I just hate that movie, The Wizard of Oz, with its
simpering characters and slurs on
"Home on the Range" and Oz are the only two things people in
distant parts of the world can identify firmly with
The author of Erewhon was a gentleman
sheep-farmer named Samuel Butler, proprietor of a station called Mesopotamia, in
the foothills of
In Erewhon the people are beautiful and happy, but they have no advanced technology, and everything is backwards. If you get sick they put you in prison, but if you steal, they call a doctor to treat your sickness. The banks conduct worship services, while the colleges discourage rational thought by the students. (Well, maybe not everything is backwards.)
The hero of Erewhon, investigating, finds that long ago, the Erewhonians had a rich and mechanized society, but a reform movement turned them against all technology, and they destroyed their machines.
I'm just about certain that Lyman Baum read Erewhon
before writing Oz and was influenced by it. American reformers of Baum's time
were acquainted with
Anyway, there are just too many things in Oz that recall similar things in Erewhon. Like the hero of Erewhon,
Dorothy leaves a gray, drab place and goes to a land which is beautiful and
puzzling. Dorothy's first encounter with the figurehead of the Wizard reminds
me of an encounter with frightening, but hollow, statues in the
Most of all, though, the books share certain attitudes. Each author invents a strange, absurd land and uses it to poke fun at his own. Samuel Butler hated the pretenses of English society, English universities, and the Church of England. He meant for people to see the absurdities of Erewhon in themselves.
As for Baum, a couple of historians have contended that his whole Oz book
was intended as a satire on the Populist farm movement of the 1890s. The
Scarecrow symbolizes the farmer, the Wizard is President McKinley, and Dorothy,
of course, comes from the most Populist state of them all,
I discussed all this with a Baum scholar, Nancy Tystad
Koupal of the South Dakota State Historical Society.
She says she has no direct evidence that Baum read
Maybe you don't want to know where the Oz story came from, but if this discussion gets someone to skip the movie and read the book, then it's been worth it.