need a response to 2 post introduction to fiction week 6
need a response to 2 post introduction to fiction week 6
Christina Gibbs
Number 1
I chose an article by Evan Schwartz titled “The Matriarch Behind the Curtain.”
The article states that his mother-in-law may have been his inspiration for The Wizard of Oz. His mother-in-law was named Matilda Joslyn Gage. She was described as the most radical leader of the women’s rights movement in America. Mrs. Gage was a cofounder of the National Woman Suffrage Association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Mrs. Gage was said to be argumentative and was not happy that her daughter was marrying a man who had an uncertain future as an actor.
Mrs. Gage gave speeches about the persecution of women by the government and churches. She wrote about innocent women being labeled as witches. Frank Baum may have been inspired by her to include witches in the story. Mrs. Gage was labeled satanic by religious leaders and politicians. Baum sympathized with her and regarded her as a mentor.
Baum had a myriad of careers prior to his success with Oz. It was actually his mother-in-law who encouraged him to write down the stories he told to his children. Matilda tried to get Frank to enter a writing contest after 1895, but he would not do it. She encouraged him in a letter, telling him “you are a good writer and I advise you to try.” It was not Matilda died in 1898 that Baum decided to write the stories into the book we now know.
Baum and Matilda did not get off to a good start when he proposed to her daughter Maud in 1882. However, in seventeen years, they certainly learned to respect and admire each other.
Schwartz, Evan I. “The Matriarch behind the Curtain: L. Frank Baum’s Most Surprising Source of Inspiration for The Wizard of Oz May Have Been His Argumentative, Mercurial, Suffragist Mother-in-Law.” American History, vol. 44, no. 5, Dec. 2009, p. 52. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.213399777&authtype=sso&custid=083-900&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Number 2
Zahit Aceves
The scholarly article I found was titled, “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism” by Henry M. Littlefield. This article offered not only the evidence towards how our novel is related to things such as politics and economics in the early 1900’s, as most of the articles reviewing Baum’s novel do, but provides a detailed overview of the characters and plot in relation to Democratic Populism specifically. I learned the comparisons of each supporting character (the lion, tinman, and scarecrow) and their relation to 1900’s society such as western expansion of industrialism.
The author’s ability to continuously link the characters and their actions into examples of the populist actions sold me on the idea that Baum did indeed intentionally form political opinions into the story. Overall the theories behind the relation of this novel to Democratic Populism were easy to decipher, the only part that did not sell to me was the authors relation to a specific senator. While the representation of the lion is accurate in terms of his societal roles within the 1900’s populist movement, I believe the idea for the lion is more of a bigger picture rather than a single person. The representation I interpreted is the lion is the group of supporters behind populism who supported the movement that was so large in the early 1900’s.
Sources:
Littlefield, Henry M. “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.” American Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 1, 1964, p. 47., doi:10.2307/2710826.