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Is this an example of exogesis, or isogesis?
Are you trying to discover the author's original intent, or are you trying to cram some sort of meaning, or political agenda into a strory that had no such aim? I've never heard of such symbolism in the Wizard; it may have been the author's intent, but this is the first I've heard of it. Please research and tell me more.
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Great question! My own agenda is only to encourage discussion on the topic. There is a huge amount of study done on this story. As an example, when I was an undergrad it was the subject of 3 consecutive terms of upper division study in the English dept (which i regret that I didn't pursue). The web abounds with scholarly interpretations of nearly every element of the story. Granted some of the stuff out there is rife with personal agenda but the Wizard ties to so many literary, psychological, philosophical, historical, and sociological topics as to be a kind of modest literary nexus.
Here’s some notes for starters
Biography of the L. Frank Baum author, who lived 1856-1919. The wiz was published in 1900.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lfbaum.htm
works & biography of L. Frank Baum
http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Baum/
Baum was a reporter who became a writer of children’s novels. He was knowledgeable of a number of authors and one of his goals was to create modern fairy tales. Remember also that while the Wizard novel was published about 1900 it wasn’t until nearly 40 years (1939) that the musical film story we all know came to be. The film was aimed squarely at post depression USA. Consequently there are some blatantly political statements about FDR and the New Deal being what the film is about. Some even say that Tin Man's heart was a representation of the New Deal. While clearly the great depression was well after the original book, one can’t deny the obvious role of the depression in the story. Look at a timeline of USA expansion and contraction periods (
http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html ) and it’s obvious the reality was part of the Baum’s life. Given that 1889 was the first time the USA produced more Steel than did GB, is it unreasonable to see the heartless Tin Man as a 2 edged symbol of the USA personified?
Baum was active during on of the richest periods in intellectual thought ever. As a couple of examples, for sources in psychology and philosophy, Freud was a contemporary of Baum. They were born the same year, while Nietzsche was born in 1844 and he (Nietzsche) died the year that the Wizard was published. He would have know of Marx as The Communist Manifesto and Das Capital were published in the late 1880s-1890s.
Against this backdrop, some of Baum’s goals were to create new kind of fairy tail. Given that the novel includes references to murder (dead witches), drug use (poppy fields), good and bad magic, and revolves around what in the novel is Dorothy’s dream, how can it be anything other than richly symbolic? In turn the film was a composite of several authors and a musician who had a prominent role in the film’s direction. Draw your own conclusions, but IMO a film that employs talking trees and animals, and hapless wizardry and magic to tell a journey about how lost became is found is almost boundless in symbolism.