drmstream[writing]

She’s get­ting car­ried off to the evil witch, cap­tured by her demon mon­keys who were sent out to col­lect the inno­cent intruder.  Look at the Tin Wood­man doff­ing his cap, Dorothy sit­ting at the edge of her seat like a lit­tle girl at the movies, and the winged mon­keys wide-eyed and intent.

Where’s the fear?

There’s ter­ror lurk­ing in the dark edges of The Wiz­ard of Oz: the story begins with death and destruc­tion, and through­out the lit­tle girl is under assault, pro­tected only by a mot­ley, impaired rag­tag of friends and allies.

That’s how art can help chil­dren make sense of life, by mak­ing the ter­rors of the unknown known.  The Broth­ers Grimm knew that.

But what fright­ens in words can scar in images — our imag­i­na­tion man­ages the power of fear­ful images when they are left abstract, spo­ken.  An illus­tra­tion makes the image sep­a­rate from our imag­i­na­tion and struc­tures it into dif­fer­ence.  When the image is ter­ror, and mar­ried to words, it can haunt some­one for ever.

So, when Baum’s illus­tra­tor sat down, he took that first step to dilut­ing the wiz­ardry of the Wiz­ard of Oz, the mod­ern fairy­tale that was loyal to the Broth­ers Grimm.  Maybe an edi­tor told him to take the edge off the scary image.  Maybe he didn’t have the true sense of ter­ror in his fingers.

Dorothy would be stark with ter­ror being car­ried off into the unknown.  A child would under­stand that ter­ror and take com­fort in know­ing that it could be spo­ken, be heard and be tol­er­ated.  Bear­ing fear is a crit­i­cal step to walk­ing con­fi­dently into the uncer­tain future.  And, the only thing that we all share is an uncer­tain future: it’s at the essence of the human condition.