While I was reading, I noticed the amount of color that Baum used.
"When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now" (Baum 1)
I was first interested in this quote because when I also wondered why the beginning of the movie was gray and then it got colorful. This explained that, but then I also thought how terrible of a place this had to be that it changed everything pretty and happy about her life to gray and gloom. Why would someone stay there if it changed them that much and for the bad. When looking more into the color gray I found that. Gray is a cool, conservative color that seldom evokes strong emotion although it can be seen as a cloudy or moody color. It is a balanced color that usually stands for mourning. If you look at it in this persepective then Aunt Em must be mourning something, maybe her life and what it has become. Also if you look at in the perspective of a balancing color then maybe it means that she is at ease with her life and that she knows that it is going to be this way and balanced for a while.
"...shod in silver shoes with pointed toes" (Baum 3)
First, I thought it was really interesting that they are really silver shoes not red. But secondly, I was wondering why they made them silver. The witch that she killed was a bad witch but does silver have anything to do with that. Usually when people say that gray and silver are similiar so maybe they are silver because she died and she's mourned but then she was a bad witch so it is good that she died. When i looked into the color silver, I found that silver is cool like gray but livelier, more playful. So maybe this is irony for what is ahead for Dorothy. But some would say that her journey wasn't all fun. Silver also symbolizes riches. This could represent the strength that the wizard has so she is wearing the shoes to go to the riches of the wizard.
"The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick" (Baum 4)
Yellow is a warm, sunshine color. Yellow is used as a celebration when a loved one comes home from war. In this case, I think yellow is used as a celebration that Dorothy will find a way home and the lion, scarecrow, and tinman will get what they need and want. It is a promising road that they had to take.
These are a few examples of the use of color in the book. Color is used in a lot of things but they way it is used and the idea of it. Color is strong, weak, and crazy.
I chose this as depth because I took many different parts of the book and went into each one. I researched each part that I talked about and looked into what each color was. I expressed my thought of what I thought each color meant in the situation and what the auther was trying to tell from it.
