The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is one that has attracted a number of attempts to decode its meanings. A friend of mine swears that 'the yellow brick road' ties into a Midwestern 1890's 'cross of gold' anti-Wall-Street populism, for example; while possible, I don't feel that is the most important meaning one can decode from the film.
For those who haven't seen it in years, here's a rough synopsis: Dorothy (Judy Garland) is a young-adolescent girl growing up in black-and-white small town Kansas. We meet a number of other characters in the beginning of the film, most important among them a bicycle-riding severely-dressed tall spinster schoolteacher. This being Kansas, tornadoes are an ever-present threat, and one strikes the town, sweeping up Dorothy, her dog Toto, and her family's house.
The tornado takes Dorothy et al. to a Technicolor magic kingdom called Oz. When the house lands, it crushes a Wicked Witch, of whom we only see a pair of lower legs shod in bright red shoes. The natives rejoice that the Wicked Witch is dead and persuade Dorothy to put on the red shoes which the late Witch usurped from their rightful owner. Dorothy acquires masculinized companions: a lion, a scarecrow, a robot. On her journey to the city of Oz, whose Wizard has the power to return her home, Dorothy et al. are attacked by a second Wicked Witch. This Witch strongly resembles the athletic spinster from Kansas; covets the red shoes Dorothy wears; and is finally slain by water. Dorothy's companions acheive completeness by gaining courage, a brain, and a heart, respectively. Dorothy ends up going home, it was only a dream, the end.
The key to decoding this film lies in the following observation:
red shoes = the vagina
(If the above is obvious, you can skip this paragraph). There are a number of metatextual points that give rise to the vaginal symbolism of the red shoes. One simple one is the topology of footwear: shoes are the paracoita in the paired relationships male:female/foot:shoe. The use of the color red is a further signifier. Reddish hues of the vulval region are associated with coital receptivity in female primates. For this reason, red lipcolor was the mark of the fellatrice in ancient temple-prostitution societies. The red shoes are similarly meant to evoke vaginal associations.
The goals sought by the patriarchal auteurship of The Wizard of Oz through its manipulation of the red shoes is simple. Female viewers, especially those of about Dorothy's age, are presented with a strict, limited dichotomy of choices about what a woman may do with her sexuality: she may only identify with Dorothy or the Wicked Witches; viz. with passive femininity or lesbianism.
Dorothy's passivity is a recurring feature of the film. She only arrives at Oz at the whim of the tornado, for example, and once there is dependent on the advice of other (primarily male) characters. (Are there any female Ozian characters other than the Wicked Witches)? Dorothy's only proactive actions, leading the team to the Emerald City, are undertaken solely to help her return to Kansas.
Dorothy is also passive in dealing with red shoes. She only puts them on at the urging of indigenous Ozians oppressed by the house-killed Wicked Witch, and is unaware of their totemic power. In this she is a proper young girl at the gate of menses, unaware of the magic associated with the post-pubescent vagina. After putting on the red shoes, she attracts male companions. Her relations with the lion, scarecrow, and robot evoke peculiar sets of responses. She is on one hand timid, requiring male suzerainty to pursue her goals. However, she is also the smartest of the four, and her insights help the others realize that their desired objects (courage, a brain, a heart) have been gained. Her insights are carefully detached from her self-esteem, however. Her guileless innocence and "innate" maternal instincts combine in a quasi-Oedipal fashion to do good in a lover/mother role for her male companions.
The final point with regard to the red shoes is the construction of Dorothy's goals. Though she has worn the red shoes throughout the Oz portion of the film, her goal is to return to the colorless, presexual Kansas of her childhood. That she does so is meant to promote a culturally-coded frigidity that is one of patriarchy's means of locking women into monogamous indenture.
Many features of the film are intended to portray the Wicked Witch/Schoolteacher as a lesbian. This portrayal, however, is limited by the stock stereotyped images of lesbianism available to the pre-Sexual Revolution patriarchal mindset.
For one, the Wicked Witch/Schoolteacher is the tallest and most athletic female character in the film. Riding a bicycle or a broom is far more athletic than the walking/skipping that Dorothy does, and the association of female athletic prowess with lesbianism runs from Navratilova and King back to Babe Didrikson Zeharias.
Another stereotype is the portrayal of the Wicked Witch/Schoolteacher as having twisted maternal instincts. As the Kansas schoolteacher, the character helps raise children, but has not borne any. The Wicked Witch has on-screen mutant offspring in the form of her monkey-esque familiars. By implication, the lack of semen in their conception has resulted in twisted parthenogenically-derived offspring.
The leading features of the monstrous lesbian stereotype revolve around the Wicked Witches and the red shoes. In both cases the Witches covet the shoes because they are aware of the powerful mojo of the sexually-potent vagina. In neither case, the filmmakers imply, does she deserve this power. After all, a lesbian would not yield use and possession of the vagina to patriarchal males, its "natural" purpose. The magik power can only be trusted to a neophyte fresh in from the wheatfields, hence the crowning of Dorothy as the innocent whore by the oppressed (read: denied coitus) Munchkins.
The killing of the second Witch by water underscores the incompatibility, in patriarchal eyes, of lesbianism and the vagina. A passively heterosexual female such as Dorothy is untroubled by rain, but it is the rain that slays the lesbian Witch. Rain, and by extension water, has two associations that charge the melting of the Witch with symbolic power. The first is that of the impregnating power of rain, which runs through the collective unconscious of agricultural societies from the beginning of recorded history, when this awareness was objectified in Babylonian legend: rain is the semen of the sky-god impregnating the earth-goddess. The second focuses on the phallocentrism of the patriarchal mindset, that everything in the world revolves around the greater glory of the penis. In this view, water is evocative of vaginal self-lubrication to better allow penetration and impregnation. The Witch, lacking the red shoes/vagina, is thus destroyed by something that she, if "normal", would possess.
