Laura Ingalls Wilder succeeded in her mission to create a national narrative about the US and the pioneer life perhaps a bit too well, at least when it came to me.
I read the books when I was very young, and I think they were probably the first American books I had read. Raised on a steady of British kids' book, E Nesbit, Narnia, Tolkien, Prydain, the Little House books seemed I suppose just another charming fantasy, except of course it wasn't.
Who can forget eating a barbecued pig's tail? Ma's strawberry print dress? Pa and the fiddle? Laura's joy at receiving an orange for Christmas? The dug-out room they lived in, like beavers, by the creek? Pa building a little house on the prairies with his bare hands and an ax, Ma helping, then a log rolling down and hitting her, and Pa shouting "Caroline!" in a terrible voice? The train ride? Their books? The red book of Tennyson's poetry Laura found, a later Christmas present? I still seem to replay those scenes regularly in my head. It was all so wonderful, and yet so unlike the luxe wealth and crass consumerism which modern media assures us Americans are enjoying these days. What happened? Can the Americans go back to being pioneers in their own land, please and thank you?
by 1000andonenites
18 Comments
I think the indigenous Americans probably had a different view of the pioneers
Well said
Life sure can be romantic when you’re living a colonialist fantasy enabled by the theft and reapportionment of someone else’s land.
Don’t get me wrong, I grew up on Wilder as well, and I love the books in many ways. But this romanticism of settler colonialism is deeply problematic and nothing we should be aspiring to recreate; rather, we need to revise our national narrative to include the stories of those disenfranchised by the system Wilder romanticized, and look forward towards building a new narrative of mutual support and prosperity.
I live not too far from the Little House here in Kansas and it’s a slice of that era of history but still fiction. I think your memories are a testament to the author’s impact and memorable scenes but life on the prairie was a hundred things to a hundred families (including native Americans as someone else mentioned).
I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and the horrors of the industries taking advantage of people felt like our past AND our approaching future. America is vast and complicated and run by a goddamn idiot.
Read the book prairie fires. It gives context to the world Laura grew up in that she left out.
You should read Pioneer Girl – a biography of the Laura and the Ingalls family.
Their life was quite hard.
We finished pioneering the land. The only thing left to pioneer anymore is our attention span. Why do you think we are all on Reddit?
Hardy Boys/ Nancy Drew books were formative for me too, and gave a similar image of current America then. Those and Little House were the YA books of their time.
I had a doctor growing up that was a descendant. Literally Dr. Ingalls.
You might enjoy Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser, a biography about Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was a huge fan of the Little House series as a kid, even more so because I grew up near where she did. The biography was very eye opening and I learned so much.
Yeah, you have the nice parts imprinted, but life on the prairie could also be abject horror. The settlers faced, for instance, insane winters where they were cut off from the outside world altogether by blizzards and genuinely struggled to not freeze or starve to death.
Have you read children’s books set in your own country that really glosses over the complicated bits of your history?
This is a normal thing to do for kids. A less sanitized though still pretty sanitized in the Dear America series which a a series of fictional diaries of kids going through major events. They range from a recently freed girl on a Southen plantation during Reconstruction, to Indian boarding schools to westward expansion to all the wars.
It makes quite a bit of difference to know that the Ingalls got government aid to send Mary to the college for the blind, but Laura’s libertarian daughter Rose persuaded her to write that Pa financed it entirely himself with the sale of his cow, because she felt promoting “entirely by their bootstraps” ideology was more important than the mere truth.
I remember hard candy christmas.
I do understand the appeal, but coming from poor farmers from another part of the world I never bought it. When you worked on a land you saw it was a rose tinted narrative- nice, enchanting, but carefully curated. Like your grandma telling you about her youth because she doesn’t want to recall greatgrandpas drunken fits of rage.
so good propaganda is good, you say?
The Little House on the Prairie tv show was on when I was a kid. I remember watching it. I never read the books but my teenager enjoyed them when she was younger. I was more into mysteries like Nancy Drew than historical fiction.
Laura romanticized her childhood. The books were heavily edited by her daughter, rose, who helped start the libertarian movement.
Why does everyone today concentrate on the negative of life? The Wilder books paint a picture of the spirit necessary to sustain life under difficult circumstances. There is nothing wrong with that.