The Long Winter: an Introduction to Western Womanhood

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for 1990 The Long Winter: An Introduction to Western Womanhood Ann Romines George Washington University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Romines, Ann, "The Long Winter: An Introduction to Western Womanhood" (1990). Great Plains Quarterly. 503. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/503 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. THE LONG WINTER AN INTRODUCTION TO WESTERN WOMANHOOD ANN ROMINES In many ways, The Long Winter is the central and with the onset of Laura's adolescence the volume in Laura Ingalls Wilder's extraordinary powerful role of gender in establishing param sequence of seven Little House books. 1 It is the eters of possibility becomes more apparent. Ma most intense and dangerous of the novels, and looms larger as influence and model, and Laura's it covers the shortest span of time, a single relationship with her becom~s more problem legendary seven-month winter. The Ingalls atic. Ma urges her daughters to perpetuate tra family has made its fullest commitment yet to ditional women's culture wherever they find one spot on the Dakota prairie. Although Pa themselves. Yet the exigencies of Western life yearns to start again in Oregon, Ma insists that push the girls into positions and tasks that are they settle so the daughters can "get some traditionally male; for example, Laura shares schooling." Laura, the autobiographical protag Pa's work and finds it more to her taste than onist, is approaching adulthood. This book, housework or teaching. Lillian Schlissel, study darkest of the series, does indeed provide her ing Western women's diaries, found that, under with powerful "schooling"-it is a sober and the stresses of the frontier, women typically clung disquieting crash course in what it can mean to to gendered culture for security, as does Ma. live out a female life on the Western prairie. Thus a gynocritics like that described by Elaine All the Little House books chronicle the ed Showalter, which studies women's culture as a ucation and maturation of Laura and her sisters, sustaining and ambivalent phenomenon, is par ticularly appropriate to Wilder's series, allowing us to read the Little House books as something more complex than a euphoric romance of prai An assistant professor of English, Ann Romines teaches rie childhood. 2 American literature and women's studies at George The Long Winter especially lends itself to such Washington University. She has published articles on many a reading; its brief span presents the crux of American woman writers, including Laura Ingalls Wilder. Laura's adolescence. She is forced by violent weather to live a life of confinement and house work as circumscribed as her mother's and to [GPQ 10 (Winter 1990): 36-47J contemplate the very different possibilities open 36 THE LONG WINTER 37 to a young man through the exploits of Almanzo rounds her, and she is now Ma's collaborator, Wilder, whom she will someday marry. AI not her charge. Then, "Laura knew that she manzo and Ma are the heroes of this book be was not a little girl any more. Now she was cause they successfully enact traditional plots of alone: she must take care of herself. When you gendered culture. Almanzo triumphs with a dar must do that, then you do it and you are grown ing journey across the frozen prairie and Ma up" (14). This assumption of solitary inde triumphs by staying home and contriving to feed pendence is one that would have been explicitly her family. Laura's growing awareness of her urged on a boy, not a girl, in the nineteenth own limits and duties as a woman brings new century West; it is Pa who treks across the prai weight and sobriety to the Little House series rie alone, while Ma is almost always depicted in The Long Winter, which can be made appar surrounded by daughters. Laura tests her new ent by a feminist reading grounded in an un sense of independence in various "unfeminine" derstanding of women's culture. ways. With a tomboyish new girl friend, of whom Laura Ingalls Wilder's own adult life was not Ma does not approve, she sings and laughs and so exclusively devoted to housekeeping as that rides bareback across the prairie. Gangs of men of Ma in The Long Winter. In addition to her railroaders and homesteaders and preachers domestic work, Wilder shared farm work with troop through the Ingalls house, which briefly her husband, organized farm women, served as becomes a hotel. And Laura is now interested administrator of a farm loan program, and had in the work men do. She is especially caught a long part-time career as a journalist before up in the practical romance of railroad building; beginning the Little House series in her sixties. it spurs her to think about completion and But she remained very attentive to the bound achievement and "what makes things happen. " aries and traditions of women's culture. 3 Thus, She asks Pa, in her early seventies, writing The Long Winter, Wilder ~as still engaged with young Laura's "Are there railroads because people think gender dilemma, and issues concerning the per of them first when they weren't there? petuation of women's culture came to dominate ... "That's right," [Pal said. "Yes, that's the last three Little House books. Wilder's what makes things happen, people think of daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, serving as her them first. If enough people think of a thing, mother's editor and literary mentor, reinforced and work hard enough at it, I guess it's pretty these concerns. Although she was an inde nearly bound to happen, wind and weather pendent novelist and a pioneer woman jour permitting." (106) nalist, Lane was deeply interested in housekeeping and women's culture, both per Pa's assumptions here about collaboration and sonally and professionally: she crocheted lace, progress are typical of popular male culture in quilted, cooked, and preserved, as taught by her the nineteenth century. Such ideas could be mother and maternal grandmother, and wrote expressed in traditional linear plot in which an early study of American women's needle conflict and complication advance toward res work. 4 For Wilder and Lane, the survival of olution and completion. (The only limitations gendered culture was a continuing project and on such resolution that Pa mentions, as an af problem of their lives, and that fact adds ur terthought, are the natural forces of "wind and gency and immediacy to The Long Winter. weather.") In By the Shores of Silver Lake, in a The previous volume in the series, By the Darwinian brawl of competing claimants, Pa Shores of Silver Lake, is very different. 5 In it, files for a homestead. William Holtz sees this Laura first becomes aware of her newly adult novel as pivotal because of the claim, made status. When Pa goes ahead of the women to possible by the 1862 Homestead Act. Now Pa's claim a new job and Laura's watchdog Jack dies, "private quest finds official sanction in the gov the shelter of male protection no longer sur- ernment's offer of a homestead."6 And he enlists 38 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1990 his wife and daughters in this classic pioneering prescriptions. "'The buffalo are gone,' Laura plot, to be completed in five years. He sees it thought. 'And now we're homesteaders'" (285). as a wager between men: "'Well, girls, I've bet Laura's reflections indicate her new matu Uncle Sam fourteen dollars against a hundred rity, which will develop in the next book. The and sixty acres of land, that we can make out Long Winter typifies the novel of female ado to live on the claim for five years. Going to lescence as described by Pratt: it foregrounds help me win the bet?'" (237) "the hidden agenda of gender norms" by which, More than any of the others, this novel seems for a girl, being to be shaped overtly by male values. The book is sprawling and linear. Pa loves to move, and 'adult' means learning to be dependent, sub the family moves five times in a single year. missive, or 'nonadult.' As a result of this Laura is outdoors much of the time, and the conflict, an imagery of entrapment or fear of boundlessness and beauty of the still unsettled psychological invasion introduces a night prairie are emphasized. Annis Pratt has ob mare element into texts that also, at the served that the fictions of female adolescence opposite extreme, manifest yearnings for an are often marked by the young woman's special integration of childhood hopes with adult attraction to the natural world: "taking posses social possibilities. 8 sion of nature, she possesses herself." In By the Shores of Silver Lake and the first chapters of The Long Winter plays images of a protracted The Long Winter, Laura has exhilarating mo series of debilitating storms against images of ments in such a supportive natural world, which preservative housekeeping in which gender roles Pratt calls "the green-world archetype. " Within are strictly observed. Both sets of imagery are this archetype, however, the girl's "appreciation charged with the nightmarish potential Pratt of nature" is typically "retrospective, a look describes, as Laura is forced to acknowledge that backwards over her shoulder as she confronts her place, as a woman, will be in the house.

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