Little House in the Culture Wars
John Kilgore
from the Vocabula Review, April, 2005
Ages are all alike, but Genius is always above the age. — William Blake
Q
uick takes: a glimpse of the art of literary criticism, as currently practiced in American universities:This past year ... I had students read Wilder's Little House on the Prairie as a non-white reader might. This single one-page assignment made the point that Wilder's attitudes toward Native Americans and toward African Americans are problematic, and made it better than any amount of lecturing on my part could have done. One of my African American students wrote that she wondered why there was no mention of the Civil War in the novel and made the observation that it was no surprise to find an African-American doctor dealing with marginalized patients out on the prairie. Another, part Native American, student said he could barely bring himself to continue reading the novel, he found its attitudes toward his people so offensive — and many white students concurred with him. The assignment led to further useful class discussion about why we continue to read such texts with children, and possible ways to continue using these texts as starting points for placing attitudes towards race into a cultural and historical context.
Thus M. Daphne Kutzer of SUNY Plattsburgh, in a genial online discussion of her classroom approach to Laura Ingalls Wilder's famous saga of frontier survival. Reading this, I am just old enough to feel, amid a swirl of more complicated emotions, a pang of nostalgia. When I was a lad, and dinosaurs roamed the lecture hall, basking in the sober late-Arnoldian gaze of the New Critics, you weren't supposed to ask anyone how they felt about classic works of literature. It went without saying that what you felt was partly wrong and generally inadequate, and if the masterpiece left you confused, bored, or offended, brother, that was your problem. The classic, after all, had proved itself over the years, and who were you? Your job was not to sit there complaining, much less judging, but to work like a Tibetan novice at attaining the exalted state called appreciation. The whole premise of the literature class was that it was the student who must be taught to see.No more. Now, clearly, it is the Classic that is on probation, and must sit there in the classroom gnawing its cheeks with uncertainty, desperate for a nod of approval. The students may still be anxious too, for various reasons, but it is no longer the work of art that scares them. Taught since the cradle to function as customers, they approach the text, and sometimes reading in general, in just that spirit: if it's not to their taste, that's that. Every year, somehow, it becomes a little less acceptable for the professor (me, for instance) to suggest that, if The Scarlet Letter was a big bore and Paradise Lost stuffed with unnecessary words, the problem might lie with the reader rather than the writer. Much the same attitude persists even into the upper levels of literary study. There, the Tibetan novice of yore has become a martial arts expert, equipped with a large repertoire of flashy, well-practiced moves, historicizing the text, dehistoricizing it, problematizing it, destabilizing it, putting it in quotes, allegorizing it, unpacking it, recuperating it, deconstructing it. The general feeling is that the work is a rather poor thing in itself, but satisfactory material for a display of the critic's overmastering prowess.
What happened to the cult of the classic is of course widely known. Around 1969 or so, some joker pointed out that the Great Books of the Western Tradition, the exalted few works that supposedly embodied the universal truth of things, had nearly all been written by white European males. This discovery worked like the child's disclosure, in The Emperor's New Clothes, that the King was naked. A generation of literary scholars went scurrying for cover, and the whole quasi-religious vision of Literature as a sort of secular Bible, composed of works that had won admission by Intrinsic Merit, works by many hands yet somehow all held together by a single, if endlessly complex, vision of the Truth of Things — this became completely untenable. Suddenly it was possible to hang on to Literature only by adopting historical, anthropological, political, sociological, psychological, theoretical, and otherwise coldly unsympathetic ways of explaining what it was. You could still teach Hamlet if you wanted to, and might even quietly admit that you liked it. What you couldn't do was claim that your admiration stood on an objective footing, or that you were engaging in an innocent, unironic pursuit of Truth, Beauty, and "the best that has been thought and said." Your excuse, now, had to be that the play had "cultural currency," or as an anthology I used one year put it, "In our culture, it is the play," as if the class were an expedition setting off to research the hill folk of New Guinea.
The New Critics had seen Literature as the opposite of propaganda; now it was seen as much the same thing, one of the props of power, something imposed by the dominant culture on everyone else. You had to be a little apologetic about this, but you could always claim that you and your class were a sort of recon party, scouting out the assumptions and "dominant metaphors" of "the culture" in preparation for an eventual guerilla action of some kind. Universal Truth had been taken off the table, but there was still plenty of excitement to be had. Appreciation had promised only a degree of personal redemption, and of a kind that might be rather bleak if you were reading, say, Sartre. But consciousness raising aimed for the new heaven and earth of a reformed, liberated society.
All this was by no means a uniformly bad thing, but there were tradeoffs. Under the old dispensation, I would probably never have been allowed to think of Little House on the Prairie — a work for children, and written by a woman — as a classic at all. Now that I am allowed, though, even with the term no longer trading at par, the old training kicks in, and I am dismayed at Kutzer's presumption, her peremptory dismissal of a work that so many young readers have taken so thoroughly to heart for so long. Dismayed and oddly chastened: for this is the kind of airy cant the paradigm shift has taught us all to speak far too readily, and I recognize some of my own classroom maneuvers in hers. What happens when the "dominant metaphor" of the English classroom ceases to be that of the monk, worshipfully devouring every word of the precious text, and becomes that of the anthropologist, coolly cataloguing the evidence of social systems? What happens at least sometimes is bad reading — very bad reading, in this case. Let alone, for the moment, Kutzer's difficult notion that students can meaningfully, in a one-page exercise, re-read an entire novel "as a non-white reader might" — that they should, that is, put on the perspective of some colossally abstracted Person of Color, by way of learning that one ought not to stereotype people. Ignore the illogic of finding fault with the novel for including a black doctor — the only professional person anywhere on the horizon of the Little House books, as Ann Romines points out — or of regarding the white settlers, the very tip of the spear of Manifest Destiny, as "marginalized." Pass by these in silence, I say, and focus on the essential problem: that of assuming that "Wilder's attitudes" can be abstracted from the book as easily as if it were a thirty-second campaign spot.
We made plenty of dumb mistakes in the old days, but this one, never. Practically your first assignment, when you arrived at college as an English major (you fool, you), was to go to the mat with some suitably recalcitrant text — a sixteenth-century sonnet would do nicely — to discover that what you had, there, was no flat declaration of anything, but an unbelievably complex play of different ideas, attitudes, feelings, and tones, none of which could be confidently ascribed to the author, who was expressed only by the totality, the endless give and take. The point was not that the writer was a "flip-flopper," as the Republicans now like to say of anyone who speaks in complete sentences; on the contrary, he (it was always a he) knew better than anyone what was up, his beliefs having been tested and refined in "the hellfires of antithesis." Rather, the point was that life itself was endlessly complex, and that Literature was a passionate attempt to honor that complexity, catching it in words far better than was possible in the compromised, approximating languages of business, politics, science, or even religion. Your assignment in Lit 101 was to see life steadily and see it whole, starting with that stinking sonnet.
Of course, we would never have subjected Little House on the Prairie to the ten-cigarette, three-espresso, line-by-line analysis that was customary for short lyrics. Here is the thing, though: if we had gone over it that way, the book would have held up remarkably well. Kutzer offers her students' testimony; now here is mine. Over the years of teaching my college children's literature course, a very modest introduction pitched mainly to Elementary Education majors, I have re-read this novel nearly as often as the quiet little girls who carry it around in purple knapsacks every year, all over America; and each re-reading has increased my admiration for its depth, subtlety, and craft. To me the book seems, in a word, a work of art, sitting there all unsuspected in the Children's Section, disguised as a mere perennial bestseller. Framed in language that a seven-year-old can read and enjoy, it yet manages to supply an account of the Ingalls' frontier adventure that is balanced, nuanced, inclusive, and altogether responsive to the excruciating paradoxes of the American experience.
Kutzer is far from alone in finding the book's racial attitudes "problematic." It is the kind of judgment anyone might make who was bent on sizing up the book without really reading it: an editorial writer working on deadline, a time-starved parent hastening to a PTA meeting, a relative shopping desperately on Christmas Eve — or a critic equipped with a theory assuring her that society itself is racist, so that the same judgment can be safely pronounced on all of its productions. For all these, the favored procedure is not that New Critical close reading in which I squandered my youth, but sortilege and a swift leap to grand conclusions.
So it is that at least three times in the past fifteen years, in Louisiana, Minnesota, and South Dakota, Little House has been forcibly removed from school libraries. In Minnesota, it was forced back in, by court order. In each case, the complaint was the same: the book is "offensive to Native Americans" or "promotes racial epithets" or "contains attitudes offensive to Native Americans." In a 1998 editorial, Deborah Locke declared that "Wilder's children's books about a 'heroic' white settler family are filled with racist and absurd portrayals of Indians. Her series is utterly inappropriate for third-graders" (qtd. in Seidman; in fact, Indians hardly appear in the other eight books). The Oyate Web Page, a site maintained by a Native American advocacy group, has placed Little House on its list of "Books to Avoid," and backs up the judgment with a passionate article by novelist and Washington Post reporter Dennis McAuliffe, the descendant of an Osage grandmother murdered by whites. McAuliffe begins by declaring that Wilder's fans "should be grateful that the Osages didn't dismember her when they had the chance" and continues in that vein, angrily detailing the historical facts — the appalling historical facts — of the tribe's dispossession and betrayal and persecution by whites. By the time he ends, with the account of half-Osage Joseph Mosher being beaten to death in front of his family by a gang of white vigilantes, even I have to pause for a moment, wondering whether, in the face of such horror, one has the right to a book as satisfying and finally optimistic as Little House.
But only for a moment. I find McAuliffe's anger in every way preferable to Kutzer's bland condescension, but in the end both seem to stem from the same error: essential inattention to the book itself; essential incomprehension of the unique powers and obligations of fiction. In a word, both want to dismiss Art in favor of History. Rather than appreciating the book for what it is — the intimate, vivid, marvelously particularized and fictional portrait of one frontier experience, with many telling side glimpses into the history that so concerns them — they insist on the complete picture, the big canvas however badly drawn, replete with information about policies, treaties, and events, whether or not these fall naturally into the sphere of experience of one wide-eyed little girl. Insisting on the truth, they forget that there can be such a thing as a truth, the lived subjective moment, and that it is the proper and crucial business of art to capture this.
Worse, both critics seem absolutely tone deaf to the book's artful counterpointing of voices and perspectives. Wilder sat down to write the story in 1932, as a sixty-five-year-old grandmother, at a time when Jim Crow was still in force, the Civil Rights Bill still thirty years distant. An anti-lynching bill had failed repeatedly in the Senate during the previous decade, and the following year, 1933, would see a sudden upsurge of racially motivated lynchings. In such a climate, it would have been utterly unsurprising for Wilder to write the sort of blithely ethnocentric fantasy that was still immensely popular in 1963, when on my first date I took a girl to see a movie called How the West Was Won. In fact, however, Wilder wrote no such book. Read with a decent minimum of care, Little House emerges as no reassertion of the pioneer myth, but an earnest, perceptive, and sometimes painful critique of it, all the more remarkable in that it is targeted for children of elementary school age. Wilder's point-of-view character, the four- or five-year-old "Laura" who is and is not herself, is from the first attentive to the moral ambiguities of the family's westward adventure. As Ann Romines shows in her fine book on Wilder, Constructing the Little House, Laura persistently raises troubled and troubling questions about the Indians whom the Ingalls will be dispossessing. "This is Indian country, isn't it?" she asks Ma early on; "What did we come to their country for, if you don't like them?" (47). Given the severe standards of propriety that usually constrain the Ingalls girls, this amounts to a bold challenge to the whole enterprise.
As the story proceeds and the Ingalls build their house and settle in, what had seemed rather a lark, lighthearted and episodic, gradually takes on a sterner aspect; it becomes ever more clearly a story about the conflict of Indians and whites. One day, in Pa's absence, two gaunt and nearly naked natives come into the house, eat the meal Ma has been preparing, and depart, having frightened Ma and the girls half to death, a fact the insouciant Pa seems not to grasp. A little later the girls get to hear their kind neighbor Mrs. Scott declare, in a line invariably cited out of context by the book's enemies, as if it expressed Wilder's own deepest convictions, "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" (211). Read in its context, the line is perfectly recognizable for what it is, a compound of fear, anger, grief (Mrs. Scott has lost relatives in the Minnesota Massacre), rationalized self-interest, and lack of imagination. If anyone should miss the point, Pa will later, after a long series of positive comments on and experiences of the Indians, expressly disavow the sentiment (301). Opponents of racism, if they are sincere, ought to cherish the line, as a gemlike exemplum both of how ugly racism can be — ugly enough to transform a good and kind woman into a murderous harpy — and of its provenance in cultural competition and war. That they do not is depressingly instructive. Apparently it is not the truth that is wanted, after all: no real investigation of what racism is — how it looks, how it works, how it feels — but only the polite reflex of condemning it, then quickly changing the subject. At best the book's enemies would seem to be leaving room for a cartoon vision in which it is never oneself who is guilty, but always someone else, some alien and suitably monstrous bogey.
For Laura, however, there is no escaping the truth of personal involvement. Having come to Indian Country full of eagerness to meet and befriend the Indians, consumed especially by the desire to see and hold a papoose, she nevertheless finds herself, at her moment of greatest panic in the "Indians in the House" episode, wanting to let the dog loose so that "Jack will kill them" (136). Momentarily quelled at the end of this episode, this fear of the other returns and gradually builds for much of the rest of the story, as the situation worsens and battle between the Indians and the settlers appears more and more likely. Dark and nerve-wracking, the late chapters are an object lesson to anyone who thinks that children's reading is not serious business. In one adroitly understated image, Laura is aware of Pa staying up late at night to make extra bullets (287).
But at the same time Laura, Pa, and even Ma struggle against the fear, yearning for some way out of the confrontation into which they have blundered, seeking some basis for compromise and human connection with the Indians. The conflict is caught with crystalline clarity in the chapter "The Tall Indian," when after a particularly tense day — Indians have come into the house again — Laura catches Ma singing a popular ditty of the day, "The Blue Juniata," whose heroine is the Indian maid Alfarata, a kind of demi-goddess vanishing into the west. Like future generations of culture critics, Laura is struck by the emotional disconnect: real Indians as the enemy during the day, imaginary ones as romanticized friends and lovers at night. She proceeds to mount her most determined attempt yet to discover what, exactly, Ma and Pa think they are doing in Indian Country. The cross examination ends without any satisfactory reply — for none is possible — when Pa commands her to go to sleep (236–237).
The beauty of such moments in the book — and they are countless — is how much remains unspoken. The very young reader, still needing to believe in the infallible wisdom of grownups, can do so, taking at face value Pa's chapter-ending pronouncement that the time for questions is over. The older reader, beginning to learn the limitations of adults, sees something very different: that Laura is badly troubled; that Pa and Ma, good and loving parents though they are, have been caught up in an enterprise they can no longer control or justify, and are struggling with uneasiness and shame.
All this comes to a head in the book's most powerful chapter, "The Indians Ride Away," and its most famous moment. On one level a sharp anti-climax — there will be no battle, after all — the episode by that very token rises above the easy evasions of the shoot-'em-up Western. Instead we are invited simply to watch, drawing our own conclusions as the displaced Osage ride en masse past the Ingalls' house:
The Indian children's mothers were riding ponies, too. Leather fringe dangled about their legs and blankets were wrapped around their bodies, but the only thing on their heads was their black, smooth hair. ... Some had narrow bundles tied on their backs, and tiny babies' heads stuck out of the top of the bundles. ... More and more and more ponies passed, and more children, and more babies on their mothers' backs ... (307–308)
Finally it is all too much for Laura, who startles Pa, Ma, and the reader with a bizarre demand: "Pa, get me that little Indian baby!" There follows a completely uncharacteristic tantrum."Hush, Laura," Pa said. "The Indian woman wants to keep her baby."
"Oh, Pa!" Laura pleaded, and then she began to cry. It was shameful to cry, but she couldn't help it. The little Indian baby was gone. She knew she would never see it any more.Ma said she had never heard of such a thing. "For shame, Laura," she said, but Laura could not stop crying. (309)
The moment lacks the flashing marquee lights that political correctness seems to demand, but it could not be more brilliantly conceived. Laura's outburst is at once a sort of parody of the adult attitudes that have been troubling her — as if she were telling her parents, "Look what you've been teaching me!" — and a heartfelt protest against them, a plea to reassert the ties of human kinship and decency. That she herself understands almost none of this is part of the beauty of the writing, and part of its truth.
As this chapter ends, the family are all starkly depressed: Ma too "let down" to cook, Pa and Laura not hungry anyway. No eight-year-old fails to understand what the trouble is: a guilty, pained, awestruck sympathy for the Indians, a fellow feeling that can surface now that the moment of danger has passed. Apparently many adult readers do miss the point; but there is hope even for them in the novel's denouement. In a turn of events that Wilder invented from whole cloth, uncharacteristically abandoning the family memories that furnish the basis for most of the novel, it is finally the settlers who are dispossessed, when word arrives that the Cavalry will for once side with the Indians. (In real life, the Cavalry did not, and the family had financial incentives for moving again.) So the end of everything — all the traveling, all the building, all the tension — is simply this: the family goes back east. Those who have been convinced by the TV show or malicious neighbors that the book is a cheery hymn to Manifest Destiny need to be reminded of this fact, two or three times a day if possible: The Ingalls head east! They are singing and happy again, all packed up snug in the wagon, but the reason for their serenity can be hard to fathom: hard for grownups, anyway. In the conventional sodbuster, the settlers hang on to the seized land and justify their claim by laying the foundations of the mighty America of the Future; this ending gives us the opposite: a quiet and partly inadvertent, but finally resolute withdrawal from the schemes of empire; a choice of renewed hardship over wealth with an uneasy conscience. As Laura drifts off to sleep at the end, lulled by Pa's singing, the whole family seems to have recovered an innocence somehow lost along the way, and that, not the prospect of wealth or hegemony, is what is happy.
Long before the age of political correctness, then, Wilder manages to write a compassionate and earnestly critical account of the American frontier, one that hinges on precisely our own keenest preoccupation, the fate of the indigenous peoples. Her foresight would have surprised no one in the old days, when it was axiomatic that the truths of Literature were timeless and that the writer saw better and more completely than you or me. That it does surprise us now tells us, I would suggest, nothing good about the current state of academic English. We have gotten too much into the habit of reducing the literary work to the least common denominator of what its age or cultural moment seems to allow, then rushing on without taking a real look. As a result, Little House has taken fire from those who ought to know better, those who, if they would only listen, would hear Wilder making their case for them better than they are making it for themselves. The woods are always full of people, some of them quite well meaning, who would restrict children's reading to the stultifyingly unexceptionable: the ham-handed, the dull, the monstrously cheery, the agonizingly obvious, the unbearably decent and wholesome and inoffensive. Criticism ought not to be the business of encouraging such people, but of sorting out the junk from the gold, in the mad faith that this is still possible. We need to recover some our old respect for the uniqueness of the literary work, for the power and particularity of the author's individual vision.
References
Kutzer, M. Daphne. "Pleasures and Mixed Audiences." https://io.uwinnipeg.ca/%7Enodelman/resources/kutzer.htm. Found 12 October 2004.
McAuliffe, Dennis Jr. "Little House on the Osage Prairie." https://www.oyate.org/books-to-avoid/littlehouse.html. Found 15 March 2005.
Romines, Ann. Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
Seidman, Rachel F. "This Little House of Mine." https://www.common-place.org/vol-03/no-03/seidman/index.shtml. Found 15 March 2005.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House on the Prairie. New York: Harper Trophy, 1971.
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