The Tin Man is said to be representative of industrial workers. Tin Man said he was a human who was transformed due to a curse placed on him by Wicked Witch of the East. The curse was that with each blow of his axe, a part of his anatomy would be lost. The only assistance available to the Tin Man at this time was a tinsmith, who replaced Tin Man’s severed limbs with the tools of his trade, leading to the total transformation from human to machine. In time after the transformation, Tin Man rusted into place and was abandoned. That is, until he was revived.
When did popular literature start expressing that the process of work transformed one into a dehumanized machine? Was witch craft a product of this dehumanization or was it yet another layer of talking about the effects of industry upon man without doing so directly – as if to say we are driven to our ends by demons? Or was it something else?
Could it be that spirituality in this moral play was hidden and disguised as witch craft? And what of this transformation of everything except Tin Man’s absent heart? Could it be that Tin Man was a mockery of Nietzsche’s Over man and of capitalism at the same time? And an even worse implication is that his heart was ultimately replaced by a ticking clock. Does this mean that our sense of spirituality is like Newtonian physics, only a mechanical process which keeps time but which slowly runs down?
Another view of Tin Man was that he represents the will of technological mankind, which cannot endure the test of time without passion. This too implies that passion is a mechanical process. Is it really the effect of time or merely of life in the industrial age that causes ones sense of passion to fade? Could it be that by the curse which caused him to change, Tin Man has gone so very far from his origins that all he has left is a fabricated image of what he once were? Is this fabricated image representative of the beginning of materialism? Is Tin Man really any different that anyone else?
Or is it all a mere bleak and meaningless fantasy? What is it that made this story so popular and enduring?
