Good vs. Evil Theme Analysis

When a cyclone uproots Dorothy from her simple home in Kansas and carries her to the magical Land of Oz, she’s dazzled by how different everything seems. Where the Kansas prairie is depicted as a gray and uniformly ordinary place, Oz is an exaggerated fairy tale world of opposites and extremes. One of the first things Dorothy learns about Oz is that its balance of good and evil is perfectly symmetrical; for instance, there are two good witches and two bad ones. The goodness or wickedness of the witches is never called into question, because their behavior speaks for itself. Morally (and literally, compared to Kansas), there are no shades of gray in Oz. As colorful and whimsical as the Land of Oz can often appear, it’s equally defined by its unpleasantness. For every polite talking animal or benevolent witch, there's a gruesome beheading or a terrible witch who keeps an entire country enslaved. The sharp contrast between beautiful goodness and hideous wickedness reflects Dorothy’s simple and childlike perspective.

The extreme good vs. evil in Oz also heightens the tension and emphasizes Dorothy’s childlike innocence by contrast. But even Dorothy participates in Oz’s violence as she kills both wicked witches, though it’s notable that both killings were accidental. It’s also likely not a coincidence that the Wizard—arguably the only morally gray character in the novel—isn’t native to Oz. Both Dorothy and the Wizard are from a “civilized” country, as the Witch of the North calls it: a place without witches, where good and evil aren’t as clear-cut as they are in a children’s story. In fact, in her longing to return to the gray, ordinary world of Kansas, Dorothy shows a remarkable maturity and willingness to face her complicated reality, rather than the simplicity that Oz offers. Part of growing up, this suggests, means learning to embrace shades of gray and a more nuanced understanding of good, evil, and morality, which Dorothy symbolically does when she returns to Kansas a more mature person than when she left.