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1994

Writing The Little House: The Architecture of a Series

Ann Romines George Washington University

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Romines, Ann, "Writing The Little House: The Architecture of a Series" (1994). Great Plains Quarterly. 813. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/813

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. WRITING THE LITTLE HOUSE THE ARCHITECTURE OF A SERIES

ANN ROMINES

Laura Ingalls Wilder's perennially popular houses a central metaphor of U. S. culture, Little House series takes as its central motif one that we continue to rethink and retell, as the invention, abandonment, and perpetua­ the Little House books proliferate, spawning tion of a series of Great Plains houses. In large everything from television reruns to porcelain part Wilder tells the autobiographical story of dolls to architectural reconstructions and res­ her childhood and adolescence through a plot torations. of housing, a risky competition and collabo­ These seven novels of Laura Ingalls Wild­ ration of male traditions of buying and build­ er's childhood were written during the Great ing and female traditions of furnishing, Depression and published between 1932 and arrangement, preservation, and housekeeping. 1943 when the author was in her sixties and With her series, Wilder made Great Plains seventies.! Wilder was then living in the Mis­ souri Ozarks, where she and her husband AI­ manzo had migrated in 1894, leaving the Great Plains behind them. Working together, they built, by stages, a ten-room farmhouse using materials from their own land: "We cut and planed and fitted every stick of it ourselves," Wilder boasted.2 Such building, of course, Ann Romines is associate professor of English and would not have been possible in the treeless, Women's Studies at the George Washington University. She is the author ofThe Home Plot: Women, Writing stoneless South Dakota where the couple had and Domestic Ritual and of numerous articles on met and married. In the Ozarks, with the en­ U. S. women writers, including Cather, Welty, Jewett, couragement, example, and collaboration of and Wilder. Her book in progress is a feminist reading her writer-daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Laura of the Little House series. Wilder had established a career as a journal­ ist, publishing brief essays from a "farm wife's" perspective in The Missouri Ruralist. As an [OPQ 14 (Spring 1994): 107-115] organizer of farm women, Wilder had also cam-

107 108 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 1994

FIG. 1. The Wilder farmhouse at Rocky Ridge near Mansfield, Missouri. Reproduced from A Little House Sampler, by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, edited by William T. Anderson, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 1988 by the University of Nebraska Press.

paigned for public spaces for rural women, The rest of the piece is an account of the feats helping establish women's meeting rooms, rest­ of planning and cabinetry by which Wilder's rooms, and clubs in small Missouri towns. "ideal" was accommodated, on a total budget One of her early efforts to reach a larger of $49.84. This kitchen on paper is an in­ audience, beyond the Ruralist, was a charac­ tensely organized and articulated space, with teristic 1925 piece for Country Gentleman, "My a cupboard for every bucket and every boot. Ozark Kitchen." She begins with the problem Almanzo Wilder's skills as carpenter and paint­ of building a dream kitchen on a real farm, er are acknowledged, but the essential "sheer where the kitchen brain power" clearly came from Laura Wilder, and her success is signalled by the language of is the place where house and barn meet­ practical romance to which the essay returns often in pitched battle .... I meant, some­ at its end: "It is a kitchen to be happy in. The how, to bring my ideal kitchen to the farm. convenience and the neatness of it and the It had to be done by sheer brain power, for whiteness are a continual joy."3 in the first place I could find no kitchen By the time Laura Ingalls Wilder began to plans that provided for chicken's feed buck­ draft the Little House books, then, she had ets, swill buckets, taking care of oil lamps had considerable experience wrestling archi­ ... and all my other problems. And in the tectural fantasies into habitable realities, both second place we had very little money. in her house and on the page-in wood, stone, ARCHITECTURE OF THE LITTLE HOUSE 109 and words. In the late twenties, as Wilder be­ ter the winning of suffrage."6 So it seems inev­ gan to work at the autobiographical stories itable that the series they jointly produced her daughter had long urged her to write, she probed questions of gender-and especially of may have been particularly spurred by the re­ female independence and agency-in the fram­ cent deaths of her mother and her blind sister ing context of a series of houses. Mary, by the breakup of the last Ingalls home This is how the first Little House book be­ in South Dakota, and by the economic uncer­ gins: tainties initiated by the 1929 stock market crash, which made the family farm seem a risky Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a lit­ source of income and wiped out the invest­ tle girl lived in the Big Woods ofWiscon­ ments of prosperous Rose Wilder Lane. Fur­ sin, in a little gray house made of logs. thermore, Lane had returned from France, The great, dark trees of the Big Woods Greece, and Albania to live with her parents stood all around the house .... As far as a on Rocky Ridge Farm, bringing her own archi­ man could go to the north in a day, or a tectural fantasies. 4 In 1928 she had insisted week, or a whole month, there was nothing on building.a modern "showplace" "English­ but woods .... no houses .... no roads .... style cottage of Ozark rock" as a retirement no people.7 house for her parents and had remodeled their farmhouse as her own home.s So, as the col­ Here, a little house is the one mark of culture laborative writing of the Little House books in an overpowering natural world. A little girl began, mother and daughter were living in in a house seems consigned to stay there, for adjacent houses on Rocky Ridge Farm-and according to this passage and the book that not without rivalry and tensions, as Lane's follows, it is only "a man" who can traverse journals and the two women's letters attest. In the Big Woods. Wilder's first book evokes a 1936, midway in the series, Lane left the farm static now in which there is no possible mo­ residence permanently. As soon as she was bility for a girl. The Ingalls house in the Big gone, her parents closed the new stone house Woods epitomizes the "detached dwellings in and moved back to their farmhouse, where the countryside" which, as Gwendolyn Wright they remained for the rest of their long lives. has written, signified "certain key national Thus the Little House series was written in virtues" in the nineteenth century: "personal an anxious period for Wilder and Lane, when independence. . . . democratic freedom of the construction of houses and of books was choice .... and private enterprise." These conjoined. During this period, too, Lane con­ "virtues" are all essential to the fictional tinued to write fiction and launched a career Laura's father, Charles Ingalls, whose "free­ as a political theorist; she and her mother, standing single-family dwelling" is to him, in who took an active interest in politics, were terms that Marilyn R. Chandler says still pre­ united in their opposition to the New Deal. vail in U.S. culture, "the most significant Wilder's longtime advocacy of women's part­ measure of the cultural enfranchisement that nership in family farming and her and Lane's comes with being an independent, self-suffi­ interest in traditional forms of women's mate­ cient (traditionally male) individual in full rial culture linked them to prevailing concerns possession and control of home and family. of the Depression years. As Barbara Melosh The seldom-realized ideal is for the household­ has argued, the New Deal years, which almost er to have designed and built this house with exactly coincide with the publication of the his own hands,"8 as Charles Ingalls did build Little House books, were "not accompanied the Little Houses. by a resurgence of feminism. Instead, the Much of Wilder's narrative is determined strains of economic depression reinforced the by the fact of her father's restlessness. De­ containment of feminism that had begun af- spite his wife Caroline's lack of enthusiasm, 110 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 1994 he decides to move west. The family's subse­ they looked as if they spoke Norwegian."ll quent migrations are the vehicle by which Laura is beginning to see houses as languages Wilder's story could become a serial narrative evoking the multiple cultural heritages and of Great Plains houses. At their first stop, in priorities of the Great Plains. Kansas Indian territory, Pa constructs another Obviously she has also learned another house, following the precedents of settlers of important principle of her culture: houses are English descent who, Wright says, "brought property and property belongs to men. These with them the knowledge of how to construct are Pa's and Mr. Nelson's buildings, even a simple foursquare ... dwelling, its facade though both men have hardworking wives and unadorned, save for symmetrically placed daughters. For Laura, as Daphne Spain argues, windows and doors."9 Working in wood, Pa "houses are the spatial context within which perpetuates northern European building tra­ the social order is reproduced."12 Clearly, it is ditions, and Little House on the Prairie chron­ by building that her father constructs himself icles, in amazing detail, the processes of his as a citizen. Thus, although the Norwegian­ carpentry, using no manufactured materials built dugout is a snug and practical shelter, Pa but a few nails. Even today, it would seem takes economic risks and borrows money for possible to construct a wooden door latch, for an English-style two-room dwelling that the example, from Wilder's precise instructions. dazzled Laura calls "the wonderful house." Although young Laura watches her father in­ Never again will Charles Ingalls construct a tently, clearly this building is men's work. Pa log dwelling. Instead, in this relatively settled hauls logs and raises walls alone. When he community, he delights in all the manufac­ once enlists his wife to help in lifting, disaster tured building materials he can buy on credit: strikes: a log falls on her and nearly crushes machine-sawed boards, tar paper and "bought­ her foot, frightening the whole family. Pa says, en" shingles, windows, doors, latches, locks, "I blame myself.... I should have used skids."l0 and "white china door knobs"-no more hand­ Obviously, a woman who participates in build­ made latchstrings! As Pa hauls his new sup­ ing courts disaster; Ma never helps Pa again in plies, "his face was one big shining of joy." He raising a house. Instead, he eventually finds has promised his wife and daughters that, when other men with whom to trade work. the wheat crop is harvested and sold, they will In Little House on the Prairie, the narrative live "like kings."13 In the west, Pa seems to say, of building vies with another narrative: the self-made men crown themselves kings by story of the competition between "white set­ building castles. But the unspoken question tlers" and Native Americans for lands that are for Laura is-how can a girl participate in that still, according to U.S. law and tribal tradi­ process? Apparently not by building. The se­ tion, "Indian territory." After a year of build­ ries offers not a single example of a female ing and planting on land they do not own, the builder. Ingalls are forced by the exigencies of this strug­ The Ingalls, of course, never actually live gle to abandon their house on the prairie, "like kings." Crops fail, debts loom, and an which Pa has just proudly completed. Next epidemic blinds the oldest daughter, Mary. they locate beside Plum Creek, in Minnesota, When her parents decide-Pa eagerly, Ma re­ moving into an already built, non-wood dwell­ luctantly-to make yet another start in Dako­ ing that Ma considers degrading-a dugout. ta, Laura, now adolescent, is delighted to leave Here young Laura observes that the white­ the "wonderful house" behind. The rest of the washed house and sod barn of their N orwe­ series has a single Great Plains setting, De gian neighbor, Mr. Nelson, "did not look like Smet, South Dakota. Pa's house and Pa's stable. They cuddled to The little town is the last stop on a newly the ground, under a slope of the prairie, and built railroad. In this booming environment, ARCHITECTURE OF THE LITTLE HOUSE 111

it is increasingly apparent that the serial pro­ indicated. Instead, the emphasis falls more cess of building matters far more than any sin­ heavily on Ma's sphere. Inside the amorphous gle permanent edifice. Pa erects a claim shanty spaces Pa constructs, she intensely, rigorously in a day and the family moves in the next day; articulates space, and she teaches her daugh­ while Pa is cutting a window in the shanty ters to do the same. They are accustomed to wall, Ma and Laura are placing the furniture moving and rearranging their possessions at under that very window. Pa expounds, "That's least twice a year. The continuities of home what it takes to build up a country .... Build­ are created by these arrangements and their ing over your head and under your feet, but combinations of variables and constants, so building."14 He almost exactly echoes an 1859 that even the blind daughter has the security Pocket Manual of Rural Architecture, which of a stable shelter. After one such move, Mary declares, "We are proud of the flimsy, insub­ says, "The cupboard is in a different place, but stantial structures ... which dot the whole Ma put all the dishes in the same places in the face of the country. They are the homes of the cupboard, so I find them just as easily as ever."17 people, who will by-and-by build and own In the earlier books, Ma sometimes seemed better ones."15 In her South Dakota books (By cowed by her husband's egocentric feats of the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little building and buying. When her husband sur­ Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years) prised her with a new stove, she was almost Wilder elaborates the major buildings of such afraid to cook on it. But now her confidence homestead towns, most of which Charles In­ and her powers of invention become more galls helped to erect: claim shanties, stores apparent. When faced with the problem of with apartments above, barns, schools, church­ fitting six people and all their things into a es, and railroad stations. Required by the tiny shanty, Pa is perplexed; he says, "Can't Homestead Act to live on their claim for at you get it all in?" Ma replies confidently, least six months a year, but unable to survive "Where there's a will there's a way." Laura, by on farming income alone or, at first, to im­ now a moving veteran herself, comes to her prove the shanties so that they were habitable mother's aid by proposing a furniture arrange­ in winter, the Ingalls, like other families, spend ment of perpendicular beds. "Then we'll hang summers on their claim and winters in the a curtain around our beds ... and another store building Pa has erected in town. Thus curtain beside yours, and that leaves room for "home" for them is no one dwelling, but a the rocking chair against your curtain." Ma's stable idea of a house that (unlike any actual response is the most explicit praise she ever structure) is portable and imperishable. The gives Laura: "'That's my smart girl!' said Ma."18 signifier, the word "house," becomes more and Laura is praised because she is following more distant from any literal, physical signi­ her mother's example, controlling space in fied. Laura learns to think of the structures her ways she has seen Ma do, and using textiles father builds in reference to this conceptual such as quilts, curtains, and sheets-traditional house. Thus the Ingalls women see the new appurtenances of women's culture-as her claim shanty as half a house; the other half medium. Thus women "build" rooms in the exists in their minds. When Pa adds more frame Pa has provided, expressing the preoc­ rooms, years later, Laura says, "Pa built the cupation with differentiated space that was so missing half of the claim shanty."16 important to the domestic literature of the As the family shuttles between store and second half of the nineteenth century.19 Ma, a claim, the gender balance of the series seems former schoolteacher reared in the eastern to shift. While Little House on the Prairie fore­ U.S., reads domestic literature whenever it is grounded Pa's work as a builder, in later books available on the frontier: a sentimental novel the processes of building are only very slightly by Mary Jane Holmes,zo Godey's Ladies' Book 112 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 1994

(which published monthly house plans), and get our homestead."23 Pa loves moving, tran­ Protestant women's "church papers." Through sience, and rebuilding; any roof over his fam­ such reading, she would have been at least ily is house and home to him. As a former indirectly touched by the most influential teacher and the family letter-writer and read­ housekeeping manual of the times, Catherine er, Ma is far more tied to formal language than Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Ameri­ he. With the shepherdess and other such ploys, can Woman's Home, published in 1869. she controls the family vocabulary as well as This book begins its discussion of houses the family space, impressing on her daughters with these words: "In the Divine Word it is what house and home must mean.24 Later, written, 'The wise woman buildeth her when Almanzo Wilder proposes to Laura, he house."'21 Pivotally, this text claims "Divine" says apologetically that their first residence approval for women's appropriation of the pre­ will "have to be a little house." Laura replies rogatives of building, and especially as Ma does ardently, "I have always lived in little houses. so, by the articulation of interior space. Beech­ I like them."25 In fact, she has grown up in er and Stowe continue with instructions for amazingly varied dwellings, from covered wag­ "the close packing of conveniences" in "small on to dugout to shanty, as well as more con­ and economical houses" and they advocate ventional residences. It is a testimony to her the use of home-constructed movable storage mother's success in enforcing the abstract but screens to define space. With their quilts, cur­ habitable ideal of the Little House that Laura tains, and recycled packing boxes, Laura and can conclude that she has always lived in Lit­ her mother accomplish these same ends. The tle Houses. Ingalls family's practice demonstrates what The late seventies and eighties, the period Angel Kwolek-Folland has argued: in the late in which the De Smet books are set, was a nineteenth-century U.S., "the home environ­ period of rapid change in domestic ideology. ment essentially was a woman's creation even The high point of the "separate spheres" of though the physical shell was designed or built men's and women's lives that was so influen­ by males."22 tial in U.S. culture at midcentury had passed, Another of the means by which Ma takes and the emphasis on "order and hierarchy in on the authority of a house-builder is through domestic life" was giving way to "new stress on her control of language. Her dearest posses­ individual talents, the display of material pos­ sion is a porcelain figurine shepherdess-a sessions and the equality of household mem­ portable signifier by which she indicates that bers."26 As we have seen, this shift also occurs a particular structure is worthy of being called in the Ingalls household, as Ma's influence a house (and thus, an Ingalls home). The shep­ becomes more apparent and Laura takes in­ herdess, older than Laura can remember, al­ creased responsibilities for family housekeep­ ludes to an elaborate literary tradition of ing and finances. pastoral agriculture and, with its glaze, gild­ A new neighbor emerges as catalyst of such ing, and delicate modelling, to a tradition of changes. Mrs. Boast is a newlywed recently consumer art and culture that may seem very arrived from "the East" (Iowa). Although her distant from the Great Plains. Unchanging and shanty is excruciatingly small, the determined unchipped, the little figure, which Ma dis­ bride invents a furniture arrangement that al­ plays prominently, also indicates a tradition lows her to give a dinner party, even if the of female survival. When the family squeezes door won't close. To Laura, Mrs. Boast's novel into the first shanty, Pa asks, "where's the chi­ housekeeping is entrancingly "fashionable ... na shepherdess?" and Ma replies, "I haven't odd and new," enhanced by "pretty dishes and unpacked the shepherdess, Charles .... We brand-new tablecloth." Mrs. Boast also in­ aren't living here, we're only staying till you structs the Ingalls in constructing an Iowa (and ARCHITECTURE OF THE LITTLE HOUSE 113 national) fad, a whatnot. With this task, ar­ vice, for each of the objects it holds evokes an chitecture becomes a female project. Pa does earlier episode in the series. Like the shep­ the carpenter work to Mrs. Boast's commands, herdess, it provides coherence for a series of and the girls and women do the fine work. Little Houses and of Little House books. The When the shelves are in place, whatnot speaks for women's capacities to in­ vent, to build, to survive, and to perpetuate "So that's a whatnot," Pa said. culture, even in a community where houses "Yes," said Ma. "Isn't it pretty?" are built and owned by men. Thus it is not "It's a neat job," said Pa. surprising that in the last book, when Laura is "Mrs. Boast says they're all the rage in preparing to marry, she is concerned about Iowa," she told him. her departure's disordering the whatnot. She "Well, she ought to know," Pa agreed. wonders if she should disturb the arrangement "And there's nothing in Iowa too good for by removing her treasured glass box: you, Caroline."ii Laura held the box in her hands, unde­ Pa's responses are equivocal; he accedes to the cided. "I hate to take this box away from authority of his wife and Mrs. Boast. Mary's. They shouldn't be separated," she The whatnot, a homemade adaptation of a mused. Gothic Revival furniture style, becomes a lit­ "See, I've moved my box closer to tle temple within the Little House, a tableau Mary's," Carrie showed her. "It doesn't look as telling as any altar. 2S When Pa builds "two lonesome." So Laura put her box carefully tiny bedrooms" onto the shanty, his labors are in the trunk. lO summarized in two paragraphs. But eight para­ graphs are devoted to the women's arranging When she marries, at the end of the last of the "front room," newly spacious with the book, Laura moves into a small house that bedsteads gone. The crucial separation of pub­ Almanzo has built for them. The series' final lic and private spaces is finally accomplished. image is of the newlywed Wilders on their The chapter culminates in a minutely detailed wedding night, sitting outside the door of their description of the whatnot: new house. Then, in the original 1943 edi­ tion, a final page reprises that image with a The afternoon light made plain the gilded drawing of the couple and a foursquare, proto­ titles of the books on the whatnot's lower typical Little House, crucially captioned, "The shelf, and glittered in the three glass boxes End of the Little House Books."ll The message on the shelf above .... [Albove them, on is double: the series is definitively ended (Wild­ the next shelf, the gilt flowers shone on the er, at seventy-six, was eager to complete the glass face of the clock and its brass pendu­ project) but, with Laura's marriage and com­ lum glinted, swinging to and fro. Higher ing of age, another cycle of Little Houses is still, on the very top shelf, was Laura's white launched. china jewel box with the wee gold cup and Visiting the homes of U.S. writers is a pop­ saucer on its lid, and beside it, watching ular pastime for tourists and pilgrims. The over it, was Carrie's brown and white china houses of Samuel Clemens, Washington Irv­ dog .... It was a beautiful room. 29 ing, Louisa May Alcott, and others~includ­ ing Wilder's Great Plains contemporary, Willa The whatnot orders and summarizes the Cather~are open for business. But, despite values Ma would impress on her daughters: the enormous popularity of the Little House literacy, socialized time, amenities, and pres­ story, it is impossible to visit any of the dwell­ ervation. It also functions as a narrative de- ings which Charles Ingalls built and where his 114 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 1994 family kept house, as portrayed in the series. 3. Wilder, "My Ozark Kitchen," Little House At site after site, only a historical marker or a Sampler, ibid., pp. 138-42. reconstructed cabin marks the spot. The flim­ 4. House-building and domestic arrangements were lifelong preoccupations for Lane, as reflected sy, transient prairie shelters are gone without in her public and private writing and in the in­ traces. tense, serial housekeeping she practiced all her adult But Wilder's novels, more durable, still life. These interests probably contributed signifi­ stand. Probably no writer of her generation cantly to the domestic focus of the Little House has provided such a complete evocation in series. On Lane's interests in architecture and do­ mestic culture, the most thorough source to date is words of Great Plains houses, outside and (es­ William Holtz's recent biography: The Ghost in the pecially) in. Writing the Little House books Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (Columbia: with her daughter, Laura Ingalls Wilder per­ University of Missouri Press, 1993). petuated the building traditions of both her 5. A Little House Sampler (note 2 above), pp. parents. In a serial context established by Pa 174-75. According to William Holtz, this "cottage" closely resembles one of the mail-order houses and the patriarchal vagaries of manifest desti­ marketed by Sears and Roebuck, "The Mitchell," ny, Ma Ingalls taught that enduring houses although the local stone exterior of the Wilder/ could be built of order and of words. Thus, Lane house is an alteration of the shingle siding of even in the most constraining of gender para­ the Sears model. The catalog description of this digms, a girl could grow up to be a builder. house, with its mixture of domestic romance and European/Californian allusions, recalls Lane's tastes Wilder's long, productive career as journalist, and interests: "The Mitchell follows the latest idea farmer, housekeeper, and novelist is a rich and in English architecture with a touch of the popular complex testimony to that fact. California studio type," featuring "French doors ... [and] colonial bench. Strap iron hinges on the NOTES sturdy arched front door and a quaint English lamp hanging above bespeak the hospitality and 1. When I refer to the Little House books, I happiness that dwell within." Katherine C. mean the seven novels about the Ingalls family, all Stevenson and H. Ward Jand!, Houses by Mail: A of which feature the fictionalized Laura Ingalls as Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck & Company protagonist: Little House in the Big Woods, Little (Washington: Preservation Press, 1986), p. 212. House on the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By My thanks to William Holtz for bringing this the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little suggestive description to my attention. Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years 6. Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Man­ (1932, 1935, 1937, 1930, 1941, 1943; rpt. New hood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and York: Harper, 1953). Theater (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Wilder's second novel, Farmer Boy (1934; rpt., Press, 1991), p. 1. New York: Harper, 1953), is often considered an 7. Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (note eighth volume in the series. It is a narrative based 1 above), p. 1. on a year in the New York State childhood of 8. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Laura Ingalls Wilder's husband, Almanzo Wilder. Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge: Almanza's family is depicted as stably located in a MIT Press, 1983), p 89; Marilyn R. Chandler, settled, thriving agricultural region, and they are Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction much more prosperous than the fictional (or ac­ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), tual) Ingalls family ever was. Their house and pp. 1-2. Two other books have also helped to shape barns are large, commodious, and built to endure. my argument about frontier housing in this essay: Thus I do not consider this volume a Little House Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home book, although some other Wilder scholars (no­ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and tably Fred Erisman) disagree; see Fred Erisman, C. A. Weslager, The Log Cabin in America: From "Farmer Boy: The Forgotton 'Little House' Book," Pioneer Days to the Present (New Brunswick: Rut­ Western American Literature 28 (Summer 1993): gers University Press, 1969). 123-30. 9. Wright, Building the Dream, ibid., p. 88. 2. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, 10. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie (note A Little House Sampler, ed. William T. Anderson above), p. 61. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 11. Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek (note 1 p.l06. above), p. 215. ARCHITECTURE OF THE LITTLE HOUSE 115

12. Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel 22. Angel Kwolek-Folland, "The Useful What­ Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), Not and the Ideal of Domestic Decoration," Heli­ p.140. con Nine 8 (Spring 1983): 72. 13. Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek (note 1 23. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake (note 1 above), pp. 111-14, 109,315. above), p. 74. 14. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake (note 1 24. Angel Kwolek-Folland argues that icons of above), p. 253. "movable culture," such as Ma's shepherdess, had 15. Daniel Harrison Jacques, quoted in Wright, special import for women who settled the Great Building the Dream (note 8 above), p. 86. Plains between 1870 and 1900. "The Elegant Dug­ 16. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie (note 1 out: Domesticity and Movable Culture in the Unit­ above), p. 16. ed States, 1870-1900," American Studies 25 (Fall 17. Wilder, The Long Winter (note 1 above), p. 73. 1984): 21-37. 18. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake (note 1 25. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years (note 1 above), p. 268. above), p. 220. 19. According to Clifford Edward Clark, "by 26. Clark, American Family Home (note 21 the middle of the nineteenth century such divi­ above), p. 108. sions [especially between 'public and private spac­ 27. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake (note 1 es'] had become an obsession." The American Family above), pp. 204, 211. Home, 1900-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of 28. According to Kwolek-Folland, the whatnot North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 42. "presented a small replica of the rooms them­ 20. Holmes' Millbank (1871) is mentioned in selves .... The what-not cabinet or its equivalent the earlier Little House books as the only novel appeared in all homes with any pretension to cul­ the family owns; Ma reads it aloud to Pa so often ture." "The Useful What-Not" (note 22 above), p. 73. that Laura memorizes the first paragraphs of the 29. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie (note 1 text (On the Banks of Plum Creek [note 1 above], above), p. 18. pp.33-34). 30. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years (note 1 21. Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher above), p. 284. Stowe, The American Woman's Home (1869; rpt., 31. Laura Ingalls Wilder, These Happy Golden Hartford: Stowe-Day Foundation, 1975), p. 23. Years (New York: Harper, 1943), n.p.