In his 1843 “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Karl Marx famously considered the relationship between religion and ordinary people’s struggle to survive under capitalism. Faith is “a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”[1] Religion brings relief, in other words, to miserable workers and their families — think of promises of paradise, eternal life, or seeing lost loved ones again, as well as a sense of community, one’s squalid life being God’s will or even noble, and so on. Marx argues that poverty and class exploitation sustain comforting religions, and vice versa, rejecting both: one must fight “a condition that requires illusions.”[2] Society must work toward “real happiness,” not “illusory happiness.”[3] When “man is the highest essence” there exists an “imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved” being; not so with religion.[4] Interestingly, Marx’s ideas come readily to mind while consuming classic works of popular culture full of commentary on both God and oppressed workers: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995). Given that, according to cultural theorists, even fantasy texts “always present a particular image of the world,” this paper argues that these works frame America as a site of struggle between illusory happiness and attempts at real happiness.[5] That is, as a place where worker liberation is inhibited by consoling faith.
Others have interpreted L. Frank Baum’s narrative as an allegory for — or simply influenced by — the populist movement of the late nineteenth century, which saw farmers in the American heartland organize, forming associations and political parties, in response to economic hardships like crop failures, falling prices, and increasing debts. Farmers pushed for policies such as the expanded use of silver for currency, progressive taxation, the right to vote for U.S. senators, and nationalization of some industries. Dorothy’s silver shoes, which are magical and the key to her desired return to the family farm in Kansas, are judged representative and significant, for example.[6]
It is difficult to deny Baum’s interest in the plight of farmers. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz opens with two pages of agrarian misery. Dorothy, Uncle Henry, and Aunt Em live in a one-room home, surrounded by land that is nothing but a “gray mass, with little cracks running through it” from drought.[7] In the same way the sun and wind have ruined the earth, they have also drained Aunt Em, removed “the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also.”[8] She was thin as a rail and “never smiled,” in the same way Uncle Henry “never laughed.”[9] “He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also…stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.”[10] Most disturbing is a possible description of prairie madness: with “not a tree nor a house” to break the monotonous landscape, and seemingly no other people around, Aunt Em “would scream and press her hand upon her heart” when she first heard Dorothy’s laughter, shocked that the little girl “could find anything to laugh at.”[11] This opening is significant, as there is little narrative reason why Aunt Em and Uncle Henry should live such dreadful lives — they play no real role in the tale. A dreary farm may provide a sharper contrast with and highlight the colorful, fantastical land of Oz, but the story would function just as well if Dorothy’s parental figures were happy and their home pleasant — perhaps better, as Dorothy is so determined to get back. Clearly, the author has something important to say — the reason is thematic, ideological. Baum is concerned for farmers of the Midwest, for their living conditions, their broken bodies and minds. Yet Dorothy’s love for and determination to return home suggests there is value there — the farm is a place worth treasuring, perhaps all the more so if it could be made anew, as it is after the tornado.[12]
Baum also seems interested in the abilities of ordinary people. Various observers have reasonably read the scarecrow, the tin woodman, and the cowardly lion as stand-ins for the common man. The characters famously seek, respectively, a brain, a heart, and courage. The scarecrow, being a tool of the farmer, is seen as representative of the farmer. (The tin woodman, losing body parts and perhaps his soul, may be the industrial worker.[13]) There is a moment just after the scarecrow is created when he feels he is “as good a man as anyone.”[14] A crow later tells the scarecrow, who is sad that he has failed in his duties and cannot keep birds away, “If you only had brains in your head you would be as good a man as any of them, and a better man than some of them.”[15] All this feels like rather pointed language, this comparison to other men. It is tempting to read this as the farmer is as good a man as any of them, though some say otherwise. Consider that Dorothy’s companions already possess that which they seek from the wizard. The scarecrow uses logical thinking to help the group cross a chasm safely, the tin woodman is so compassionate he cries over accidentally killing insects, and the lion bravely faces down monstrous beasts.[16] Then, at the end of the tale, the scarecrow is made ruler of Oz, the tin woodsman ruler of the Winkies, and the lion ruler of the beasts of the forest.[17] The supremacy of great wizards and witches comes to a close, and simple folk are crowned. The implication seems to be that we should question stereotypes concerning ordinary people and the self-doubts they create (the scarecrow thought he was an equal to others before the crow suggested he needed brains first, which he took to heart). The common man is not inadequate or inferior, but capable and worthy of determining his own destiny — whether through certain monetary policies and the direct election of senators, the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of the workers’ state, or some similar reading.
We now turn to a second common interpretation of Baum’s text, and move towards synthesis. While the Wizard of Oz could be seen as the politician or capitalist oppressing the masses, his godlike qualities are more obvious. He is “wise,” “powerful,” and “good,” but may also grow “angry” and “destroy” the “dishonest” and “idle”; he is often called “great” and “terrible” in the same breath,[18] reflecting older visions of the Judeo-Christian deity that balanced righteousness with wrath. Oz appears in different forms, as gods often do, to each of the main characters.[19] “Few have ever dared ask to see his face,” the Emerald City gatekeeper tells Dorothy,[20] somewhat reminiscent of biblical declarations that none who look upon the face of God shall live. “I am everywhere,” Oz says plainly, “but to the eyes of common mortals I am invisible.”[21] “O Oz,” Dorothy says reverently.[22] Baum’s entire story could be judged an anti-religious text: four companions bring their desires (prayers, if you will: “I come to you praying that you will put brains in my head,” the scarecrow tells the wizard) to a powerful being who ends up being a man-made invention.[23] The wizard can only give the three locals (unneeded) facsimiles of what they seek, and fails to help Dorothy return to Kansas.[24]
It is here suggested that these interpretations cannot be parsed apart. If the farmer’s conditions are dire, if the characters position the farmer and other workers as intelligent, compassionate, and brave enough to wield power, and if Oz is representative of God, then narratively the workers have overthrown and replaced God. The companions expose the wizard as a fraud and rule in his stead; comforting, illusory religion has been overcome, and the working class has gained the power to control its own destiny, improving its conditions, pursuing real happiness in the here and now. The worker will now, to quote Marx, “think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”[25] Man, not God, is the center of concerns. It is important to note that in the story the falsity is embraced while real suffering occurs. The wizard, despite being mysterious and frightening to the people of Oz, is revered: “the people remembered him lovingly” and “grieved over the loss of the Wonderful Wizard.”[26] (But, the wizard suggests, this is only because the masses did not discover his secret: “they would be vexed with me for having deceived them.”[27]) The people love their illusions. But the god figure is powerless to stop characters who are better stand-ins for capitalist oppressors, such as the Wicked Witch of the East, who “held all the Munchkins in bondage for many years, making them slave for her day and night.”[28] Dorothy must (accidentally) dispose of the evil witches.[29] The oppressed creatures love their god, but will receive no help in improving their circumstances from fictions. Their devotion sustains wizard rule and by extension a brutal status quo.
The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz can be read in the same way.[30] In fact, though its setting and consideration shift to a later American period, some class and religious elements are slightly reinforced (as is an Oz-U.S. connection, with characters existing in both realms). True, Dorothy’s caretakers are not as shattered and isolated as Baum’s versions. But the Kansas farm looks weathered by the Dust Bowl and Great Depression alike, and the drab sepia tone reflects the book’s obsession with gray. Ms. Gulch, who will become the Wicked Witch of the West in Dorothy’s dream, owns half the county, more closely tying witches to the ruling class. The subjugated Munchkins have Lollipop Guilds and Lullaby Leagues, reflecting workers’ unions. The wizard gives the scarecrow, tin man, and cowardly lion a college degree, philanthropic testimonial, and medal, saying that in the real world these are given to people with no more brains, heart, or courage than they have — a shot at society’s better-off, a cheer for common folk. Meanwhile, when Dorothy asks the gatekeeper at the Emerald City if he has ever seen the wizard and hears no in reply, she then asks how he knows there is one — a common question concerning faith. The scarecrow is still appointed ruler when Oz departs, to be assisted by the tin man and lion.
Gregory Maguire’s Wicked continues the cultural work of its predecessors. With the wizard, the traditional god character, now cast as an authoritarian (and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, as a freedom fighter, if a morally complex one), there exists even more fertile ground to consider how religion inhibits worker freedom. To begin, the pleasure faith, which is all about fulfilment of base desires, clearly grows from and distracts from human miseries — similar to those of Kansas farmers (who get a nod with a description of Oz as “bankers against farmers and factories against shopkeepers”[31]). Frex, a unionist minister and Elphaba’s father, considers the people of Rush Margins: “Their lives were hard and their hopes few. As the drought dragged on, their traditional unionist faith was eroding,” replaced by “the so-called pleasure faith,” full of “spectacle and violence.”[32] It was all “individual freedom and amusement,” “sorcery,” “charms,” “sound and light displays,” and “hedonists.”[33] But perhaps followers of the pleasure faith and the familiar, monotheistic unionism (as well as tiktokism, Lurlinism, and other religions) are not so different. The atheistic Elphaba wonders:
Do you need religion as, say, the hippos in the Grasslands need the poisonous little parasites within them, to help them digest fiber and pulp? The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn’t an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself — that tired and ironic phrase — the necessary evil? The idea of religion worked for Nessarose, it worked for Frex. There may be no real city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.[34]
The opium of the people, the soul of soulless conditions, the “universal basis of consolation.”[35] For Elphaba, there is something “appealing” about the pagan Lurlinism, with “Lurlina in her fairy chariot, hovering just out of sight in the clouds, ready to swoop down some millennium or other…”[36] Perhaps the vague Unnamed God of unionism needs more “character” to be less “hollow,” bringing greater relief to the people as a more relatable, anthropomorphic fantasy: “Perhaps it’s time to name the Unnamed God, even feebly and in our own wicked image, that we may at least survive under the illusion of an authority that could care for us.”[37] Illusions, Elphaba sees, aid survival and give comfort.
But perhaps they also help maintain domination: the nonreligious Elphaba engages in resistance against the wizard, whereas Nessarose establishes her own unionist “religious tyranny” over Munchkinland and Frex is “feckless” in the face of authoritarianism, “reacting instead of acting, mourning the past and praying for the future instead of stirring up the present.”[38] Indeed, the people of Oz distracting themselves from the harsh realities of life with religion surely benefits the wizard, who rules with an iron fist and is of course responsible for many of these realities — the Quadlings suffer in mines, sentient Animals are stripped of their rights and become beasts of burden, and so on.[39] Faith stunts a coherent response to wretched conditions under a dictator and exploiter. This is suggested when an imprisoned cow tells Elphaba that many Animals tended to “draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labor.”[40] The growing passions and diversions of religion occurred at the same time that oppression crushed workers. We know that the wizard desired the latter; if the former aids the latter, so too would the wizard desire it. In fact, it is easy to interpret the pleasure faith and its tiktok derivative as extensions or outgrowths of the wizard’s presence and will. The wizard himself is a spectacle, a sound and light display. Elphaba makes this connection when the tyrant takes the form of a skeleton: “The Wizard turned itself around, broke off its femurs, and pounded the seat of the throne as if it were a kettledrum. ‘Really, this is getting ridiculous, it’s all pleasure faith showbiz,’ said Elphaba.”[41] Further, Elphaba, likely the wizard’s daughter, was born in the Clock of the Time Dragon, the central pleasure faith artifact.[42] Perhaps the wizard birthed or fed these newer faiths, to turn the gaze of the masses away from his oppressive policies (“Who had engendered this Time Dragon, this fake oracle, this propaganda tool for wickedness,” wondered Frex. “Who…was benefiting?”[43]). Either way, the faiths serve this function.
For the scholar of history or culture, addressing the question of how creators saw and presented their societies has more to do with answering “What is the author interested in?” than demonstrating that a fantasy land like Oz is a neat allegory for the United States itself (even if a good case can be made). After all, one could find authorial, 1970s perspectives on capitalism and exploited workers in Alien without its setting (a ship, space) being a stand-in for a particular place. An allegorical setting is a bonus, but not necessary to do cultural work. All you need is interest, which offers to the consumer a specific image of the world. This paper argued that interest in the plight of ordinary people and how religion both soothes and prolongs it can be seen in Baum’s original work, the classic film, and Maguire’s reenvisioning. These texts are concerned with the exclusion of the common person from power. But this cannot be merely a general sentiment. This common person is inevitably American not solely thanks to an allegorical setting but, first, because the creators were Americans whose interests were shaped by the American world and whose offerings were made to the American public with its reaction in mind.
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[1] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February 7, 1844. See the introduction. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 10th ed. (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2024), 4.
[6] L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Orinda, CA: SeaWolf Press, 2019), 187-189.
[7] Ibid., 2-3.
[8] Ibid., 3.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., 189-190. See also page 29.
[13] Ibid., 40-41.
[14] Ibid., 31.
[15] Ibid., 31-32.
[16] Ibid., 49, 53-57.
[17] Ibid., 185-187.
[18] Ibid., 84-85, 133.
[19] Ibid., 90-98.
[20] Ibid., 85.
[21] Ibid., 132.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid., 94, 132-136.
[24] Ibid., 141-145, 149-150.
[25] Marx, “Critique.” See the introduction.
[26] Baum, Wizard of Oz, 150.
[27] Ibid., 148.
[28] Ibid., 12.
[29] Ibid., 12, 112-113.
[30] The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming (1939; Beverly Hills, CA; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).
[31] Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1995), 158.
[32] Ibid., 13.
[33] Ibid., 41.
[34] Ibid., 387.
[35] Marx, “Critique.” See the introduction.
[36] Maguire, Wicked, 388.
[37] Ibid., 387-388.
[38] Ibid., 350, 319.
[39] Ibid., 194, 174, 317.
[40] Ibid., 317.
[41] Ibid., 176.
[42] Ibid., 15-21, 374-375.
[43] Ibid., 12.
