"How much should I tell my own daughter about these different levels of meaning and reality?"

This Little House of Mine
Rachel F. Seidman

Rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder has been a challenge. Once I accepted that Wilder made up a lot, I had to embark upon a more adult and thus complex relationship to the author. I can no longer see her as a completely trustworthy guide to her own past, let alone the nation's. Nor do I need to. Seeing her as a novelist, I can live with her desire to shield some parts of her history, and to celebrate others. As an historian, I can understand her relationship to the time in which she wrote as well as to the time that she describes. I can see the limits in her world view and understand the constraints against which she was pushing. All of this takes work, but in the end I find myself enriched and my belief in the importance of these books affirmed.

But what about my six-year-old daughter? What still troubles me is how, and indeed whether, to pass along my newly complex perspective to her. I want Eliza to understand the limitations of the American past on matters of social justice, gender, and race. Yet I also want her to be able to experience that intense relationship with Laura. How can she if she doesn't trust her? I was so eager to share the Little House with Eliza that I introduced that world to her at a much earlier age than I was at my first meeting, reading aloud the books I had devoured on my own. I wasn't sure she'd appreciate the stories, but she loved them. In fact, she once told me with great feeling that she wished Laura was still alive so that she could watch her actually writing. "I've never seen anybody really writing a book," she said. (I tried not to take this personally, even though Eliza had in fact been around while both her father and I had done exactly that.) It was Laura the adult, the writer, who seemed to fascinate Eliza most.

In a sense, Eliza's approach is lucky for me. If already she is thinking about Wilder as an author, then to think about the decisions a writer makes might not be as startling as they would have been to me at her age, when I focused solely on Laura the subject, running and playing on the prairie. But I hesitate to assume a readiness that is not really there. I don't want to ruin a connection that is based, at least in part, on the belief that what Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote was real. So how much of my newfound knowledge do I pass along? I think my dilemma raises some questions about the problem of genre and children's literature. We can't assume that young children can tell the difference between history, historical fiction, and auto/biography. The question is, do they need to? What role should parents and teachers play? Does too much intervention spoil the magic? Is too little information irresponsible?

Regardless of how I would answer them for my daughter, these questions sufficiently complicated my own perspective that reading the books with Eliza was not an unmitigated pleasure. Used to my own, private relationship with Laura, I found myself in the awkward position of mediator between author and audience. I had to explain that parts of the books make me uncomfortable, and discuss why.

I found it particularly difficult when I recognized pieces of context that Wilder only hinted at. For instance, in 1862, Dakota Indians in Minnesota attacked and killed white settlers who were encroaching on their ancestral lands, and whites retaliated, with devastating results. Mrs. Scott refers to the incident, but Ma won't explain it to Laura. Clearly this pivotal event informed the terror that the parents felt when they listened for days to beating drums and singing that signified a war council among the tribes near them. The adult author Wilder controls the story, but the parents in the book held a knowledge they did not share with the children. Should I let Eliza's perspective remain close to that of the child, Laura, or should I explain what Wilder knew and I later learned?

How much should I tell my own daughter about these different levels of meaning and reality? I'm not sure yet, but I think the answer for me lies in treating this as I do other aspects of parenting. The Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Elijah drinking the wine at the Passover table: sometimes we enable stories that aren't quite true in order to preserve our children's sense of wonder. I also shield my children from some of the more difficult realities in the world because I feel there are certain things they don't need to know, at least not yet. But, when my kids ask for the truth, I don't lie. And when truths demand to be told, I don't silence them.

As part of my research on Wilder, I visited the Children's Literature Resource Center at the University of Minnesota's Elmer Anderson Library. They have a collection of newsletters from the various Laura Ingalls Wilder historical sites that dot the Midwest. Sitting in that library, the little girl in me gasped again, this time with delight at a photograph of Pa's fiddle, now on display in Mansfield, Missouri. There was something thrilling about seeing an object that really truly belonged to the Ingalls family. Even with my new critical distance, there is a core humanity to these stories that still resonates with me. Maybe I'll take Eliza on a trip to Mansfield to see some of the Ingalls relics, and maybe we'll talk about which parts of the story are true and which parts aren't. Or maybe we won't, at least not yet. There's plenty of time for her to grow up.

Further Reading:

For information on the relationship between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, the role Lane played in crafting the Little House books, and Wilder's political ideas, see John E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend (New York, 1998), and Anne Romines, Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (Amherst, 1997). William Holtz, in The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (New York, 1993), has argued that Lane was mainly responsible for the literary merit of the Little House books. For charges of racism in Wilder's work, see Deborah Locke, editorial, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, December 17, 1998, and Dennis McCauliff Jr., The Deaths of Sibyl Bolton (New York, 1994).

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