I was looking for a picture of the Princess Langwidere actually, she of the cabinet of thirty heads, but I could not find one, and no longer having my childhood collection of vintage Oz books in my possession (not that I have figured out how to post my own pictures anyway), I have decided to substitute it with this drawing of what Fred Meyer, the portly, septuagenarian secretary of the International Wizard of Oz Club during my youth called "the sexy Ozma"; and indeed, in the orthodoxy of the series, Ozma is more beautiful than Langwidere anyway, more beautiful than Polychrome the rainbow's daughter, more beautiful than any woman who could ever be conceived, though in the illustrations she always appears to be a sixteen-year old gymnast, albeit one who is too assiduous in her work and duties to ever think about anything so insipid as having a boyfriend. It happens however that the very first time I saw the future Mrs Bourgeois Surrender, the immediate thought that came to me was, "Goodness, it's the Princess Langwidere's angry head!" (for the princess had one head of auburn curls similar to Mrs S's that contained a very bad temper) As you can imagine, having been nurtured from a very early age on these books and their Edwardian notions of pubescent feminine beauty, this inclined me strongly in her favor rather than otherwise.
As with many of the early Oz women (the series continued with the same illustrator until the 1940s), the illustrations of Langwidere were heavily influenced by the Gibson Girl pictures that were fashionable at the time, and have of course remained iconic, representative of the jaunty confidence and, to me, charming character, underappreciated I think in our time, that permeated the productions of American culture, both popular and "serious", in that period:
Like L Frank Baum, the author of the original Oz books, I have only sons, three in my case to his four. It was apparently a matter of great regret to him that he never had a daughter. This has been cited as the reason (along with the influence of an irrepressible suffragist mother-in-law) why girls are always the hero(in)es of the stories, which was considered noteworthy in those lamented days when children`s literature and the habit of reading in general were less girly than they are supposed to have become in our day. For my part if I had ever had a little girl, and later a bigger one, who given the current trends in society would probably have had a great work ethic and been a big success in school (do any girls of reasonable to good intelligence backed by admonishing parents flounder anymore?), and flattered the vanity of her father with relative ease, my preferred choice of a name would have been Dorothy, in part due to its being that of the main character of the Oz series, in part after Dorothy Parker, in part because the name evokes for me the more attractive parts of the general spirit of the whole 1890s-1940s era in this country, which obviously appeal to me. It is an almost uniquely all-American name, and as well its popularity seems to have extended across the population; there are famous Dorothys who were black, Catholic, communists, New Yorkers and small town girls. Dorothy Parker herself I am pretty certain was Jewish (I believe she was registered after birth as Dorothy Rosenberg). Dorothy Parker to me is one of the more interesting specimens of an extremely intelligent American mind that achieved--in places--something approaching a pure realization of the type that we have ever had. Someday I will try to elaborate on this more. It is something along the lines of: She had a very beautiful and poignant, a very self-contained kind of intelligence that is remarkably powerful and incisive when deployed on the subjects it understands. This is the source of good wit, I suppose, but I find it is an extremely rare quality even among otherwise accomplished or brilliant writers; and she really had it.
But I am going off the rail again. One more picture. Then I am going to Montreal for the weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment