The Wish List
What happens in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? A girl, a cyclone, a yellow road, and four wishes. This is a full chapter by chapter summary of L. Frank Baum’s novel, so it spoils the ending, including something Dorothy could have done on her very first day. I will follow each wish from the moment it is made to the moment it is paid.
Which Edition
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number fifty-five. It opens with a short introduction by Baum, dated Chicago, April nineteen hundred. In it he says the book was written solely to please children, and that the heartaches and nightmares are left out. Keep that sentence in your pocket. We will test it.
By my count there are twenty-four chapters and about thirty-nine thousand words. Short. You can read it in an afternoon.
Gray Kansas
Chapter one. Dorothy lives on the Kansas prairie with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em in a one room house. Everything is gray, the grass, the house, even Aunt Em, whose eyes the sun and wind have turned gray. Only Toto, a little black dog, makes Dorothy laugh.
A cyclone comes. Aunt Em drops into the cyclone cellar, but Dorothy goes back for Toto, and the house lifts off the ground with her in it. She sleeps through the ride.
Chapter two. The house lands in the Land of the Munchkins, and under one corner of it are two feet in silver shoes. The house has killed the Wicked Witch of the East. A little old woman, the Witch of the North, tells Dorothy that there were four witches in Oz, two good and two wicked. She hands Dorothy the shoes, kisses her forehead, and points her down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, where the Wizard might send her home. That is wish number one.
A Scarecrow and a Tin Woodman
Chapters three to five. Dorothy lifts a Scarecrow off his pole in a cornfield. His head is straw, so he wants brains. Wish number two.
Deeper in a forest she finds a Tin Woodman, rusted solid, holding an axe in the air. He tells her how he became tin. The Witch of the East enchanted his axe, so it cut off his legs, his arms, his head, one at a time, and a tinsmith replaced each part. His heart went with his flesh. He wants one back. Wish number three. Oil can in her basket, Dorothy sets off with both of them.
A Lion, a Ditch and a Poppy Field
Chapters six to nine. A Lion leaps out of the trees, and Dorothy slaps him on the nose for threatening Toto. He admits he is a coward, and he joins them to ask for courage. Wish number four.
Now the road gets dangerous. At a ditch, the Lion jumps with each friend on his back. At a wider one, the Scarecrow’s plan drops two monsters called Kalidahs into the gap. A raft loses the Scarecrow, stuck on a pole in the river, until a stork lifts him out.
Then the poppy field. Its smell puts Dorothy, Toto and the Lion to sleep, and the two friends who are not flesh carry her out. The Lion is too heavy. A Queen of the Field Mice, whose life the Tin Woodman saved, calls thousands of mice, and they drag him out on a truck.
Oz Has Four Faces
Chapters ten and eleven. At the Emerald City’s gate, a Guardian locks green spectacles on everyone, to protect their eyes from the glare. Everything inside looks green.
Oz will see one visitor a day. Dorothy sees a giant Head. The Scarecrow sees a lovely Lady with wings. The Tin Woodman sees a Beast with five eyes. The Lion sees a Ball of Fire. Four people, four different Ozes. But the price is the same every time. Kill the Wicked Witch of the West.
The Witch of the West
Chapters twelve to fourteen. The Witch has one eye that can see everywhere. She sends forty wolves, forty crows and a swarm of bees, and each is stopped, by the axe, by the Scarecrow, and by straw spread over the sleepers. Then she uses her Golden Cap. Its Winged Monkeys scatter the Scarecrow’s straw, drop the Tin Woodman on rocks, and cage the Lion. They cannot touch Dorothy, because of the Good Witch’s kiss.
The Witch makes Dorothy a kitchen servant. She wants the silver shoes, and with an invisible bar of iron she trips Dorothy and steals one. Dorothy loses her temper and throws a bucket of water over her. The Witch melts. In chapter thirteen the Winkies, freed from slavery, mend the Tin Woodman, and restuff the Scarecrow, and Dorothy walks away with the Golden Cap. In chapter fourteen the Monkey King tells how the Cap came to control his tribe.
Behind the Screen
Chapters fifteen to seventeen. Back in the Emerald City, Oz makes them wait, until the Lion roars and Toto knocks over a screen. Behind it is a bald little old man. He is a humbug, he says, from Omaha, a ventriloquist and then a balloonist, blown here years ago and mistaken for a wizard.
He pays the three wishes with props. For the Scarecrow, bran mixed with pins and needles. For the Tin Woodman, a heart made of silk and sawdust. For the Lion, a green drink, and the words that courage is always inside.
Then he builds a hot air balloon from green silk to take Dorothy home. Toto runs off after a kitten. The ropes snap, and Oz floats away without her.
South to Glinda
Chapters eighteen to twenty-three. The Monkeys cannot cross the desert. A soldier suggests Glinda, the good Witch of the South. On the road are Fighting Trees, a town made of china where the Lion breaks a church, and a forest where animals crown the Lion after he kills a giant spider. Armless Hammer-Heads block a hill, and Dorothy uses her last Monkey command to fly over.
Glinda tells Dorothy that the silver shoes could carry her anywhere in three steps. If Dorothy had known their power, she could have gone home the first day.
The Scarecrow will rule the Emerald City, the Tin Woodman the Winkies, and the Lion his forest. Dorothy knocks her heels together three times, lands on the Kansas prairie in front of a new farmhouse that Uncle Henry built after the cyclone, and finds the shoes lost in the desert.
Home Again
Chapter twenty-four is only eighty-two words. Aunt Em is watering cabbages. Dorothy runs to her, and says she has come from the Land of Oz. That is the whole chapter. No dream, and no doctor.
The Ledger
My tally. The words silver shoes appear about twenty times. Ruby appears five times, and not once is it a shoe. Kansas turns up fifty-one times. And the three wishes are all granted by a man who admits he is a humbug, with a handful of bran, a silk heart and a green drink.
Here is my reading, and it is an opinion. Baum said he left out the nightmares, but I counted forty wolves, forty crows, a melted witch and a man cut into pieces. The book is gentle in tone and grim in detail. What stays with me is the ledger. The Scarecrow makes the plans that save them from chapter seven on, and the Lion fights for others. The wishes were already paid. If this helped, subscribe, and tell me in the comments which wish you would have asked for.
