Don’t Break His Heart: The Tin Woodman’s Love Life in Adaptations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
By: Michelle Heilig
“As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don’t know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable” (Wizard). Before gifting him with a beating heart, The Wizard of Oz cautions the Tin Man of his newfound emotional capacity. In the 1939 film adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Wizard foreshadows the emotional troubles the Tin Man suffers in modern adaptations of L. Frank Baum’s novel. Whether he inflicts the damage upon himself by forcing excessive emotion or by restraining his own feelings until he implodes, the Tin Man is portrayed as a character that cannot tune his mind to match his heart, allowing artists to use him as a reference for their own heartache.
In Baum’s original novel, the Tin Woodman, the man with no heart to fill his empty body, believes that without physical heart he cannot live a life with empathy: “‘I have no heart, you know, so I am careful to help all those who may need a friend, even if it happens to be only a mouse’” (Baum 53). Clearly, he can empathize, as he stops to save every mouse or bug along the way. But the Tin Man requires the physical heart to prove his loving capacity to himself. He doubts himself through the entire journey to Oz, scrambling to prove he doesn’t have the heart to feel emotion. However, only his internal struggle to not feel is getting in the way of his emotional well being. After having his heart stolen by the Wicked Witch of the West, the Tin Man hides his sadness by claiming an inability to empathize and love. Only when the Wizard gives him a physical heart—a fake heart—does the Tin Man identify his emotions for their value.
The Tin Man’s hopelessness is captured in the Avett Brothers song “Tin Man.” The singers lament their inability to feel, comparing themselves to the Tin Man, using this Tin Man status to mask their feelings. Rather than sharing their thoughts they mask themselves in a fog of indifference, because American culture values the strong, emotionless man: “So it goes a man grows cold, some would say a man grows strong” (Avett). The singers’ voices crack despite the cheerful melody of the song. Only once in the song, during the bridge, do the Avett Brothers sound sincere in their music. An acoustic guitar is the only instrument used to accompany their singing, reflecting the genuine emotion they feel, as they say “I miss that feeling of feeling…the wind upon my face, and caring what it brings this way” (Avett). But soon after, they return to the false cheer of the melody. Just as the Tin Man regrets wallowing in his sadness to the point of desolation, the Avett Brothers want to return to “caring what if brings this way” (Avett).
Rather than taking the shell-of-a-man route that the Avett Brothers used, Marj Hahne depicts the Tin Man as melodramatic in her poem Dorothy Gale, in which Dorothy criticizes him because he “cried too damn much” (Hahne). The Tin Man got his wish and more, to the extent that his emotions hinder his quest for love rather than cement it. By convincing himself that he should have strong emotions, the Tin Man overdoes himself and over-dramatizes the emotion he assumes he should have. Hahne hints that these emotions were perhaps acted or forced by emphasizing that “his gestures were too mechanical,” iterating the Tin Man’s plagued love life (Hahne). He could gain this description because of his tin exterior, but “too mechanical” also implies that his movements were not genuine. Whether he uses stoicism as a safety net or gushes out his heart, the Tin Man cannot find love in any adaptation.
According to most critics, in Baum’s original story the Tin Man character represents the industrial worker during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The Tin Man shows that although their happiness and emotions have been buried under a layer of hardened soul due to working in harsh conditions, whether they believe it or not, all people have the capacity to love.
Throughout time, readers, viewers, and lovesick people use the Tin Man to lament their own love lives. Some view the Tin Man, with his so-called unfeeling heart, as having a free pass on heartache, even though he spends his life longing for his lost loved one. Baum reveals that the Tin Man has had the capacity to feel emotions just as well as anyone else, but the simple fact that he doesn’t believe he can bars him from love. All of these adaptations follow the same story—protecting one’s heart by pretending it has a malfunction, a deformity, never leads to the comfortable outcome the architect hopes for. Creators use the Tin Man as a lovelorn character who can’t quite get his way because he has thought himself into being unable to love. Unfortunately, the Tin Man may travel through time, but he does not age, so his flaw follows him throughout his life.
Readers take the Tin Man and turn him into themselves, whether to represent love or passion or anguish. The Tin Man finally recognizes and claims ownership of his pain once the Wizard of Oz shows him that he is capable of loving, if only because he is loved so dearly by his companions. Fascination surrounding the Tin Man throughout time stems from a shared battle over balancing pain and hiding from it. Hearts may seem to be hardened by difficult working lives, but the search for love lives on even in the most jaded of people. Ultimately, Baum teaches his readers that accepting misery and heartache validates the heart and its hardships, more so than masking pain and pushing it out of sight. “Now I know I’ve got a heart, because it is breaking” (Wizard).
Works Cited
Avett Brothers. “Tin Man.” I and Love and You. American Recordings, 2009. MP3.
Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Lexington, KY: Amazon, 2015. Print
Hahne, Marj. “8 Works Inspired By The Wizard of Oz.” Laurie Boris. WordPress, 30 Nov. 2010.
Web. 25 Sept. 2015.
The Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming. Perf. Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert
Lahr. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939. Film.