Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond ed. by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips (review)

In this collection of essays edited by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips, the complexities of Laura Ingalls Wilder are highlighted by a group of talented critics. Broken up into four parts, these essays present a diverse range of topics. Green-Barteet and Phillips' introduction explains that the origin of this project stems from a conference in Philadelphia and discussions of Wilder's memoir, Pioneer Girl. In addition to this history, the reader is introduced to the purpose of this study. While Wilder's work is often considered childish, kitschy, and racist, this book complicates these designations. Engaging these opinions, the editors clarify that scholars need to address all aspects of Wilder's work in order to gain a better understanding of her era, her perceptions, and her philosophical inclinations. Critics should not separate her interesting ideas on education or ontology from her blatant racism and xenophobia. Instead, the editors assert that this is a fertile ground for critical inquiry.

The first of the four parts is comprised of three essays by Katharine Slater, Dawn Sardella-Ayres, Keri Holt, and Christine Cooper-Rompato. This section, entitled "Wilder and 'Truth,'" addresses issues of veracity, authenticity, ontology, and Wilder's writing techniques. This group of essays gives readers an understanding of the philosophical underpinnings and theoretical frameworks within the collection. Slater's "Play it Again, Pa" addresses the issue of repetition within Little House on the Prairie and how it forms patterns that produce rhizomatic offshoots to reinforce ideals of settler colonialism. Sardella-Ayres' "It All Depends on How You Look at It" wrestles with the classification of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane's political views. Overall, this section presents a wide variety of strategies to consider the Wilders' work. Slater's idea that there is no core truth within the series lends to its mystique (as well as disdain) among scholars. This idea is also present in Sardella-Ayres and Holt and Cooper-Rompato's essays. Each of these authors present ontological issues within Wilder's universe (or Wilderiana to some) and they try to classify and clarify the authors' conservatism, ideas of kinship, individualism, issues of freedom, depictions of disabilities, and the shared sense of space (both exterior and interior) on an ever-changing frontier.

The collection transitions to a discussion of gender and its construction in Wilder's body of work. In this second section, Vera R. Foley provides a fascinating account of how Native American horses function as figures of freedom on the rolling plains of Kansas. With one of the family's homesteads situated in the Osage Diminished Reserve, the Wilder family has encroached upon Native American territory illegally. In this respect, the fictionalized Laura Ingalls discovers a divide between rebellion and domesticity where equestrian behavior demonstrates the possibility for a new kind of womanhood. In Foley and Jenna Brack's essays, both writers prove how the Wilders' use (and objectification) of Native American iconography (as well as actual Osage people) further complicates and enriches critical inquiries into feminine expressions within the series. Sonya Sawyer Fritz's essay explores the matrilineal tendencies of the Wilder family and Melanie J. Fishbane's work dissects the constructed masculinity of Almanzo Wilder. All four of these essays evoke questions by those traditionally underrepresented voices in both Wilder's series and in American society. Throughout the Wilder universe, gender construction and identity are not simply reaffirmations of dominant cultural beliefs. Rather, these authors demonstrate the underlying complexities within Wilder's novels, which further establishes her value to Plains Studies and literary criticism as a whole.

Part III explores Wilder in the contexts of Plains Studies and canonical American literature. Often, Wilder plays second fiddle to figures such as Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, O.E. Rølvaag, and Wallace Stegner. In Lindsay R. Stephens' essay on snugness and place making...