Laura Ingalls Wilder

Recently, Judith Thurman reviewed some books about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose that suggested she grew into a rigid, domineering mother and that both drifted into conservative thought that made her books icons for people like Sarah Palin and Ronald Reagan.

I read the Little House on the Prairie books when I was ten, and I cherish my memories of them too much to reread them. When I saw them appear in small, thin paperbacks I feared by childhood would be diminished. The books I read were thick, no doubt with heavy pages, and covers swollen by the plastic wrappers that encased the dust jackets. The act of finishing such a large book was an action that felt like a step towards adulthood. I didn’t want to know they, in fact, had been so small.

I also never watched the television show. I remembered nothing of the parents from the books: the four girls inhabited that world so common in successful children’s books, the one where adults are reduced to marginal figures. When Michael Landon transformed it into a series focused on the father, it was no longer my book, but about his journey from the youngest son of the all male world of Bonanza to marriage and fatherhood. More, it encapsulated many people’s view of the frontier that went from a male world to that of the nuclear family, from the ranching pioneers to the farmers and towns.

I also knew the television series was wrong when I heard it featured the family’s long ties to the Olsens in Minnesota. As a child I knew every book took place somewhere different. The only incident I clearly remember was when they received clothes at Christmas from a barrel sent west by some church. I knew even then that signified a life of isolation and poverty where people, in fact, could not do everything for themselves.

I’ve since read Hamlin Garland, Frederick Jackson Turner and the history of my hometown. I now know settlement took place in two phases. The first often lasted no more than a year or so, when people staked claims, cleared the land, then left - they either couldn’t succeed or sold to the next group who made the settled towns we think of as pioneer communities. Wilder’s father was one of the restless breed, best romanticized by Daniel Boone, not one of those who built society.

The history of my home town makes clear that Dickens’ description of incompetent settlers lured into bogus town plats in Nicholas Nickleby was not just satire. In Cameron, Patricia Averill describes people who came west with nothing more than a few tools, and were reduced to harnessing themselves to pull their wagons or whose only cooking implements were so burned they barely functioned. Once more settlers arrived, followed by the railroad, they were able to sell some crops, make some money, and begin the slow climb towards respectability.

For the television series to have been true to the books, each season would have had a new setting and a new set of secondary characters. That would have violated the expectations for continuity held by an audience who wants the comfort of the familiar each week. It’s the same dynamic that domesticated M*A*S*H when it lasted more than a few years. The logic of the original movie would have kept the chaos the same and changed the characters every season; when the characters became stable, the outside environment followed.

The reason the books worked, despite the constant change, is that the girls were the constants and children know childhood is not a time of sameness. Every day something is different.

Notes: Judith Thurman, "Wilder Women: the Mother and Daughter Behind the Little House Stories," New Yorker 10 August 2009.