Things that are disturbing about the "Little House" series

Cafe Society
1

I loved these books as a child, and now I’m re-reading them as an adult with my daughter. There’s some weird stuff in those books! Maybe it just went over my head as a child, but I’m really noticing now some really weird values in that series.

  1. They are really seriously emotionally repressed. In “Little Town on the Prairie” their blind sister Mary is going to go off to a college in Iowa and they don’t expect to see her again for 7 years. Of course everyone loves her and is sad, but she has a special bond with her youngest sister, 4 year old Grace. As Mary leaves, little Grace starts crying. Do they confort her? Hug her? No.

  1. Modesty takes precedence over almost everything else. There is a scene in which Pa is missing, caught in a blizzard. He’s been gone for days and they don’t know if he’s alive or dead. Besides the emotional connection of a loving father, if he dies their whole family is destroyed, as he is the breadwinner and sole financial support. But then one night, as the girls are sleeping, Pa comes in. He’s alive! Mary and Laura and Carry rush out to hug him in joy, but how do the parents respond. They are shocked are horrified that the girls are letting their father see them in their nightdresses! They shame them and tell them to go get dressed if they want to greet their father.

  2. Incomprehensible (to me at least) social expectations. The family goes to a large Thanksgiving feast at their church and when they walk in, they see something very unexpected.

I know that all of these things are a function of the time and place this was set in, but “A grown-up person must never let feelings be shown by voice or manner.” Really?

2

One thing you have to keep in mind about the series is that Laura Ingalls Wilder did not write them - her daughter Rose wrote them, from her mother’s recollections and memoirs, and did so specifically to make them a moralistic and fictionalized version of events.

I’ve often wished for an unvarnished auto/biography of LIW. I don’t know if one was ever written.

3

I understand that they are a whitewashed version of real events, and I’ve read a little background that shows the real story is more complex and messy than the stories. But if they were intended to be a more moral version of the truth, than these examples are even more explicable to me. It’s more moral to punish young children who a embrace their father because they are wearing nightdresses? It’s more moral to yell at a 4 year old for crying when her beloved older sister goes off to college?

4

There are also implications that Rose was not entirely right in the head; from memory, she had no children and spent her life caring for her mother (and battling with her over how to tell the stories). I think you have to consider when they were written, by whom and with what expectations.

But yes, there is some kind of weird stuff in there, such as that you cite. I remember being a little creeped out as a kid and just assuming I didn’t understand something about the times and mores.

5

In spite of the moralistic conservatism, the series did tread a very fine line, when 16 year old Melissa Gilbert (playing 15 year old Laura) married 24 year old Dean Butler/Alonzo)

Nothing unusual for the time the show was set, but kind of shocking for the 1980s heartland of America.

6

This is a great series but it surely contains many things that seem crazy to me now.

My biggest reaction when reading them as an adult is that Pa is a menace to himself, and really does a piss poor job providing for his family.

I had forgotten about little Grace being so upset! But I can believe stoicism was so highly valued during that time that their response was realistic.

Laura and her daughter Rose worked on the series together, and it seems that Rose contributed a substantial amount to the actual writing (much more than was acknowledged at the time the books were published), but there is still a lot of debate about what exactly each of their authorial roles were.

7

The things listed above are all things that I’ve chalked up to the mental and emotional difficulties of living the way they did. The whole family isolated in a one-room cabin all winter with only cornmeal and salt pork to eat? Yeah, you need to set boundaries and stick to them in that kind of situation just to keep everybody sane. And the American Puritanical spirit has always run true.

Edited to add: you’d be interested in reading A Home In The Woods by Oliver Johnson, written from his grandfather’s stories about homesteading in Indiana in the 1830s. In his family the children weren’t allowed to talk inside the cabin. No noise. You made noise, you got whipped. The Ingalls portrayed in the Little House books are positively lenient in comparison.

8

Cleaned up and simplified, yes, but “whitewashed”? Not so much. In thisthread, I observed:

9

Almanzo. A name that bizarre and unlovely deserves to be gotten right. :smiley:

10

In the 19th century, the attitude toward children was completely different than it is today.

First of all, you did not form close attachments to very young children, due to the high mortality rate.

Second, the average household contained a lot of dangerous things that children had to be kept away from (open fires, oil and kerosene lamps, hatchets and axes, and so on).

Third, fertility was much lower than it is today, due to disease and poor nutrition. Even without birth control, a woman could expect to have a child maybe once every two or three years.

So, up until the age of five, children were treated like big babies. If they survived until the age of five, they had a decent chance of making it to puberty and were treated as little adults. They were expected to start working as soon as possible and contribute to the family’s support, especially if the father died young (which was often the case). Girls would be expected to help inside the house, especially if they lost their mother (which probably happened more frequently, due to things like childbed fever).

And yeah, marrying young was very common, especially for girls, since life expectancy in general was so short. A man could easily marry more than once in his relatively brief lifetime, and often to girls/women much younger than he.

It doesn’t surprise me that children would be encouraged to stifle their emotions at the loss of a loved one, since early death or separation was so common, especially at the lower levels of society. Hell, even Lincoln showed his wife little compassion when they lost sons to tuberculosis and typhoid fever (and only one of their four sons lived past the age of 18).

In short, child-rearing back then was largely a matter of survival and propagation.

11

My grandfather, who was born in 1905, grew up with a tyrannical father, who among other misdeeds, farmed out his young sons as day laborers and beat his wife and children. My grandfather remembered his father throwing him and his brother Braxton out of the house when they were just little boys, in the dead of winter, with no shoes. They wrapped newspaper around their feet and ran to take refuge at the neighbor’s house. And this was in the 1910-1920s! By comparison, the Ingalls were warm and gentle parents.

A friend of mine’s grandfather was orphaned in about the same era, and went to live with his aunt and uncle. They made him sleep in the barn and regarded him as cheap labor. He left as soon as he could, and she remembers that he had nothing good to say about his childhood.

12

There was a movie on TCM a few months ago that was apparently based on a true story; it was about Scottish immigrants who arrive at a small town in Wisconsin in the 1840s and try to build a new life there. (The only person in the cast I remember was Glynis Johns.) Even allowing for some Hollywooding (it was made in the 1950s), it was quite accurate in its portrayal of frontier life: Father having to traipse 20 miles to get to the sawmill, even in the dead of winter; four or five children punched out over a period of about ten years; youngest son dies of typhoid fever; father gets sick and dies immediately afterward; mother gets sick and dies a year later from overwork; and the eldest son assumes responsibility for finding decent foster homes for his siblings before leaving town to go to work himself. Very few displays of emotion; more like, “This is what we have to do, let’s go out and do it.”

13

I’m under the impression that Laura was quite a significant contributor to the books, mostly because of how short The First Four Years is – apparently it was written right after Almanzo died and Laura was too sad to work on it and elaborate very much. IIRC, this was the story I heard when I visited De Smet, SD, a few years back. So you can extrapolate (interpolate?) that Laura had contributed a lot to the other books, which were written in happier times. Although it could have been Rose who was too sad to write, having just lost her father…

14

I personally am of the opinion that it was about 75% Laura, 25% Rose – which is really based mostly on reading the series a lot, as well as reading other writing from the two of them, and a layman’s familiarity with the academic work on the series. I believe Laura was no slouch as a author - she wrote quite a bit and was a very evocative and thoughtful writer. I suspect, though, that she didn’t have as much initial interest in writing a long, narrative series with a clear structure, and that Rose was likely the editorial force in the relationship, providing the direction and organization to get the stories out in a form that worked as a book, and then as a series.

I don’t think there will ever be definitive proof, given that they two of them are dead and I highly doubt there are any secret papers left undiscovered. I know that some people, including scholars, feel that Rose had a much larger role in the actual writing, while others are extremely committed to the idea that it was 100% Laura.

15

Clown rape? Did anyone mention clown rape yet?

Oh, you’re talking mainly about the books. I’m guessing (hoping?) that was made up for the show.

16

They’re fascinating to read as an adult after having loved them as a kid - wow, Pa was really a shitty dad, wasn’t he? Every time they get even a tiny bit comfortable he just can’t stand having people within fifty miles or so so he just uproots everybody for some more barely-clinging-on!

17

I got a kind of a weird vibe in the book in which Laura got a job teaching at a town an awkward distance from her family… she went several months without seeing her family, and then in the dead of winter, Almanzo just showed up on her doorstep one night with one of his Morgan horses hitched to a sleigh; she threw some things in a bag, put on her warmest clothes, and headed off into the night with him.

Kind of a weird courtship, since I think that was the first time they were alone together, or even spoke to each other. It’s been a few decades, so I might have the timeline wrong, but still… kind of stalker-ish.

18

I always say I wouldn’t have blamed Ma one bit if she had smothered him with a pillow on some dark and dreary prairie night.

19

I think it’s fair to say the attitude toward courtship and potential mates was vastly different in those days as well, especially when you’re out in the middle of nowhere and your selection is kind of, uh, limited. :frowning:

20

I haven’t read them since I was a little kid, but I remember loathing Ma. Maybe my memory is off (or I could be conflating her with awful Marmee from Little Women - what the hell is with the portrayals of mothers?!), but I remember her as a self-righteous martyr who couldn’t open her mouth without a moral falling out. I kept hoping someday Laura would give her a good kick.

Probably I’d find loads of stuff deeply disturbing if I reread them now, but the only thing I found disturbing at the time was the racism. Isn’t it Ma who goes around telling people that the only good Indian is a dead Indian? I mean, I get that it was a different era, and that she was terrified - with reason - that the Indians would kill her and her whole family. But even when I was seven I knew that the reason the Indians wanted to kill the white people is that the white people were invading their land and killing them. Also, one of my best friends was American Indian and, in spite of the virtue and wisdom of that awful bag Ma, I did not think the world would be improved by my friend being dead.