When we view Victor Fleming’s immortal classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz we sympathize with Dorothy’s quest for home, fixate on her gaudy ruby slippers and shudder at the hideous visages of the flying monkeys (and their master). We often scrutinize the meaning of the shift to glorious Technicolor or rhapsodize about the fantastical scenery of the Emerald City and haunted forest. Rarely do we infer a narrative about sexual subjectivity in this tale with an adolescent female protagonist—especially one with queer undertones. However, upon close inspection Dorothy’s journey, along with that of her compatriots, assumes the form of a trek to destroy their own queerness through magical reparative therapy; an expedition fueled by heteronormative conceptions of compulsory heterosexuality (what theorist Adrienne Rich identifies as the assumption of male-to-female sexual attraction, and the embodiment this affords, as the innate, and therefore superior, norm). The Wizard's final inability to grant Dorothy's wish, however, allows for the formulation of non-normative subjectivities and bespeaks the importance of the personal and public acceptance of the validity of queer identities. Therefore, in The Wizard of Oz the mandates of compulsory heterosexuality are first troubled, then denied by the reinforced actuality of non-normative embodiment.
The queerness of Dorothy’s character is apparent from the film’s start. Rather than assisting with pastoral chores or showing an interest in her rural home in the manners of a “proper” girl from Kansas she focuses on the relationship with her quadruped pal Toto and actively dreams of a land “somewhere over the rainbow;” the contemporary, evocative symbol of the LGBT community. Yet, Dorothy’s non-normative existence is initially a disengaged one and when she becomes aware of her “folly,” through the mumblings of the charlatan Professor Marvel (whose humbug prophecies mirror the fallacious threats of heterosexual patriarchy), she vows to become a good, “normal” girl and live in a state respectable to her heterosexual grandmother. In a stroke of queer salvation—hello, she gets transported into a world where a witch floats around in a pink bubble and little people wear fashionable flower pots for accessories—her efforts toward the construction of a false, non-queer identity are immediately stilted.
Still, throughout the majority of her travels in Oz, her interest lies in the return to a gray, and thus unquestionably unchallenged, heterosexual existence; a retreat to her “home.” She accepts the diverse companionship of those with a similar yearning—for a brain to help them think normally or courage to transform them from a “dandylion”—while simultaneously rebuking the sexual advances of the evil “lesbian” of a witch who wishes to possess her because of her attractiveness and her fashionable red shoes: and the line reads “I’ll get you, my pretty…” She evens goes so far as to (accidentally) dissolve the ultimate icon of queerness in Oz; an action that seems an attempt to subconsciously exhibit her superiority over the aberrant Wicked Witch. Thankfully, Dorothy’s strivings for normality ultimately fail, as the Wizard has nothing to effectively challenge her concretized queer identity; no real way to send her back to a home, an existence, with which she no longer phenomenologically aligns. Thus, when Dorothy returns to Kansas she is convinced of the realness of Oz, the mythical manifestation of her queerness, and refuses to coalesce with the others notion that the land is a dream. Perhaps it is for this reification of their actual lived existence that The Wizard of Oz is such an integral part of the queer film canon? Or maybe it's just because we like Dorothy's shoes.
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