The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane by William Holtz (review)

Reviews 111 This volume is a readable contribution to contemporary literary theory, and an important collection of analyses of Native American literature. SCOTT R. CHRISTIANSON Radford University AllMyRelatives: Community in ContemporaryEthnicAmericanLiteratures. ByBonnie TuSmith. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. 216 pages, $34.50.) About a decade ago, sociologist Robert Bellah and his associates claimed that Americans have lost the language for expressing communal values. In this ambitious and insightful book, however, Bonnie TuSmith asserts that in the works of ethnic American writers the vision of community is very much alive. Four main chapters deal with the four broad ethnic American groups— Asian American, African American, Native American, and Chicano/a. For each of these groups, TuSmith examines two major writers, one male and one female, whose works appeared after the civil rights movement and who have consciously drawn from their ethnic backgrounds: Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston,John Edgar Wideman and Alice Walker, N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, Tomás Rivera and Sandra Cisneros. In most cases, the synopses are too brief to help those who are unfamiliar with the works under discussion. And the author rarely deals with such relevant questions as “What do these texts suggest about the community or communities outside their own?”and “How are their visions of their own ethnic communities affected by their attitudes towards the American community as a whole?” TuSmith nonetheless accomplishes important things with this book. Filled with cultural and socio-historical insights, her readings successfully refute ear­ lier misreadings by those who interpreted and evaluated the works from Eurocentric perspectives. Her analysis of the linguistic patterns in each work is exceptionally brilliant. More significant, her courage to cross cultures is inspir­ ing: a first-generation Chinese American who grew up partly in polyracial Manhattan and who teaches multi-ethnic literature at Bowling Green State University, TuSmith has done a pioneering work in exploring the relationships and connections among various ethnic American literatures. SEIWOONG OH Rider College The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. By William Holtz. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. 425 pages, $29.95.) This is a thorough and readable biography of a significant figure in twentieth -century western U. S. literature. Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), after a 178 WesternAmerican Literature South Dakota and Missouri girlhood, established a New Woman’s career as a real estate salesperson and professional writer. She made a name for herself with celebrity biographies of Jack London, aviator Art Smith, and Herbert Hoover. In the late twenties, she produced several profitable serials and novels, including two (Free Lane and Let the Hurricane Roar) which were based on her family’s experience with Great Plains homesteading. Then, in the late thirties and thereafter, Lane turned increasingly to political writing and theory, becom­ ing the best-known spokesperson for the Libertarian Party. At seventy-nine, Lane travelled to Vietnam to report on the war; she was still active and working when she died at her last home in Texas, in 1968. Holtz has done a meticulous job of telling the story of this complex life. However, this valuable biography is distorted by its undue emphasis on the fact that Lane was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the well-known “Little House” series. Holtz’s title, his framing of Lane’s story with that of her mother, and his antagonistic account of their uncredited collaboration on the “Little House” books (a story already known to Wilder scholars)—all these suggest his assumption that one must choose sides in the case of the Wilder/ Lane collaboration and that Rose Lane was victimized by her powerful mother. Certainly the story of this mother/daughter collaboration, in which the daughter framed herself as her mother’s teacher, editor and sometime co­ author, is one of the most compelling cases in the history of U. S. women’s authorship. Holtz, who sees himself as Lane’s advocate, doesn’t historicize that story sufficiently; nor does he place it in the contexts of changing ideas about female authorship and traditions of oral storytelling and anonymous collabora­ tion that were important to the nineteenth-century women’s culture in...