At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers

The Wizard of Oz is a book that was written by L. Frank Baum and published in 1900. The book tells the story of a girl named Dorothy who gets taken away in a tornado to the Land of Oz. She has many adventures and meets many different characters while she tries to get back home to her family in Kansas. The magical slippers in the book were silver but when it was made into a movie in 1939, Ruby Slippers were used.

The ruby slippers in At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers, written by Salman Rushdie and published in a book of his short stories called East, West, are the same ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz. I think the slippers represent normalcy and happiness. They can allow people to go back "home", or even a place in time where they think they will be happy. I think "home" represents wherever or whenever a person was having the best time of their life, and if they are able to purchase the ruby slippers, they will be able to go home. The slippers are so valuable because in the world that the author is describing, the time when this story takes place, happiness seems so rare. In this setting, the world seems to be in such turmoil that everyone wants these ruby slippers so they can go somewhere that makes them happy.

Since the ruby slippers would be an amazing prize for anyone to have, this auction has lured everyone to it. It seems that the auctioneers are the people who are in control of the world at this point. If they are able to have control over something as valuable as the slippers, then they must be powerful people. Everyone wants the slippers, and even if they can’t afford the slippers, they still show up to the auction. Movie stars are there, memorabilia junkies, the ruby slippers even have a cult following. "Wizards, Lions, Scarecrows are in plentiful supply... there is a scarcity of Tin Men on account of the particular discomfort of the costume" (Pg. 89). "The public" is a particular group who is at the auction, along with political refugees, exiles, and "homeless tramps" (Pg. 89-90). Even people who criticize the slipper fetish are there. The bidders can be anyone who has enough money, since the auctioneers insist that "anyone’s cash is as good as anyone else’s" (Pg. 93).

"The Grand Saleroom of the Auctioneers is the beating heart of the earth" (Pg. 98). It is what rules the world now. Anything can be sold, and anything can be bought. It is how value is established for items as wondrous as the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, the Alps, the Sphinx, to items as precious as state secrets, human souls, family trees and royal lineages. "It is to the Auctioneers that [the people] go to establish the value of [their] pasts, of [their] futures, of [their] lives" (Pg. 101).

I think this story is supposed to be a pessimistic, futuristic view of the world, or possibly even an exaggeration of today’s world. It describes a world where although everything has a value to it, nothing is held as precious or holy anymore. People are willing to throw away the love of a husband or wife in order to get their latest material desires. It is almost as if the world is coming to an end so people live for the day or the second, and they see no future. While reading this story the first time it just sounded bazar and pointless, after sitting on it for a while I realized that there is more meaning to it if you read between the lines