ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the violence of childhood domestication presented in each text, focusing specifically on relationship between Dorothy and her beloved pet dog, Toto. It describes the process of domestication to trauma and marginalization in order to interrogate the Otherness inhabited by both Dorothy and Toto. Critics writing about The Wizard of Oz disagree about relationships between Dorothy, Toto, and domesticity. It is useful at this point to enlist trauma theory as way to conceptualize domestication as dominance-and, by extension, as traumatic-in order to read ways in which Oz interacts with Dorothy's domestication. The chapter views Dorothy and Toto in Was as examples of characters who extend Sedgwick's argument to include oppression of children and pets considered Other-or as Kidd puts it, "nonconformist" within homogenous societies. For Baum's Dorothy, when the pair reaches Oz and she realizes that it may be impossible to return home, her trauma manifests at the realization that Aunt Em and Uncle Henry "will worry about.
