The Patchwork Girl of Oz
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| Written by | L. Frank Baum |
| Illustrator | John R. Neill |
| Published | 1913 |
| Publisher | Reilly & Britton |
The Patchwork Girl of Oz is the seventh book in L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz book series. It was published on 1 July 1913.
Baum dedicated the book to Sumner Hamilton Britton, the young son of his publisher Sumner Charles Britton.
The full text of "The Patchwork Girl of Oz" can be found online here at Project Gutenberg's website.
Contents |
Summary
Ojo, called "Ojo the Unlucky," is a Munchkin boy who lives with his uncle, Unc Nunkie, in a remote part of the country. Privation looms: they have noting to eat but bread, and there are only two loaves growing on their bread tree. They visit their only neighbor, Dr. Pipt, and his wife Margolotte. There, they learn of the doctor's magic. Margolotte has used the Powder of Life to animate a glass cat sculpture they call Bungle; and Margolotte plans to use the Powder to provide herself a servant. She makes a dummy out of a crazy quilt, and selects doses of "Obedience," "Amiability," and "Truth" from her jars of "Brain Furniture." Ojo surreptitiously supplements the brain mixture with doses of all the other available possibilities: "Cleverness," "Poesy," "Self-Reliance," etc. When the Patchwork Girl is animated with the Powder of Life, she is more of everything than anybody expected.
Unc Nunkie and Margolotte are accidentally dosed with the Liquid of Petrifaction and are paralyzed into marble statues. Ojo, the zany Patchwork Girl, and the Glass Cat set out to gather the five exotic ingredients needed for the antidote. They set off across Oz for a series of adventures; along the way they meet the Shaggy Man, the Woozy, Dorothy Gale, and the Tin Woodman. They encounter Tottenhots, the captive Yoop, the Hoppers and Horners, and a trick river among other curiosities.
Ojo is desperate to obtain the needed ingredients, so much so that he is willing to break rules and sneak around, which gets him in trouble. Still, the quest is successful, until the end: the searchers go to the Winkie Country to find a left wing of a yellow butterfly, but the Tin Woodman, the Emperor of the Winkies, will not allow even a butterfly to be killed.
It appears that Ojo's quest has failed; but the forces of good in the Emerald City are not helpless. The Wizard of Oz finds a way to disenchant Unc Nunkie and Margolotte. Ojo has learned lessons and endured a growth process during his adventure; he is renamed Ojo the Lucky.
Background
Baum had stopped his Oz series in 1910 with the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz. He wanted to tell other types of fantasy stories. Yet his alternate works, The Sea Fairies (1911) and Sky Island (1912), were less successful than his Oz books. His child readers wanted more Oz; and his 1911 bankruptcy meant that he needed more royalty income from his books. A return to Oz was requisite.
But how? At the end of the sixth book, Baum had sealed Oz off from the rest of the world with a barrier of invisibility. Taking a hint from one of his child fans, the author got around this barrier by introducing the "wireless telegraph" to Oz. Fortunately, the Shaggy Man knows Morse code.
Editing
Extant evidence shows that Baum had originally written a different Chapter 21 for the book. His text has not survived, but John Neill's pictures and captions still exist. The original chapter was called "The Garden of Meats," and dealt with vegetable people like the Mangaboos of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. Neill's pictures show flowers with children's faces being watered by their vegetable-men growers. The vegetable creatures grow ordinary humans, "meat people," apparently for food. (This is thematically linked with the anthropophagous plants in Chapter 10 of Patchwork Girl.)
Publisher Frank Reilly suggested to Baum that the material in this chapter was not "in harmony with your other fairy stories," and would generate "considerable adverse criticism." Baum saw his point, and the chapter was dropped. Baum suggested replacing the excised material with an episode about "Marshmallow Twins, who are to appear in another story." Yet Neill had already completed his pictures for the volume, and neither chapter was used. The marshmellow twins were stillborn in the author's imagination.
Sales
Baum's return to Oz met with public acceptance. The Patchwork Girl of Oz sold 17,000 copies in its first year on the market, better than Baum's non-Oz fantasies had done. (Emerald City had sold 20,000 copies in the same interval.)
The character
The Patchwork Girl proved a popular character, who could be relied upon for comic relief; she makes appearances in many subsequent Oz books. Her contributions to the plot resolutions of The Lost Princess of Oz and Glinda of Oz are notable. Baum's successor Ruth Plumly Thompson also made use of Patchwork Girl comedy.
Film
The Patchwork Girl of Oz was one of the four Baum works turned into movies by the Oz Film Manufacturing Company in 1914 and 1915.
Influence
Other Oz writers have also taken advantage of the Patchwork Girl's possibilities. Gilbert M. Sprague even has the Patchwork Girl and Scarecrow get married in his The Patchwork Bride of Oz.
Outside the bounds of Oz, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl is a critically-praised work of hypertext fiction that exploits the Frankenstein story in a feminist context.
Atticus Gannaway's short story "Toto and the Truth" depends upon a highly specific connection with The Patchwork Girl of Oz.
References
- Michael O. Riley. Oz and Beyond: the Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum. Lawrence, KS, University Press of Kansas, 1997.
- Katharine M. Rogers. L. Frank Baum, Creator of Oz: A Biography. New York, St. Martin's Press, 2002.
External links
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