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Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

ann romines

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With more than thirty-five million copies in print, the Little House series, written in the 1930s and 1940s by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, has been a spectacular commercial success. What is it about this eight-volume serial novel for children that accounts for its enduring power? And what does the popularity of these books tell us about the currents of American culture?

Ann Romines interweaves personal observation with scholarly analysis to address these questions. Writing from a feminist perspective and drawing on resources of gender studies, cultural studies, and new historicist reading, she examines both the content of the novels and the process of their creation. She explores the relationship between mother and daughter working as collaborative authors and calls into question our assumptions about plot, juvenile fiction, and constructions of gender on the nineteenth-century frontier and in the Depression years when the Little House books were written.

This is a book that will appeal both to scholars and to general readers who might welcome an engaging and accessible companion volume to the Little House novels.

304 pages, Paperback

First published November 1,1997

This edition

Format
304 pages, Paperback
Published
November 21, 1997 by University of Massachusetts Press
ISBN
9781558491229
ASIN
1558491228
Language
English

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ann romines

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Rating(3.8 / 5.0, 5 votes)
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Profile Image for Kimberly .
Amanda_B
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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As a Little House fan and a history/ social/ cultural studies lover, I had high hopes for this book. I had always wondered about the story behind the Little House books, the culture and its views on gender at the time. I was quite disappointed. Some of the author's ideas were often extremely far-fetched and I found her arguments quite weak, backed up by few historical facts. I felt like the author read in between the lines excessively at times and twisted the evidence to support her preconceived arguments (instead of using the text/ evidence to arrive at her arguments). For instance the book suggests that there was an incestuous relationship between Laura and Pa and insists that straw stacks and guns in the LH books are phallic symbols!
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bloopglop
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Really interesting to read a scholarly take on material with which I am extremely familiar. I agreed with many of the points the author raised, as well as learned much personal history of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane that I did not previously know.
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ponytaorponyboy
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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So even though I am personally and academically ALWAYS interested in critical analyses of especially oeuvres considered beloved and enduring childhood literary classics, I do (and with absolutely no apologies here whatsoever) tend to react majorly allergically to “analytical” tomes which while they might claim to be scholarly sound (intellectually reasonable, academically researched), are really and in fact NOTHING OF THE SORT (and this especially and in particular pertains to so-called academic interpreters offering textual explanations and musings that cannot and even with an intense perusal be located within a given author's printed words, that are for all intents and purposes completely imagined and fantastical and thus not even able to be backed up with and by the text proper of the work(s) being covered).

And yes indeed, the above has most definitely been my own and personal reaction towards Ann Romines' Constructting the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. For while Constructing the Little House is perhaps (as claimed in the book description) written from a feminist perspective, much if not most of the author's, of Ann Romines' presented musings are sadly and annoyingly annoyingly far-fetched to the extreme and based solely or at least rather majorly and heavily on rumour, on rather strange innuendo. Because well, that Ann Romines continuously considers and makes claims that Laura and her father (Charles Ingalls) are supposedly involved in some type of incestuous, sexually problematic exploitative relationship and that the many images of for example hay stacks and guns encountered in the Little House on the Prairie novels are supposedly phallic symbols, well this has just floored me and would perhaps even be rather humorous if it were not so sad, as I personally do think it reveals more about the author's own deeply rooted issues and her tendency to obviously see family dysfunction due to sexual inappropriateness everywhere and anywhere, including in narrative texts where it does NOT AT ALL appear, such as in Laura Ingalls Wilder's remembrances of her childhood (which has not only majorly creeped me out, it also rather stridently demonstrates why those of us who love to read children's literature classics for pleasure often tend to despair with regard to warped and unreasonable "scholarly" interpretations of our favourites, because unfortunately, Ann Romines' Constructing the Little House is not really all that much of a rarity either with regard to presenting analyses and considerations that make one at best shake one's head in consternation and frustrated anger).
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ScarletNitsa
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Reaches for symbolism where there is none. Grandma winning a jig-off against a man and then running into the kitchen is a commentary on gender? Laura and Pa's relationship is intensely romantic? A game of mad-dog is thinly veiled incest?
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