At least once or twice a year I re-read the entire Little House on the Prairie series, along with all of the Betsy-Tacy books, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s entire oeuvre, and all the Noel Streatfeild books I can get my hands on. Some of these books have aged well, and get even better on revisiting (Betsy-Tacy), while others are pure nostalgia reads for me. But the more often I read the Little House books as an adult, the more I realize something:
I fucking hate Ma.
Have I always hated her? I don’t think so. As a kid, I vaguely thought she was unfair to Laura and was much unnecessarily nicer to Mary. It’s only as an adult that I realize that the true plot of the Little House books is Laura growing up and moving the hell away from Ma.
In Ma’s world—and in the world of many people during that era—a well-behaved girl has a suffocatingly boring life. No tears, no laughter, no smiles, no running, no anger, no joy. A good girl and a good woman had no vision of self, but spent her life working only for others. And that vision is bullshit.
Let’s talk about her bullshit vision of what the word “selfish” means. Ma’s idea of being a good girl is apparently ignoring your own desires and giving your own toys—your toys that you LOVE—away to someone else. Remember the time Mary and Laura found a bunch of pretty beads in an abandoned Native American [“Indian” in the book] camp?
Ma untied the handkerchief and exclaimed at what she found. The beads were even prettier than they had been in the Indian camp.
Laura stirred her beads with her finger and watched them sparkle and shine. “These are mine,’ she said.
Then Mary said, “Carrie can have mine.”
Ma waited to hear what Laura would say. Laura didn’t want to say anything. She wanted to keep those pretty beads. Her chest felt all hot inside, and she wished with all her might that Mary wouldn’t always be such a good little girl. But she couldn’t let Mary be better than she was.
So she said, slowly “Carrie can have mine too.”
“That’s my unselfish, good little girls,” said Ma.
Mary and Laura go exploring and find themselves some sparkly beads, some of the only pretty things in their miserable pioneer lives. And as soon as they get home, Mary (the suck-up) gives her beads to an infant. And Ma, instead of saying “No, she’s a baby, she doesn’t need beads, she will eat them and choke on them and die” – stares her other daughter down until she’s guilted into giving up her pretty beads, too.
Possibly the most brutal moment of the entire series, though, comes when Ma forces Laura to give away her beloved doll (Doll. Singular. Because she had only had one doll in her entire life) to a bratty neighbor.
Laura watched anxiously while Anna tugged at Charlotte’s shoe button eyes and pulled her wavy yarn hair, and even banged her against the floor. But Anna could not really hurt Charlotte, and Laura meant to straighten her skirts and her hair when Anna went away.
At last that long visit was ended. Mrs. Nelson was going home and taking Anna. Then a terrible thing happened. Anna would not give up Charlotte.
Perhaps she thought Charlotte was hers. Maybe she told her mother that Laura had given her Charlotte. Mrs. Nelson smiled. Laura tried to take Charlotte, and Anna howled.
“I want my doll!” Laura said. But Anna hung onto Charlotte and kicked and bawled.
“For shame, Laura,” Ma said. “Anna’s little and she’s company. You are too big to play with dolls, anyway. Let Anna have her.”
Laura had to mind Ma. She stood at the window and saw Anna skipping down the knoll, swinging Charlotte by one arm.
“For shame, Laura,” Ma said again. “A great girl like you, sulking about a rag doll. Stop it, this minute. You don’t want that doll, you hardly ever played with it. You must not be so selfish.”
JUST READING THAT MAKES THE RAGE RISE IN MY HEART. Her beloved Charlotte–her doll she protected so carefully, who she made certain wouldn’t get dirty or hurt, who was given to her on her fifth birthday, who was her only constant comfort while her itinerant parents dragged her all the fuck over the country–get stolen by some other kid, and Laura’s own mother tells her not to be so selfish? Laura should have walked upstairs and set the house on fire.
Of course, Anna doesn’t even really want poor Charlotte. Laura finds her mangled body months later, frozen in a puddle, bald, with half a mouth, and only one eye. Congratulations, Ma.
But then, Ma doesn’t want Laura to have any fun, ever. One glorious day, Laura’s cousin Lena takes her horseback riding and sings songs with her and gives her one of the happiest, freest afternoons of her life. Of course, Ma has to go and smother Laura’s passions and tells her to “remember that a lady never d[oes] anything that could attract attention.”
Don’t attract attention! Don’t smile, or laugh, or cry in front of anyone. What a miserable life to want for your daughters.
You didn’t think I’d forget the racism, did you? All of my friends who are mothers have pulled out their treasured Little House books for their kids, and are so excited to start reading them together at bedtime. And then a few weeks later, they come to me, horrified.
“…So I had to have a difficult conversation with Emma last night about why Ma hated ‘Indians’ so much.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ma was a “product of her time,” and back then everybody thought that way, and really, aren’t we all a little bit racist? But it really sucks to read a nice children’s book you loved as a kid all about a brave little girl and think about how fun it must have been to churn butter and use a pig’s bladder as a balloon and then BAM, RACISM IN THE FACE. There are plenty of examples of bigotry in the books, but Ma’s vicious, obvious hatred for and mistrust of Indians is the most glaring example, especially since Pa and Laura both try to defend Indians (with little success, even when they do things like SAVE ALL OF THE INGALLS’ LIVES).
Not to mention the Ingalls are only able to move around the country and settle on various prairies and lakes and towns because every place they move to is empty and cleared for them by means of forced resettlement and genocide.
It’s easy to say it’s good to use those books as a lesson about racism, but six-year-olds don’t need to read Little House to know that there are lots of people out there who hated them—who still hate them—just for their brown skin. They’ll find that out soon enough.
In sum, instead of reading the Little House books to your kids, try reading Betsy-Tacy instead. It’s still got all the charm of pinafores and popcorn-stringing of Little House, but when Betsy makes friends with a little Syrian girl, instead of frothing at the mouth and starting a race war, her mother cheers her on.
You can let the kids read the Little House books when they’re older, and you can both talk about how Ma is fucking terrible together.
Tags: awful literary characters, bad mothers, fuck pa too while we’re at it, i bet even little carrie was a dick sometimes, jasmine guillory, laura ingalls wilder, little house on the prairie, racism
Stay tuned for next week’s episode: “Is it strictly necessary, Mr. and Mrs. March, for you to be so fucking self-righteous?”
My best friend and I love the Winona Ryder “Little Women” and make a point to watch it and eat an entire box of Entemann’s chocolate donuts whenever one visits the other. Our favorite part of it is making fun of Marmee, who we have dubbed The Fortune Cookie, for her inability to speak in anything but suffocating platitudes. Good grief.
My first response to this excellent piece was to make rage-fists and think about the Marches giving away their whole goddamn dinner to the neighbors as though giving your daughters rickets is somehow a demonstration of moral fiber. I always wonder if Beth would have lived longer if she’d gotten the chance to consume some nutrients every once in a fortnight.
Read “Transcendental Wild Oats”, I say, apparently trying to give you a rage-stroke. Because she wrote about her own sisters, and “Little Women” leaves out the time where they were vegan in Massachusetts in the 1800s and did not eat root vegetables because harvesting them disturbed worms.
Mostly they ate melons. No wonder Beth died. And then Amy.
(Not that I think veganism is bad or unhealthy! I just think it’s untenable in temperate climates without tractors. And that maybe you should eat grains and nuts and beans and potatoes.)
All spring and summer long, I’ve been hugging to myself the promise of cold weather, weather suitable for bundling up, snuggling down, and re-reading the Little House books. I haven’t read them since I was a child, and I’m looking forward to grappling with them from an adult perspective. (I don’t know whether we had expurgated copies or whether childhood me silently absorbed the racism in them; though I’m now aware of it, I don’t particularly remember it from childhood readings. I’m half-ill, half-curious to see if it’s familiar upon re-reading.)
I remember resenting Mary, who always seemed so prim and perfectly behaved, so self-sacrificing and suffering-with-a-smile. I remember not being a bit surprised when [SPOILER] she was stricken blind, because — to my childish logic — it seemed like something that would happen to Mary just so she could be saintly about it.
I didn’t hate Ma, but I something about her made me deeply anxious, so anxious that when a Little House chapter was our before-bedtime story, I often couldn’t sleep. I think that, even second-hand through Laura’s writing, I absorbed the barely repressed dread Ma seemed to have of trying to keep her family safe and fed and clean and civilized, whatever that meant to her. But as a child, I didn’t have an emotional or intellectual grasp on that pervasive anxiety, so all I got was a constant vigilance and a blanketing sense of disquiet.
I have a hard time hating Ma when I’m sitting here realizing how she has to take care of a bunch of small children in the horrifying conditions caused by her irresponsible shitwit of a husband.
I’m really curious how Pa will look to an adult re-reading these books. I remember seeing him as a sunny, dazzling, all-capable everyday hero, but I suspect that was a combination of Laura’s perception and my own sunny-smiley childhood feelings about my own dad [edited to add: and a generous helping of the wholesome-frontiersman narrative that was/is so popular in my nation’s historical vernacular.]
Well, there’s the “fuck pa too while we’re at it” tag – maybe your re-read will help to round it out. 🙂
Well he moves his wife and three small children away from their established farm and family connections to a part of the country that isn’t even open for settlement, because he thinks it might be open at some point soon.
It’s hard to give him points in the enlightened view of race relations when he’s literally stealing Native land out from under them. Meanwhile Ma gets stuck with the delightful task of dealing with angry Native men coming in to the house and physically threatening her, while she’s there alone with three little girls.
I expect to spend most of the books in a spitting-furious rage at one or another parent.
But then, there’ll be the later food-porn of Almanzo’s childhood to soothe me. I expect to make a lot of pies this autumn, in tandem with re-reading.
Also Pa does blackface.
“These darkies can’t be beat” or something? I still remember it from 5th grade. I though it was not good even then
i had no clue what that was when I read that. I have never felt so betrayed years later when I figured it out.
Even as a very small child I remember raging at Pa for being so goddamn reckless all the time. I have been trying and I cannot put together a better description of him than “irresponsible shitwit” and I commend you for the pith. Even at 7 years old, I used to roll my eyes at his unfathomably selfish wanderlust. Oh, your “wandering foot got to itching”? Funny how that always seems to lead to the times when your childrens’ “malnourished bodies get to collapsing.”
This, this, THIS. OMG, Pa was a law-breaking, anti-social BASTARD. Every damned one of their moves was because he decided other people were living too close (except for the one where they got thrown out of their illegal farm in Indian Territory.)
I think it’s probably fair to say that Laura’s relationship with Ma was on the complex side–as in, yes, Ma did seem rather obvious in favoring Mary, yet Ma may well have seemed in many ways more reliable than Laura’s beloved Pa could claim to be. It’s mentioned in the post how Ma was arbitrary and rather mean in giving away the doll–yet she later took a somewhat unusual step for a parent in those days and actually apologized to Laura when she realized that this was in fact a serious thing in Laura’s mind–furthermore, when Laura brought the battered remains of the doll home, Ma not only said that Laura had acted correctly but also helped her to repair the doll.
Plus, wasn’t there a Pa-does-a-minstrel-show moment in one of the stories? Maybe at a spelling bee? In the Big Woods, perhaps? Whatever it was I remember it being super disgusting and then wondering why people thought this was a good thing to read to children.
It was in Little Town on the Prairie. Wedged between the spelling bee and the charades, I believe.
Oh, 19th century.
BETSY-TACY YES FOREVER. That is all.
Okay, not quite all.
My younger sister – named Laura – holds a special place in her heart for these books, but I never related quite as hard. My sister would tell you this is because I’m the older sister with the perfect life – I’m not blind yet, but it’s probably coming, and I plan to be supremely saintly about it – and she might be right. About the being older part, anyway. (Betsy-Tacy is also about little sisters and ALSO holds a special place in my sister’s heart – possibly there’s a theme developing here…) I am very interested to hear what she thought about Ma.
I’ve always felt robbed by the fact that Betsy fucking quits college and cheats on/dumps Joe in between books. Those are two of the most interesting things to happen to her, and they are just blips in between Emily of Deep Valley and Betsy and the Great World.
100%. I used to think I had skipped a book! Like, “Woah! That’s not where I left off!”
#EmilyofDeepValleyhealshearts
this is what is great about beverly cleary!! both beezus and ramona get books.
But…not really. She’s a sidekick in Henry’s and Ramona’s books, and in her ONE book she shares billing (Beezus and Ramona) and most of the story is still all about her adorable pest of a little sister.
I adore Ramona, don’t get me wrong! LOVE Ramona and cannot wait to read them to my daughter. But Beezus was another in a long line of stick-in-the-mud big sisters. It’s a good thing we all have perfect lives to console ourselves.
Betsy-Tacy are my all time favorite books. Those girls pursue their dreams til the very end! They have what seems to be the best high school experience of all time. (Betsy can only blame herself for her drama — except for that crap with Tony.)
I loved reading those books because all the women were so real! Mrs. Ray and Mrs. Poppy, Carney, Julia, Winona.. Dammit, I feel a re-read coming on.
TIB. TIB FOREVER.
I loved Tib with every scrap of my little being. She just did not give a fuck about what anyone thought, and became the kind of woman that the greatest of my ladyfriends are: she refused to participate in drama, did what she liked, didn’t do what she didn’t like, and was happy because she didn’t see why she shouldn’t be. Also she went by Tib.
Tib changing the tires on her car inspired me to learn how to change my own tires at a young age. Tib is OG.
NOT TO MENTION how incredibly feminist Tib is. She doesn’t view other women as enemies! She gives zero fucks. I love Tib. And I love those books so much. I re-re-read them recently, and fell in love with them all over again.
Oh my god this has dredged up so many memories, totally need to read these books again. I know I must have read every single book in my youth, though I can scarcely remember.
Me too. All I remember is when a boy got stung by a swarm of bees and his face swelled up and he almost died (or maybe he did die?) and it scared the crap out of me. And when they cooked a pig, and the kids’ favorite part was the tail because it was crispy.
I’ve been reading my son the Henry Reed books, which I remembered as great, and now find that Henry, for all that he is a likable egghead, is also a sexist fuck, and every time he says something nice about best friend Midge, who absolutely rocks, he has to qualify that she is completely unlike other girls in her intelligence/ gameness/ general coolness to be around. Midge is ok, because she’s like a boy. Hell and damnation.
But Ma smacks the bear when she’s in the cow pen! And she wears wine-colored calico! And makes butter in the shape of a strawberry! And Pa’s hands could fit around her waist when they were married!
(Pretty much all I retained from these books were weird, sensory details about fabric and food. And the detail about the waist, which is bizarre and yet everyone I’ve ever talked with about Little House remembers it.)
I remember that, too! She says it while chiding Laura for taking off her corsets at night instead of wearing them 24/7. And I remembered the whole exchange that follows almost verbatim:
“”He can’t now,” Laura answered, a little saucily. “And he seems to like you.”
“You must not be saucy, Laura,” Ma repr oved her, but Ma’s cheeks flushed pink and she could not help smiling.
I suspect I would depict my mother like that if our relationship had functionally ended when I was 15, because I got married and moved to another state and cars didn’t exist.
That is such an excellent point.
Yes! Betsy-Tacy! I loved those books growing up. (I also loved the Little House books – in fact, Little House in the Big Woods is the first book I remember receiving as a gift – but definitely had a more complicated relationship with them as I grew older for reasons that are already pretty well tread in this piece/comments.)
Re: Little House, was anyone else’s mind blown by that NPR piece on the pediatrician who wrote a paper on how Mary’s blindness wasn’t really caused by scarlet fever? You don’t even want to know how many people I texted with that piece of news.
Spill the beans! What caused it then?
You can listen to/read a partial transcript of the story here: http://www.npr.org/2013/02/07/171413261/laura-ing…
The researcher posits that it had to to with a brain infection.
what WHAT LINK PLEASE
Link here! http://www.npr.org/2013/02/07/171413261/laura-ing…
You can thank Audie Cornish for this hard hitting piece of journalism.
I love this, thank you for the link! I love the image of the doctor going, “But…but…Mary Ingalls!” and the teacher having a, “…oh crap, it DID say that, didn’t it?” moment. Science!
Ah! I remember when I was little and went in with strep throat, my doctor told me that if we didn’t follow whatever antibiotics regimen he prescribed, the disease could progress to scarlet fever. I was TERRIFIED. The disease that killed Beth and blinded Mary???
I’ve never been so good about a course of antibiotics in my life.
I remember hating these books as a child. I never knew why, and felt vaguely embarrassed by it when all my friends rave about them. This article sums up all my feelings that I didn’t know I had. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I think ‘repressed’ is the right word. Then again, Ma gave birth to at least two children miles from anywhere, dragged all over the country by her husband, away from family, friends, anyone she could have relied on. No wonder she was a bit weird.
I have to agree. And, I feel like Ma’s religious views are a huge factor here.
Farmer Boy is happily Ma-less.
Yeah, but Almanzo’s whole family is even worse. Yes, I recognize that it was a different time, but my skin still crawls when I think of how terrified Almanzo was of being beaten by his father. (Or his mother’s stuck-up classism. His siblings at least had the excuse of being still children themselves.)
Although Betsy does make friends with the Syrian girl, it’s still a little gross with its Oh, but this family is so clean for being immigrants, and so grateful to the white folks that they are therefore worthy of our help.
I’m sure I read somewhere that Ma and Laura had a very troubled relationship later in life and Laura didn’t attend Ma’s funeral. Apparently this was partly due to Ma’s religious fanaticism and conservative (anti-immigration) views, which Laura disagreed with.
This is a lot like dissing Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice; she might not be quite as delightful as the father or some of the sisters, but she is the only one aware of the economic realities of the situation.
“You WILL follow societal convention enough that someone of my class will marry you and you won’t have to grind wheat in a coffee grinder for food. You WILL have a career. You WILL know how to run a household so that getting married as a teenager doesn’t result in too much disaster. You WILL survive and function and by God, I WILL have grandchildren, even though your father is doing his best to stymie that.”
I think Mr. Bennet is the worst! Yeah, he gets out some good one-liners, but:
(1) he’s constantly putting down his wife in front of their children;
(2) he’s constantly calling the younger three sisters silly and stupid;
(3) he humiliates Mary at the ball at Netherfield (embarrassing her by intervening when she’s about to play another song);
(4) he invites Mr. Collins to visit for the sole purpose of laughing at him;
(5) he’s completely neglectful of his kids, and knows that Lydia’s going to make a fool of herself at Brighton but isn’t interested in doing anything about it; and
(6) the whole reason they’re financially vulnerable in the first place is that he couldn’t be bothered to adhere to a sensible budget or plan for his family’s maintenance after his death.
I’m sure there are more. He is terrible!
We had this discussion on The Hairpin a few months back. He is a first-class jaghole.
the world always needs more noting of Mr. Bennet’s awfulness
always
Didn’t he basically marry his wife because she was hot?
Mr. Edwards: creeper?
Was Mr. Edwards the one who forged a flooding river in order to bring the Ingalls’ supplies from town AND Christmas presents for the girls? How could he be a creeper? He met Santa Clause for them!
I just get this vibe of both parents thinking “He makes us uncomfortable, but convention requires that we be nice to him. He’s buying us gifts? He’s giving us money? What is he getting out of this?”
It might be that they were poor and shy about charity. Or it might be that Ma was pretty and pliant and he was a creeper.
Mr Boast was the creeper.
Mr Boast was *also* a creeper.
Though really we’re basing it on the baby buying comment. Was there other stuff? (Not that there needs to be other stuff.)
I think the baby buying was it (“it”).
Not to mention that the repeated mention of how Ma’s waist was so tiny that Pa could encircle it with his fingertips! I was worried MY ENTIRE CHILDHOOD/ADOLESCENCE about the fact that no one could do that to me.
ME TOO. I was also very concerned about Pa staying up at night to make bullets.
I had a complex about that too, until I got older and realized that was possible due to a) extreme corset use and b) malnutrition (probably).
AND ANOTHER THING.
The gallivanting with Lena occurred at a time when the family was basically living in an episode of Deadwood. If I had an adolescent girl running around in a railroad camp, my primary interest wouldn’t be cultivating her free spirit either.
Yeah, exactly. The scene is directly adjacent to one vague scene where Pa is going on about the railroad camp and the men and blah blah, and Laura is “That sounds so cool!” and then Ma is like NO. No. And her girls are kind of confused, and then Pa is like “um….don’t go there, ever.”
Pa: Experience the wonderful freedom of the prairie and the excitement of building the railroad!
Ma: Don’t go over there, you’re young and naive teenage girls and you’ll be raped and assaulted.
If you read Laura’s actual memoirs, she put all sorts of true, lurid details about the railroad camp, attempted rapes (including of her by a drunken employer), a murder she witnessed between a husband/wife she worked for (I think he set her on fire?), etc. and her daughter Rose constantly told her to rewrite her childhood because it didn’t make good children’s books. Rose had her change most of the real timetable of her childhood (they moved in all directions in real life, for instance, and back to some places), important details (the little house in the big woods was near town and many neighbors and they often went to parties) and more. Mary’s college was paid by the government and not some mysterious benefactor, and she had her put in all this “we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps” business because Rose was a rabid libertarian. The Ingalls Family skipped out on paying rent in one town by leaving in the middle of the night. Laura supported the family for quite some time in her early teens by working at inns in horribly seedy situations because Pa didn’t work. It was all whitewashed and changed.
Love this, and I sure hope we get to read about your strong feelings re: Scandal next.
The thing that has stuck with me is her Unbreakable Iron Will on which color hair ribbons went with which color hair. That one time, when she’s tired or busy or something, and Laura and Mary switch and get to wear a new color for fun for one damn day, and Ma is like “…my life, it is ruined…” makes me feel so sympathetic for all three of them.
Let the kids wear blue/pink for one damn day.
All this lady wants is for her kids to look nice for one damn day.
(I am glad not to live in that time period)
content note: rape, sexual and other violence
I cut Ma a lot of slack when I think about:
1) the filthy, disgusting, impoverished, rootless life Pa makes them live. Every time they settle down and start establishing something HA HA WHOOOPS time to move on!
2) how entirely cut off from all her family/support she is
3) How she’s doing nothing more than enforcing current social norms
4) how hard pressed she is to defend her daughters against rape in the only way she knows how (making sure they “don’t call attention to themselves,” get mistaken for “loose women” (what with Laura’s literally loose stays and bonnet strings).
Ma’s got her problems, sure, but a big part of the reason she’s seen so negatively by us modern readers is that times have changed, and also that Laura went out of her way to paint herself as the victim in many ways with mean old ma bullying her and favoring Mary.
I really liked these books as a kid, but as an adult the only way I’d let a kid of mine read them was if we’d already laid anti-racism and anti-sexism ground work and we read them together and discussed the book’s place in history as well as what viewpoints have changed and what viewpoints haven’t. It’s a ~~problematic~~ series, like many books of its time.
I’ve heard people contrast this book with the Little Women books, commenting on how Marmie encouraged her girls to essentially run wild and play with boys (or, A boy, Laurie). How awful Ma must be! It’s a viewpoint that TOTALLY manages to overlook how secure the social position/standing of the Marches were, despite their genteel poverty. Nobody was going to mistake the March girls for whores. No miners/grizzled prospectors/whatever were going to rape them and dump their murdered bodies in the woods. When Pa took Ma away from the East Coast, he stripped his wife and daughters of the same protection. Thanks Pa! Cool move!
“3) How she’s doing nothing more than enforcing current social norms ” Yes this.
The Alcott family (Little Women is loosely autobiographical) were part of the elite intelligentsia of their time. They may have been short on cash, but their circle included such as Thoreau and Emerson. Their lives were night and day different from the Ingallses.
You might be interested in this essay, if you haven’t already read it: Blackford, Holly. “Civilization and Her Discontents: The Unsettling Nature of Ma in Little House in the Big Woods”
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Number 1, 2008
Thanks for this
I remember loving the adventures the kids would have on their own, but haaaaaaated all the scenes/stories back at the house …. and now you’ve nailed why. I’d never thought about it that way, but you’re right. Ma sucks.
This is a great article about Laura and her daughter Rose
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/200…
I read LHOP to my daughter right around the time I read Jeannette Walls’ “the Glass Castle,” and realized both fathers are the same character… but Ingalls is made out to be a dashing pioneer, and Walls is made out to be kind of a lunatic.
When I was little, the fact that Laura realized she’d never seen Ma’s ears always weirded me out. I always tucked my hair behind my ears and thought it was kinda scary there was a time when you could be sent home from school for it.
The flip side, though, is that Pa is always right and Laura is valued because she’s most like him. It’s that particular kind of protest against gender roles that has room for only one special girl who gets to be the honorary boy. So even though Ma is hateful, I think it’s the narrator’s perspective that is fucked up, since it just reproduces the denigration of everything associated with femininity (Ma is controlling, Mary is a simp, Carrie is a wimp), while trying to let Laura out through an escape clause.
Yes! One of the few things I disliked about the series was this, despite my liking of Laura and how relatable I found her. I hated how people reading the books always praised her for not being naturally dainty like Mary and playing with the boys and not being an icky stuck-up girly girl like not only Mary (who honestly got some good character development when she matured and admitted she’d been a bratty suckup as a kid sometimes) or worse, Nellie Oleson, who Almanzo chides behind her back for being afraid of horses (for all her faults, I didn’t think that was one of them, though).
on re reading prarie, I never realized how absolutely stressed ma is, her husband is always dragging her to some new part of the country where they are isolated and alone and having to deal with housefires and the whole family being sick by herself. I can understand why she might be such a controlling parent, it was the only thing she could control.
I think you missed the point of that story, where it is a biting satire of her father’s determination to follow transcendentalism at the cost of her family’s health and well-being.
sorry that their malnourishment was the only thing you only took away from it.
I would also like to add that the Ingalls also designated Laura as “eyes for Mary.” She had to go over all her lessons at night, out loud, for Mary, and she even had to fork over her sewing earnings and teaching money to keep Mary in the School for the Blind. Even Mary’s fucking organ was purchased with Laura’s money….well, she went halfsies with Pa, if memory serves.
No wonder Mary’s reaction to Laura’s engagement was, “Do you really want to leave home and marry that Wilder boy?” Laura should have answered, “HELL-TO-THE-YES. It’s someone else’s turn to be your seeing eye sister.”
I mean, seriously. What a huge burden to put on your daughter. “Your sister is handicapped and YOU must suffer for it. Get to work.” Sounds like Duggar parenting.
Ma Ingalls definitely did have a stick up her ass, didn’t she? Mary kinda had a stick up her ass, as well.
I’m sure there were times when Laura wished she had a courage to just go “fuck society” and do what she truly desired, without giving a rat’s ass of what other people thought of her. But, sadly, those were the times when there was a huge stigma on people who dared to not toe the line.
Pa blatantly favored Laura while the quieter Mary who always tried so hard to be good was overlooked. True, Ma favored Mary but it was Pa who’s attention and favoritism everyone was vying for. Pa was clearly running that show.
I thought Laura acted kind of jealous when Mary went blind and finally got a turn to be catered to and to get some public recognition.
As I recall, there’s an episode in one of the later books where a teenage Laura tells Mary of having wanted to slap her for being so impossibly good when they were little–and Mary made the rather interesting comment that what Laura thought of as Mary being too good to be true, was often a case of Mary showing off just how good she could be. Didn’t occur to me on first reading, but it does occur now to wonder, just who besides her sisters might Mary have wanted to show off for? Pa, because she wanted some of the attention he gave to Laura? Ma, because there was some sense of Ma’s approval being a rather tenuous thing? Might Mary even have felt that she was held to a tougher standard in general purely for being the oldest? We may never know–and might do well to remember that we get the particular slant on this family purely because it was Laura rather than one of the other children who wrote the books.
I will stick to reading my Bobo books by Eileen Rosenthal!
From a boys’ tale perspective, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Barsoom” series as an adult has a bit of that same “ugh, really?” reaction, when you realize John Carter is a slave-holding racist held up as the ideal human male. (But it’s “okay” because his family’s slaves love them so much, they refused their freedom.) As a kid, the slavery and such was a twinge which got in the way of the adventure and got glossed over. Today, as an adult, I can’t get past it.
From a boys' tale perspective, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Barsoom" series as an adult has a bit of that same "ugh, really?" reaction, when you realize John Carter is a slave-holding racist held up as the ideal human male. (But it's "okay" because his family's slaves love them so much, they refused their freedom.) As a kid, the slavery and such was a twinge which got in the way of the adventure and got glossed over. Today, as an adult, I can't get past it.
Actually, it’s Pa I want to hit with a shovel. Pa, who moves the family from pillar to post, very often taking off and leaving Ma to run the farm, and do all the housekeeping chores her training wouldn’t let her skip, and raise the kids. Also, to deal with locusts and Native Americans and the opinions of the townspeople if she didn’t hold her little girls to the icky standard of selflessness expected at the time. We see Pa through the lens of Laura’s hero worship. Like a lot of dads, he gets a pass because he’s not around as much, because he’s special, because when there’s a rule to be broken it’s Charles Ingalls who gets to break it. Ma gets put in the position of being the enforcer.
It’s been a while, but in one of the last books, when newlywed Laura realizes she’s pregnant, she remembers something (I think it is) Ma said. “I’ve danced, and now I have to pay the piper.” I think of city-bred Caroline Ingalls of Boston who falls in love with a charismatic guy with Libertarian leanings and wanderlust, out on the homestead with the snow howling, her husband God knows where, with three kids to raise and keep alive until the man of the house returns, thinking “this is what paying the piper really is.”
Now, if you want to talk Marmee from Little Women, her I hate. She’s the “good parts version” of the mother Alcott really had, the Barbie of motherhood, and I hate her with a sweaty passion.
Caroline grew up outside of Milwaukee (which wasn’t a big city yet)
The same sorts of events run through other books written by pioneers. It’s just how life was at the time. The same sorts of events show up a lot in the writings of the folks hardest hit by the Depression
When I think of Ma, I think of her keeping a candle burning in window through the blizzard that Pa spent in a snow drift. With no practical experience of winter in that area, Pa had foolishly set off to town in just a cloth coat and if he hadn’t had survived through dumb luck, Ma would have been left with a houseful of small children and no chance of holding onto the farm by herself. She would have had to go back to her folks and live on their charity and abandon any hopes she had of building a comfortable life. Laura was anxious when Pa was lost in the snow, but Ma REALLY knew what the consequences would be if he didn’t come home, and I feel for her.
saddest sentence in all the LIW books: “Ma did not approve of puns.”
To the Person Who Wrote this:
:
I. LOVE. YOU.
I have always loved the little house on the prairie books and the show, but I’ve never read them on a deep, in-depth level; its always just for fun.
But yeah. You’re so right. And you’re fantastic. Yes. XD
In many ways-the way the Ingalls girls are raised reminds me of the Duggars. The purpose of girls is to be quiet, selfless, and obedient.
I can’t help but notice that you make much of Laura’s one doll, Charlotte, without mentioning that Ma made her in the first place, and regretted telling Laura to give her away, and then repaired her and made her beautiful again.
I can’t hate on a woman who lived the kind of life Caroline Quiner Ingalls lived. The woman was dragged away from all of her family to the western frontier in a time when a woman was literally working every single second of her waking life, and with little to no outside support she did EVERYTHING, and had to worry about her husband getting himself killed, her children dying or getting killed, and what might happen to them if something happened to her. All. The. Time.
So she wasn’t perfect, big deal. I realize it’s fun to jettison perspective in order to write a trite hit-job, and to take modern mores and overlay them into a time period you know nothing about, but hate? Really? THE WOMAN SLAPPED A BEAR.
If you read Laura's actual memoirs, she put all sorts of true, lurid details about the railroad camp, attempted rapes (including of her by a drunken employer), a murder she witnessed between a husband/wife she worked for (I think he set her on fire?), etc. and her daughter Rose constantly told her to rewrite her childhood because it didn't make good children's books. Rose had her change most of the real timetable of her childhood (they moved in all directions in real life, for instance, and back to some places), important details (the little house in the big woods was near town and many neighbors and they often went to parties) and more. Mary's college was paid by the government and not some mysterious benefactor, and she had her put in all this "we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps" business because Rose was a rabid libertarian. The Ingalls Family skipped out on paying rent in one town by leaving in the middle of the night. Laura supported the family for quite some time in her early teens by working at inns in horribly seedy situations because Pa didn't work. It was all whitewashed and changed.
Dang. That’s a serious ax to grind, isn’t it? Please remember, these books were written in the 1930s, by a woman who was born in 1867. Let me say that one more time. 1867. Caroline Quiner was born in 1839. When grinding your ax it’s best not to hold books nearly a century old to the same standards as the ones published in 2016 (or 2013). If you don’t want to read them, then don’t, but please don’t expect others to be shocked and dismayed over your obviously painful discovery from the 1930s. And for the record, despite their period faults, these books are a damn sight better reading than most of the slop in print and out there for children. Oh. And you forgot the part about Ma REPAIRING Charlotte for the traumatized Laura, after they found her in the frozen puddle. This woman also gutted animals, cooked all the meals and worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk and even into the late evening hours in order to keep her family fed and clothed, while Charles Ingalls hunted and built homes for them. And I don’t know about you, but I sure wouldn’t have the guts to haul off and slap a bear – even if I did mistake it for a cow in pitch dark.