Laura and Pa: Family and Landscape in Little House on the Prairie

"I like to look at the hills, there is something fascinating in their loneliness" (On the Way Home 30). So wrote Laura Ingalls Wilder during her journey of 1894 from South Dakota to Missouri. Ever since her early childhood, Laura had intimated loneliness in landscape, even as she had celebrated a contrasting closeness in her family relations. Ultimately, however, Laura's "fascination" may have occupied most intensely the margins between family and land, between the inside of the family and its outside, between childhood and maturation, and especially between identity with her father and separation from him. It is the purpose of this essay to explore Laura's relations to family and landscape as developed in Little House on the Prairie and to suggest, particularly, some of the tensions in Laura's relations to her Pa.

In many great works of children's literature, authors use their writing to search backward through time for the child's-eye view of things and for roots of their own identities. Recapture of their varying childhoods by such authors often turns out to be a mixed blessing, however, for the paths of their stories generally lead forward again through time and toward the very crises of maturation and separation that remain either unresolved or so painfully resolved as to suggest why the authors might indeed search for their own youthful roots. The narratives of Mowgli, Jim Hawkins, Tom Sawyer, Alice, and the little sea-maid exemplify just a few instances in which authors manage to reawaken both the vital energy of the child's union with first persons and places and also the confusion and unease, explicit or implicit, of the child's task to separate and to become her or his own "groan-up." In Little House on the Prairie, a fusion or confusion of child's and grown-up's points of view is suggested early on and never is quite overcome.

Consider the opening:

A Long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. They drove away and left it lonely and empty in the clearing among the big trees, and they never saw that little house again.

They were going to the Indian country.

Pa said there were too many people in the Big Woods now. Quite often Laura heard the ringing thud of an ax which was not Pa's ax, or the echo of a shot that did not come from his gun. The path that went by the little house had become a road. Almost every day Laura and Mary stopped their playing and stared in surprise at a wagon slowly creaking by on that road.

(1)

The first paragraph of the story asks us to sit in the present and to imagine "a long time ago." The narrator shares our present time. Yet the strain of the paragraph is not only backward in historical time through the generations but also, implicitly, from the perspective of a grandparent to that of a baby, so that the introduction of "Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie" recapitulates the first, retrospective sequence even as it invites us to see the Wilder family from a child's eye view (giving parents role-names but the children proper names). The final sentence in the paragraph reinforces this interpretation as it semi-personifies the "lonely" house and adopts a child's way of saying "they never saw that little house again."

The second paragraph is objective: "they were going." This could be seen from any family member's point of view or could be taken collectively or from an outside perspective. The first two sentences of the third paragraph begin with "Pa said" and "Laura heard." Now Laura could, presumably, hear what Pa said (as well as hear another man's ax and gun), but the words also express Pa's own personal opinion, his view...