Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1994
Abstract
Laura Ingalls Wilder's perennially popular Little House series takes as its central motif the invention, abandonment, and perpetuation of a series of Great Plains houses. In large part Wilder tells the autobiographical story of her childhood and adolescence through a plot of housing, a risky competition and collaboration of male traditions of buying and building and female traditions of furnishing, arrangement, preservation, and housekeeping. With her series, Wilder made Great Plains houses a central metaphor of U. S. culture, one that we continue to rethink and retell, as the Little House books proliferate, spawning everything from television reruns to porcelain dolls to architectural reconstructions and restorations.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:2 (Spring 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.