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I think that I started this discussion to get another view of how people see the books. I've read and reread them countless times, and yet I keep finding inconsistencies in them and inconsistencies between the books and the real life Laura Ingalls led. Sometimes I wonder if she wasn't writing about a world she wishes she could have lived in.
For instance, there's the part in Little Town on the Prairie where her Ma tells Pa that she won't have Laura working in a hotel among strangers. Yet, if you look at her real life, Laura did work in a hotel when she was eleven or twelve when the family was in Burr Oak.
Also, for all that Laura pushed the family togetherness thing, apparently her own daughter felt she was unloved and that her mother even told her that life is hard and she just needed to get used to it. This is something I've read in two places so far and I'm still trying to verify it.
There is also the fact that Laura believed people shouldn't depend on the government and should only rely on themselves, stating at one time she didn't believe in handouts. Yet Mary, despite all the things written about how the family scrimped and saved to send her to college, actually had her college paid for by the state of South Dakota.
These are things so at odds at what are in the books, I just had to bring them up.
As already pointed out, these books are historical fiction, not pure autobiography.
But apart from that, I don't see issues with the examples you posted. So Laura didn't believe in government handouts but her sister had her college paid for....Maybe I personally don't believe in government handouts but my sister is on disability. What does my sister's behavior have to do with me?
As far as Laura's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane apparently suffered from depression and had a somewhat difficult personal life. In the 1920s, did anyone really understand depression? You're judging these things from the perspective of almost a century later. If Laura told Rose, "suck it up buttercup, life is hard and life isn't fair".....is that really so bad? (Frankly, I wish more parents would tell their children that now.) Laura's own life was hard, with Almonzo becoming partly disabled due to his stroke, the death of their son, and financial hardship. Life in general was more difficult then.
Moreover, much of semi-autobiographical children's literature flirts with the facts. A shining example of this is Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women". In real life, Louisa's father was practically abusive and failed to provide for his family. He is hardly the paragon of gentlemanly virtue that Mr. March is portrayed to be. Louisa herself hated the book "Little Women"...hated writing it, and refused to have Jo marry Laurie. Why did she write it the way she did? To make money. Another example of this is Twain's "Tom Sawyer", which offers an idealized view of rural American childhood if ever there was one.
I don't think that this makes the books "disturbing".
Last edited by calgirlinnc; 09-08-2017 at 03:46 PM..
The Little House books are some of my favorite pieces of literature and I am a huge admirer of Laura Ingalls Wilder, less so of Rose because of her early politics. I also read the children's literature series about Rose (excellent) and the one about Laura's mother (IMO only fair). I've also read many nonfiction works about the family, including the recent "autobiography" about Laura. How amazing it must have been to have seen the American landscape change over her 90 year life span.
Like many mother-daughter relationships, Laura's relationship with her own mother was just as complicated as the relationship between Rose and Laura. Yet, Rose took very good care of her parents when they got older and encouraged and helped her mother to become an acclaimed children's author. I am also very inspired by Laura to have started her career as a novelist at age 65. Both Laura and Rose were way, way ahead of their time.
My favorite "scene" was when Laura rode a horse (like an Indian) bareback. I've read all of the Little House books several times, but last read one about 15 years ago so I don't remember all the narrative. I also thought that they portrayed the relationship between the homesteaders and the Indians in a more 2 dimensional light than Hollywood films, radio, and early TV did during the periods of Laura and Rose's lifetimes. This helped provide a different perspective for the young 20th-century readers of the books, but by today's standards would be as Mark stated, "disgusting."
That's a very interesting question by the OP.
I read the Little House books as an adult and some things do come to mind.
Charles is made into a kind of "drifter/dreamer" type who just dragged his family around for the sake of it. In the Big Woods of Wisconsin, they had a farm, livestock, materials for building, a full attic of food in the fall, best of all, family. Why did they leave when they had all of that?
In reality, Charles did what he could to find opportunity for his family. Many went west into the unsettled Great Plains for 160 acres of land from the government. All they had to do is "settle up" and live for five years on the land.
Really it's Ma who is kind of disturbing. She keeps telling Laura to "not be selfish". She has Laura give up her only doll, Charlotte I think? Laura has one doll and she has to give it to a neighbor girl?
But then, I try to see it from Ma's perspective. She's trying to raise all those girls into proper young ladies, on the western frontier, where they could have just become prostitutes or bar maids.
The books make it look like Laura is the workhorse of the family. Mary is blind, Carrie no doubt had some serious developmental problems from the hardships of The Long Winter. Grace was a baby. Laura was the strongest in the family, Pa's "sturdy as a little French horse." The strong family member's were necessary for the survival of the family in those times.
Then there's the portrayal of Indians and Charles doing a minstrel show in blackface. Today, yes those portrayals are definitely misguided, but in those times, minstrel shows were very popular.
Pioneer Girl really shows the reality of Laura Ingalls Wilder's life, vs the books written for children. It reads like a PhD dissertation, heavily footnoted, but it shows how things really were. In Minnesota, they had three seasons of grasshopper plagues. There was literally nothing to eat, many faced starvation if not for relief from the government. Three seasons, I would have packed up the wagon after one. Pa had to walk three hundred miles to find work.
Then there was the Bloody Benders. Yikes!!! Serial killers on Little House on the Prairie!!!
I would recommend Pioneer Girl to anyone who is a fan of the books. It does a good job of showing the work that went into producing the series, though I will confess that I liked Laura just a little bit less after reading it. Just some personal views she held that I don't agree with.
Pioneer Girl is also interesting for the things that didn't make it into the books. For instance, during The Long Winter there was actually a couple with a baby that stayed with the Ingalls who are not mentioned in the books. The Ingalls had not asked or wanted them to stay, but they were out of money, so they just stayed on through the winter. And they did not pull their weight. George, the husband, always helped himself first to the scare food and often took more than his fair share, and never helped to make the hay twists they became dependent upon for warmth. He promised that when the winter was over and work opened up he would repay their share of the living expenses but never did.
Or that in one town they were in--I can't recall where now, as it's been a while since I read it--Laura was sent to stay with a woman as a paid companion because the family needed the money, and the woman asked to keep Laura because, and as she told Ma, you have other girls and you won't miss her. They lived in a hotel for a while around that time, adjacent to a saloon, and the girls witnessed and experienced some harrowing scenes.
I agree with whoever said in this thread that they thought Pa was a bit selfish, dragging his family around. In Pioneer Girl Laura talks about how often they were dead broke, and they went hungry more than once. I'm a wanderer myself, so I get Pa's wanderlust, but he had a family to provide for and a wife who just wanted to settle somewhere so her girls could have some stability and be educated. As an adult, I feel sorry for Caroline. What a hard life she had. And Laura remarks in several places about how Ma was always tired.
One other thing that gets glossed over in the books is when they went to live in "Indian Territory" in Little House on the Prairie, Charles was actually breaking the law, pushing into Osage territory where they had no right to be. He only left after federal troops threatened to remove them. From an adult perspective, I see Pa now in an entirely different light than the idealized father he is written as in the books.
I loved these books as a child and young adult, and I love them still. But Pioneer Girl does give you a much more realistic look at the hardship of life in those times.
I never understood why Mary couldn't get married just because she was blind.
I don't think it was a matter of she couldn't get married, it was probably more a factor of where and when she was living. A wife out on the prairie had to be able to shoulder her share of the work, because there was a lot involved in just surviving. Chores such as the washing, which was an onerous, all day affair; caring for livestock; cooking and baking; caring for the children; tending a garden; canning vegetables. All things a blind woman in the late 1800s would find difficult to manage. So she probably wasn't considered marriage material by the men around her.
I'm aware the books were classified as fiction (you'd be surprised at the number of people who don't know they're fiction) and that they are not true to life in the sequence of how things happened. But when you deal with other people today who hold these books up and use them to make an example of how life should be, like some politicians do, then you have to consider some of the contradictory things that appear in the books. Especially the outright untruths in the books.
For instance, Laura has been quoted as saying everything she put in the books happened, which could lead some people to believe everything in the books is true. But we already know from the first book that the statement that Ma had been very stylish and had her dresses made by a dressmaker in the East where she married Pa that that's not true at all. I think Ma was born and raised in Wisconsin.
I know Pa had wanderlust, and it's interesting to me that he wanted to go to Oregon. His reason for leaving the Big Woods was because he had been so tired of grubbing trees out of the ground to farm it. Had he ended up in Oregon, I think he would have been grubbing trees out of farmland again. And it's also interesting that if Ma wanted her daughters to get schooling, well, Oregon had been being settled for over 40 years at that time and there were well established towns and schools there then. Probably better than the ones in De Smet, South Dakota, where the family ended up staying.
But it is fascinating to think of what Laura might have written if she had added the last chapter in America's settlement about taking a covered wagon across the west to Oregon.
But when you deal with other people today who hold these books up and use them to make an example of how life should be, like some politicians do, then you have to consider some of the contradictory things that appear in the books. Especially the outright untruths in the books.
For instance, Laura has been quoted as saying everything she put in the books happened, which could lead some people to believe everything in the books is true. But we already know from the first book that the statement that Ma had been very stylish and had her dresses made by a dressmaker in the East where she married Pa that that's not true at all. I think Ma was born and raised in Wisconsin.
I think you are either grasping at straws or you have a different agenda.
I don't think it was a matter of she couldn't get married, it was probably more a factor of where and when she was living. A wife out on the prairie had to be able to shoulder her share of the work, because there was a lot involved in just surviving. Chores such as the washing, which was an onerous, all day affair; caring for livestock; cooking and baking; caring for the children; tending a garden; canning vegetables. All things a blind woman in the late 1800s would find difficult to manage. So she probably wasn't considered marriage material by the men around her.
While I'm certainly aware of the physical demands placed on the average prairie housewife of the time, I still had trouble believing that blind people generally did not expect to get married. I did a little research and found this interesting article about a leading educator for the blind and his dark eugenic-like anti-blind marriage agenda.
I have no knowledge that Howe was involved with the particular school Mary attended, but his (ultimately unsuccessful as many of his blind students married) crusade may have informed the attitudes of the Ingalls family and others re: Mary's options.
I think you are either grasping at straws or you have a different agenda.
Sorry, JMO.
I'm neither grasping at straws nor do I have any agenda. I simply wanted to know if other people saw the Little House books differently now that there's more info on them and we know a lot more of the background stories.
This isn't a plot I'm trying to foist on the world - please don't make it out to be more than what it is!
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