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Chapter 15: The Discovery of Oz, the Terrible
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Wizard of Oz, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Self-Doubt vs. Self-Confidence
Home and Belonging
Good vs. Evil
Friendship
Summary
Analysis
The next day, Oz is true to his word, in his own way. He gives the Scarecrow brains by removing the Scarecrow’s head and filling it with bran, pins, and needles along with the straw. He gives the Tin Woodman a silk heart full of sawdust, inserting it into his chest after cutting a hole through the tin and patching it afterwards. And finally, he gives the Lion a green drink and tells him it’s courage. All three of them are finally content, fully convinced that they’ve been given what they desired. When he’s alone, the Wizard wonders how he can help being a fraud when everyone expects him to do the impossible. It was easy for him to give Dorothy’s friends what they wanted because they believe in him, but he still isn’t sure how to help Dorothy get home.
The Wizard’s trickery reveals a counterintuitive secret to self-confidence: the placebo effect. While Dorothy’s friends were never willing to believe that they already had what they needed—despite ample evidence to the contrary—they became willing to believe in themselves through a bit of harmless self-deception. The Wizard did nothing to them except increase their confidence, though he did it in the only way he knew would convince them. In this way, the Wizard himself is a perfect foil to Dorothy’s three friends. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion already have the merits they believe themselves to lack, and all they really need is confidence and self-esteem. The Wizard, on the other hand, has no real powers; instead, he’s managed to become a beloved figure through sheer confidence alone. In the conflict between self-doubt and confidence, the latter ultimately proves to be much more powerful.
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