Domestication of Desire: Gender, Language, and Landscape in the Little House Books

Why is it that we think of the Golden West as the destination of young men? Where are the stories of the women and girls who moved into that mythical frontier? In the series of novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder that we refer to as the Little House books, we can read the movement of women into the Western landscape; yet, we also read the movement of the female into silence, the very silence that surrounds the story of the female in the Golden West. The narrator speaks for the female child, who cannot speak for herself; the "ladies" remain appropriately silent. But that depiction of the aphonia of the female is the center of the definition of Woman in the West that Ingalls Wilder recalls. Her novels relate the process of enculturation by which the voice of the female child is trained and restrained so that the child may become a proper lady. Woman here is characterized by her silence, even in the face of suffering, and her ability to perform her female duties regardless of that silence. Ingalls Wilder's books, in spite of the delight with which their former readers, now adults, recall them, are disturbingly sad. They verify that the only way a woman can speak is by recalling the desires of herself-as-child, desires which are always represented as themselves silenced.¹

The working of gender enculturation upon Laura frames the entire series, which takes Laura from the age of five to the first years of her marriage, and the series limns the individual developing from child to woman. These issues are most pressing when Laura is at her youngest, in the first three books: Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, and On the Banks of Plum Creek. Little Laura is a tomboy, a wild child who must be domesticated; her noisy playing is "naughty"; her inappropriate utterance of desire, her very questioning of her surroundings, is transgressive. And she is presented in contrast to the appropriate standard of feminine behavior, as demonstrated by her mother and her sister Mary, who is always a "good" girl.

Ma and Mary are parallel in their proper femininity, which is recognized both by its domesticity and its self-suppression. Ma defers in silence to her husband's decisions; she restrains herself from crying out even when she has been injured; the one time she becomes upset enough to "burst out crying," we are told: "That was a terrible day" (LHP 157). She also is the crucial instructor in moderating Laura's own inappropriate vocalization: "'I want to camp, now! I'm so tired,' Laura said. Then Ma said, 'Laura.' That was all, but it meant that Laura must not complain. So she did not complain any more out loud, but she was still naughty, inside. She sat and thought complaints to herself (15).

Ingalls Wilder, through her use of an elementary form of free indirect discourse, depicts Laura as resistant to this project of silencing, whereas her interpretative readings of Mary show that the lesson of quietism has already been successfully internalized. Mary engages in "quiet, ladylike play" (LHBW 204) and speaks with "shining eyes" (LHP 248), rather than with shouts and laughter. Laura, from the earliest mention, is a much more active and curious child who feels confined in her gendered role of silence as well as her female costume of confinement. Mary, the feminine exemplar, is never contumacious: "Mary looked very good and sweet, unrumpled and clean, sitting on the board beside Laura. Laura did not think it was fair" (LHBW 175). This contrast between Mary and Laura remains a lesson in the reader's mind, as well as in Laura's. Whereas she resents Mary's goodness and her own innate failure to match it, we see the process by which her desire is manipulated and reshaped into a more culturally acceptable version of feminine behavior.

Mary is a contrasting and instructive text of femininity in bodily appearance, proceeding directly from the narrative convention of the more desirable and successful blond...