Preempting the Patriarch: The Problem of Pa's Stories in Little House in the Big Woods

When I was a little girl reading the Little House books, the first one, Little House in the Big Woods (1932), was my least favorite. Although an avid fan, I was tempted to skip the long stories from Pa that were set into this book, for I was always eager to get back to the absorbing autobiographical narrative of Laura, with whom I identified strongly. So, many years later, I was surprised to learn that Laura Ingalls Wilder considered those paternal tales her richest material. In 1937, she said that Pa's stories were the part of her childhood that she remembered most vividly and "loved best, " and she concluded, "I have always felt they were too good to be altogether lost" ("Laura's Book Fair Speech," Sampler 216-24).

Now, when I look again at the stories Pa tells in this first book, it seems to me that they articulate some of the most pressing issues of the series. Both Wilder and her collaborator, Rose Wilder Lane, were loving, dutiful writer-daughters who had no brothers and no sons.¹ They were the heirs of their fathers, and they were the heirs of a patriarchal tradition that valued and articulated male stories far more than female ones. Yet the Little House series is preeminently a narrative of girls' experience. Thus Little House in the Big Woods proposes crucial questions about gender priorities, questions with which its authors would wrestle repeatedly. Was their purpose to preserve a body of male narrative or to inscribe a girl's story? If the Little House series was to continue after this first book, Wilder had to find a way out of Pa's stories and into her own.

As I have argued elsewhere, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Euro-American women's culture had encouraged Wilder to think of writing as a woman's prerogative, and in the teens and twenties, Lane had urged her mother toward the frank professionalism of the enfranchised New Woman. But in the Depression years, when most of the Little House books were written, there was widespread hostility to such professionalism, especially in rural agricultural communities such as Wilder's Missouri home, which began in the early twenties to experience "an agricultural depression that preceded the general 1930s depression by nearly ten years" (Fink 46). In this climate, women's writing often seemed justifiable only if it served the priorities of traditional domesticity and maternity. According to historian Barbara Melosh, as the Depression widened and more "men lost their jobs, wage-earning women became the targets of public hostility and restrictive policy. One slogan exhorted, 'Don't take a job from a man!'"(1). In many ways, Big Woods reflects these conditions. Ma Ingalls never speaks of her teaching career and her relative affluence before her marriage; now she is unremittingly domestic and would never "take a job from a man. " Much of the narrative is plotted to assure us that the Ingalls daughters too will never infringe on the priorities of patriarchy. Thus, although the book is presented as autobiographical fiction inscribed by a woman, its centerpiece is men's tales, told in Pa's voice.

Big Woods is a primer in the gendered division of labor and culture, and Pa's stories provide some of that primer's most important lessons. His tales are largely classic accounts of male adventure, clearly and conventionally plotted. The protagonists are Pa as a child and young man, his father, and his paternal grandfather. These mythic inset stories bring the (male) past into the present, making it seem continuous with the world that young Laura and Mary inhabit. In the first story, for example, Grandpa Ingalls breaks a taboo of the Big Woods, venturing into the forest without the protective attribute of his maleness, his phallic gun. There he is beset by an antagonist, a hungry panther, with a terrifying scream "like a woman" (41). On horseback, Grandpa barely makes it to the safety of his house; as he slams the door, the panther leaps "on the horse's back" (42...