Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend, and: Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilde (review)

John E. Miller. Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1998.

Ann Romines. Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1997.

Walk into any bookstore or peruse the Sunday papers, and as Ann Romines declares in her conclusion to Constructing the Little House, one will find an ever "lengthening menu of Little House items" (249). Not only are Little House video collections n ow available, so too are dolls, travel tours, cook books, and an expanding HarperCollins collection of calendars, paper dolls, a songbook, and "'first' Little House books for very young readers" (250). Laura Ingalls Wilder's fictive saga, written between 1932 and 1943, is, at century's end, a hot commodity. The proliferation of Wilder scholarship has also been remarkable in the 1990s, and fortunately the quality of this literature is high, in contrast to some of the questionable products Romines catalogue s in her study. As Jane M. Subramanian has noted, Wilder's Little House books have proved fertile ground for feminist, "New West" historical, environmental, sociological, multicultural, and post-structural literary critics. Despite scholarly ambivalence t oward Wilder's patriarchal family, her representation of Native Americans, and her political beliefs, such a plethora of insightful, critical studies marks the continued centrality of Laura Ingalls Wilder in American children's literature.

Wilder biographies have also proliferated in recent years. Since Rosa Ann Moore's important studies of Wilder's collaboration with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, biographers have attempted to clarify this fascinating, tangled mother-daughter relationship . William Anderson's work has been invaluable in detailing the many relationships in Wilder's apprenticeship; Anita Clair Fellman has highlighted the politics of this mother-daughter team; and William Holtz has posited in his provocative The Ghost in t he Little House that Rose Wilder Lane was the primary talent in shaping the Little House books. These revisionist biographers complicate any claims of sole authorship for Laura Ingalls Wilder--a fiction Rose Wilder Lane herself circulated to protect h er own reputation. Ironically, the mother's reputation now eclipses the daughter's.

Into this growing body of Wilder studies have arrived two outstanding works, one critical, one biographical. Receptive to all the new perspectives on the Little House series, yet respectful of past scholars as well, Ann Romines and John E. Miller have wri tten two of the best Wilder studies in a decade already remarkable in its production of Wilder scholarship. Indeed, these studies will prove irreplaceable. Though very different in their approaches, Romines and Miller agree that the process of creation--the "constructing" and "becoming"--is key to understanding the women behind the Little House phenomenon. Though neither goes so far as William Holtz in promoting Rose Wilder Lane as the more significant writer of the mother-daughter team, they acknowledge that Wilder required her daughter's expertise to complete the novels. Romines argues persuasively that "sole authorship" is a patriarchal perquisite. Miller calls the two women c ollaborators, but I prefer Romines's metaphor of "composite author": "While writing this book, I have come to see the Little House books as the work of a composite author, with strengths and qualities that do not exactly match the independently produced p ublications of either collaborator" (47). Though historical realities of publishing and marketing books sixty years ago compelled Rose Wilder Lane to cover up her role in creating the Little House series, at the end of the century such female teamwork pro vides an alternative model of authorship.

Both Romines and Miller credit Lane as coproducer, but neither dismisses the talent, ambition, or aesthetic judgment of Wilder. In Miller's assessment, "Wilder demonstrated a high degree of writing competence from the beginning, and...