We're Off to See the Wizard ... On Oscar Diggs and Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Oscar Diggs as imagined by William Wallace Denslow 

in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

 

'Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain ...'

 

 

I. 

 

Even as a young child, I was no friend of Dorothy's and avoided spending time in Oz if I could possibly help it: I hated the Munchkins, had no time for the Scarecrow, Tin Man, or Cowardly Lion, and if my sympathies lay anywhere they were with the Wicked Witch of the West and her army of wolves, crows, and bees.  

 

Of late, however, I have become fascinated by the character of Oscar Diggs, the Wizard who, it turns out, is not so very wonderful at all; who is in fact a humbug - that is to say, a fraud, an imposter, a great deceiver ... 

 

 

II. 

 

I suspect we all know people like Oscar Diggs; individuals who, for example, use elaborate titles and self-descriptions to appear more important, more successful, and more interesting than they actually are; individuals who mask a very ordinary nature behind a carefully crafted image that is projected for so many years that they themselves come to believe it real. 

 

Such individuals are not bad people; just fake magicians or fake whatever else they try to pass themselves off as, unable to perform the miracles that they promised. 

 

This is not to deny they may have certain gifts and achieve certain things of which they are rightly proud. But, alas, they are not the mighty figures, the wonderful wizards, or true talents they pass themselves off as and they maintain a facade of accomplishment only through lie and illusion.         

 

 

III.

 

It's possible, of course, that certain individuals exhibiting the Wizard of Oz syndome are not faking things, but are, rather, suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder; i.e., a mental health condition characterised by an inflated sense of self-importance and a deep need for attention and admiration often masking fragile self-esteem and leading to arrogant behavior, entitlement, and difficulty handling even the mildest criticism. 

 

Other symptoms include: preoccupation with fantasies, unreasonable expectations, and resentment and envy of others, making both personal and professional relationships strained and often unsustainable.     

 

I'm not a therapist, so I don't know what causes this condition. Nor do I know what can be done to treat it. I would, however, encourage those who recognise something of themselves in the character of Oscar Diggs to seek treatment unless they wish to spend their lives behind the curtain, dreading the day when they might be exposed ...  

 

 

Lady Chatterley's Lover Vs the Tin Man

 

Oliver Mellors portrayed by Jack O'Connell in Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022)

The Tin Man portrayed by Jack Haley in The Wizard of Oz (1939) 

 

 

 I. 

 

According to Oliver Mellors, the whole of mankind is not only becoming increasingly tame and sexless, but slowly transforming into what he calls tin people and what we might term today cyborgs (i.e. human beings who have been augmented and enhanced via the integration of artificial components or technology; the sort of bio-mechanical beings that Donna Haraway once encouraged us to embrace with open arms). 

 

One evening, before they both strip off their clothes and fuck like animals in the rain, Mellors informs his lover, Lady Chatterley, that there's no hope to be found in either the ruling class or the working class, nor in any of the coloured races - that all men have been dehumanised by industrialisation:  

 

"'Their spunk's gone dead - motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck the last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with indiarubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people!" [1]

 

 

II. 

 

I know for sure that Lawrence didn't see The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), as it was released nine years after his death. 

 

However, he might have read - and almost certainly would have been aware of - the children's novel by L. Frank Baum upon which the film is based, first published in 1900 (with illustrations by W. W. Denslow). And so it's quite possible that when he writes of tin people he was thinking not only of Rossum's Universal Robots [2] but also of Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman.

 

Of course, even Baum wasn't writing in a vacuum; in late 19th-century America, men made out of various tin pieces often featured in advertising and political cartoons and Baum was said to have been inspired by a figure built out of metal parts he had seen displayed in a shop window [3].     

 

 

III. 

 

In Baum's book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy befriends the Tin Woodman after she finds him rusted in the rain; using his oil can to help free up his movements [4]. 

 

Axe in hand, he joins Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road, accompanied by the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, headed for the Emerald City, where he hopes to be given a heart - although, funny enough, he already possesses the capacity for feeling and the display of various emotions (even for accidently crushed insects). 

This is explained by the fact that, unlike Tik-Tok the wind-up mechanical man that Dorothy meets in a later story, the Tin Woodman is still essentially human and alive. For Nick Chopper was not a robot, but rather a man who had his organic body replaced with artificial parts bit by bit [5], after self-mutilating with an accursed axe (don't ask). And, far from regretting his becoming-cyborg, he often delighted in his enhanced status. 

 

Unfortunately, the Wizard can only provide him with an artificial heart made of silk and filled with sawdust, although the Tin Woodman seems happy enough with this. And, after Dorothy returns home to Kansas, he becomes the ruler of Winkie Country and has his subjects construct a palace made entirely of tin. Even - and this would horrify Lawrence/Mellors still further - the flowers in the garden are made of metal. 

 

 

The Tin Woodman 

by W. W. Denslow (1900)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217.

 

[2] In 1920 Czech writer Karel Čapek published a science fiction play with the title R.U.R., an initialism standing for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti. The play - which premiered on 2 January of the following year - was both popular and influential; by 1923 it had been translated into thirty languages and had introduced the word robot (from the Czech robota, meaning forced labour) into English.

      Lawrence used the word in his late poetry on the subject of evil, declaring: "The Robot is the unit of evil. / And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving." See 'The Evil World-Soul', The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 626.

 

[3] The mechanical man was a common feature in political cartoons and advertisements in the 1890s and various scholars have argued that the work of Baum and Denslow is derivative. That seems a little unfair to me; like most writers and artists, they were atuned to their times and happy to exploit whatever ideas and materials were available to them.

 

[4] The threat of rusting when exposed to rain, tears, or other forms of moisture was a constant concern for the Tin Woodman and so, in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) - the first of thirteen full-length sequels written by Baum to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - the character has himself nickel-plated. The Tin Woodman remains a central figure throughout the whole series of books; unfortunately, I do not have time here to explore his entire history, fascinating as it is.

 

[5] As the author of The Generalist Academy points out in a post entitled 'The Tin Woodman of Theseus' (5 Dec 2020), L. Frank Baum's character took a classic philosophical thought experiment in a novel direction: click here.