Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and: Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls' Series (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and: Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls’ Series Alice Phoebe Naylor (bio) Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture and Laura Ingalls Wilder by Ann Romines. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997, 287 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $14.36 paper. Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls’ Series edited by Sherrie A. Inness. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997, 193 pp., $41.95 hardcover, $18.95 paper. These two critical works have in common the serious consideration of girls’ series books that have been, and are being, read by many millions of children over most of this century. Both Inness and Romines make a fascinating and significant contribution to a feminist understanding of growing up as a female reader of series books and of how those books are constructed. My childhood preceded the Little House books and as an adult student of children’s literature I have never felt the emotional attachment to them that Anne Romines describes as a “consuming passion” (9). Romines has not lost her affection for the Little House, nor her memory of feeling speechless when her grandmother took her to meet Laura Ingalls Wilder. Thus, Romines writes, she hears a “clamor of voices” that inform her about the Little House series: the “raptly reading girl of the 1950’s,” the voices of the book characters, the joint but competing voices of the two authors, and her own feminist scholar voice, so challenging to the girl of the 1950s (10). In each of the five chapters, these voices appear. Romines examines the texts from feminist perspectives: how both the authors and characters wriggle out from under, and still protect, patriarchal domination; feminist and patriarchal attitudes toward multicultural issues raised in the text; [End Page 213] women’s education in materialism, consumerism and domesticity; portrayal of gender and adolescent sexuality; and lastly, how interweaving of multiple plots characterizes women’s lives dominated by patriarchy and contributes to the richness of text for readers. The voice of the authors, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Lane, is based on collaboration through letter writing and, for periods of time, discussions of inclusions, plot, and characters. Romines believes that Wilder is credited with sole authorship because joint authorship was, and is, frowned upon in the patriarchal system. For the women themselves, collaboration was a daily domestic activity. Writing was already the profession and substantial source of income for both Wilder and Lane when the first Little House book was conceived. Lane was prolific, traveled widely, and made a substantial living on her writing. Her mother wrote primarily for farm and domestic journals. Lane was always interested in writing as a means of earning an income, and she encouraged her mother to write to meet market demands. The two communicated constantly, and often in disagreement, over the formation of each story. At one point Wilder thought she could go it alone, but found herself at a loss without Lane’s help. The failures of their husbands to succeed financially also accounts for Wilder and Lane becoming writers. They were far more successful than the men and the Little House series is still earning money for heirs. The two novels concerned with sexuality and becoming an adult, By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter, seem to reflect the two voices, mother and daughter, with special power and emotion. Romines exposes the myth of sole author of the series, but beautifully illuminates the feminist nature of the mother-daughter collaboration. Romines believes that the foremost dilemma of the authors is how to balance their desire to preserve their father’s narratives with their inclination to “inscribe a girl’s story” (22). Both Lane and Wilder were daughters of “beloved and partially failed fathers who had no male heirs” (24). Pa’s stories, which figure in most of the earliest books, do not include a single female character. His stories portray a single male in battle with nature and government regulations. The central problem of the text, says Romines, is in how to gain female agency and the female storyteller’s voice...