Vastness and Contraction of Space in Little House on the Prairie

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.One clover, and a beeAnd reverieAnd reverie alone will doIf bees are few.

—Emily Dickinson

Although she lived in circumscribed territory, Emily Dickinson realized that sheer reverie allows an expansion of the imagination independent of the particularity of the images. Such images can either whirl the imagination into an open-ended reverie or particularize it within the concreteness of the text, from which the creative reader generates yet another reverie. Laura Ingalls Wilder writes in Little House on the Prairie, "The vast prairie was dark and still. Only the wind moved stealthily through the grass, and the large, low stars hung glittering from the sky. The campfire was cozy in the big dark stillness. . . ."¹ Her depiction of Laura in house and prairie is an indissoluble interrelation of memory and imagination, which, to use Gaston Bachelard's words, "give us back the images which pertain to our lives."² Bachelard finds the origin of reverie and oneiric images in childhood. "When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like a son of the cosmos. And thus, in his solitudes, from the moment he is master of his reveries, the child knows the happiness of dreaming which will later be the happiness of the poets" (PR, p. 99).

When we as adult readers of children's literature encounter a certain image, we become suddenly aware that the image has "touched the depth before it stirs the surface."³ Intentionality, reason, and consciousness of specifics are slackened as our eyes wander off the page and "stare into the blue." Children's literature, especially fairy tales, often projects such singular images seemingly free of traditional meanings, but rather of such luminousness that they are retained in the memory as a kind of concrete metaphysics. The authenticity of such images attracts the phenomenologist. Furthermore, the double audience of children's literature, child and adult, urges the critic toward a phenomenological perception of the text and at the same time reveals the problems intrinsic to that kind of interpretation. As a phenomenon, the image appears to the child-perceiver with an autonomy that the adult reader rediscovers rarely, for the adult reader perceives the image with presuppositions and existential projections and can return to the being of the image only after laborious sublimation of knowledge. The adult reader is inclined to perceive the image as a symptom that transmits the values of culture and civilization. Such a reader extracts meaning from the image, robs it of its value, and relegates the creative imagination to a secondary position by assuming that the poet's imagination simply hides personal and cultural problems in the material of the image.

There is thus an inherent contradiction in critical analysis from a phenomenological perspective, for criticism traditionally claims objectivity whereas the phenomenological critic attempts to communicate a subjective response to the text. Therefore, we often find that when the phenomenological critic is most phenomenological, he or she becomes poetic, Bachelard being a prime example. It cannot really be otherwise, for the phenomenological critic who applies the concepts of phenomenology must overcome the subject-object dichotomy by describing and explaining the image in such a way that the image is constituted only in its intentional relationship with the perceiving subject.

The question of the objective reality of the image, its historical, cultural, or psychological validity, is usually bracketed by the phenomenologist. Phenomenological criticism, in contrast, presents illuminating descriptions of the correlative relation between the perceiving subject and the phenomenon of the text. In this way, as Wolfgang Iser argues, the images of a text are not used up in a kind of literary consumerism, for the vital feature of a text is retained: it does not lose the ability to communicate even after overt messages are decoded.⁴

I agree with Iser that all interpretation, including phenomenological interpretation, involves a frame of reference; in addition, each frame deepens the text. Therefore, Little House on the Prairie gains dimension as it is seen in terms...