plastic. How goofy! How fun! And this hilarious sound kept me, as I strolled up the cobblestones, merry, dear company all the way home, assuring me that I was not alone, that I ought to be of good cheer, and that tomorrow really would be different.
I woke however to an inhospitable world. The streets were glazed. A freezing rain had fallen overnight, and then the temperatures plunged. Icy air seeped in around the old window casings. I tried to write. My sentences shattered. My stiff, cold fingers seemed to be the problem. I shook them until they batted one another. I held them under the hot water but they wouldn’t sufficiently warm. To my dismay, I was still stuck in my writing. In the early afternoon, I let my pen drop. Then I drew the curtains shut, inserted the videotape, and, with a sigh of relief, plumped down to watch The Wizard of Oz.
And the movie did let me see, quite soberly, why I was still transfixed. The clues were everywhere. I hadn’t watched it in twenty years but my mouth uttered key lines along with the characters. The movie’s rhythms were in my body like the pulse of a song that’s on the radio so low you don’t notice it, yet your feet tap to its beat and you are nodding your head.
Dorothy is racing up the road, all in a frazzle. “Auntie Em!” she cries. “Uncle Henry!” Her little charge, Toto, has gotten into some natural, even hormonal mischief, chasing Miss Gulch’s cat. Yet the punishment will be dreadfully severe. It just doesn’t seem fair! But Dorothy, a quintessential adolescent, comes off as all elbows and histrionic gasps. She’s only in the way. “Dorothy, please! We’re trying to count!” her aunt chastises. “Don’t bother us now,” says Uncle Henry. They’re gathering up eggs, and Dorothy will make them lose track. Financial troubles threaten the farm; there’s no time for Dorothy’s breathless complaints.
The situation is the same with the rest in this dusty, grim world; the farmhands are all busy or give silly, heedless advice. “You going to let that old Gulch heifer buffalo you? Next time she squawks, walk right up to her and spit in her eye. That’s what I’d do,” advises Zeke.
“Aw, you just won’t listen, that’s all,” says Dorothy. Her sense of what’s crucial is so different from the adults’. Her aunt seems impatient for Dorothy to grow up and realize what matters (counting eggs; maybe it’s time for Dorothy to take notice of her own incipient fertility), to give up childish concerns and take responsibility for the womanliness her body suggests she already possesses. Dorothy wears a pinafore that crams her breasts against her and spills into a frothy white yoke of blouse while every other woman in the movie wears a dress. Dorothy seems to have outgrown her childish frock without noticing, or perhaps she’s installed in a sort of transitional training dress, like the training wheels on a bicycle before a child knows how to maintain her balance, or like a “training bra,” those concoctions of padding and lace meant to train—not one’s breasts, certainly. Well, then, one’s mind into an acceptance of one’s breasts. Or the boys in one’s class into an acceptance of one’s acceptability.
How tired Aunt Em looks. One of the characters describes her face as “careworn,” as if she’ll soon be erased, rubbed away. Perhaps Em would like Dorothy to fill in for her. Instead, the girl frolics, indulging her high spirits. In her exuberance, she tries idly walking the balance beam of the fence top between the animal enclosures, but tumbles right into the hogs’ slovenly pen. The big loud beasts start to trample her, and she shrieks. Finally a man rescues her; the other farmhands rush up. Their circle of warm laughter is descended upon by the irate Em.
Dorothy’s first fall is due to her carefreeness, her animal high spirits (like Toto, she wanders after “trouble”). Dorothy can’t keep her balance; she is not used to the weight of being a woman yet. And her burgeoning, fence-flouting femaleness lands her flat in the mire. The farmhands all come running. She gets them to show concern when Aunt Em won’t. Unrescued, though, wouldn’t she be a “Miss Gulch”?
The word gulch comes from the Middle English word meaning to gulp. It refers to “a deep or precipitous cleft or ravine, especially one occupied by a torrent” and “containing a deposit of gold.” The word gulch also meant “to swallow or devour greedily,” the way a glutton or drunkard might, and the act of “taking a heavy fall.”
A woman who is a gulch is a devouring, appetitive, carnal woman, a torrential woman who will swallow you up into her vacuumous cleft. (She recalls Shakespeare’s weird sisters on the “blasted heath,” that gashed, watery waste whose hags draw their power from arousing taboo cravings.) Kansas’s particular Gulch is an aging spinster, which in the era of the movie meant she occupied a certain realm of death—undesired, sterile and thwarted. And yet, unlike Aunt Em, she pays a lot of attention to Dorothy.
We know from the start that Miss Gulch is a wanting woman—it is her demands that set the world of the movie in motion, that set Dorothy rushing up that road of dust. The very first words of the picture are “She isn’t coming yet, Toto. Did she hurt you, Toto? She tried to, didn’t she?” with Judy Garland’s frightened face staring straight into the camera toward the impending, wrathful She. In fact, the real, scarcely noticed precipitating event is Dorothy’s decision to go past Miss Gulch’s house on the way home. Couldn’t she predict that Toto would once again invade Miss Gulch’s garden? When a farmhand suggests she simply choose a different route home, Dorothy exclaims, “You just don’t understand.” But what exactly doesn’t he get? That Dorothy wants to explore Miss Gulch’s garden?
When we see this appetitive female, she is anything but fat, as we might expect a ravenous “gulch” might be. She flies into the movie on her bicycle (historically the symbol of a liberated woman: the first bikes were made in retooled corset shops, and gave middle-class women freedom of movement; bike makers, in turn, bolted together the first airplanes. Stays to spokes to wings). Miss Gulch is a gnarled skinny vixen stoked with a commanding fury. She trembles with energy. She will be satisfied.
Many of the scenes I was most drawn to, incidentally, are in the black-and-white section. These scenes form the back story that impels all the rest. When I watched them on that wintry afternoon, it was with a feeling of eerie unfamiliarity, as if I were seeing a reality that had been hidden in plain view.
“Ga-yle!” trumpets Miss Gulch, saluting Uncle Henry with his last name in perfunctory military fashion. “I want to see you and your wife right away. It’s about Dorothy.”
Uncle Henry stages a few jokes at Miss Gulch’s expense. She says she’s here because of Dorothy, but she keeps talking about the dog. She’s conflated the two! “Dorothy bit you?” he asks. “She bit her dog?”
He blinks, holding a whitewashing brush. He’s whitewashing the fence (walls and gates and doors of all sorts figure emphatically here). Miss Gulch claims she’s almost lame from where Toto bit her on the leg, but obviously she’s lying—she glances down and her face takes on an almost guilty look. Besides, she’s nowhere near lame; she’s one of the most vigorous, nimble women imaginable. She announces that Toto is “a menace to the community.” From the looks of him, he could hardly hurt a flea—he’s a yappy, bright-eyed terrier who extends a consoling paw when Dorothy feels blue. In fact, he is the only one who pays much loving attention to Dorothy at all—he is her all, her “toto,” her soul, as well as embodying her own instinctive animal spirits.
“He’s really gentle. With gentle people, that is,” Em points out.
Bizarrely, Miss Gulch does seem to have an impulsive shrinking terror of the creature—she drops way back in her chair when he’s near. It’s as if she fears he might recognize her when no one else does (it’s Toto, of course, who later drags the curtain away from the man operating the smoke-and-thunder machine). Dorothy would give up just about everything she has to save him (she proves that when she runs away). Yet Miss Gulch wants to “take him to the sheriff and see that he’s destroyed.” Why? Out of mere vindictiveness?
“Their magic must be very strong or she wouldn’t want them so badly,” the good witch later declares about the wicked one’s desire for the red shoes. Aunt Em also identifies the issue as power. “Just because you own half the county doesn’t mean you have power over the rest of us!” she exclaims.
But Miss Gulch does. She comes equipped with magic: a slip of paper from the sheriff. If they don’t give her the dog, she rants, “I’ll bring a suit that will take your whole farm. There’s a law protecting people from dogs who bite.” How fast the dog has transformed into the farm! No one questions this dream logic.
She claps open her basket (it seems like a torture device), and Aunt Em nods to Uncle Henry to pry the pooch from Dorothy, who stares from Henry to Aunt Em, then runs off weeping. Miss Gulch cycles away in triumph, what she wants contained, for the moment at least, in her woven box.
“Boxes, cases, cupboards, and ovens represent the uterus,” Freud had noted in what now seems an almost cartoonishly reductive analysis and yet one still pertinent in this context. Miss Gulch has Dorothy’s genie, her wild pleasure, caged up for herself. But her lock can’t keep Toto; her basket is not secure. Toto pushes free and gallops back to his rightful mistress.
This is a story about who owns what, about merging and splitting and boundaries, about the right to consolidate or not to consolidate one’s sovereign identity, as archetypal stories about women generally are. Historically disempowered, taught to exercise boundless empathy, women’s drama often enacts the story of the self absconded with—ravished, raped, invaded and annexed. Demeter and Persephone, Hera and Io, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, all are about self-possession and the struggle with a rapacious outside force. The Oz story, too, has to do with the control of one’s own animating spirit.
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 (her own crystal) smashes her on the head. She swoons onto her bed. All at once a peaceful expression comes over her. Her face doubles into an overlay and an underlay; the twin images superimpose over one another, seesaw through each other, brows, noses, smiles nodding up and down, agreeing to something marvelous.
In Dorothy’s delicious dream her house sails high. It is a doll’s house, a toy house, although when it comes down to earth its landing is real enough: It kills. Dorothy’s first act in this new sublimity is to crush a faceless woman. “She’s gone where the gardens grow. Below, below, below,” just like Aunt Em. Of course, it’s an accident. But, as the Wicked Witch drolly observes: “I can cause accidents too, you know.” (Ironically, this is precisely what finishes her off: She incites an accident that dissolves her. Dorothy is capable of violence, apparently, only under the guise of an accident.) The murder implement of this first act? It’s death by house, as if the incarnated burden of housework could be hurled like a thunderbolt.
Yet, ring the bell! This is cause for celebration. The wicked old witch at last is dead! Who is this witch? Well, we can’t quite see yet; nothing is visible but her feet on which gleam the scarlet power slippers.
