5. The Wicked Witches serve as a metaphor for powerful interests in American politics
The Wicked Witches serve as the primary antagonists of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. The Wicked Witch of the East, having enslaved the Munchkins of eastern Oz and caused the amputations of Nick Chopper, appears only briefly in the novel when she is crushed by Dorothy’s falling house; upon her death the Munchkins celebrate their freedom from bondage, thanking Dorothy for saving them and gifting her a pair of slippers. The Wicked Witch of the West serves as the evil ruler of Winkie Country, ousting Oz and enslaving its people. Seeking first to destroy and later capture Dorothy in order to obtain her magical shoes, she is killed when a bucket of water is thrown over her by the protagonist causing her to melt.
Despite their seeming pantomime and absurdist nature, the Witches serve as a politically charged metaphor condemning the power and influence of moneyed interests as a threat to American political life. The Wicked Witch of the East represents the industrial and banking interests of the East Coast of the United States. As the character who stole the Tin Man’s heart, symbolizing the deteriorating conditions of industrial laborers, she is killed by a falling house in a veiled reference to Wall Street and financial greed. Concurrently the Witch is noted as offering assistance to her subjects only at unreasonable costs, resembling the avaricious inclinations of east coast banking institutions.
Similarly, the Wicked Witch of the West represents the moneyed interests of the West Coast, including railroad owners and wealthy oilmen. Enslaving the Winkies, a thinly-disguised metaphor for Asian economic migrants in the American West, she is dissolved by water in an allusion to monetary liquidity; it has also been proposed the Witch symbolizes the threat of drought in the western states, with her defeat at the hands of water cited as evidence for this interpretation.
6. The Emerald City represents America’s national capital of Washington, D.C.
The Emerald City, situated at the end of the yellow brick road, serves as the capital of the fictional Land of Oz and is home to the Royal Palace of Oz. Whilst likely inspired by the White City of the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, for which Baum moved especially to Chicago in anticipation of and the illustrator Denslow professionally sketched for the Chicago Tribune, in addition to these real-life inclusions it is often contended that the Emerald City symbolically represents the capital of the United States: Washington, D.C. A city of entrancing green, Dorothy believes the city capable of solving her problems before realizing the entire edifice is, in fact, a deception. Dorothy, as the average American, discovers that the Emerald City’s splendor is illusory, with the green coloration a product of all its citizens being required to wear green-tinted glasses at all times.
Serving as a disappointing mirage it is widely asserted that Baum, an opponent of the introduction of unsecured “greenbacks” – green paper currency not back by a fiduciary holding of gold or silver by the federal government – into the American economy from the 1860s, uses the Emerald City as a political allegory. Just as the Emerald City initially appears wonderful its positive qualities exist only as part of a shared delusion among the inhabitants, akin to the inherent worthlessness of unsupported paper money except by popular convention assigning an accepted value. Dorothy’s optimistic hope of a solution to all of her problems quickly evaporates upon reaching the Emerald City, with her understanding that the entrancing panacea was nothing more than a mirage all along serving as a sub-textual condemnation of the seemingly wonderful prospect of an unlimited supply of paper money. Furthermore, the golden yellow brick road apparently leads only to the Emerald City, and thus only towards paper money, reflecting Baum’s potential pessimism concerning the unyielding direction of the nation’s future fiscal arrangements at the turn of the century.