There's No Place Like Home: Dorothy's Journey and Domestic Ideology in TheWizard of Oz

Abstract

"There's no place like home." With these words, Dorothy Gale clicks her heels three times and vanishes from the colorful, magical land of Oz, returning to the gray Kansas prairie where she began. This iconic moment from L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has resonated through generations as a comforting affirmation of home's irreplaceable value. Yet beneath this sentimental surface lies a more troubling narrative: Dorothy's circular journey represents not a heroine's triumphant adventure, but a story of feminine containment that ultimately reinforces early 20th-century domestic ideology. While Oz offers Dorothy agency, power, and significance, Baum's text systematically devalues these experiences, positioning the impoverished Kansas farm as the proper "home" for a young girl. This narrative structure reveals profound anxieties about female autonomy and exposes the mechanisms by which the cult of domesticity was maintained at the turn of the century, even as women increasingly challenged their confinement to the private sphere.