Laura and the "Lunatic Fringe": Gothic Encoding in Wilder's These Happy Golden Years

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books are fundamentally concerned with nation-building as much as they are concerned with the development of the central protagonist, Laura Ingalls. In fact, these two processes are narratively interdependent. Laura (the character) must establish and negotiate borders—both interpersonal and physical—in the process of defining herself. As the Ingalls family pushes westward, Laura grows and develops as a direct result of her contact with the land and the people who already live on it. When the time comes, Laura herself must venture even further into the borderland, the uncharted territory, to take the final, critical steps into adulthood, an unknown place represented by the desolate Dakota plain. In the novel These Happy Golden Years (1943), Wilder details Laura's travels through the borderland. Indeed, Laura crosses borders not only geographic and metaphoric, but also generic, since at a critical point in the narrative, Wilder slips uncharacteristically into the Gothic mode, a literary form alien to the rest of the series. Unable to represent explicitly Laura's fears of sexuality, maternity, and domesticity, Wilder relies on the intermingling of border space and Gothic discourse to evoke her unspeakable themes.

For the most part, Wilder's Little House series is written in a fairly straightforward, prosaic manner. Events are narrated mostly from the perspective of the central character, Laura, and they make sense chronologically and thematically. While Wilder's style has been described as lyrical and episodic, it is most of all realistic, relating events that are plausible and logical. Certainly the stories are not devoid of drama; however, most of the drama is produced by minor interpersonal, usually familial, conflicts and by the constant struggle between the Ingalls family and nature. Of the two, nature is the force that usually poses the greatest problems, as the frigid temperatures and ceaseless wind in The Long Winter (1940) so memorably exemplify. Occasionally, however, people are perceived as being as extraordinary as the midwestern weather. For example, in Little House on the Prairie (1935), Laura and her family are visited by Indians who look, smell, and act strangely, threatening the Ingalls women as they eat Ma's food and steal Pa's furs. But these events and characters are realistically part of the pioneer landscape and find their counterparts in other literature of the region and era.

Only one episode stands out from the others in terms of its literary form: the ordeal that Laura undergoes in These Happy Golden Years while living with the Brewsters so she can teach school. Laura is miserable because Mrs. Brewster, sullen and rude, treats her so badly. The nadir of this experience is the horrifying scene during which Laura peers from behind a calico curtain to view Mrs. Brewster, nightgown-clad and black hair streaming, wielding a butcher knife. Laura wakes in the night to an unearthly scream, "a wild sound without words that ma[kes] [her] scalp crinkle," and finds that Mrs. Brewster is about to kill her husband (64). In its dangerous threat, terrifying intensity, and referential imagery, this scene is nothing less than Gothic.

To be sure, an examination of Wilder's reading material throughout her youth and adulthood does not indicate a close familiarity with Gothic literature. Certainly, there is no indication that she read original Gothic classics such as The Italian or The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe or The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, all published in the 1790s. Nor is there conclusive evidence that she read the more well-known and perhaps more accessible nineteenth-century novels that had Gothic underpinnings. But the correspondence between Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane reveals that Wilder did read novels such as Charlotte Temple, a story of a woman's seduction, and the Little House books demonstrate that the Ingalls daughter were avid devotees of serial fiction in magazines such as The Youth's Companion and the New York Ledger.¹ Ann Romines argues convincingly that Wilder probably read an enormously popular novel serialized in the New York Ledger in 1859, E. D. E. N. Southworth...