Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture (review)

In the first few pages of Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture, Anita Clair Fellman introduces the Laura Ingalls Wilder of familiar legend: the white-haired farm woman who sits writing the story of her pioneer childhood on lined school paper, and, by dint of her untutored artistry and the homespun authenticity of her life story, who becomes the best-selling author of Little House in the Big Woods. Over the past few years, this version of the Laura Ingalls Wilder story, and with it the underlying facts of the novels she wrote, have been challenged by biographers and critics such as Rosa Ann Moore, Ann Romines, William Anderson, Donald Zochert, John E. Miller, and William Holtz, but the legend of a lone woman writing the truth of her experiences persists in popular culture. In this excellent, well-researched study, Fellman looks beneath the surface of the legend not simply to separate truth from fiction but to ask a different set of questions: what gives these novels their enduring popularity, and to what extent is their vision of the past colored by Wilder's intention to show a Depression-era America that it had lost its core pioneer values of stoicism in the face of adversity and a sense of individual responsibility? In its treatment of Wilder's biography, the kinds of truths that her books present, and the phenomenon of canon formation that made them a cultural institution, Little House, Long Shadow argues that Wilder's seemingly artless presentation of pioneer life masks a purposefully interjected ideology of individualism—one that paved the way for the nation's acceptance of Ronald Reagan's folksy conservatism of the 1980s and laid the groundwork for the culture wars of today.

In the first three chapters, Fellman discusses the biographical and historical contexts for the series as well as the ways in which Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, transformed the events in Wilder's life for dramatic effect. Fellman's account of the Ingalls family's restless journeys in search of a stable economic future—together with their struggles against the catastrophic natural forces that complicate their lives (grasshoppers, blizzards, droughts, and hailstorms)—reads not only as a series of challenges to be overcome but also as a record of "unmitigated disaster" (p. 21). Fellman also investigates the difficult relationship between Wilder and her daughter, herself a successful journalist and novelist. After years of writing a column for The Missouri Ruralist, Wilder had produced a long autobiographical manuscript, "Pioneer Girl," that she hoped Lane could help her sell; when attempts to market the manuscript for adults failed, Lane encouraged Wilder to mine it for material for the "Little House" novels, each of which Lane edited for structure and style. Despite the friction that grew between the two as Lane's reputation for fiction diminished and her mother's rose, Wilder and Lane worked diligently to convey the themes they saw as crucial to the books, among them the dangers posed by the natural world contrasted with the security offered by the nuclear family, negative views of government, informed obedience to parental authority, the necessity of self-control, and a general disdain for Eastern ways.

The "truth" of the books is strongly influenced by these ideas. As Fellman shows in one of the most interesting sections of the book, "Revisiting the Little Houses," Wilder repeatedly altered or invented episodes from the "Pioneer Girl" manuscript to emphasize these themes. Distances between the Ingalls family's houses and those of their nearest neighbors were consistently exaggerated to emphasize the family's independence, just as their participation in community events and clubs was minimized to emphasize their self-reliance and self-discipline. For example, the Ingalls family had a young couple and their baby living with them all through the events of The Long Winter, but the three were left out of...