University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for 1994 Writing The Little House: The Architecture of a Series 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, "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.