From Obedience to Autonomy: Moral Growth in the Little House Books

Children's fiction, like much fiction for adults, frequently takes as its subject the moral growth of its protagonist. The Little House books of Laura Ingalls Wilder trace Laura's growth in moral awareness and moral development from early childhood through her first employment, her courtship by Almanzo, and her marriage. Laura's moral maturation is rich and multilayered, but at the heart of the Little House books, and shaping their progression as one multivolumed novel, is the theme of obedience giving way to autonomy, literally moral self-rule.

Laura's moral development throughout the seven books of the original series is hardly unusual or idiosyncratic. Indeed, her growth closely follows the pattern laid out in Jean Piaget's ground-breaking The Moral Judgment of the Child, in which deference to rules laid down by others gives way to a growing respect for moral rules as self-legislated: "Autonomy follows upon heteronomy; the rule of a game appears to the child no longer as an external law, sacred in so far as it has been laid down by adults; but as the outcome of a free decision and worthy of respect in the measure that it has enlisted mutual consent" (65). Laurence Kohlberg could easily map Laura's growth onto his six stages of moral development: she grows from stage-one heteronomous morality, where she follows externally imposed rules to avoid externally imposed sanctions, to stage-six morality, where she recognizes that moral rules are binding on her because she legislates them for herself. Although I shall argue that Laura's moral development, as presented by Wilder, follows the Piaget-Kohlberg pattern quite remarkably, it also reflects some facets of moral development that are distinctively female, as articulated by Carol Gilligan. Laura develops her moral personality in close connection with her family and community; the ethic that emerges from her maturation is an ethic of care as much as or more than an ethic of justice.

What is most striking about the vision of moral development in the Little House books is how fully and vividly it is realized and how it is shaped to mirror the American political context. For Laura Ingalls Wilder and her collaborator daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, the individual's moral growth from obedience to autonomy parallels the American polity's growth from subjection to democracy. It is in Wilder's explicit drawing of this parallel that the Piaget-Kohlberg model of moral development most clearly shows its dominance over Gilligan's alternative model, though elements of the latter are clearly present. (Anita Clair Fellman explains Wilder and Lane's attraction to a robustly liberal ethic of rights and noninterference as a possible artifact of the difficulties that arose from their dangerous overdependence on each other in their mother-daughter relationship ["Laura Ingalls Wilder" 540-41].) In any case, at key points in the series, Laura's moral growth toward freedom and independence is linked to the ongoing struggle of Americans to achieve those same values in the political realm.

Although Fellman (this vol.) rightly notes the stress on the highly individualistic moral and political values of freedom and independence, I am concerned with a different point. Whatever values an individual finally adopts as her own—whether those tending toward selfishness or selflessness on the moral spectrum or those stressing an ethic of justice or an ethic of care—most of us think it important that such values emerge at the end of a rich and complex process of moral maturation rather than being adopted in unthinking conformity to existing moral conventions. Likewise, whatever policies one would like to see a democratic government enact—regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum—most would agree on the implementation of such policies through democratic decision making rather than through authoritarian control. Thus, whatever one makes of the particular values Laura ultimately chooses as her own—and I would argue that these center at least as much on unselfish care of others as on self-interested pursuit of her own projects—readers should welcome her emerging ability to make such...