13 - Adaptation

Summary

Introduction

Various interpretations, from the political to the psychoanalytic, of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz have existed almost since the moment the novel was published. The endless interpretive possibilities of the text are one of the lasting gifts bestowed by Baum. Historian Quentin Taylor, for instance, offers an analysis of the characters in the original story, in which the Scarecrow represents the troubles of American farmers in the late nineteenth century, the Tin Man represents workers during the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the Cowardly Lion functions as a metaphor for former US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan.

Of course, each new adaptation or interpretation of the novel is a product of its time. The film critic Nicholas Barber describes the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz as more of an anti-fairy tale than a fairy tale, one that revealed the dangers of following a popular but incompetent politician and reinforced the belief that success comes to those who work hard. The 1975 Broadway musical The Wiz provided a provocative, soul-stirring interpretation inspired by Motown and the movement for Black liberation (Smalls). In 1985, the film Return to Oz offered a grim, haunting fever dream that reflected the nature of high-concept, atmospheric films of the early 1980s (Murch).

Literary adaptations of Oz were, by contrast, in limited supply until Gregory Maguire’s explosive 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire’s work merges elements of Baum’s original novel with ones from the 1939 film. For instance, Baum’s witch is not green, but Maguire employs the iconic green hue of her skin from her MGM iteration. Maguire does though keep much of Baum’s Oz geography intact, which is necessary because the geopolitical landscape is key to his story, a story of good and evil.

While veganism is never addressed directly in Wicked, perhaps a step too far for a work that treats vegetarianism as a gray area, a vegan reading is critical to understanding the novel’s complex portrait of human relationships with other animals. This short essay draws on Evan Maina Mwangi’s conception of the “vegan unconscious” of African literary texts to demonstrate the unconscious vegan sentiments of Wicked.