A tornado strikes a Kansas farm, blowing a young girl called Dorothy off to the Land of Oz. Here she meets three characters who are searching for various attributes: a scarecrow wanting brains, a woodcutter made of tin yearning for a heart, and a lion desperate for courage. They all decide to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to find the great wizard Oz. Apparently only Oz has the power to send Dorothy home, and provide her companions with what they desire.

The journey begins and, ironically, it soon becomes clear that each character already has the qualities they feel they lack. The scarecrow, for example, having straw for brains, sees things in a straightforward way. When Dorothy describes the home she is so keen to find again, he wonders why anyone would want to go back to a grey place like Kansas. Dorothy dismisses such nonsense, but on the journey to the Emerald City, it is the Scarecrow who generally does the thinking and comes up with ways out of scrapes.

It’s the same with the Tin Woodman who, not having a heart, is always worried about acting in a heartless way. This means he compensates by always behaving with great sensitivity. When he has a heart, he muses, he won’t have to worry so much.

And then there’s the cowardly lion, who performs many brave acts on the journey. As Oz eventually tells the lion, courage cannot really exist in the absence of fear. The lion’s fearfulness is actually part of his courage.

Which brings us to Oz himself, who turns out to be a circus promoter blown in by accident from Omaha, just pretending to be a wizard. He ‘grants’ his visitors’ wishes, using theatrical flimflam – pins for the scarecrow’s head for example, to make him ‘sharp’. And though Oz gives nothing, he is at least wise enough to realise his limitations.

While he provides Dorothy’s companions with the confidence to believe in what they already have, Oz can’t send Dorothy back to Kansas. For that, he suggests that the homesick girl visits someone with proper magical power, Glinda the Good Witch of the South. But Glinda merely informs Dorothy that she already has the ability to go back to Kansas. It had been there all along in the pair of magic slippers which she inherited from the Wicked Witch of the East, when Dorothy’s wind-borne house fell on her.

This is a fairytale relevant to modern times. Dorothy doesn’t do the usual fairytale thing of waiting around to be rescued by a knight, who in this case seems to have been taken down a peg or two to become a tin man, who is actually rescued by Dorothy. There is also the fact that in praying for rescue, the godlike presence Dorothy seeks turns out to be a mirage. Oz, using showbiz smoke and mirrors, appears in the form of a beautiful woman, a huge face, or a ball of fire, maybe recalling gods, goddesses or sun worship. But these authorities are merely Oz, who has no supernatural power to answer prayers. All of the things we wish for have to be found within ourselves. And yet, even if old forms of omniscient assistance are shown to be a fraud, this modern-feeling story still presents its sources of actual help in terms of ancient religious symbolism. For example, there’s the trinity of helpers assisting Dorothy. Religions often have a group of three central figures, and Dorothy is helped by a group of three. The idea of a helpful trinity also crops up with the powerful Flying Monkeys, who grant three wishes. And Dorothy has to click the heels of her magic shoes together three times to get back to Kansas. There are other possible religious parallels, in the Yellow Brick, which some critics portray as Buddhism’s golden path to enlightenment, and in the cyclone, representing death and rebirth.

Written in 1900, The Wizard of Oz remains a fascinating modern fairytale, accepting the new while continuing with a sense of long established reassurance. Historian William R. Leach summed it up nicely when he said that The Wizard of Oz meets “the particular ethical and emotional needs of people living in a new urban, industrial society. The Wizard of Oz was an optimistic secular text: it helped people feel at home in America’s new industrial economy.”