I notice that my religious group is having an adult religious education offering entitled "The Zen of Oz". This got me interested. There sure is a lot of religion, especially Zen, in The Wizard of Oz. The yellow brick road is the road of life. The goal you are pursuing is the Emerald City. You think that there is someone who will guide you, such as that humbug Wizard of Oz, but you find out that he is only someone rather like you. And the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion are aspects of yourself.
There is another story around of a voyage of a girl to a far land and back, namely Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (and Through the Looking Glass). This was one of my favorite stories when I was growing up, even though I was a boy instead of a girl. Like Oz's Dorothy, Alice finds herself in a weird land where things are just not the same as back home. So what are the similarities between Oz and Wonderland?
One can pair up characters. Some of these are Dorothy with Alice, The Wicked Witch of the West with the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen, The Good Witch of the North with the White Queen, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion with the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse, and the Mighty Wizard with the King of Hearts. In both stories, Dorothy and Alice try to find their way in their far-off land, and both eventually make it back to where they came from, in the form of waking up from a dream.
The main difference, I see, is a matter of direction. Alice doesn't know where to go. She asks the Cheshire Cat, and the Cat throws the question back at her, saying if she doesn't know where to go, any route is OK. She wanders around trying to find out where to go, and winds up stumbling into one nonsensical scene after another - the Mad Tea Party, the Croquet Game where the Queen of Hearts is all the time threatening the players with beheading, the lobster quadrille, the turtle's woeful stories of his education, and finally, the ridiculous parody of a court proceeding which ends with the Queen ordering Alice's head off. Just at this moment, Alice uses her powers to fend off the entire card deck.
Dorothy definitely knows where she is going. She wants to go home, and she knows that Oz will bring her back home, and there is a yellow brick road leading her to Oz, and a good witch is helping her along the way. She meets characters who share her feelings about what she wants, and she proceeds to her goal, including defeating the evil elements of her kingdom. At the very end, not Oz, nor the Munchkins, or even the Good Witch show Dorothy the way back home. Dorothy herself does it by knowing she never left it to begin with.
The characters and scenes reflect this as well. The Evil Witch has a definite goal in mind, to destroy Dorothy. The Queen of Hearts does not have much of a goal in mind; she goes flailing around shouting "Off with his head" to everyone. The Lion wants to go to Oz to get courage; the Mad Hatter sits around all day aimlessly in a place where time never changes. Oz has good and evil characters; Alice in Wonderland only has silly characters. Dorothy's goal was to go back home to Kansas; Alice simply wanted to make sense of what was happening around her.
So that's how I see the difference between the two. So what is the real world like? Some in power would have us be in Oz, with evil and good witches out there. But I suspect much of it is like Wonderland instead.
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