In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum wrote an allegory or metaphor for the political, economic and social events of America of the 1890s. To many, the Wicked Witch of the West represented a "malign nature," and the difficult physical environment in which farmers on the Great Plains were trying to make their living. To others, she symbolized left-wing Populism. Yet Tonto recently discovered a journal, which Baum kept when working as a journalist and editor of a small newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota, that reveals the true story of how the witch actually represented the infamous cowgirl stripper, Kitty Gonzalez, who repeatedly rebuffing his sexual advances. Kitty filed a lawsuit against Baum and the club, The Great Dakota Bush Company, saying she was "humiliated and degraded by that sleazebag and his cronies." Baum fired back, “just wait till I expose you to infamy in my new book, you ‘witch.’”
And so the literary detective work of Tonto Fielding once again sheds light into the landscape of implied meaning, and perhaps, ironic suggestion.
