Hermenuetics

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May 4, 2011

Churning Butter in Bonnets with Laura Ingalls Wilder

Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life answers why we all wanted to live the pioneer life of Little House on the Prairie.

Rachel Stone

Have you ever connected with someone through a mutually loved book? Of course, there are many ways to love the same book, but some books inspire a similar kind of devotion in their fans. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series seems to call forth reverence for their author and protagonist, Laura, and a persistent yearning to enter her world. Thousands of Laura fans embark each year on their own searches for the historical Laura, visiting the sites and homes where the Ingalls and Wilders lived.

Wendy McClure has written The Wilder Life, a funny, insightful memoir about her adventures pursuing “Laura World” — the partly historical, partly fictional, partly fantastical mental space she inhabited as a child and revisits by re-reading the books, researching the history of the Ingalls and Wilder families, and traveling to their every homesite. Along the way, McClure, a Chicago-based children’s book editor, purchases a half-dozen bonnets and attempts to recreate the "vanity cakes" Ma made in Little House on Plum Creek — a recipe for which begins, “take 2 pounds of lard,” among other things. Throughout, McClure is trying to figure out why these books, more than any others, so captured her imagination in childhood as well as adulthood.

For readers like me, who dreamed of being Laura or Laura’s best friend, who longed for pinafores, butter churns, and the occasional blizzard, McClure’s journey will elicit laughter and some new reflections on why, exactly, Laura’s stories have held readers in enduring enchantment. Even as each of us imagines the worlds of Laura’s words differently, many seem to share a fascination in the real world (now mostly lost) and real people (now all dead, and with no living descendants) behind the stories. Those stories, though frequently regarded as "straight" biography, are more likely fictionalized. (For instance, Carrie was born on the prairie, not in the Big Woods, as the books have it, and when the Ingalls family moved to Indian Territory, Laura was only 3, not 6 or 7, as the story has it.)

In her travels, McClure meets historical re-enactors, girls entering Laura look-alike contests, homeschoolers, and even a nondenominational, rural Wisconsin church that’s preparing for the apocalypse, which they believe to be imminent. They do so by learning Ingalls-style self-sufficiency and food preservation and regularly holding “survival drills.” I was sad that McClure’s and her boyfriend’s interactions with Christians were largely limited to the church. Agnostics, they were “freaked out” by these folks, whose witness meant warning them of a coming tribulation and asking if that scared them. (It did, but not in the way the lady meant.) The church was an extreme example of the people who McClure continually encountered: those who found in Laura’s world inspiration for living simpler and returning to the frontier world that was already fading when Wilder began penning her books.

Ultimately, McClure finds these approaches to the series problematic. She’s not about to deny anyone the pleasure of living in “Laura World, ” but as an educated urban woman, she has no interest in pursuing a facsimile of pioneer life. Having purchased a churn and dash to make butter in her apartment, she’s unimpressed with the results, even though some of the recipes she tried from The Little House Cookbook — like apples ‘n onions — were “incredible.”

So what is it that has McClure hooked on the Little House books?

Well, hand-ground flour, maybe. And Ma’s china shepherdess. And the leeches that stick to Laura’s legs when she wades in the creek. What’s most appealing for McClur e— and for me — is the books’ frank delight in the specific ordinaries of their present, the people, things, and places that make life sweet. Laura wrote in Little House in the Big Woods:

[Laura] thought to herself, "This is now." She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

This pleasure in the “now” runs richly and deeply throughout the books. Sure, there are some “moral lessons” tucked in for good measure, but beyond manners, calico dresses, and McGuffey’s Readers, there’s this: celebrating what is. As writer, cook, and Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon wrote in The Supper of the Lamb:

The world exists, not for what it means but for what it is. The purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms; wine is in order to be wine: Things are precious before they are contributory. It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else.

In other words, to love the world as God does, we celebrate his gifts for what they are, where we are, and with those around us. Good books can enhance our love for God, our neighbor, and creation by allowing us an excursion into the past (or the “preposterous”) that sends us back “with renewed pleasure to the actual, as C. S. Lewis wrote in his essay “On Stories.” I’m grateful to have connected with McClure over our shared love of Laura World and the way her books enrich our lives — not by making us wish to live in the past, but by enhancing our love for the people, places, and things, however humble, that make the now so precious.

Posted by Katelyn Beaty on May 4, 2011 9:10 AM

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