Sibling Assignment #65: There's No Place Like Home

I handed out this week's Sibling Assignment. It's pretty simple:

"What do you understand about The Wizard of Oz as an adult that you didn't understand as a child?"

InlandEmpireGirl's beautiful, moving post about her adult understanding of the Tin Woodsman is one you must read and it is here; Silver Valley Girl's post is not posted yet.

Twenty-six years ago, I taught full-time for two years in the English Department at Whitworth College (now University). My first semester I taught the Shakespeare course and I was going through a transformation in my thinking about and my feeling toward Shakespeare's plays.

I was only twenty-eight years old and had been studying Shakespeare seriously for about two years, but his plays had really been on my mind since I was twenty.

During much of that time, I saw the tragedies comprising Shakespeare's most profound thinking and deepest feeling. I regarded the comedies as fluff. I treated them as afterthoughts. To me, it was as if Shakespeare needed a vacation from writing real plays, so he dashed off some comedies.

But during the fall of 1982, my thinking and feeling and attitude began to change.

In part, I think the divorce I'd just been through inspired this change. Divorce left me longing for reconciliation, healing, stability, union, and reunion; in short, I longed for home.

I was preparing to teach A Winter's Tale when it hit me that this play, like many of Shakespeare's comedies is about the pain of separation and the longing for reunion. Furthermore, A Winter's Tale, like The Tempest, was about being separated from home and the longing to return home again.

Shakespeare's comedies satisfy that longing to return home, whether home is in actual place or whether it's portrayed in the success of a threatened love relationship culminating in marriage and the promise of a new home.

It suddenly struck me that this idea of home, a place of security, trust, belonging, and ease, was not only a physical place, but an inward spiritual truth.

Inwardly, home takes shape as a wholeness and Shakespeare's comedies suddenly were more profound and meaningful than his tragedies in their portrayal of the joy that comes when one's home is lost or one is separated from home and one returns. The comedies portray peace.

Suddenly, preparing A Winter's Tale, I pictured Dorothy wandering the yellow brick road through the forests and poppies and finding herself in the castle of the Wicked Witch and I remembered her baleful voice, the sound of longing.

All Dorothy wanted was to return home.

The Wizard of Oz always moved me as a child and its power was beyond my understanding.

Now I know.

As an adult, I began to understand that Dorothy's longing to return home was not just her longing, it is a deep human longing, deep in all of us, and I had been feeling Dorothy's longing since I was about five years old.

In the loneliness and despair of being newly divorced, I felt the loss of the sanctuary I thought I had with my wife; within myself I was casting about, pitching between the joy of my work and my inward misery. I knew I couldn't return home with Eileen; I wanted to find home within my soul. It was a futile search. It's still elusive.

My literature instruction began to seize more and more upon the idea of home. When I wanted my students to understand the emotion, outside of themselves, of this universal longing for home, I implored them to remember Dorothy and her repeated mantra: "There's no place like home."

Like me, my students began to understand The Wizard of Oz as adults in a way they hadn't as children.