Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring 1984, pp. 79-90.
Abstract
It was the summer of 1894. Their wagon had halted where the ferry would take them across the Missouri River, while across the parched landscape they had just traversed, "covered wagons stood one beyond another in a long, long line." The woman spoke to the child at her side, '" That's your last sight of Dakota.''' At twenty seven, she had turned her back on Dakota and a failed homestead to set out for a new life in the Missouri Ozarks, leaving behind her own family and her husband's, in every way all she had ever known of home. Her journal of that desperate trip was published only after her death, many years later, when the simple narrative gained luster as the earliest writing of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of pioneer fiction for children.
THE CIRCLE IS BEGUN
That early narrative is as far from fiction as history can be-tied to the daily progress across the landscape, cautious in its emotional range, broken off rather than concluded. It marks both a great geographical transit and the end of youth. As her first written work it stands also as the unreached goal of her later fictional account of her life, which begins with her earliest memories and moves steadily through childhood, adolescence, and marriage toward that day of removal from her Dakota home. Yet Laura Ingalls Wilder does not complete the circle. The last book in the series-The First Four Years-is also a posthumous book, and her failure to publish it in her lifetime suggests that some doubt underlay her effort to come even so far.
The reasons for this unclosed gap are complex, but the deepest reason is that Laura Ingalls Wilder had committed herself to a material, a method, and a myth that finally made her assessment of her experience too painful to continue. The Wilder books are, in style and as individual works, realistic novels, but the unifying structure of the series is that of a romance that tends toward myth. What poses as autobiography and history actually becomes an archetypal story with roots deep in American experience and Christian tradition and deeper still in ancient anxieties concerning human fecundity and the nourishing land. In its commitment to authenticity, however, it confronts fInally some facts too obdurate to be assimilated to its shaping purpose. The autobiography can proceed only so far as the myth will carry it.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln