Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
May 2000
Abstract
Long considered to be a work celebrating traditional pioneer values, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has in recent years come under increasing attack for its stereotypic racial representations and attitudes. In one notable instance, novelist Michael Dorris describes trying to read the novels to his daughters and stopping because of the unfavorable depictions of Native American characters and Ma's "unreconstructed" bigotry. Dorris and others present a compelling argument about the potential negative effects of such representations, yet to dismiss the work as though Wilder's vision of other races represents a monolithic whole is to deny the ways in which the novel raises questions about racial identity even as it affirms some negative stereotypes. As the most prominent novel in the Little House series featuring Native Americans and the only one featuring an African-American character, Little House on the Prairie is distinguished as well by its narrative ambivalence toward these figures. The central conflict in the series between Pa's pioneer spirit and Ma's civilizing impulse has become a critical commonplace, but another source of creative tension deserves consideration: the ways in which the competing discourses of the novel's "wild men" interrupt and transform the stability of the narrative voice.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2 (Spring 2000). Published by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Copyright © 2000 Center for Great Plains Studies. Used by permission.