Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie
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I’ve never worn a bonnet, but I have to cop to being one of the obsessed. Once a year, even in adulthood, an overwhelming, unspoken urge sends me toward The Long Winter, and then all the other Little House books, out of sequence, until the floor around my bed is littered with pieces of my crumbling 1970s-era paperbacks. The writing is so sensual, so rooted in the physical world–in the feel of itchy wool underwear, the taste of bean porridge, what it’s like to be inside on a cold day, outside on a hot–that the stories feel real even while they feel unfamiliar. As a girl I reveled in the strangeness, the history, the weird uncomfortable dated stuff. I was happy I had escaped those strictures (bonnets, corsets), but they also felt analogous to certain constraints I experienced but had no words for. I was–I am–seduced by the bedrock centrality of Laura’s family life, the pleasure found in small things, the uncool striving toward “being good,” the survival of one young girl against gigantic odds, the way all the books together showed a path out of girlhood. And I liked the access the books gave me to survivalist information like how to make bread or sew my own hat.
This month the continual interest in Wilder’s books is served by another attempt to tell her stories on the small screen: a five-episode miniseries on the Wonderful World of Disney based on the second book, Little House on the Prairie. (The first episode, two hours long, aired on March 26; the last episode, one hour long, runs this Saturday, April 23, on Channel Seven.) This series has a lot to contend with: not only readers’ ideas of what things looked like but also an entire generation of kids who grew up thinking of Pa as big shiny Samson-haired Michael Landon–that is, those who weren’t hopelessly devoted to the books. Those who were have been known to object to the Landon series: after running through the entire plot of Little House on the Prairie in the first episode, the show parked the family in On the Banks of Plum Creek (book three) for most of the following 182 episodes, in which the Ingallses and a bunch of new characters dealt with pressing teen issues like addiction and kids falling down mine shafts. It was an after-school special in vaguely period dress.
All of this is where Disney’s efforts to give us a Little House we can understand backfire. The demands of being a girl at that time were as big a challenge as wolves or weather. Sitting quietly for hours without twitching in church, memorizing Bible verses (the Bible hasn’t even shown up in the miniseries), always modulating your voice, trying to stay neat and clean while being chained to daily, physically exhausting, filthy housekeeping, not being able to do things you wanted to or run around in ways considered unladylike, being so completely under parental thumbs–the series loses a lot by not showing how hard some of that must have been. Authenticity, certainly, is lost, but also a sense of women’s experience and hard work and how far we’ve actually come.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/ABC–Kimberly French.
