This is now - Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Augustinian conception of time

Little House in the Big Woods moves through a single year, autumn to autumn, roughly.  Laura has her fifth birthday during the winter.  The seasonal cycle is an obvious, almost necessary, structure for any story like this, a story about agriculture and hunting, man (or child) in nature.  Little House on the Prairie mimics the movement through the seasons, but the pattern is shattered by the family’s abandonment of the homestead, one of several ways Prairie subtly parodies the simpler Big Woods.

The little house in both titles, that’s another.  In Little House on the Prairie, we witness every step of its construction, which takes about a third of the novel.  In Little House in the Big Woods, the house is simply there, and always has been, at least as far as a four year old can tell.  Presumably, it is also nearly new, built by Pa with the assistance of his nearby relatives, but to Laura, like the reader, the house simply is.  Pa tells stories about his childhood, which he emphasizes was different than that of his daughters.  Those stories are the sum total of history for Laura.

I didn’t really see this until the very end of the novel.  Little House in the Big Woods, despite the different circumstances, ends much like Little House on the Prairie – more parody.  Pa fiddles and sings while Laura fails to fall asleep.

The long winter evenings of fire-light and music had come again.

Pa’s fiddle wailed while Pa was singing:

  “Oh, Susi-an-na, don’t you cry for me,
   I’m going to Cal-i-for-ni-a,
   The gold dust for to see.” (236-7)

The endings of both novels even share the same song, not so ironic here, or not that I can see.  Foreshadowing, maybe.  Soon, they will be off to see the Oklahoma gold dust.

Then Pa began to play again the song about Old Grimes.  But he did not sing the words he had sung when Ma was making cheese.  These words were different.  Pa’s strong, sweet voice was softly singing:

[And here we have the most familiar bit of Burns, from “Auld Lang Syne”]

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are the days of auld lang syne, Pa?”

“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said.  “Go to sleep, now.”

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods.  She looked at Pa sitting in the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle.  She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She 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.

The End.  Those are the final lines.  St. Augustine, turning to the nature of time in the Confessions (397-8) writes that “it is abundantly clear that neither the future nor the past exist” (XI.20) and:

It is in my own mind, then, that I measure time.  I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective…  All the while the man’s attentive mind, which is present, is relegating the future to the past. (XI.27)

The ironies multiply as five year old Laura discovers the Augustinian nature of time.  The adult Laura, sixty years in the future, knows how the child is wrong – oh, it was a long time ago.  And the author knows that soon – that spring, or is it a year later? – that house and fire (but not the music) would be abandoned for another, and then another, and so on.  One more ironic turn – Laura’s memories are a bit less likely to forgotten, now, aren’t they?

“I confess to you Lord, that I still do not know what time is” (XI,25), St. Augustine laments.  Little House in the Big Woods is an altogether simpler book then Little House on the Prairie, less ambiguous, and, I suspect, written at a slightly lower reading level.  But it ends with an Augustinian meditation on the nature of time!  A simple one, just the beginning of the idea, but still!  Fine, you were expecting that.  Fine.  It surprised me.

St. Augustine quotations from the 1961 Penguin Classics edition, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin, if you can believe it.

Irony, ambiguity, and the usual literary business - the not-so-radical politics of Little House on the Prairie

The prairie in Little House on the Prairie is in Indian Territory; the little house is illegal.  In the book – no idea what happened in so-called real life – Pa had thought settlement was legal, or, a bit of ambiguity, soon would be, and piles the family back into the wagon the instant he learns that soldiers plan to uproot the settlers.  That cabin, constructed piece by piece for the first third of the novel, is simply abandoned, along with a new plow and a freshly-planted garden.

The politics of Little House on the Prairie are, as suits a genuine work of literature, ironic and complicated.  Please see this book review at Reading, Writing, etc. for the case that the politics are earnest and simple.  I’ll confess, Jane, as I reread that post and compare it to the novel I just read, I don’t understand a word of it.

I mentioned yesterday that the family is threatened with utter destruction four times.  Twice they succeed through pluck and rugged individualism.  See the ford crossing in Chapter 2 and the prairie fire, an early example of U.S. magical realism, in Chapter 22.  Twice, their survival depends entirely on the fortunate intervention of others.  Here I mean, first, Chapter 15, where the entire family gets malaria, dehabilitated to the point where Laura commits a great act of heroism simply by crawling across the floor with a cup of water, and the family is saved only by the entirely fortuitous intervention of a neighbor, and second, the terrifying Chapter 22, in which a council of Osage Indians debate whether to wage war on the settlers.  The anti-war party wins the debate.  In other words, Laura and her family are saved from death in a frontier war at the hands of the Osage by the actions of other Osage.

If we are scoring the “individualism vs society” match, I think we end up with a 2-2 tie.

Similarly, when Pa learns he will – or might – be evicted, he offers no resistance.  One might wonder if this restless man is in fact a little too eager to move on, but that’s a different issue.  There are two sets of neighbors.  A married couple, portrayed as semi-competent and hostile to Indians, wants to fight back.  A bachelor frontiersman, coon cap and all, is like Pa, instantly ready to resume his ramblin’ ways.  Amusingly, he leaves on a raft – he’s Huck Finn!  My point is, I detect the presence of contrasting views.

The end of the novel is brilliant.  The family is camped out, a pause in the journey to wherever Plum Creek is (Minnesota, right?).  Everyone is happy, oh so happy.  The horses are happy.  The dog is happy (“he curled into that round nest with a flop and sigh of satisfaction,” 334).  Pa, always positive, is singing and playing his fiddle.  Pa is always happy.

Except that he is, in fact, angry, and he expresses his anger through ironic songs.  He plays a little bit of “Oh, Susanna” – don’t you cry for him.  And doesn’t “Oh, Susanna” also appear at the very end of Little House in the Big Woods, in an altogether more placid context?  It does, two pages from the end, exactly where it is placed here!  A fragment of “Dixie.”  A bit of “Rally Round the Flag”:

The fiddle began to play a marching tune, and Pa’s clear voice was singing like a deep-toned bell.

  “And we’ll rally round the flag, boys,
   We’ll rally once again,
   Shouting the battle-cry of Freedom!”

Laura felt that she must shout, too.

This is the very last page.  Ma suggests Pa shift to something less likely to make little girls of a certain emotional temperament want to shout.

She began to drift over endless waves of prairie grasses, and Pa’s voice went with her, singing.

  “Row away, row o’er the waters so blue,
   Like a feather we sail in our gum-tree canoe.
   Row the boat lightly, love, over the sea;
   Daily and nightly I’ll wander with thee.”

That’s the end.  It’s an ironic revisiting of the end of Little House in the Big Woods, a high-level literary feat.  Showy, even.  That’s for tomorrow.  But just to stay with this passage – the motif of singing (those always-singing prairie stars), the metaphorical sea of the prairie merging with the actual-yet-imaginary sea of the song, the familial wanderlust of the final line.  How is this not great writing?

There was no end to that long, long line - she could not say what she meant - the sublime Laura Ingalls Wilder

Does a reader need Edmund Burke to truly understand Little House on the Prairie?  Not exactly, no.  Not exactly.  Wilder is trying to recreate an experience she had as a child, her deep unconscious response to the wildness and immensity of the prairie.  She needs a language to do this, a literary language.  Some of this literary language comes from a tradition that begins in the mid-18th century, partly with Burke.  That's all.

I was just leafing through a copy of a manuscript Wilder titled Pioneer Girl, a memoir written before the Little House books.  Non-fiction.  The constant communion with the stars was not there, nor was much of the matter I am labeling “sublime.”  That was all added later, an integral part of what makes Wilder’s books literature.  The sublime is not an important theme of Little House in the Big Woods, although there are hints.  But it provides a thematic frame that runs all the way through Little House on the Prairie and is an essential part of understanding the characters – how Ma, tough and self-reliant as she is, is a different kind of pioneer than her husband (she’s saner, for example), or how Laura differs from her sister Mary.

The climax of Little House on the Prairie is actually about the sublime, or whatever word one might want to substitute – the uncontrollable emotional response that is too big to understand.  Chapter 23, “Indian War-Cry,” is tense, and genuinely threatening.  The war cries and drums of the Osage Indians invade the little house.  The dog growls, Pa can’t whistle (and then can), an Indian rides by – “the lonely sound of the rider’s galloping” (294).  The chapter is written in sounds.

The next one begins with sounds, too, safe ones, from an owl and frogs, but ends in silence.  A line of migrating Osage ride by the cabin.  Laura and her family watch them go by, for hours.

As far as she could see to the west and as far as she could see to the east there were Indians. There was no end to that long, long line. (310)

Look, it’s the sublime again, more sections of Burke’s book – Infinity (2.VIII), and Succession and Uniformity (2.IX).  Something begins to happen to Laura – to the whole family, actually, but particularly to Laura.  Since the first chapter, Laura has wanted to see a papoose.  She finally does.

Laura looked straight into the bright eyes of the little baby nearer her.  Only its small head showed above the basket’s rim.  Its hair was a black as a crow and its eyes were black as a night when no stars shine.

Those black eyes looked deep into Laura’s eyes and she looked deep down into the blackness of that little baby’s eyes, and she wanted that one little baby.

“Pa,” she said, “get me that little Indian baby!” (308)

Laura has a hysterical fit.  I really wonder what I saw in this as a young reader.  Wanting something I couldn’t have, and screaming about it, that I understood.  This is not exactly a toy, though.  What is it?  Why does she want it?

“It’s eyes are so black,” Laura sobbed.  She could not say what she meant. (309)

Throughout the novel, the stars are always “glittering,” as are the black eyes of Indians, adults who wander by the cabin.  Wilder does not need that word here, since she has already established a close link between stars and the eyes of the Indians, so she does it differently.  Those black eyes also, like the stars, offer a path to – no one knows where.

The passage of the Indians is the emotional high point of the novel.  Nothing has happened, and there was no danger at all, but the family is shattered, exhausted.

And nothing was left but silence and emptiness.  All the world seemed very quiet and lonely. (311)

This chapter of Little House on the Prairie is itself sublime.  Or so I found it as an adult reader.

Little House on the Prairie and the Prairie Sublime - a Burkean interpretation

Laura Ingalls Wilder writes under the sway of the aesthetic ideas of Edmund Burke. No, not kidding - she may not have known it, but it's true.  She continually differentiates between the picturesque and the sublime.  Little House on the Prairie is an investigation of the Prairie Sublime, closely related to Mountain Sublime, Ocean Sublime, and Desert Sublime.  It has something to do with the prairie sky.

The wind made a lonely sound in the grass.  The camp fire was small and lost in so much space.  But large stars hung from the sky, glittering so near that Laura felt she could almost touch them. (Ch 1, 13)

Thickly in front of the open wagon-top hung the large, glittering stars.  Pa could reach them, Laura thought.  She wished he would pick the largest one from the thread on which I hung from the sky, and give it to her.  She was wide awake, she was not sleepy at all, but suddenly she was very much surprised.  The large star winked at her! (3, 37)

The large, bright stars hung down from the sky.  Lower and lower they came, quivering with music.  “What is it, Laura?” she asked, and Laura whispered, “The stars were singing”…  But the fiddle was till singing in the starlight.  The night was full of music, and Laura was sure that part of it came from the great, bright stars swinging so low above the prairie. (4, 50-1)

Laura is not actually carried off into the stars in every chapter, although it can seem like it, and the theme returns at the novel’s climax, and again at its very end, where the stars, curiously, have lost their power and are now “safe and comfortable” (334-5).  The word "glittering" turns out to be a leitmotif.

When I look into Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), just at the chapter titles, I am amazed by how many of Burke’s examples of the sublime are employed by Wilder.  Obscurity, Vastness, Difficulty, Suddenness, The cries of Animals, Bitters and Stenches.  “Such sounds as imitate the natural inarticulate voices of men, or any animals in pain or danger, are capable of conveying great ideas” (Burke, 2, XX).  I’m not sure what “great ideas” the wolf pack of Chapter 7 suggests to little Laura, but the ring of wolves around the house has the right combination of beauty and terror.

Laura could hear their breathing.  When they saw Pa and Laura looking out, the middle of the circle moved back a little way. (7, 97)

Laura and her father are watching the wolves from the house.  The wolves are terrifying in some sense, yet Laura is actually perfectly safe.  Thus, the aesthetic sublime.

The emotional base of the sublime – I’m following, and agree with, Burke – is fear, “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (2, I).  As we aestheticize the sublime we somehow tame it.  We even seek out the sublime and find pleasure in its thrill.  The sense of threat rarely eases in Little House on the Prairie.  The threats are often real, of course – I count four episodes where the entire family nearly dies - but Laura, the child, also has a series of powerful emotional responses to them.  It is perhaps key that the child does not always consciously recognize the threat.

Laura’s parents embody contrary responses to the Prairie Sublime.  Ma is more open about her fear, and struggles to control it, while Pa, like his daughter Laura, is attracted to the big sublime experiences. It's Pa and Laura who want to see those wolves, not Ma or sister Mary.  A theme of the entire series, at least as I remember it, is The Taming of Pa, as setbacks and responsibilities break him of his taste for risk and solitude.  Ma wins.  That family should not be out on that prairie.

Page numbers are from the 1953 uniform edition.

Think of having a whole penny for your very own. - Laura Ingalls Wilder ruins Christmas (kidding! kidding!) - memories of Little House on the Prairie

I recently read the two early Laura Ingalls Wilder novels, Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and Little House on the Prairie (1935), a child’s view of life on the Midwestern frontier during the early 1870s.  No children were involved in the reading of these novels – I read them for my own pleasure.

They’re both excellent, as I assume everyone knows.  Little House on the Prairie is better, by which I mean nothing more than “more complex.”  It might even be one of the 50 Greatest English-language Novels Written Since 1880, why not?

I want to write a post or two or three about these books, and for some reason I feel the need to reassure readers that I am not trying to damage their childhood memories.  On the one hand, this is absurd. They’re fine books and I’m a gentle Appreciationist, and we are all adults.  On the other hand, poking around Ye Olde Internet a bit for other blog writing about Wilder, I have discovered that those warm childhood feelings can be delicate, lacey things, torn to shreds by the slightest pressure.  I encountered a surprising resentment of anything that made the novels interesting.

Those are the parts I want to write about, the interesting parts!  I should stop here.  Anything else I have to say will sound insulting.  A warning, then: I am going to write about these novels as conscious works of art that employ concepts like irony and ambiguity.  Anyone who fears for their childhood should rejoin Wuthering Expectations next week, when I will discuss – no, sorry, that’ll probably be John Henry Newman, so skip that.  Coming up, maybe: a Thackeray novel few people should read.  I mean, it’s brilliant, but who are we kidding?  So that’s useless.  Emily Dickinson, maybe come back for Emily Dickinson.

Should I reveal my own crushed memory?  Actually, it was just slightly bent.  Little House on the Prairie has a Christmas scene which had a powerful effect on me.  On the Kansas prairie, forty miles from the nearest town, Laura and her sister Mary receive identical presents: a peppermint stick, a tin cup, a little heart-shaped cake made of white flour, and, what abundance, a penny!

They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny.  Think of having a whole penny for your very own.  Think of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy and a penny. (Ch. 19)

Oh, I thought about it all right.  I thought and thought, enough to memorize the list of gifts, although for some reason I had forgotten the cake (that's the bent memory).  My conclusion, after all of that thought, was that regardless of virtues the author is trying to inculcate, that was a horrible Christmas.  Laura Ingalls Wilder confirmed me in my selfish materialism.  That penny was the crowning insult.

But Mary and Laura looked at their beautiful cakes and played with their pennies and drank water out of their new cups.

Drank – water.  Played with their – pennies.  Oh, no no no.  At this point in my life, I have no interest whatsoever in receiving Christmas presents, and would be delighted to receive nothing more than, say, a single square of dark chocolate.  Or two, so I can share.  Perhaps this is the long-delayed influence of the asceticism of Laura Ingalls Wilder!  Still, any kid who gets presents from me will be sure to receive at least two pennies and two tin cups and two peppermint sticks (and two cakes - forgot 'em again), for which he can thank Little House on the Prairie.

I think everything I just wrote is more or less true, except the word “asceticism” is a joke.  To Laura, in the novel, that Christmas really is abundant.  That might even be a theme of these wonderfully material books.  Maybe I should write about that.  There’s a lot a person could write about.  These are complex books.