Plenary Paper: The Magic Circle of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Abstract

Plenary PaperThe Magic Circle of Laura Ingalls Wilder Virginia Wolf (bio) Seven years ago I left Kansas, where I grew up some twenty-five or so miles from where the little house on the prairie once stood, to come to Wisconsin, where I now live some twenty-five or so miles from where the little house in the big woods once stood. I was glad to leave the drab plainness of Kansas for the green or white, tree-filled beauty of Wisconsin, and my gladness found expression when I wrote "The Symbolic Center: Little House in the Big Woods." In the first Little House book, Wilder admirably captures my feeling for the Wisconsin landscape, especially for the north woods where every winter I retreat to a rented cabin for a week of skiing and rest. Whenever I have read "The Symbolic Center," however, someone in the audience has inevitably asked me to speak about the parallels between Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. Finally, curiosity led me to reread the second novel, and I came full circle back to Kansas only to discover, as I continued to read the remaining five books about Wilder's growing up, how central the circle is to the meaning and structure of Wilder's series. In "The Symbolic Center," I have, of course, already suggested that in the first Little House book a center for the circle exists in Wilder's synthesis of house and big woods, a vision of harmony arising from the fluid status of oppositions. And I note there that the novel is cyclical, moving from autumn to autumn and from Chapter 1, "Little House in the Big Woods," to Chapter 13, "The Deer in the Wood." Wilder, in other words, uses style and structure to unite the oppositions characteristic of human existence: home and universe, domesticity and wildness, light and dark, big and little, play and work, reality and dream, time and eternity. But the fundamental vehicle for this union is place—the image of a little house in the big woods. What I did not perhaps sufficiently stress in "The Symbolic Center," on the other hand, is that the house is the focal point, the exact center in Wilder's first novel. The primary experience here is one of safety, snugness, and enclosure. The big woods are remote. We are less aware of them than of the little house. They, in fact, contribute to our sense of enclosure, blocking our view of what's distant from the little house and sheltering—even hiding—the little house from foes and strangers. We are, therefore, less aware of the circle than of the center. But when we turn to Little House on the Prairie, the situation is the exact reverse. Our attention is focused on the circle, and the center, paradoxically, becomes a moving house, a covered wagon, or a skeleton house open to the light, air, and danger of the wild, endless prairie. As Dolores Rosenblum points out, Little House on the Prairie is no less visionary than Little House in the Big Woods. Here Wilder focuses on big rather than little, universe rather than home, wildness rather than domesticity. But in both books oppositions are held in tension so that if in the second one we experience what Gaston Bachelard calls "intimate immensity," we might very well say the first one offers immense intimacy. As Little House in the Big Woods nurtures Laura and the reader, then, engendering the bliss of security within, Little House on the Prairie releases them into the universe, evoking the bliss of freedom without. The image of freedom creates the most powerful of Wilder's many magic circles. In her words, "Kansas was an endless flat land covered with tall grass blowing in the wind. Day after day they traveled in Kansas, and saw nothing but rippling grass and the enormous sky. In a perfect circle the sky curved down to the level land, and the wagon was in the circle's exact middle" (13). As Bachelard suggests (Chapter 10), the circle as an archetype is evocative in its capacity to suggest both movement and stasis, security...