Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond ed. by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond ed. by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips Cathryn Halverson Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips, eds., Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 2020. 256 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30. Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond is an engaging collection of fourteen essays contributed by scholars at all [End Page 393] stages of their careers. The book grew out of a roundtable at the 2015 meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) inspired by the publication of Wilder's memoir, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Editors Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips explain that rather than simply celebrating Wilder the group wanted to critically analyze her books and influence. Acknowledging that her racial views have made her a controversial writer, they argue for why we should continue to read and study her nonetheless. Grouped into four sections—"Wilder and 'Truth,'" "Wilder and Constructions of Gender," "Wilder, Plains Studies, and the American Literature Canon," and "Cultural and Intercultural Wilder"—the book's many excellent essays complement each other without growing repetitive. Their diverse subjects include, among others, the antimodernist dimension of Wilder-related tourism (Anna Thompson Hajdik), Wilder's and Rose Wilder Lane's differing political views (Dawn Sardella-Ayres), Wilder's perspective on rural women's education (Jericho Williams), and Wilder's use of horses to imagine "Anglo-Indian Womanhood" (Vera R. Foley). Examining Laura's "two terrible mistakes" in respect to both Indians and the "abundant nonhuman world" around her (192), Margaret Noodin's "A Little Place in the Universe: An Ojibwe, Osage, and Dakota View of Laura Ingalls" is a highlight. Full of precisely expressed readings, the book offers many fresh insights: that Little House on the Prairie can be read as a captivity narrative, with Charles Ingalls the terrifying captor (Christine E. Farnan); that Laura's infamous desire to possess a black-eyed Indian baby builds on her attachment to her button-eyed rag doll (Jenna Brack); that the historical record upholds the fictional portrayal of the Wilders' equitable marriage (Melanie J. Fishbane); that Laura's fate in becoming a white mother is to acquire an aversion to Indians (Sonya Sawyer Fritz); that the "ceaseless acts of repetition" generated by the series are the source of its "semblance of truth" (Katharine Slater, 3). One might expect a book on this topic to include several scholars who specialize in western studies or at least make reference to established, influential works in the field. That expectation, [End Page 394] however, is not fulfilled, and as a consequence the collection lacks essays that deliberately situate Wilder within regional literary traditions while engaging with the existing scholarship to theorize her work. Even Annette Kolodny's classic The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers and Amy Kaplan's essential "Manifest Domesticity" are not invoked, nor is Nina Baym's more recent, quantitative Women Writers of the American West. Ann Romines's Constructing the Little House and Frances W. Kaye's "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve" are critical touchstones throughout the volume, but a study like Linda Karell's Writing Together/Writing Apart: Collaboration in Western American Literature would have provided specific regional insight into the Wilder and Lane partnership that interests so many of these scholars, as would Christine Bold on gender and western cultural production, Susan Rosowski and Brigitte Georgi-Findlay on women's frontier narratives, Krista Comer on landscape, Victoria Lamont on Westerns, and many others that readers of this journal are surely familiar with. While the editors maintain that the relative critical neglect of Wilder is "emblematic of the way critics have historically dismissed many commercially successful women writers" (xv), it is also symptomatic of the widespread tendency to read and write about western women writers in isolation from each other, which in turn reflects the marginalization of western studies at large. Lamont's review essay in Legacy (SSAWW's home journal), "Big Books Wanted: Women and Western American Literature in the Twenty-First Century," explores the cluster of factors that have led...