Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (review)

Studies in American Fiction25 1 Gandal' s challenging thesis is undermined to a considerable extent by the sometimes obsolete and faulty scholarship that supports it and the unbalanced presentational format of The Virtues ofthe Vicious. The 129 pages of actual text and photographs are corroborated by 54 pages of documentation and lengthy textual notes, many of which interrupt the flow of the narrative and might readily have been incorporated into the body of the book. Inexplicably , Crane's letters are quoted from the out-of-date and inaccurate Stephen Crane: Letters (1960) or from R. W. Stallman' s deeply ñawcdStephen Crane: A Biography (1968) rather than from the two-volume The Correspondence of Stephen Crane (1988), and Gandal ignores subsequent journal essays challenging the authenticity of what had formerly been accepted as the canon of Stephen Crane letters. In consequence, a significant number of fraudulent letters and events ultimately derived from Thomas Beer's fictionalized biography , Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (1923), are used to support Gandal' s arguments. A notable case in point is at least a dozen excerpts from and references to an ostensible Crane letter addressed to a Miss Catherine Harris in which Crane opines that "I do not think that much can be done with the Bowery as long as the . . . [blurred] ... are in their present state ofconceit. A person who thinks himself superior to the rest of us because he has no job and no pride and no clean clothes is as badly conceited as Lillian Russell. In a story of mine called 'An Experiment in Misery' I tried to make plain that the root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice. Perhaps I mean a lack of ambition or to willingly be knocked flat and accept the licking." These redoubtable apothegms do not exist in drafts ofthis letter in the typescripts of Beer' s book, and the letter is a demonstrable fabrication; it was written by Thomas Beer, not Stephen Crane. While Crane may in part have shared such sentiments, his view of the human condition was always ambiguous and paradoxical, and he had an aversion to preachy, doctrinaire statements. Unfortunately, Beer's spurious letters and incidents have spread like a computer virus through Crane biography and criticism, and their origin is often overlooked. The result is a seriously distorted view of Stephen Crane's life and literary vision. William Paterson UniversityStanley Wertheim Romines, Ann. Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. 287 pp. Cloth: $55.00. Paper: $18.95. In Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ann Romines persuasively explains why Wilder' s "children's books" still retain their powerful hold on our culture. As her title suggests, Romines is as interested in the writer of the books as in the books themselves, and much of her study is taken up with discussions of Wilder' s collaboration with 252Reviews her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane (a successful writer in her own right). Although some scholars have claimed that Lane deserves more credit than Wilder for the Little House series, Romines sees the writers of the Little House books as forming a "composite author," an argument that adds to the growing discussion about collaborative writing, often dismissed as less important than the single-author texts historically valued by the "patriarchal publishing tradition ." Romines offers a nuanced examination of the strategies created by Wilder and Lane to balance their series between patriarchal traditions, on the one hand, and on the other, their need to tell a woman's story that questioned those traditions. Neither Wilder nor Lane wanted to reject or humiliate the father figures so central to the Little House books (Charles Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder), and yet, in the books and in the lives of the Ingalls and Wilder families , it is the women's skills that enabled family survival. Romines convincingly argues that the Little House series as a whole "reclaims wider powers of action and language for twentieth-century U.S. women" because the hero of the series is a "girl who will become a writer" (247), a radical shift in focus for fiction about westward...