Date: Tue, 01 Oct 1996 18:36:41 -0400
From: DavidXOE@aol.com
Subject: Ozma Essay

ARE YOU A GOOD RULER OR A BAD RULER?
An inquiry into the quality of Ozma's governance
by David Hulan

Of course, we all know that Ozma is sweet, kind, adorable, and
well-intentioned; there's no question about that. And her subjects (at least,
those who know her) all love her dearly. But as to the wisdom of her
rule...well, we're often told that she's a wise ruler, but what are we
actually shown in the books?

Clearly the routine tasks of governing Oz are handled adequately. The people
wouldn't be enthusiastic supporters of a ruler who didn't see that the
routine tasks were done with reasonable efficiency. The real test of Ozma's
rule is what she does when something outside the routine happens. And there
her record is, in my opinion, spotty at best, especially toward the beginning
of her reign.

The first example we get of her acting as a ruler is in OZMA, when she
crosses the Deadly Desert with an army to compel the Nome King to release the
royal family of Ev. Let us leave aside, for the moment, whether or not she
should have interfered in this situation at all. (Ken Shepherd did an
excellent article on that subject in the BUGLE a year or two ago.) Given that
she has chosen to intervene, did she choose a reasonable approach?

The Nome King is a powerful ruler, with a large and well-trained army, and
extensive magical powers. To counter this, Ozma has a ridiculous little
"army", only one of whose members is willing to fight, and apparently no
magical powers of her own at that time. (If she has any magical powers, she
never uses them.) Now, given this disparity of power, it's clear that she has
no hope of compelling the Nome King to do anything - only diplomacy can
possibly achieve her objective. Yet in that case, as she herself points out
in a somewhat similar case in GLINDA, taking an army along at all simply
makes it more difficult for her to persuade Roquat to go along with her
wishes. It would be reasonable to take the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman along
for companionship, and the Cowardly Lion and Hungry Tiger both to pull the
chariot and to defend her against wild beasts if necessary, but a 27-man army
is too large to be diplomatic and too small to be useful.

Now, it can be argued that she had no idea how powerful the Nome King was -
in fact, this appears obvious in their initial meeting, when he shows her
part of his army. But this is all the more reason why it was foolish for her
to step in and attempt to force him to do anything he didn't want to do.
There was clearly no great hurry to get the royal family of Ev restored; they
were in no pain, and in fact didn't even know anything during the time they
were ornaments. A wise ruler would have sent an emissary - perhaps the
Scarecrow - to visit the Nomes and gauge both Roquat's temperament and the
possibility of compelling him to do anything against his will. At the least,
she could have used the Magic Picture to observe the Nome Kingdom and
determine the best approach to take. (With sufficient foresight, she could
even have used the Magic Picture to identify the ornaments the Evites had
been turned into, which would certainly have simplified their task, though it
would have shortened the book quite a bit.)

But she didn't do that - she jumped right into a dangerous situation blind,
rather like Captain Kirk in the original STAR TREK series. And she didn't
even have the advantage Kirk had of having a well-established chain of
command behind her, so that if anything happened to her, there would be an
orderly transition of power in Oz. Who knows what chaos might have happened
in her kingdom if Billina hadn't fortuitously joined the party and rescued
her, with some help from Dorothy and the Scarecrow? No, I don't think our
first sight of Ozma as ruler redounds greatly to her credit.

In the first half of the next book, Ozma isn't present - though this, in
itself, is some cause for concern. According to Dorothy, Ozma looks in the
Magic Picture every day at four o'clock, and if Dorothy makes a secret sign
she'll bring her little friend to Oz. This means that Ozma has clearly seen
Dorothy in the Mangaboo Country (the travelers spent two or three days there,
judging by how often they slept), and probably climbing the tunnel to the
Valley of Voe and the steps in Pyramid Mountain, even if she didn't check
during the relatively brief times they were in Voe or the Gargoyle country.
It's hard to imagine that if she loves Dorothy as much as she appears to, she
would leave her wandering in what's clearly dangerous territory - yet she
does. (It's not as if she couldn't bring her to Oz, ask her if she really
wants to go climbing around underground, and send her back if she says she
does.)

But then we get the totally ridiculous trial of Eureka, which takes up much
of the last part of the book. Now, certainly Eureka isn't a terribly
sympathetic character; she wises off at the least opportune moments, and
frequently seems to be trying to be deliberately offensive. But on the other
hand, she's clearly less than six months old, and a natural predator. Even if
she had eaten the piglet, there seems to be no justification at all for
capital punishment. We know that the Cowardly Lion goes off hunting, and
presumably eats other animals when he does; certainly the kalidahs eat humans
as well as other animals, and there is no extermination campaign against
them. It just makes no sense at all that a kitten would be condemned to death
for eating a small animal. The only reason that I can see for a potential
death penalty is not that she ate the piglet, but that she is guilty of
lese-majesty for eating Ozma's piglet. This is a penalty that one would
expect from, say, the Wazir in KISMET, but from sweet, kind Ozma? (And the
theory that she didn't really mean it doesn't help much; in that case she
would be putting Dorothy through a lot of mental anguish unnecessarily.)

In ROAD there's not much about her ruling, but again she doesn't seem to be
too bright in her choice of methods to get Dorothy to her birthday party. OK,
she knows Dorothy likes adventures. But why on earth would she transport
Dorothy - in the company of a tramp who, for all Ozma knows, might be a child
molester - to a spot well outside the Deadly Desert? Even if she kept a
constant watch on her through the Magic Picture (which if so must have
interfered considerably with her duties as ruler), so she'd be safe from
actual harm, why make things that difficult? And since Dorothy never wants to
be away from Uncle Henry and Aunt Em for very long, and Ozma claims to want
Dorothy with her as much as possible, why arrange it so that she spends
several days of her absence from Kansas away from Ozma as well? Again, we get
an impression that sweet and lovable as Ozma is, she isn't terribly bright.

This impression is continued _a fortiori_ in EMERALD CITY. First, there's her
offhand transportation of Aunt Em and Uncle Henry from wherever they were and
whatever they were doing to the throne room. As it happened, there wasn't any
great harm in this; Em was doing dishes and Henry was doing chores, so they
were both standing up and fully dressed. But she never checked to see what
they were doing before transporting them; if one of them had been sitting
down, they'd have hit the floor hard (and with old people, that can be
serious), and it wouldn't be that unlikely that she'd have found one of them
in the outhouse. I don't think an Edwardian-era American would ever get over
the embarrassment if that had happened.

But that was just a bit of thoughtlessness about two individuals. More
serious was her reaction to the Nome King's invasion. Aside from tut-tutting
and feeling sad that someone could be so evil, she did nothing whatever about
the invasion until Dorothy and her party returned to the Emerald City, by
which time the tunnel was finished and only an ingenious thought of the
Scarecrow's, combined with the amazing coincidence that the tunnel ended
right in front of the Forbidden Fountain, managed to save the day. Why didn't
she do something sooner? I can sympathize with her reluctance to fight -
especially since it didn't appear that it would do any good - but by her own
admission, she didn't even think about it much. Why didn't she notify Glinda?
(One might also ask why Glinda didn't know anyhow; she should have been
reading about it in the Great Book of Records. But maybe she was busy for a
week or so and didn't get around to checking the Book for a while.) We know,
from TIK-TOK, that Glinda has the power to twist routes so that they end up
in a different place from the one intended; she could probably have twisted
the tunnel so that it ended up under Mt. Phantastico, say, instead of the
Emerald City. We also know that she has the power to make Oz invisible to
people from outside Oz - she does that later in EMERALD CITY. Wouldn't it
have done more good to do it before and not after the invasion? But Ozma
apparently never thinks of consulting the great sorceress; she just passively
accepts her fate of becoming a slave or an ornament, along with all the rest
of her people that she allegedly loves. Now, maybe even Glinda doesn't have
enough power to overcome the magic of the Nomes and the Phanfasms (the
Whimsies and Growleywogs don't seem to have magic powers, just physical
strength), but Ozma never even tried to find out.

In PATCHWORK GIRL Ozma doesn't have much to do, but what she does isn't done
very well. It may well be that the law against picking six-leaved clovers is
justified - we never see an example of how it is, but Ozma says so and one
can accept that - but the arrest and trial of Ojo are almost as much of a
kangaroo court as that of Eureka. Ozma knew by some magic means - possibly
the Magic Picture, though why she'd have been watching Ojo isn't clear - that
he'd picked the clover, but instead of simply having him brought to the
palace so she could ask him why, and in the absence of a good reason
pronounce his punishment, there's an elaborate charade that seems to have no
purpose other than to show that the criminal justice system in Oz is (a)
seldom called upon, and (b) very different from any other.

And then, once she's pardoned him, instead of asking what the other
ingredients in the charm are - at which point it would be clear that the left
wing of a yellow butterfly is no more acceptable than the heart of a fat baby
- she just asks what next, and lets him go off with Dorothy and Scraps and
the Scarecrow on a lengthy, potentially dangerous, adventure that had no real
purpose at all. This is aside from the fact that the Wizard - who's standing
there at the time - presumably knows, or at least is pretty sure, he can
break the enchantment in a different way.

In TIK-TOK, SCARECROW, and RINKITINK she has little to do, and on the whole
does it well enough. It's interesting that in none of these books does the
Magic Belt seem to be working well - she doesn't seem able to help Shaggy or
the Scarecrow at a distance, even when she's watching them in the Magic
Picture. This gives some credence to the theory that sending all the
Phanfasms, Whimsies, and Growleywogs home at the end of Emerald City drained
the power of the belt, so that it took it quite a while to recover. Even by
the time of LOST PRINCESS it can only protect its wearer, do transformations,
and grant one other wish a day; before that, it was much more powerful.

In LOST PRINCESS, of course, Ozma is kidnapped at the beginning of the book
and rescued at the end, so she doesn't have a chance to show her wisdom or
lack thereof. It does seem, however, that her abduction provided the shock
treatment needed to convince her that she really needed to learn to do some
magic of her own. It's notable that through this book, Ozma seems to have no
more magical powers than, say, Dorothy; both of them can use magic tools,
like the Magic Belt and Magic Picture, but when Ozma needs magic done beyond
their use, she always calls on Glinda or the Wizard to do it.

TIN WOODMAN is the first book in which we see Ozma working magic on her own,
and it's also the book where she appears at her best. It's only a couple of
chapters, but she proves highly resourceful and does a number of very
intricate transformations (or de-transformations) that prove that she has
learned a great deal about magic in a year or so. She also doesn't do
anything that a rational person would take issue with.

By GLINDA she seems to have finally begun to mature as a ruler and a person.
Going off to the country of the Flatheads and Skeezers with no companion but
Dorothy is probably not the best idea, but her justification for it makes
more sense than, say, her earlier refusal to think about the Nome King's
invasion. If she'd found out about it earlier then it would have made more
sense to send the Wizard or the Scarecrow or the Shaggy Man to see what was
going on, and then to make a plan based on much more complete knowledge. (Her
emissary wouldn't have to make any threats, after all, which was her excuse
for not sending one; he could just tell them "Then I have to report back to
Ozma.") But it appeared from the Book of Records and Glinda's magic that the
war was imminent (as indeed it proved to be), so she didn't really have time
for that. Otherwise, she did about as well as she could.

In the remaining books Ozma seldom plays a major role; in the few where she
does (KABUMPO, LOST KING, HUNGRY TIGER, WONDER CITY, SCALAWAGONS) she tends
to be competent though not brilliant. The only serious faults one can find
with her in the later (post-Baum) books are that she lets the Emerald City be
invaded far too often and too easily, and her punishments for villains are
arbitrary and inconsistent. Hostile armies succeed in entering and conquering
the Emerald City, at least briefly, in JACK PUMPKINHEAD, PIRATES, OZOPLANING,
and MAGICAL MIMICS, and only Jenny Jump's alert action prevents it in WONDER
CITY.  Individual villains come close in KABUMPO, GNOME KING, HANDY MANDY,
and SHAGGY MAN as well (plus the longer-term usurpation of Skamperoo in
WISHING HORSE). The individuals get there by magic and are probably not
preventable, but one would think that it wouldn't take so many occasions
before Ozma posted some kind of sentries to watch out for invaders and at
least give reasonable warning.

As for the villains: Ruggedo, who has caused more mischief in Oz than any
other five people, always seems to be at least mildly forgiven; his last two
times out he was transformed into inanimate objects, but in both cases he's
still there and might be disenchanted and return. Similar transformations
happened to Abrog, Faleero, Mogodore, and the chocolate soldiers. Other
nasties like Mustafa of Mudge, the Sultan of Samandra, Skamperoo, and Matiah
had very little happen to them other than being deprived of their ill-gotten
gains. But a few - Glegg, Mombi, and Mooj - were totally destroyed. And aside
from the personal memories from when she was Tip, it's hard to see why Ozma
punished Mombi more severely than she did Ruggedo.

Based on my analysis, it appears that Ozma began her reign as a
well-intentioned but immature and unwise ruler. It is not certain, but it
would appear that the trauma of her kidnapping and imprisonment in LOST
PRINCESS had a profound and salutary effect on her; she not only took up the
study of magic on her own behalf, rather than depending on Glinda and the
Wizard, but she began to think far more deeply about the effects of her
actions, and to rule much more wisely than in the past. She was still far
from perfect, but much wiser than she was in the beginning.