What Really Happens in the Little Town on the Prairie

Abstract

What Really Happens in the Little Town on the Prairie Suzanne Rahn (bio) On the wall between the doors of the new bedrooms, Ma hung the wooden bracket that Pa had carved for her Christmas present, long ago in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Every little flower and leaf, the small vine on the edge of the little shelf, and the larger vines climbing to the large star at the top, were still as perfect as when he had carved them with his jackknife. Older still, older than Laura could remember, Ma's china shepherdess stood pink and white and smiling on the shelf. Little Town on the Prairie 18 Forthright tone, transparent style, episodic narrative, and details we can touch and taste create the illusion of untrained honesty in the Little House books—the sense that we are simply living Laura Ingalls Wilder's life. As we read through the series, Laura's memories become ours as well. It always comes as something of a shock when we uncover the craft, purpose, and design that transformed Wilder's life into art.1Little Town on the Prairie, published in 1941, is a prime example of this transformation. Here, in contrast to the strongly focused structure of the preceding volume in the series, The Long Winter, Wilder appears merely to be highlighting the most interesting and amusing incidents of two years in Laura's early teens. Yet by the end of the book, both Laura and her Little Town have grown up, and what "grown up" means in America has been carefully defined. For where The Long Winter is essentially about being human—surviving the winter as a human being rather than an animal2—Little Town is specifically about being an American. In linking Laura's maturation with that of her country, however, Wilder may have revealed more than she intended. Beneath the thematic structure of Little Town, two very different concepts of history are at war. As the book begins, late in the spring of 1881, Pa asks Laura whether she would like to take a job in town. Before Laura answers him, Wilder flashes back to the end of the Long Winter and spends three chapters describing the happy spring on the claim. Her purpose [End Page 117] is clear: to show how much pleasure Laura is sacrificing when she agrees to go to work sewing shirts for Mrs. White. For already, at fourteen, Laura is trying to shoulder her share of family responsibility. She wants her teacher's certificate not because she wants to teach, but to help send Mary to a college for the blind and to begin repaying her parents "for all that it had cost to provide for her since she was a baby" (48). At first glance, "The Necessary Cat," interpolated into the flashback, seems more like a diversion than a necessity. The story of the kitten that Pa pays an outrageous fifty cents for, who kills her first mouse while she is still a baby, has a natural appeal for young readers. But why should the episode occur here, where it interrupts and prolongs the already interrupting flashback—unless "here" simply happens to be where it occurred in real life? In fact, "The Necessary Cat" typifies how Wilder designed her books, with less concern for plot development than for thematic structure. For the kitten is clearly placed just at this point to underline the significance of Laura's job in town. Like Laura, the kitten assumes the adult responsibilities of mouse hunting at an unusually young age. Perhaps she, too, feels obliged to repay Ma and Pa that fifty cents as soon as possible! It isn't easy for her; the squirming, biting mouse is "nearly as big as the wobbling little kitten," but the kitten will not let go (32). When Ma orders Laura to the rescue, Laura protests, "Oh, I hate to, Ma! She's hanging on. It's her fight" (33). Clearly, Laura herself identifies with the kitten, projecting onto it her own desire for independence and self-respect. And the kitten wins: "All by herself, the kitten had killed it; her first mouse" (33). Laura, too, hangs...