Books: The Woggle-Bug Book By L. Frank Baum

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this bit if you haven’t read the book and are planning to do so!

The Woggle-Bug Book features the broad ethnic humour that was accepted and popular in its era, and which Baum employed in various works.  The Woggle-Bug favours flashy clothes with bright colours.  He dresses in gorgeous reds and yellows and blues and greens and carries a pink handkerchief. One day he falls in love with a gaudy Wagnerian plaid dress that he sees on a mannequin in a department store window.  Being a woggle bug, he has trouble differentiating between the dress and its wearers, wax or human.  The dress is on sale for $7.93 with GREATLY REDUCED written on the tag.  The Bug works for two days as a ditch digger for money to buy the dress. He earns double pay since he digs with four hands. 

He arrives too late, though and the dress has been sold and makes its way through the second-hand market.  The Bug pursues his love through the town, ineptly courting the Irish, Swedish, and African-American women and even one Chinese man who had the dress in turn.  His pursuit eventually leads to an accidental balloon flight to Africa.  There, menacing Arabs want to kill the Woggle-Bug, but he convinces them that his death will bring bad luck.  In the jungle, he falls in with the talking animals that are the hallmark of Baum’s imaginative world.

In the end, the Bug makes his way back to the city, with a necktie made from the dress’s loud fabric.  He wisely reconciles himself to his fate.  “After all, this necktie is my love” he said, “and my love is now mine forevermore! Why should I not be happy and content?”

There are plot exploit elements that occur in other Baum works such as an accidental balloon flight that took the Wizard to Oz in Baum’s most famous book and hostile Arabs are a feature of John Dough and the Cherub (1906).