Little House on a Big Quilt

The paperback cover of Ann Romines's analysis of Laura Ingalls Wilder's and Rose Wilder Lane's pioneer stories features a pieced quilt block of a little house surrounded by a border predominantly composed of floral triangles and solid diamonds. The visual effect is two-fold: the prints used in the house and the border suggest contentment while the angles of the border, the points in the block, and the border's effect of isolating or confining the little house imply a certain tension. This cover illustration is an apt metaphor for the contents of Constructing the Little House. Deftly piecing together the literary, cultural, and familial issues at work within and behind the Little House books, Romines enables readers to recognize both the harmony and the dissonance of the series.

Romines draws on extensive training in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, American women's writing, and children's literature, providing the most comprehensive, sophisticated reading of the series to date. Not only is she well versed in the Little House scholarship, but she has studied and made use of all of the relevant personal and library holdings; the notes and works cited for Constructing the Little House are themselves a treasure trove for scholars at all levels. She also reveals an impressive personal familiarity with the Little House books, and it is a highlight of her study that she is not afraid to acknowledge her personal investment in them. She is both critic and fan, outside observer of the Little House phenomenon and avid follower, from childhood into adulthood. Stories about being driven by her grandmother on her tenth birthday to Springfield, Missouri, to have Laura Ingalls Wilder sign her copy of These Happy Golden Years, or admissions that she, too, owns a Charlotte doll and has toured the Little House sites throughout the Midwest, prove to be central to much that Romines has to say about the series. Aside from the breadth of knowledge and intelligence that Romines brings to her study, her voice in this work is innovative and inspiring.

Constructing the Little House is organized in a fashion that is both linear (a chronological analysis of the books in the series) and circular. Within the thought-provoking discussions of race and diversity in her chapter on Little House on the Prairie, for instance, she also incorporates references to Laura's attraction to "half-breed" Big Jerry from By the Stores of Silver Lake and the minstrel scene from Little Town on the Prairie. In her discussion of female rituals and mother-daughter relationships relative to The Long Winter, Romines usefully incorporates a discussion of the history of Laura's doll, Charlotte, based on events described in Little House in the Big Woods and On the Banks of Plum Creek. The arrangement is successful: the chapters thoroughly analyze individual works, but they also demonstrate significant connections between the volumes in the series.

Following her introduction, "The Voices from the Little House," in which she sketches her personal and professional history with the Little House books, Romines provides five chapters devoted to the individual books as well as a conclusion. The first chapter, "Preempting the Patriarchs: Daughters in the House," traces the way in which Wilder and Lane tell the stories of their fathers in Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy. Here, Romines focuses on the way that Wilder and Lane ostensibly tell the stories of men in their first two collaborations. Both works, however, offer a more sophisticated commentary on gender than has been previously acknowledged, not only in connection with the most prominent characters in the books but also through references to such characters as Big Woods' Grandma Ingalls and Cousin Charley and Farmer Boy's James and Alice Wilder. As Romines notes, "In many ways," Little House in the Big Woods "is a story about the burdens of enacting a patriarchal role" (32), and in Farmer Boy, Almanzo's sisters "provide much of the cultural complexity" (42). Ultimately...