63245.fb2 The Heroines Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 11

The Heroines Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 11

Chapter 9 Simplicity

Laura Ingalls in The Long Winter,

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

LAURA INGALLS WILDER,

“A BOUQUET OF WILD FLOWERS”

“Are we there yet? Is this the prairie?” I looked out the window of the Toyota Tercel. We were driving cross-country and I had insisted that my boyfriend take me on a route that at least skirted the prairie lands of the vast Plains states. The trip wouldn’t include the sites of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood, but it was a pilgrimage of sorts. As we reached Kansas and watched the road flatten into endless, monotonous horizon, I imagined how it must have felt to encounter a land so wild, expansive, and simple in a vehicle far clunkier and more uncomfortable than ours. Though the radio was blaring and my boyfriend was within arm’s length, I could feel a sense of quiet set in. After all, there’s not much to focus on but your own heartbeat when you’re under a vast prairie sky.

Leaning out that car window, I was transported back more than a hundred years to the way in which my childhood friend and mentor, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the woman whose stories of prairie life have meant the world to millions of readers like me, encountered this land for the first time. I looked out at the grassy landscape, deceptive in its size and almost endless in its inscrutable power. I imagined what it must have been like for the tiny Ingalls family, dwarfed by the forces of nature around them, as they traveled west to make their home in a new country. And even I, connoisseur of historical fiction and professional imaginer of other places and times, found it hard to conceive of a landscape completely stripped of modern accouterments.

Not that I hadn’t tried. It seems that simplicity becomes more and more desirable as daily life gets more complex. All around us are confusing subprime mortgages, 401(k) statements, crowded closets, and complicated living arrangements, things that make us want to take shelter under the simple quilt of yesteryear. Modern life has backfired a bit, it seems, stripping us of our autonomy, leaving us dependent and discontented even as we luxuriate in a standard of living unknown to our forebears. Lucky for us, it’s fashionable to slough off worldly things in the name of conscience. We’re not alone in seeking a simpler reality, one that focuses on people instead of things and gives honor to who we are as people without burying us under the stuff that can obscure reality as quickly as a storm cloud on the prairie.

These weren’t exactly worries shared by Laura and her family. They had an important role to play in westward expansion and the civilization of a rough land, hewing a productive nation from the vast and endless physical landscape that exhilarated and terrified young Laura. In short, they had bigger concerns: fires had to be built by dint of fuel they gathered themselves; clothing had to be stretched to the last stitch, twice-turned and mended, and then put to further use in quilts, aprons, or curtains.

In Laura’s world, there were no leftovers or seconds. When they left the little house near Independence, Kansas, the Ingallses even dug up the seed potatoes growing in their garden. Every physical possession was something precious, but not necessarily vital. What they could not buy, they traded for crops or furs. Glass windows, bathrooms, and swift transportation are fundamental necessities to us, but they were luxuries to a people who produced almost everything they needed themselves, relying only peripherally on items purchased at far-away stores. As a result, Laura’s family was fiercely independent and self-confident, answering the call of western expansion again and again as they made their own mark on the frontier.

Laura’s life may have been simple in terms of material possessions, but it wasn’t easy. The years following her marriage to Almanzo Wilder were fraught with trouble. At first, all signs pointed to a happy, unruffled marriage. Almanzo, whom Laura called Manly, was a successful farmer and horse breeder with rich relatives, and Laura was an adept housekeeper and a smart manager used to deprivation and simple living. But nothing could have prepared the newlyweds for the disastrous years that lay ahead. Almanzo fell ill with diphtheria, forcing a long separation from their young daughter Rose and partially paralyzing him for the remainder of his life. The couple’s next child, a boy, died before he was a month old; their house burned down; and a drought dried up any hopes of financial prosperity. The couple moved around in a futile search for land that could sustain them, taking on odd jobs as they went and raising Rose with a sense of constant inferiority and poverty.

Eventually, the Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri, forcing its unforgiving terrain into submission over many long years of toil and labor. By the time Laura was moved to write about her childhood, the hard years were finally over, and the couple had been living in relative security, if not full financial bloom, for years. Rose was a successful writer who traveled the world; even Laura wrote regularly as a columnist on poultry farming and rural life for the Missouri Ruralist.

It wasn’t until the onset of the increasingly dire circumstances of the Great Depression that Laura really began thinking about simpler times. There was something familiar about this new era of poverty and uncertainty, something that resonated with the Ingallses’ own roving years. Laura’s family had never had much, but they had always managed to eke out a slight living and stay together. This courage and tenacity seemed especially suited to Depression-era life, with its privations and pressing needs. It had been years since Laura saw such widespread unemployment, hunger, and want. Now, combined with her mother’s death, these reduced circumstances made her look backward to the experiences of her pioneer childhood. Laura, who was in her early sixties, began to write a memoir she called Pioneer Girl, a first-person manuscript detailing her family’s westward journey. In 1930, she showed the book to her journalist daughter for her opinion, and before she knew it, Laura was adapting passages for a children’s book tentatively titled When Grandma Was a Little Girl.

It can be easy to confuse the real Laura with the Laura of her books, to mistake the Little House on the Prairie series for a sweet tale of churning butter and stomping on hay. At the time of their publication, nobody had ever really undertaken what Laura achieved with such success: a series of books aimed at children that re-created a historical period in such vivid and compelling detail. Succeed she did, but not by telling life exactly as it was. In fact, the books were written over thirteen contentious, uneasy years marked by a decidedly complex relationship with her grown daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Though Rose’s role in the creation of the Little House books has gained acknowledgment in recent years, many Laura fans have no idea of the degree to which she influenced both the form and success of her mother’s—fictitious—life story.

Throughout the process of crafting the book, Laura drew upon her daughter for editorial and moral support. By this time, Rose was a restless, resentful woman still full of memories of the poverty and restriction of childhood and frustrated by what she saw as her mother’s lack of literary sophistication. Family ties didn’t turn Rose into a permissive editor; in fact, the editorial letters that survive are brutal, reflecting a lack of sympathy for her mother’s literary talent guaranteed to leave an acidic taste in fans’ mouths. Rose felt compelled to force the work into the literary image of the day; Laura struggled to live up to her daughter’s high standards. Mother and daughter both fought to get their version on the page, collaborating and clashing as they gave simultaneous birth to one of literature’s great coups.

Unbeknownst to Laura, Rose was committing a sort of literary heresy even as she helped her mother craft her first novel for children. Little House in the Big Woods appeared in 1931 to acclaim and good reviews, and Rose’s novel Let the Hurricane Roar appeared in 1932. An adult novel following the adventures of a couple named Caroline and Charles as they confront the American West (sound familiar?), the book became a best seller. Though some have suggested that the book was another collaboration between Laura and Rose, more recent works have hinted that Laura had no idea Rose was plundering, even plagiarizing, her unpublished memoir for her own gain. However she felt personally about the book, which was a Depression-era success story in itself, Laura remained silent. We’ll never know her true feelings on Rose’s betrayal, only that she set them aside in favor of her increasing compulsion to continue her life story. She turned her attention to the next book in the series, then the next, creating and re-creating her frontier childhood for a popular audience.

My favorite Little House book has always been The Long Winter, which fictionalizes the Ingallses’ struggle during the Snow Winter of 1880-81. It’s not a cheerful book per se, but you wouldn’t be cheerful if you had lived through that winter, either. Plagued by blizzards and cut off from the railroads for a solid five months by blinding snow and perpetual storms, the residents of De Smet, South Dakota, survived temperatures as low as 35 degrees below zero. The tiny prairie town depended on the railroads for supplies and dry goods; both were stuck behind snow drifts for months on end, until the town’s residents were forced to eat their seed wheat or starve.

Laura’s fictional account of the winter that almost killed her family is deceptively simple. Though the Ingalls family actually had a young married couple with a baby on the way living with them at the time, Laura chose to write about the family as if they’d survived the winter alone and in utter isolation. Her story of survival and basic instinct takes simplicity to a new extreme. With no firewood and no way of going out for supplies, the family must burn straw they twist into little sticks in their stove for warmth. There’s no school, no social activity of any kind, just the monotony of survival. Laura and her sisters crowd around the kitchen table and recite their lessons by day; at night, they sing songs and tell stories for entertainment. With nothing but axle grease for lamp oil, they create a makeshift lamp out of a button and some fabric. When they’re not studying or entertaining one another, they bend over a coffee mill, grinding seed wheat into flour for the coarse brown bread that sustains them for months.

Even given the nightmarish circumstances it depicts, there’s a humanity and a sense of dignity in the pages of The Long Winter that made quite an impression on a little girl who had never seen snow. Stripped of any outside landscape and denied the few comforts to which they have become accustomed, the Ingalls family gets down to basics, and the simple task of living takes up most of their time. Their struggle against the elements is one of waiting, but also one of angry confrontation. Though their relationships with one another are severely restrained by the mores and expectations of 1880s ladies and gentlemen, each member of the Ingalls family loses their patience at some point. Even gentle Ma almost breaks under the knowledge that the train will not come until the blizzards stop.

Ma threw up her hands and dropped into a chair…. “Patience?” Ma exclaimed. “Patience! What’s his patience got to do with it, I’d like to know!”

But even as they momentarily lose control, the Ingalls family knows it must cling together to survive. When Laura complains of being tired of brown bread with nothing on it, Ma is quick to chasten her: “Don’t complain, Laura!… Never complain of what you have. Always remember you are fortunate to have it.”

The Ingallses don’t have much to be grateful for, but their focus on small blessings in the face of unthinkable deprivation gives the book its sweetest moments. The family’s few possessions and creature comforts are admittedly small by modern standards, but their relative lack of complaint seems designed to undercut a culture where a throttled Netflix queue or a choppy cell phone connection can seem like a cosmic misfortune of epic proportions. But the fact that they have survived together means more than any material possession or outward congratulations. And their celebrations focus on the most simple gift of all: the gift of a heart that beats and lungs that breathe. A book about death and threat ends up affirming and clarifying simple daily life under the most extreme of circumstances.

For fourteen-year-old Laura, the book is about more than surviving harsh weather conditions. The Long Winter tests her growing spirit, pitting her against those closest to her in a struggle to remain patient and calm and to fulfill what she knows is her duty. Life was surely less complicated in a society in which the rules of success were so clear. Given a sweet disposition, a strong faith, and a womanly manner, a pioneer girl has everything she needs to move forward. But Laura can’t or won’t fit into that mold. She is challenged by the circumstances around her and by an internal rebellion that constantly threatens the family unit. This struggle to simultaneously belong and break away is all too familiar to anyone who didn’t grow up gracefully. And if Laura doesn’t exactly learn patience, she learns that her family has what it needs to sustain itself.

Laura the woman was no stranger to privation and insecurity. The Little House books she struggled to write did not entirely heal the rifts with her daughter, but they went a long way toward restoring the love and collegiality at the center of their relationship. When she finished writing the series at last, Laura knew she could rest. Her work was done; she had given something far larger than herself to her daughter and to the generations yet to discover a bit of themselves on Laura’s own vast, remembered prairie.

For Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Great Depression wasn’t a jarring shock. It was a reminder of the simpler, less materialistic days of her childhood, days when one flickering lamp held together a family, outshining her personal desires. After the profligate 1920s, the ‘30s must have seemed more comfortable to Laura, who struggled with modernity throughout her adult life. Even in her old age, her first impulse when financial difficulty arose was to cut off the electricity to the house. She had lived so long without it that it must have seemed like an easily expendable luxury.

Should modern readers give up every comfort in simplicity’s name? Of course not, but a reading of The Long Winter is a good reminder not to let mere things interfere with our heroines’ duties. For Laura, simplicity was a way of life in which the luxurious always gave way to the essential. Today’s heroine has much to learn from a world in which things like heat and food consumed so much time and energy. There just isn’t time to worry about bigger houses, better clothing, or fancier job titles when you’re trying to figure out how to stretch your meager supplies just one more week. When we focus on people and life instead of material possessions and mere wants, there’s not much room for emotional hand-wringing. Instead, there’s more space to weigh what we value in our lives and to acknowledge what really counts. For Laura and her family, simplicity meant paring down until the foundations of life—family, freedom, nothing but the nonnegotiables—were laid bare.

If you’re like me, you’ve yearned for simplicity for as long as you can remember. I was a Laura Ingalls-worshipping, bonnet-wearing eight-year-old right around the time when I began to sense that my family wasn’t perfect after all, that my teachers were humans and not gods, that my neighborhood was surrounded by crime and poverty, and that we ourselves would never have all or be all that we could. But the same parents I screamed at and railed against were the people who helped me turn my wood-paneled toy wagon into a covered one, who let me go off and find myself even when they disapproved of the means, the destination, and the young woman I flirted with becoming. It’s contradictions like these that send a heroine under the comforter with a good book, one that evokes simpler times.

The simple life still has its challenges. Simplicity must coexist with life’s shadowy gray areas, those nooks and crannies of imperfection, struggle, and toil designed to drive a heroine mad. Perhaps Laura’s own struggle with a complicated family situation and her decidedly complex relationship with comfort, money, and survival drove her to write works that hearken back to a time of simplicity and grace. Even so, her books challenge modern readers with their intolerant, racist depictions of Native Americans and their decidedly conservative bent, yet another example of the murky territory many literary heroines are called to populate.

Thankfully for us, the Little House on the Prairie books far transcend the gentle reminiscences of an old woman, however weathered by the world. The simplicity they evoke has nothing to do with age or time. Hailing from an era we have little hope of ever experiencing or understanding, they reach across history and tap into a universal longing for calm, serenity, space, and simplicity. Like the pioneer girls who came before us, we crave community, human contact, the chance to prove ourselves as we survive our own long winters. It’s easy to lose sight of what really counts in a time so taken with material possessions and fickle fortunes, a time when worrying about bank account balances and precarious markets has been prioritized somewhere between waking up in the morning and voting. Luckily, Laura’s there to remind us that sometimes all you need is the flicker of a fire and the companionship of those you love. Life is never simple, but we can strive to make it so.

READ THIS BOOK: 

• While on road trips, preferably during stops due to inclement weather

• In a warm bathtub

• When you’re tempted to buy something you absolutely don’t need

• While nursing a finicky baby

LAURA’S LITERARY SISTERS:

• Hattie Brooks in Hattie Big Sky, by Kirby Larson

• Ántonia Shimerda in My Ántonia, by Willa Cather

• The sisters from Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family