Increasingly disconnected from traditional family and community life, and existing in opposition to old-fashioned religious and social values such as self-restraint and self-denial, hard work and delayed gratification, repression and guilt, this new culture emphasized luxury and indulgence. At its heart was the quest for wealth, security, comfort, and pleasure. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new culture emerged in the United States. Literary scholars have long interpreted “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as a fable of populism, but it is more than that: It is a celebration of consumer culture as the the very meaning of America, this bright and shining land where men and women are happy to deceive themselves into believing a fairy tale, which, as the Wizard of Oz himself admitted, every sensible person ought to know is untrue.
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