“When I’m in clinic,” Dr. Tarini said, “and I tell parents their child has scarlet fever, I see their eyes widen. In my mind, it’s no different than a strep throat with a rash, but the specter of history colors their reaction.” Those emotional words describing Mary’s lost vision still carry weight with the parents who read and remember “By the Shores of Silver Lake” and all the books that came before and after it.But it turns out Mary Ingalls probably didn't have Scarlet Fever after all.
The thing that the Little House fans don’t seem to understand – and I don’t see how any adult reader can miss it – is that the books are a chronicle of failure. The Ingalls family has a pretty good life in the Wisconsin woods, living and prospering as farmers with close-by relatives and friends. There’s no reason for them to leave other than that Pa is a loner who wants to get away from other people. He forces his wife, who has a horror of being raped and murdered by Indians, to move to the Osage reservation in Kansas in the expectation that it will be opened to white settlement. (Ma is a sexual neurotic, forcing her pre-pubescent daughters to sleep in corsets.) He’s wrong about the reservation, so the family loses the year’s work they’ve put into that land and moves to Minnesota, where they lose their crop to locusts and Pa becomes a hobo looking for work as a hired man. As they move from place to place, failure follows them. They almost die of malaria. One daughter goes blind. They never have enough to eat. And so on. Eventually they wind up in De Smet, South Dakota, a railroad town, where they nearly starve to death during the “long winter.” Pa fails as a farmer and becomes a carpenter, building houses for the townspeople brought by the railroad. At age 15, Laura is forced to go to work as a school teacher, where she boards with a violent man and his terrorized wife. At 18 she marries Almanzo, a man ten years her senior, and gets out from under her parents’ control. And that’s the end of the series.posted by chinston at 9:33 PM on February 4 [26 favorites]
But her actual pioneer life after the end of the series is no better. Almanzo comes down with diphtheria, which almost kills him and leaves him partially crippled for the rest of his life. Their infant son dies, their barn burns down, and drought drives them off Almanzo’s land. When Laura is 27, they move to Missouri and try to make a living as farmers. That fails as well, and they rent a house in town, where Almanzo works as a delivery man and Laura takes in boarders. They’re slated for a life of poverty and drudgery until Almanzo’s parents buy them the house they live in, and they eventually sell it and use the money to make a go of their farm.
So the great pioneering heroine of American children’s literature winds up living in Missouri, dependent on the financial help of her in-laws from upstate New York.
The deprivation of Laura’s childhood comes through most powerfully in her book about Almanzo’s childhood, Farmer Boy, which is filled with descriptions of bountiful food: hams, sausages, pies, cakes, bread, butter, jam, milk, eggs, cheese and coffee. It’s like a starving person’s vision of heaven.
Pa and Ma had no descendants. Mary never married and had no children. Laura’s son died and her daughter, Rose, never married and had no children. Carrie and Grace both married (Carrie died in her 70′s, Grace in her 60′s) but neither one had children. The Ingalls family line is a dead end.
It’s impossible, reading as an adult, to come to any conclusion other than that Pa and his family should have stayed in Wisconsin, and Almanzo would have been better off as a farmer up around the Finger Lakes.
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posted by Capt. Renault at 12:22 PM on February 4 [8 favorites]