The Wizard of Oz: Motifs 3 key examples

Dorothy is startled to see the Scarecrow wink and nod at her, but she takes the new development in stride. Her ability to look into the Scarecrow's face and recognize the friendliness and humanity there emphasizes the way her childishness makes her well-suited to the journey through Oz. An adult may doubt their own eyes if they saw a scarecrow wink, but Dorothy is confident in what she sees because, as a child, she believes the world holds all kinds of strange and whimsical possibilities. The fact that Dorothy is familiar with scarecrows from her life in Kansas suggests that Oz could be a creation or reflection of her own imagination. Whether or not Oz is a real place, Dorothy seems to fit in there. She is able to make friends with all kinds of anthropomorphized creatures along the way—more friends than she ever made in dusty Kansas with tired Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. Her laughter and bubbly personality, which have always seemed out to place to Aunt Em in Kansas, make more sense in this whimsical place.

And yet there seems to be a difference between fitting in and belonging. Dorothy spends her time in Oz longing for "home," which for her is the grayer world where she lives with her aunt and uncle. Each of the anthropomorphized  characters has a home in Oz, whether that is in the Emerald City or the "Dainty China Country." Dorothy knows that for her, these are all places of childish fancy. Toto, arguably Dorothy's best friend, is the one animal who is never anthropomorphized. He remains by Dorothy's side the whole time, anchoring her to the "real" world where dogs cannot speak in human language.

This scene is testament to the Woodman and Scarecrow's loyalty to their friend, but it is more than that as well. Before the Woodman saved the queen of the field mice from the wildcat that was chasing her, the situation was hopeless. They had no way of getting the Cowardly Lion out of the field. Once the queen of the field mice asks how she can repay the Woodman for saving her, the Scarecrow has a brilliant idea. The Tin Woodman can build a truck or sled to load the Lion onto, and the queen of the field mice can bring all her subjects to help load him onto it and pull it out of the field of poppies. The narrator remarks that no one could have pulled the truck alone. Even the mice struggle as a group, but they manage once the Woodman and the Scarecrow push from behind. Cooperation yields better results than anyone could have hoped for.

This is only one of many instances where the Scarecrow proposes good ideas (which he has had all along), the Woodman uses his chopping skills to help others (because he has always had a heart), and strangers pitch in whatever they can to help execute a plan. Baum always insisted that The Wizard of Oz was a straightforward children's story without allegory or political meaning. Still, the way the book represents cooperation among strangers invites comparison to the movement for solidarity among laborers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Corporations in the United States had been consolidating their power, and labor unions began forming to push back against exploitative business practices. The idea that workers could make more gains when they banded together into a collective bargaining unit seems to be reflected in the way the characters and the strangers they meet along the way achieve remarkable feats when they all work toward a common goal.

Only the characters made of flesh and blood need to worry about food: the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow are exempt from this biological need, but Dorothy, Toto, and the Cowardly Lion must eat. Although the need to eat is a frequent source of stress for Dorothy, and although looking for food slows down the progress of the journey to see the Wizard of Oz, looking for food regularly leads the band of travelers into helpful encounters with other people. In this instance, the people whose house they stop at tell them what they know about Oz. He is a mysterious figure, they say, and no one has ever set eyes on him. If Dorothy had not needed to stop for a meal, she and her friends would have been far more surprised when they encountered difficulty securing an audience with Oz.

The idea that hunger and other biological needs slow people down in a helpful way seems connected to the book's general resonance with labor rights. For example, the Wicked Witch of the West behaved like a heartless corporation toward the Tin Woodman. She made him less and less human as she drove him to work harder and harder; his quest throughout the book is to become more human again. Dorothy's hunger represents the gains we stand to make when we give in to our human weaknesses instead of trying to behave like machines. Her need to eat leads the whole party to knock on strangers' doors to ask for food. In these interactions, the Tin Woodman develops human connections that get him further ahead than he ever would have by mechanically chopping down all the trees in the forest.