Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

Abstract

Ann Romines.1997. Constructing Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. $55.00 hc. $17.95 sc. xi + 287 pp. It takes a certain kind of courage for an adult literary scholar to analyze books she loved as a child. It can be sobering to revisit a childhood favorite, only to realize it is badly written, or sexist, or racist, or sentimental, or just plain dull. It can be equally sobering to discover that text one remembers is actually movie version, or cartoon version, or television version, with incidents and characters added or deleted willy-hilly Some books are best left closed. Given this, it is all more remarkable that Ann Romines chose to do a full-length scholarly study of her own favorite books from childhood, Little House series. Clearly this study was in part her personal mission to understand why these books meant so much to her while growing in Licking, Missouri, in late 1940s and 1950s. Romines includes kinds of personal details-her collection of Little House-related memorabilia (a rag doll, a nine-patch quilt, a glass bread plate); her reaction to late novels in series (When I read Silver lake and following volume, The Long Winter [1940], I had exhilarating feeling that I was leaving `baby books' . . . behind to become a grown-up reader [139], her grandmother driving her to a bookstore in Springfield, Missouri, to obtain 85-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder's autograph--that rarely appear in scholarly books. But in this study they seem right at home, even necessary; for as Romines knows well, her intense personal reaction to Little House books is not unique to her. Rather, hers is part of a continuing communal response to texts that explore issues of gender and personal identity. The Little House books have enjoyed extraordinary popularity among several generations ofAmerican girls, from Depression era (when to buy a book was a major expense) to present (when youngsters supposedly have an aversion to printed page). Even more, these books tend to be read and re-read, with Little House fans maintaining their passion into adulthood and actively recruiting their (female) children and grandchildren to share in experience. It is nature of Little House books' continuing personal and national appeal that intrigues Romines; and she brings to bear on that question her impressive knowledge of literary history, feminist criticism, popular culture, and literary theory. She also makes generous use of her gift for astute formalist readings and her sensitivity to nuances of both creative process and internecine strife. The result is a complex and provocative scholarly study Romines's sensitivity to creativity and to mother/daughter relationships is an essential element of her study's success.William Holtz's fine 1993 book, The Ghost in Little House, made a convincing case that Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was ghost of Little House series, a scenario that renders problematic one's response to Wilder as author. But Romines declares early on that she regards series as the work of a composite author (47)-and much of impact of Constructing Little House comes from her analysis of written exchanges between mother and daughter as they collaborated on texts. Both women were strong-willed, and daughter Rose-globetrotting, independent, market-minded-argued often and hard with her mother. But if Rose was aggressive, Laura was stubborn; and written record of their battles makes it clear that Laura, though not a professional writer like her daughter, nevertheless understood instinctively when to downplay or omit characters (she wrote Rose in regard to characters Lena and Docia, stress them, don't play them up [157)), how to use physical objects (a china shepherdess, a fiddle, a rag doll) as motifs to unite books in Little House series, and how to arrange plots in such a way that Pa's many failures were simultaneously acknowledged but repressed in reader's consciousness. …