Little House in the Big Woods

The final four chapters continue the themes within the book, quickly progressing through summer, fall, and then back to winter again. Life in the summer for the Ingallses consists of visiting and working in the fields. The girls are involved in the gardening and other duties that need to be done to provide food, all of which are also related in Wilder’s comforting prose: “It was all so pleasant, the doors and windows wide open to the summer evening, the dishes making little cheerful sounds together as Ma washed them and Mary and Laura wiped, and Pa putting away the fiddle and smiling and whistling softly to himself” (193). This portrayal emphasizes the virtue and security in this type of work and downplays the harshness of nature and the coming winter.

The love and sense of togetherness inspired by Ingalls’s portrayal of frontier life is only furthered by the introduction to machinery. Pa and other men from the region bring wheat threshing machines in for a more efficient fall harvest, and they work together to help all community members to survive.

The girls continue to learn their social and family duty; they even give Carrie more than her share of a cookie, as outlined in the chapter “Summertime,” because they cannot figure out how to otherwise do it fairly. Laura experiences another incidence of jealousy towards Mary’s hair. In fact, she gets so angry at what Mary says about Aunt Lotty liking her hair that she hits her sister: “Laura’s throat swelled tight, and she could not speak. She knew golden hair was prettier than brown. She couldn’t speak, so she reached out quickly and slapped Mary’s face” (Page 183). This leads to a whipping for Laura, followed by comforting from her Pa, who says, “Well, Laura, my hair is brown” (Page 185). In this passage, an incident of childhood discipline emphasizes the importance of the lessons the Ingalls elders are teaching their children about manners and Christian behavior.

Another educational incident in their lives regarding this theme is that of their cousin Charley, who “cries wolf” and disrupts the men’s work with his antics, then is stung by many insects as a direct result of his disobedience. Charley is a suitable foil in this section of the book, as Mary and Laura are too well-behaved to exhibit the kind of behavior he does, yet they still reap the moral benefit of his story. This tale is a bit more heavy-handed than some of the incidences of social duty within the narrative, but also effective: Laura agrees with her father, telling herself, “It served him right because he had been so monstrously naughty” (Page 211).

The story is bookended in natural scenes. At the beginning of Little House in the Big Woods, Laura hears wolves outside but knows she is safe. At the end, Pa goes out hunting but is so enraptured by the animals he sees that he forgets to shoot them. It’s a good description of the complex relationship that homesteaders like the Ingallses had with nature. Part of the reason some wished to be on the frontier had to do with being closer to nature and relying on themselves and the land. By the time of Little House’s writing during Dust Bowl, there was already a mythos and nostalgia of the American frontier, self-reliance, and sense of community.

As the book ends, winter is coming again, and the family is ready. Of course, there is music: Pa’s songs at this juncture favor nostalgia as well as the explorative spirit, both very fitting topics. It finishes on a happy, complete note, in which Laura clearly enjoys the moment that she is in without wishing for anything more.

Laura Ingalls’s story continues in eight more books. In Little House on the Prairie, the family travels by covered wagon to Indian territory to set up another homestead. Farmer Boy focuses on the early life of the boy who would become Laura’s husband, Almanzo Wilder, and his love of horses. In On the Banks of Plum Creek, the family sets up in Minnesota, and in By the Shores of Silver Lake, Mary is blind from scarlet fever while the family has another daughter. They move west again, to De Smet, South Dakota. The Long Winter focuses on a particularly difficult winter season in De Smet in which Almanzo Wilder goes on a heroic journey to save the town’s residents. By this time, Laura is a teenager. Little Town on the Prairie reflects on Laura’s schooling and ends with her as a teacher; These Happy Golden Years recounts the courtship between Wilder and Ingalls, resulting in their marriage. The ninth final book in the series, The First Four Years, is shorter and has a less polished, more somber tone. It was found after the author’s death by Rose Wilder’s heir, Roger MacBride, and published with few edits in 1971.

The stories make up Laura Ingalls Wilder’s coming-of-age story, which were well-received at publication (starting in 1932) and experienced a resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s. This happened because of the publication of the last novel and the popularity of the television show, Little House on the Prairie, starring Michael Landon as Charles and Melissa Gilbert as Laura. At the time, a culture friendly to evangelism and the proliferation of “family values” also helped boost the stories’ popularity.

The novels remain beloved in today’s culture, despite more recent critical analysis of prejudice within them, which appears most notably in Little House on the Prairie (Native Americans) and Little Town on the Prairie (African Americans). The problematic mentions of race within this series were mainstream and acceptable at the time. However, in 2018, the series’s racial insensitivity led the American Library Association to rename its Laura Ingalls Wilder Award. The award it gives to authors that have left a lasting contribution to children’s literature (Wilder was the award’s first recipient) is now called the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.