Literary Study

The Wilder Life

I picked upĀ The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie at a publisher’s book sale that comes to our area once a year. It has one of the most attractive covers ever, in my opinion, and as someone who has read and reread the Little House books, I dropped it into my book bag without having to think about it.

Reading it was a different story. I actually considered throwing it away after the first fifty pages or so. It’s billed as “irreverent,” but the tone and attempts at humor weren’t my style. It made me consider whether there’s a difference between “irreverent” — which implies interrogating myths in a good way — and merely “disrespectful” — which involves recasting someone else so thoroughly in one’s own terms as to simply bury them.

In the end, though, The Wilder Life grew on me.

I couldn’t ever fully relate to Wendy McClure’s overwhelming desire to find a way into what she calls “Laura World,” the imagined world of the stories. But her travels to almost all the Little House historic sites, her efforts to churn butter and twist hay, and her reflections on the interaction between the books and her own developing identity drew me in and got me thinking.

I read the Little House books as a kid, then reread them as an adult when my daughters discovered them and listened to the audiobooks. It prompted me to write some of my random thoughts about the Little House books, inspired me to reread a Laura Ingalls Wilder biography, and kept Laura in my mind as a standard for comparison when we read Caddie Woodlawn. We did attempt a milk-fed pumpkin like the one Almanzo grows in Farmer Boy last spring (a failed endeavor that resulted in a dead pumpkin vine and a margerine tub full of milk and slugs), and I did print out an internet recipe for vanity cakes like the ones in Plum Creek. (It stayed on the fridge for months but never got tried — maybe because of the prominence of lard as an ingredient.) And I remembered as I read The Wilder Life that I’ve been to Laura and Almanzo’s Missouri home site, and the photos my mom purchased there of the Ingalls family are interspersed with our own family photos in our album of that trip. So while I don’t think of myself as a Laura-devotee, I guess you’d have to say I’m a committed reader — someone who has wrestled at times with the distinction between legend and reality.

I found myself really enjoying visiting the different Laura places with McClure, and hearing her descriptions and reactions. She visits the historic sites in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, South Dakota, and New York, seeking the mysterious point of intersection between fictional and lived life. In some sense it’s a personal quest as well as a literary one, and McClure gets somewhere in her travels.

She meets other Laura-readers along the way, some of whom are described. They help to underscore the point that in addition to the shaping effects of fiction when the Ingalls family is translated to the written page, there are also layers of readerly perception that we impose on the stories — baggage we bring to our reading. There is a group of what she calls “End-Timers” at a homesteading weekend who are trying to learn to live off the land so as to be prepared for the end of the world. There are various families with kids dressed in prairie attire. There is a stereotypical homeschool family. When they try to put into words the appeal of the Little House books, many of them cite the “simplicity” and “contentment” they feel Laura Ingalls Wilder exemplifies.

I haven’t ever really thought of Laura in these terms. I’m no doubt influenced by Wendell Berry’s comment once that though people frequently extol his “simplicity,” what he’s actually trying to do is “complexify.” Running through his writings is an attempt to uncover the relationships between different aspects of “culture and agriculture,” and I think the Ingalls story is full of a similar complexity. What impresses me about them is how much they know about the natural setting in which they live out their lives, and how enormously capable and skilled they are at finding or making what they need to survive. They often have bad luck, but they survive because they have so many practical skills and so much inherited knowledge. I admire that about them, although I’m not motivated to emulate them in this respect because it doesn’t seem necessary to know how to make a latch with a string or a puncheon floor. Growing food and canning are practical skills I’d like to master. But the Ingalls’ epic context of wilderness and weather and yet-to-be-formed civilization no longer exists.

[Okay, I’ve gone off track here. I meant simply to say that I don’t think their lives are “simple.” I think they are very accomplished in a wide and intricate range of life skills. Somehow I got into my own ambivalence about having a similar set of life skills in an era when many of them seem no longer to be necessary…]

As far as “contentment,” isn’t Laura’s discontent one of the traits that makes her so appealing in the stories? Like Pa, she always wants to keep traveling, to keep searching. Mary is the content one, and it’s what makes her less interesting. Laura’s whole life, in and out of the books, seems to be about self-improvement, building and building-on until you’ve finally carved out the place you imagined. Even her writerly ambition, not acted upon until later in life, implies a restlessness. So I don’t really relate to the view of Laura as “simple and content.” It seems more apt to call her accomplished and motivated.

I think the other thing about Laura Ingalls Wilder that makes her such a strong presence is her passionate nature. She has some intensely lived moments, and while I wouldn’t say she ever gets to that sense of “arrival” that belongs in my understanding of contentment, she is able to fully delight in certain moments. It’s what gives her such keen powers of description, and enables us to feel like we’re there with her in the stories.

As I read The Wilder Life, I remembered The Magician’s Book, Laura Miller’s account of “a skeptic’s adventures in Narnia.” Like Wendy McClure, Laura Miller wrote about her intense identification with the fictional world of a set of stories, and she tried to come to terms with it as an adult. I’ve enjoyed both the Little House books and the Narnia books; more than that, I’d say both have been very important to me, and my affection and appreciation for them has endured into my (alleged) adulthood. But I don’t know if I’ve ever been so completely involved in a reading experience as either of these writers. The degree of imaginative identification they feel as child readers (both were around 8 or 9 when they first read the books they write about) amounts almost to a religious quest. They seem to have been looking for a worthy object of faith, or a vision of who to be.

I can’t say that I’ve ever approached a book with that kind of intensity. Maybe books are a safe place to entrust some of our tenderest aspirations and dreams. Or maybe they’re not so safe, if we invest too much of ourselves in them, and then have to untangle the me from the not-me later in life. But I have to say that in both cases I’ve been glad these authors have done the work and written about their experience. I have a different worldview than Wendy McClure, different experiences with reading the Little House books, and different ideas about how to write about a beloved author or set of books. But in the end The Wilder Life invited me to think about my own ideas about the books and their author. At some points — when McClure writes about the relationship between Laura and Rose, for instance, or about the historical context of the little house on the prairie, or about the impulse some have to impose a rather showy evangelical faith on the Ingalls family — I felt like I was getting to be a part of a discussion I’ve wanted to have. I’m glad I pressed on through my first reactions and took the whole journey.

6 Comments

  • Barbara H.

    I won this book from 5MFB, but I haven’t read it yet, partly because I was thinking about a LIW challenge and partly because I was a little afraid to. Jennifer at 5MFB had said it was irreverent, and people have vastly different definitions for that, so I wasn’t sure what I’d be getting into, and then The Little Women Letters was such a disappointment to me that I felt this might be as well. But I do still want to read it some time.

    One thing that really stood out to me the last time I read the LH books was the Ingalls’ resourcefulness, using every part of a pig (even the bladder, I think, for a ball) and marveling that we’ve lost that yet wondering if it would be considered a virtue today. I don’t cut the buttons off a shirt before throwing it in the rag box — is it worth the time when they’re so cheap and I don’t sew that much anyway? When a local high school was closing down after building a brand new modern building, they let different groups and schools come in and harvest property before they tore the buildings down. Our school got their gym floor (after some tedious pulling up boards, cleaning them, taking nails out, resetting them on our concrete gym floor, and then refinishing and painting it — tons of work yet cheaper than buying one), some glass doors, etc. I marveled that more people didn’t reuse materials from old buildings, and one man said it was cheaper in man hours just to tear it down and start with new materials. I don’t know whether that’s sad or “just the way it is.”

    Yet during The Long Winter, Pa lamented that people were getting so dependent on coal that they were forgetting how to survive without it, and without the family’s resourcefulness, they wouldn’t have survived that excruciatingly long and hard winter. And people today are even light years further from knowing how to survive without our modern heating systems than they were then. Yet, strangely, that doesn’t motivate me to try to learn survival skills.

    I agree that the Ingalls weren’t simple at all. Kind of like the idea people have about the Amish — I read of people joking when life gets so busy that they want to run off and join the Amish for a simpler life, and I think, “Are you kidding?” A life style that isn’t modern isn’t necessarily simple.

    Sorry to write a treatise in your comments. :-) I enjoyed the review. It would be fine to link back to this during the LIW challenge if you want.

  • Janet

    I like that you wrote a treatise! :-)

    I thought McClure was kind of typical. She is ready to point out that the Ingalls were racist toward the Indians, but she feels no compulsion about ridiculing “end timers” or other parties that she thinks are weird. So much for tolerance and enlightenment.

    The language can be coarse in spots — so unnecessary, and really kind of a mystifying miscalculation considering her intended audience. At first the tone struck me as flippant, or supercilious. But it didn’t take long to realize that McClure really does love the books, and has accumulated a lot of knowledge about the Little House world.

    So I had some reservations about these things, but there were rewards to reading the book, too. I was able to sift through the distractions and find some gold.

    I agree with what you say about resourcefulness. I have a lot of admiration for the Ingalls’ skills too, and I like the idea of not being dependent on — you name it: fossil fuels, appliances, electricity, etc. But it doesn’t motivate me to actually go out and learn how to do everything from scratch.

  • JW

    Eh. My mom gave me this as a gift and I read it. It was so horrible that I got rid of it. Her tone and expression was awful and I just thought it was not even worth the paper it was printed on. Not to say that I am so in love with Laura and her books that I can’t stand a little criticism, but this was not even that. And in the end she doesn’t “discover” anything new about herself or the books or Laura anyway. Very dissatisfying. You would do better to read this one instead:
    http://www.amazon.com/Laura-Ingalls-Wilder-Writers-Biography/dp/097779556X/
    Or this one: http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Laura-Ingalls-Wilder-BIOGRAPHY/dp/082621648X/
    Or this one: http://www.amazon.com/Little-House-Long-Shadow-American/dp/0826218032/

  • Janet

    Yes, I really liked Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. Little House Long Shadow is one McClure mentioned that sounded interesting. So did the Zochert biography.

    I think McClure learns something about herself, but I can understand that it might not be worth the reader’s effort of slogging through the tone and expression. And when it boils down to it, most of us wouldn’t pick up this book to find out what the author learns about herself. We pick it up because we want to learn about Laura Ingalls Wilder.

    I liked getting a little glimpse of the different Wilder historic sites. Was it worth enduring the things I didn’t like about the book? I don’t know… but it was my first vicarious visit to some of these places.