Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

May 2000

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.

Abstract

Laura Ingalls Wilder was a person of her time and place. She fictionalized her memories to give what she honestly believed was the truest possible account-true in deeply human ways as well as in accurate details-of one family's settlement history on the Great Plains frontier. I have never really liked her work. While my sister read all the Little House books, I read ... Zane Grey. That I do not share Wilder's values and point of view is no argument against the books-I do not share Zane Grey's values and point of view, either. But Zane Grey is not held up to contemporary parents, teachers, and children as a moral exemplar. We accurately recognize him as a prolific popular writer whose work is violent, sexist, racist, and almost self-parodically anti-Mormon and, after 1914, anti-German. Laura Ingalls Wilder, on the other hand, has spawned a minor industry in criticism. Her work, and particularly Little House on the Prairie, has been almost universally praised, especially by feminist critics, as a humane and feminist alternative to the myth of "regeneration through violence" of the masculine frontier of Zane Grey and the Wild West. What we think about the Little House books matters. It seems to me that Wilder's proponents are fundamentally mistaken. I honestly cannot read Little House on the Prairie as other than apology for the "ethnic cleansing" of the Great Plains. That her thought was unremarkable, perhaps even progressive, for the time in which she lived and wrote should not exempt her books from sending up red flags for contemporary critics who believe in diversity, multiculturalism, and human rights.

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