Handy Mandy in Oz - The Characters

The Characters

Thompson's character creations are not always highly imaginative: a medieval knight (Sir Hokus of Pokes in The Royal Book of Oz), a circus elephant (Kabumpo in Kabumpo in Oz), and an animated statue (the Public Benfactor in The Giant Horse of Oz) fall below the level of Baum's greatest grotesques. In Handy Mandy, however, she created a unique figure. The character taxed the illustrative abilities of John Neill, though he is fairly consistent in giving Mandy three left hands and four rights.

Thompson later wrote a 48-line poem that provides an origin for Mandy, though this origin is inconsistent with the novel. In the poem, Mandy is an artificial and created being, made of "wood and tin...wire and cloth and plaster...." She was built as a sort of domestic robot to perform housework. The novel, in contrast, clearly indicates that Mandy, despite her inanimate parts, comes from a race of seven-handed people.

The principle villain, the Wizard Wutz, is another unusual character for Oz: a handsome, smooth, graceful but pure-evil villain who commands a hierarchical organization of subversives, with planted spies in positions of power all over the land of Oz, and a systematic collective strategy for overthrowing the government.

Ruggedo the Gnome King makes his last appearance in the Oz-Canon of Forty here. It's very small, barely more than a cameo. He begins having been transformed into a jug (see Pirates in Oz) and ends transformed into a cactus.