When people discuss the classic young female heroines of fantasy literature, they usually get down to three: Alice from Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, Dorothy Gale from the Oz books, and Wendy Darling from J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. There's others who could make the cut (Betsy, Trot and Ozma could back up Dorothy), and some get ignored, whether for near obscurity (Anthea and Jane from E. Nesbitt's Five Children and It), and others are left out due to copyright concerns (Jane and Barbara Banks from the Mary Poppins stories, Susan and Lucy Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia), but there's one before Alice who routinely gets ignored: Marie Stahlbaum.
Marie is from E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, originally published in 1816. Maybe Marie doesn't usually get lumped in because the story was originally written in German and all the others are written in English. Or perhaps as the story opens at Christmas, it gets considered a Christmas story while the others aren't necessarily tied to a holiday. And there's also the fact that the public at large is less familiar with the original text than they are a highly streamlined version of the story that gets adapted into countless ballet variations every year.
Wait, the original text gets ignored for a popular streamlined adaptation? Oz fans, we know the feeling.
Interestingly, there's several parallels with Oz. Alexander Volkov rewrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in Russian as The Wizard of the Emerald City, naming characters Baum hadn't and changing names. Similarly, Alexandre Dumas (yes, the Three Musketeers guy) rewrote Hoffmann's story in French as The History of a Nutcracker. The Nutcracker prince got the name Nathaniel (yes, Hoffmann didn't name the title characters, Baum also didn't name the Wizard until Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz), and Marie's family name was changed to Silberhaus. Dumas' version helped launch the story into wider consciousness and is the version the ballet was based on.
In the original production of the ballet, Marie's name was changed to Clara for the first time, carrying over into later adaptations of the story. I suspect it was to prevent any connection drawn to the daughter of librettist and choreographer Marius Petipa, the famous ballerina Marie Petipa. In Hoffmann's original story, Clara is the name of a doll Marie gets for Christmas. Some claim the name gets swapped between them, but I've only seen one adaptation of the Nutcracker have the doll named Marie when our heroine is named Clara. (Disney's recent takes on the story find ways to use both names.)
Regardless of the name, Marie (as I'll call her) is explicitly said in the original text to be only seven years old when the main action of the story takes place. This makes her the same age as Alice, and around the same age a lot of readers assume Dorothy is on her first adventure in Oz.
It is well known that Alice was named for Alice Liddell, a girl that Lewis Carroll was friendly with. It's also believed that Baum named Dorothy for his late niece, Dorothy Gage. Just like them, Marie and her brother Fritz were named for Marie and Fritz Hitzig, children of a dear friend of Hoffmann's, Julius Eduard Hitzig. It's believed that he expressed himself through the mysterious Godfather Drosselmeyer, who presents the the Stahlbaum children with an elaborate clockwork castle. In real life, Hoffmann created a cardboard castle for the Hitzigs while spending the holiday with them. Then the next year, he delighted them with his new story inspired by the festivities.
Similar to Baum, who tried to improve on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (although it became his claim to fame), Hoffmann took to heart much of the criticism of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, later producing The Strange Child. Both stories appear in his collections The Serapion Brothers, in which his stories are presented with a framing device of writers who share their stories with each other and critique them. (English translations of The Serapion Brothers, save print on demand affairs, are long out of print with publishers favoring new translations of selected Hoffmann stories. Luckily for us, we have Project Gutenberg to give us Alexander Ewing's serviceable if outdated translation.) Hoffmann has the other writers call out some of the story's weaknesses.
Lothair, the fictional writer who The Nutcracker and the Mouse King gets attributed to, declares: "I think it is a great mistake to suppose that clever, imaginative children—and it is only they who are in question here—should content themselves with the empty nonsense which is so often set before them under the name of Children's Tales. They want something much better; and it is surprising how much they see and appreciate which escapes a good, honest, well-informed papa."
One could imagine Baum saying the same thing. In his introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (a simple piece that is often overlooked when evaluating his work), he writes "every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal." Two years later in the piece "What Children Want," he wrote "Positively the child cannot be satisfied with inanities in its story books. It craves marvels – fairy tales, adventures, surprising and unreal occurrences; gorgeousness, color and kaleidoscopic succession of inspiring incident."
I would hesitate to claim that Baum read Hoffmann. To be sure, it wouldn't be impossible as English translations of Hoffmann were available. However, Hoffmann is one of the earliest writers of what became modern science fiction and gothic fantasy. In many of his fantasies, such as The Golden Pot, we find a person living a normal life when they happen to witness something wonderful. A serpent under a tree becomes a lovely woman, a tiny flea helps a young man see beyond the deceptions thrown in his way, a miner sees a fantastic underground kingdom, a little girl sees a damaged nutcracker's eyes sparkle, or a bedridden invalid interprets the goings on outside his window. In a similar vein, Baum made a common but terrifying Kansas cyclone become the gateway to an incredible adventure.
Hoffmann is known to have inspired writers Baum would almost certainly have read, such as Edgar Allen Poe and also Charles Dickens, who Baum claimed was a favorite. (In fact, some wonder if Dickens' nickname Boz was actually the inspiration for Baum's most famous creation.) So even if Baum didn't know Hoffmann directly, some inspiration passed along.
There are other similarities between Baum and Hoffmann. Given their lifespans, they both settled into the life of an author late in their lives, with Baum picking up on children's writing in the last 22 years of his life. Hoffmann began publishing his stories in his last decade of life. Both were fairly progressive in their views and enjoyed music and the stage, Baum writing many pieces for the stage in his life, and Hoffmann created the opera Undine and composing music on his own. And yet as varied and fascinating careers as both men had, both are remembered chiefly for a fantasy work for children they produced: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And both works inspired far more popular dramatic adaptations famous for their music: The Nutcracker ballet scored by Tchaikovsky and MGM's classic film The Wizard of Oz.
In fact if we may go further, both of these famous adaptations often under serve their heroines. Judy Garland's Dorothy is less headstrong than her literary counterpart, relying on her friends to rescue her from the Wicked Witch of the West when she's captured and her defeat of the Witch being a happy accident. Baum's Dorothy also accidentally kills the Witch, but in an act of defiance. Don't get me wrong, Judy is still a powerhouse of a performer in the film, but her character could have stood up to the Witch a little more.
In The Nutcracker ballet, Marie (or Clara, depending on the production) is largely passive until she happens to throw her shoe at the Mouse King. In Hoffmann, Marie only wishes throwing her shoe was the end of the Mouse King. Instead of immediately being whisked to a fairyland, she awakens in bed with a nasty cut in her arm and her parents chiding her for being careless. While she's recovering the Mouse King comes to her at night and demands her Christmas candy and then her sugar dolls in return for not destroying the Nutcracker. (And note, with German customs, her injury means she had to sit out most of her family's Christmas celebrations, so those are all she had left of her holiday.) She finally realizes the Nutcracker needs a new sword and manages to procure one from her brother, allowing the Nutcracker to finally defeat the Mouse King. The Nutcracker hails her as the reason for his victory.
Baum and Hoffmann, despite coming from different cultures and different times, seem to have nearly been on the same wavelength when it came to their sensibilities, writing of the mundane turning into the bizarre and fantastic, and even describing wondrous fantasy worlds.
So, if one is going to have Dorothy meet up with Alice and Wendy, perhaps they should also make room for a little German girl.
