Civilization and Her Discontents: The Unsettling Nature of Ma in Little House in the Big Woods

When I was a child, I read and reread the Little House series. My sister and I had our own bonnets to pretend we were Laura and Mary, and we reenacted stories from the series and the television shows popular at the time. My sister took the role of Mary, both because she was older and, I think unconsciously, because her appearance and behavior conformed to cultural expectations far better than mine. The first book, Little House in the Big Woods, was my favorite novel in the series.¹ In my imagination, I would fantasize that I lived in Laura’s cozy attic, with all the food and spices lying there awaiting the winter. We lived in a house surrounded by woods and little else, and like Laura’s Ma, my mother was a home economics specialist who made domestic goods from, so it seemed to me at the time, thin air. The attic’s cornucopia of plenty meant everything to me, and I liked the book’s evocation of being safe in a kind of maternal, edible womb. I confess that while rereading I would skip the chapters with Pa’s stories, an ironic instance of revisionist reading, given that Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane penned the novel by expanding a short manuscript based on Charles Ingalls’s stories,² “strung together”³ by Lane after she edited her mother’s unpublished autobiography. Wilder herself described her first juvenile novel as paying homage to her father’s stories,⁴ suggesting a desire to equate her talent with his. I preferred the long, descriptive sections enumerating food preparation, rhythmic like the sound of my mother’s rolling pin, which was always smoothing dough for pies and cookies in ways that I never could imitate.

I did not know it, but I absorbed and came to embody little Laura’s conflicted sentiments about her mother. Ma is so mythic, so complete, so far above her, and so untouchable that Laura can never compete with or replicate Ma’s goddess-like powers. When Ma is dressed in her fashionable strawberry delaine from “the East,” Laura is afraid to touch her. Ma hulls corn for three days but “looked pretty” and “never splashed one drop of water on her pretty dress.”⁵ Ma’s beautiful butter, laboriously churned, dyed with carrot, and pressed through a strawberry-patterned mold, is a site for Laura’s wonder. Ma gives Laura only a small portion of the rich food she prepares, withholding food and, by extension, herself. Ma painstakingly prepares her girls’ hair with ribbons and curls, but her insufficient and unworthy Laura rips out her pocket and wails. Ma’s perfection reminds me of the moment in Little Women when Amy tries to copy a portrait of the Madonna and she cannot, just as Meg cannot make her jelly jell,⁶ and, in the posthumously published The First Four Years, Laura cannot make a successful pie.⁷ Laura’s anxiety about her Ma is the secret drama of Big Woods, a theme that any reader of fairy tales would recognize. The first line of the novel announces that fairy tale takes precedence over historical specificity: “Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.”⁸ Any little girl of a mythic forest would simultaneously desire and fear the socializing tools of a goddess-witch who reigns with absolute dominion over the “little” house. Ma’s civilizing rituals in Big Woods are represented with a considerable amount of anxiety and awe. It took becoming an American feminist scholar for me to realize that if closely listened to, the sound of my mother’s rolling pin, to a small child whose ear is against the counter and whose eye is level with the dough, is actually the thunderous sound of a steam roller. It is a machine in the garden.

In her article “In Search of the Great Ma,” Elizabeth Jameson, like Ann Romines in Constructing the Little House, unpacks the discrepancy between Pa’s...