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Narrative Disruption in Little House on the Prairie University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for May 2000 "WILD MEN" AND DISSENTING VOICES: NARRATIVE DISRUPTION IN LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE Donna M. Campbell Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Campbell, Donna M., ""WILD MEN" AND DISSENTING VOICES: NARRATIVE DISRUPTION IN LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE" (2000). Great Plains Quarterly. 19. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/19 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. 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. "WILD MEN" AND DISSENTING VOICES NARRATIVE DISRUPTION IN LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE DONNA M. CAMPBELL Long considered to be a work celebrating tra­ others present a compelling argument about ditional pioneer values, Laura Ingalls Wilder's the potential negative effects of such repre­ Little House on the Prairie, like The Adventures sentations, yet to dismiss the work as though of Huckleberry Finn, has in recent years come Wilder's vision of other races represents a under increasing attack for its stereotypic ra­ monolithic whole is to deny the ways in which cial representations and attitudes. In one no­ the novel raises questions about racial iden­ table instance, novelist Michael Dorris tity even as it affirms some negative stereo­ describes trying to read the novels to his daugh­ types. 2 As the most prominent novel in the ters and stopping because of the unfavorable Little House series featuring Native Americans depictions ofNative American characters and and the only one featuring an African-Ameri­ Ma's "unreconstructed" bigotry.1 Dorris and can character, Little House on the Prairie is dis­ tinguished as well by its narrative ambivalence toward these figures. The central conflict in the series between Pa's pioneer spirit and Ma's civilizing impulse has become a critical com­ monplace, but another source of creative ten­ Donna M. Campbell is assistant professor of English sion deserves consideration: the ways in which at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. She the competing discourses of the novel's "wild is the author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and men" interrupt and transform the stability of Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915, which the narrative voice.3 won the Northeast Modem Language Association-Ohio University Press Award, 1997. She is currently The multiple voices and the emphasis on working on a book covering Rose Wilder Lane and language that shape the child Laura in this midwestern women writers. book suggest more than the simple progres­ sion from being Pa's wild "half-pint" to being Ma's civilized "good girl."4 In Little House on the Prairie, the "civilizing" authorial voice can [GPQ 20 (Spring 2000): 111-221 mediate among but not silence the disruptions 111 112 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2000 posed by the "wild men" who represent alter­ tually able to usher his family into the com­ native cultures; Wilder's West is still a con­ munal life of the frontier town while his own tested narrative space where the discourse of westward-looking spirit prevents his accept­ manifest destiny does not yet hold sway. ing a stable position in it.9 As a figure poised Wilder's ambivalent representation of "wild always on the threshold between wildness and men" as a figure for the threatening yet heroic civilization, Pa embodies elements of both, "otherness" of other races, 6 her unusually var­ making him uniquely suited to be the inter­ ied techniques of narrative voice and charac­ preter between cultures. Thus it is Pa who gives terization, and the inconsistencies through Laura the word that she clutches like a talis­ which the text undercuts its surface reveal Little man-"papoose," a word that simultaneously House on the Prairie to be a work whose lin­ defamiliarizes the idea of the baby (Grace) guistic tensions expose disturbing possibilities that Laura already knows and renders less beneath the surface of its prairie pastoral. threatening the experience of "wildness" that The first of these features, the novel's de­ she will confront before the year is out. Laura piction of "wild men," functions not only as a understands this interpretive skill as part of counternarrative to the reassurance of the Pa's overall claims to omniscience. After all, authorial voice but also as a structural device she reasons, "Pa knew all about wild animals, within the novel. As several critics have so he must know about wild men, toO."IO Her pointed out, the "wild" Indians contrast with naively insensitive equation of wild men with the novel's notions of gentility, and, accord­ animals is mitigated, however, by Pa's own ing to Elizabeth Segel, "the term 'wild' does appearance as a "wild" man. Like the Osages', not hold for [Laura] the negative connotations Pa's hair sticks up; when Ma teases him, say­ it that it does for her mother."7 The opposi­ ing "You look like a wild man, Charles" (114), tions in this work between wildness and civi­ he admits that even at his most civilized­ lization are embodied in its characters: that is, during their courtship-he could not considered schematically, the Scotts represent make it lie down. Laura further identifies the the extremes of a conventionally "civilized" Indians with Pa, noting that they carry "a knife view with which Ma is affiliated, and the Na­ like Pa's hunting knife and a hatchet like Pa's tive Americans, with Pa as interpreter, oc­ hatchet" (138); perhaps more important, she cupy the opposite extreme. In this work, equates the Indian hunter's motive in killing Laura's cumulative understanding of the rela­ the panther with Pa's own motives in hunting tionship between West and East, frontier and it, thus attributing emotional as well as physi­ settlement, nature and culture, progresses cal parity to the two cultures. through her encounters with men figured as Not only Pa's appearance but his language both increasingly "wild" and increasingly he­ marks his status as a cultural intermediary. roic: Pa, Mr. Edwards, Dr. Tan, and finally The fictionalizing impulse and discursive mode Soldat du Chene. of storytelling that characterized Pa's speech Pa, the first of these characters, sets the in Little House in the Big Woods here give way standard for combining heroism with wildness. to exposition and persuasion. Stopping well Disliking boundaries and limitations, Pa shares short ofadvocacy, he nonetheless becomes the with Laura both his restlessness and his imagi­ novel's voice for the Native American point native power, characteristics that remain con­ of view. The rational tone of his expository stant and help to explain his chameleonlike mode of speech is nevertheless punctuated ability to take on a multiplicity of social and both by fragmentary, emotional outbursts that familial roles. Hamida Bosmajian notes that expose the dangers of the frontier (his early Pa prefers "to sit in his favorite place-the reference to the "band of screaming dev-" threshold,"8 and indeed he remains more a [144]) and by the comforting language ofcliche liminal than a transitional figure here, even- ("all's well that ends well") through which he "WILD MEN" AND DISSENTING VOICES 113 shapes the family's awareness of its situation. In effect, Pa internalizes two competing nar­ Laura's "domestication" involves moving from ratives involving that symbolic path, one of an initial curiosity about Indians toward a its conquest, or what Ann Romines in another position that incorporates Ma's generalized and context terms the nineteenth-century "tradi­ habituated dread. By contrast, Pa progressively tionallinear plot in which conflict and com­ discards his early, unthinking optimism to plication advance toward resolution and adopt a more complex vision that involves completion,"!! and one of his initiation into a not only a better interpretation of Native kind of sympathetic identification with the American behavior but a degree of sympathy Osage who use it. for those that inhabit the "empty" land, a The second of the novel's "wild men," Mr. movement signified by his gradual awareness Edwards, signals his nature more overtly. As of the importance of the Osage trail. Initially a "wildcat from Tennessee," Mr. Edwards, dismissing it as "some old trail" (55), he ad­ with his coonskin cap, tall boots, prowess at mits later on that he "wouldn't have built the spitting, and courtliness toward Ma, clearly house so close to it if [he'd] known it [was] a represents the vanishing tradition of south­ highroad" (227). Significantly, this awareness western humor and its "ring-tailed roarers," a marks a greater willingness to articulate the connection Wilder emphasizes through his family's plight as well. For example, Pa over­ signature song, "Old DanTucker." Best known rides Ma's objections in order to tell Laura for its tall-tale heroes such as Davy Crockett, and Mary of the Indian war-cry, for once ad­ Mike Fink, Johnson Jones Hooper's Simon mitting the girls into the fellowship of danger Suggs, and George Washington Harris's Sut that the family faces: Lovingood, southwestern humor sketches used dialect, elaborately burlesqued speech, exag­ "That yell's enough to scare anybody to gerated exploits, and broad physical humor to death," he said. "My mouth's so dry I elevate lying to an art form from which "la­ couldn't whistle a tune to save my life.
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