We wandered around the book displays, looking at the rows and rows of novel covers showing spirited heroines getting their skirts muddy in the midst of brave rescues or tomboyish adventures. Across from the wall of the historical books were all the guides and advice books, including The Smart Girl’s Guide to Parties, The Care and Keeping of You, Stand Up for Yourself and Your Friends. There were books about dealing with boys, siblings, emotions; books about dancing, knitting, food, diaries, hair. It seemed American Girl had a book for every aspect of girlhood, collectively forming an encyclopedic master guide to being a girl. It made me feel a little jealous, though I think American Girl has a book for that, too.
A lot of what I learned about being a girl I learned from Laura Ingalls. I discovered that it helps if you try to love your own brown hair as much as you love your pa’s. Not for nothing, it also helps to know that feeling bad about your looks is apparently such a universal thing that even little girls who live in isolated Wisconsin cabins (as far as one can get from fashion magazines) can experience it. I also have this crazy theory that the scene when Laura gets leeches on her legs in On the Banks of Plum Creek is a metaphorical preparation for menstruation, so that when Laura finds it terrifying and gross at first but quickly learns to deal with it, it brings us girls all one step closer to being able to handle Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Of course you’re welcome to disagree.
However, I never agree with those who characterize Laura as a “tomboy.” I know it’s a widely held notion, no doubt put forth and perpetuated by folks who identify with Laura and who, unlike me, considered themselves to be tomboys in their childhoods. While I’m willing to accept many things as matters of interpretation, wherein your Laura Ingalls Wilder is different from mine, I’m holding my ground here: LAURA IS NOT A TOMBOY.
I will not deny that Laura did some decidedly un-girly things in the books, especially in On the Banks of Plum Creek. I understand that haystacks were climbed and old crabs were taunted. However, I refuse to believe these things make Laura a tomboy. I will also cite page 146 of my Little Town on the Prairie paperback, which states that Laura “was not really a tomboy,” just a girl who sometimes likes to play catch and ante-over (whatever that is) with the younger boys at recess, and is therefore merely “tomboyish” (see page 145), a distinction that I maintain is important. It’s enough for her just to be a girl, even if she doesn’t throw like one, okay?
I suspect a good deal of the tomboy associations come from Melissa Gilbert’s rendition of Laura on the NBC television show, with her chirpy voice, spunky demeanor, and occasional tendency (inherited, of course, from her TV dad) to throw punches. I’ll accept that Laura as a tomboy, I suppose, but not the book Laura. Plus the TV Laura had a sort of string-beany awkwardness to her and stomped around in her tight pigtails as if waiting for adolescence to relieve her from skinny androgyny. (Though in Miss Gilbert’s defense, I don’t imagine that “as round and strong as a little French horse” is a type much in demand among Hollywood actresses.)
Whereas the Laura who lived in those yellow paperback pages appeared, in those Garth Williams illustrations, much more unabashedly feminine, with her bare feet and the gently rippling skirt she lifted to romp through the grass on the cover of On the Banks of Plum Creek. I held that image in my mind constantly while growing up: in all its sensual freedom, it seemed to me the very essence of girlhood.
Maybe what bugs me the most about the tomboy designation is the way it implies that Laura’s grubby antics are somehow beyond the realm of ordinary girl experience. Certainly Plum Creek never draws that line, and by the time I’d reached that book in the series I understood that Laura did more so-called boyish things because she was a pioneer girl. Children’s book reviewer Christine Heppermann, in an essay in Horn Book Magazine, describes a typical frontier experience for girls, one that matches Laura’s almost exactly:. . . while mothers fretted that pioneer life was turning their daughters “wild”—i.e., making them lose all sense of propriety—the girls stepped in to do the jobs that needed to be done. . . . They spent more time outdoors than their eastern sisters, removed from the watchful eyes of their overworked parents, developing a familiarity with the land that frequently proved advantageous.
These hard-working, nature-savvy girls couldn’t have all just happened to be tomboys, could they? I loved that Laura trapped fish with Pa and rounded up oxen run amok because she had to. Or maybe I loved that she had to and still got to be a girl.
My earliest years were spent watching my brother Steve’s life and trying to decipher all the ways in which I could or could not follow his example. I was often fascinated with his Cub Scout activities but eventually figured out that my interest could only remain vicarious: there would be no Pinewood Derby for me. My parents were fairly progressive and I doubt they ever discouraged me from so-called boy things like sports and other pursuits, but I could intuit, the way kids seem to understand, that my brother’s world wasn’t quite mine. I distinctly remember sitting in his room and flipping through one of his magazines feeling profoundly bored and left out. Never mind that the magazine was Boys’ Life! It still didn’t seem fair.
This is not to say I rejected “girl things”—dolls and dresses and so on. Rather I pursued them fervently, partly out of the need to distinguish my existence from my brother’s, and partly out of the terror that perhaps I wasn’t Enough of a girl.
I was particularly obsessed with both long hair and long dresses. The hair was really the sore point. Mine was cut in a very short pageboy because my mom had found my fine, straight hair difficult to manage; it was different from her own, which was thick and wavy. Sometimes, especially when I wore my brother’s hand-me-down clothes, strangers in restaurants would mistake me for male. I thank God and the ’70s that maxi dresses were in style, allowing me to own a floor-length pink gingham dress that I would’ve worn every day if given the chance.
But being the ’70s, it also meant I was part of one of the first generations of girls to grow up hearing the message that we could be whatever we wanted. So much well-meaning children’s programming, like Sesame Street and Free to Be You and Me, encouraged us to defy social rules we had yet to fully understand; all the while, the pink and pretty trappings of conventional girliness called to us, too. Years after I wore out that gingham dress I had a college job at a preschool and watched one of the four-year-old girls, whose hair was as short as mine had once been, race around the playground with a skirt on her head to simulate a wig. “Don’t tell her to take it off,” the teacher told me. “She gets upset.”
I found the world of the Little House books to be so much less confusing, not just because it was “simpler,” as plenty of people love to insist, but because it reconciled all the little contradictions of my modern girlhood. On the Banks of Plum Creek clicked with me especially, with its perfect combination of pinafores and recklessness. (I will direct your attention to the illustration on page 31 of my Plum Creek paperback, where you will note how fabulous Laura looks as she pokes the badger with a stick; her style is casual yet feminine, perfect for precarious nature adventures!) At an age when I found myself wanting both a Webelos uniform and a head of beautiful Superstar Barbie hair, On the Banks of Plum Creek was a reassuring book. Being a girl sometimes made more sense in Laura World than it did in real life.
I must have also appreciated the way the first few Little House books keep boys at the periphery. (The one major exception, obviously, is Farmer Boy, but that’s a book about a boy.) Boys are minor characters throughout the preadolescent chronicles of the Laura books—a cousin here, a classmate there, a younger version of Pa or Grandpa conjured up for the sake of a story. Boys in these early books rank at about the same level as bears: obviously not as dangerous, but like bears, their exploits make for swell anecdotes once in a while, the sort of story that invariably ends with a good whipping. At worst, the boys in Laura World will hurl a few witless taunts (“Snipes! Snipes!”) and are promptly told to shut up; at best, they m
ight do something spectacularly stupid, like get themselves stung by a whole hive of yellow jackets. Remember Cousin Charley in Little House in the Big Woods? Remember the illustration, page 209, in which the poor kid gets plastered with mud and wrapped up like a sad giant burrito while the other cousins look on with vague disgust? Notice how most of them are girls. Notice how they clearly know better.
This is yet another reason why tomboy never sounded quite right as a way to describe Laura. Boys are such a remote presence in these early books, the prairie where the Ingalls girls played so empty of them, that it’s hard to imagine that Laura would want to emulate them, as the term implies. Only once does Laura ever seem to express jealousy: when her little friend Clarence in the Big Woods, he of the fancy outfit and the shiny copper-toed shoes, comes to visit. She loves his shoes, but, as the book states, “Little girls didn’t wear copper-toes.” Her one pang of boy envy, and it’s about fashion.
But to heck with boys and girls and tomboys, because in the Little House taxonomy of childhood, the most crucial distinctions are between bad girls and good girls, which opens up a whole other can of leeches. It all goes back, of course, to Laura and Mary.
You know Mary’s the good one, right? By know I mean the fact is seared into your mind from repeated exposure to her endless shining examples: Mary always sits quietly (though really, she does everything quietly). Mary doesn’t interrupt. Mary doesn’t mind Sundays one bit. Mary decides Baby Carrie can have her beads that she found at the Indian camp, even if a certain someone else would rather keep her beads for herself like a selfish little flutterbudget. If that wasn’t bad enough, Mary’s goodness is like a big blue sponge so absorbent that it passively sucks up all the positive attention, so that all the compliments and the candy hearts with the prettier sayings on them inevitably come her way. You have to wonder if her behavior keeps her hair golden as well, pumping a sort of virtuous Sun-In to her locks on a daily basis.
And yet the characterization of Mary Ingalls as a goody-goody with perfect posture and a soul like a springtime meadow seems to be mostly a creation of the books. The Mary who shows up in some of Laura’s pre–Little House writing is bossier, has a “sharp tongue,” and lords her age over her younger sister. One story, written in 1917 for the Missouri Ruralist, has an account of the blond-hair-is-better-than-brown fight that goes on throughout Little House in the Big Woods, but in this version Mary really rubs it in (“Don’t you wish your hair was a be-a-utiful color like mine?”) and tells Laura she has an ugly nose, too.
We’ll never know if this reflects the real Mary, if perhaps she got a personality makeover for the Little House books, where she plays the perfect counterpart to Laura. In that sense she clearly serves a purpose: how else would we know how badly Laura’s behaving if Mary wasn’t around to give her weak little admonishments? (“Pa said we mustn’t!”) But Mary is also so insufferably dull that it makes Laura’s badness seem quite reasonable, especially to those of us with an inner girl who likes to let down her sunbonnet once in a while. Which is to say, most of us.
And yet don’t you think that there’s—yes, I’ll say it—something about Mary as well, something deeply appealing? Maybe it’s not so much that she’s good but that she’s mastered the act of it so well, what with her folded hands in her lap, all her gestures clear enough for the rest of us to follow suit if we wanted. I know sometimes I wanted to emulate her—and why not, since for the first few books Mary totally wins at life, with high scores in the hair, prettiness, and seam-sewing categories? Wanting to be Mary was a little like wanting to be Miss America: both seemed to offer so much reward in exchange for such a simple performance.
Years later, in a sisterly heart-to-heart talk with Laura in Little Town on the Prairie, Mary cops to the truth:
“I wasn’t really wanting to be good. I was showing off to myself, what a good little girl I was, and being vain and proud, and I deserved to be slapped for it.”
Laura was shocked. Then suddenly she felt she had known that, all the time.
Oh, yes, and so did we.
But maybe the whole goodness thing shouldn’t be written off as just a racket; after all, what of the girls and women who really do identify with Mary? They’re out there. In my own observations, Team Mary folks are often self-contained older siblings who feel less compelled to rebel, more inclined to prove themselves by their accomplishments: the Marcia Bradys of the world with their shelves full of trophies.
Rebecca Steinitz, in an essay in Literary Mama magazine, writes about discovering that her oldest daughter favored Mary, as well as Meg in Little Women, despite her own long-held belief that one is “supposed to like” Laura and Jo. Eventually Steinitz concludes that not every girl wants to be the “smart, tormented girl.” “[My daughter] is an optimist who prefers life to go smoothly, and, like Mary and Meg, she will do all she can to keep it that way,” she realizes.
Anita Clair Fellman, in her book Little House, Long Shadow, thinks the Mary proclivities are culturally ingrained: “Whereas the current preference is for spunky girl heroines, previously there was more ambivalence about such female role models, and even today there is still much in female socialization that makes Mary’s desire always to do the right thing resonate for many female readers.”
In pointing out that the gutsy gal archetype is more the standard these days, Fellman mentions another interesting bit: until the 1960s, the Little House books were often referred to as “the Laura and Mary books.” It must be a sign of how much our cultural inclinations have shifted that as a reader from a later generation, I found this hard to believe: how could anyone ever have seen them as anything other than the Laura books? And yet the phrase turns up in vintage book reviews, and a Google search confirmed that, indeed, people of a certain age use the phrase when discussing the books online—proof that Mary wasn’t always thought of as the boring, pretty also-ran. Instead she was the yin to Laura’s yang, the two sisters together forming an ideal girlhood filled with equal measures of safety and danger.
I had to show Kara the historical doll section of American Girl Place, which displays all its expensive accessories behind glass, like a museum exhibit. To buy something, you’d take a tag with a little color photo of the item and bring it to the cashier. We lingered at the display for the doll character of Kit Kittredge, a nine-year-old growing up in the Great Depression. We agreed that Kit had some of the best furniture (don’t worry so much about the hard times, Kit! You can always just sell your stuff to us people who live in the future!), and Kara, who collects vintage typewriters, fell in love with Kit’s tiny one. I found a tag for it and slipped it into my pocket.
“What, are you going to buy that typewriter?” Kara asked.
“No,” I admitted. “I just like taking the tags.” Something about them, with their images of doll-sized treasure, always buoyed me. I loved the simplicity these miniature things evoked, the way they called to mind uncluttered lives where each carefully crafted object shone with significance. Kirsten’s quilt, Molly’s locket—they exuded something of the same aura with which things in the Little House books appeared; I could see them with a bit of the charmed sight of Laura World. On some level I recognized that the things on display at the American Girl store purported to be as cherished as Ma’s china shepherdess, Charlotte the rag doll, and the butter mold with the carved leaves and strawberry.
Obviously, that was one thing my Little House and American Girl fascinations had in common: the stuff. In both instances, I felt like I was glimpsing the lives I’d once desperately wanted. In the case of American Girl Place, it was an indulged and solidly uppermiddle-class existence where both me and my doll had everything we needed. And yet when it came to Little House, it was sort of the opposite feeling, in that the world I wanted to inhabit was an uncomplicated one, full of sunlight and clean-swept floors.
There was still another feeling, too, one I noticed as we perused the display cases for Felicity, the Colonial Williamsburg character, whose accessories were
by far the most patrician of all the American Girls—china teacups, lacy fans, delicate pretend cakes, embroidered pillows, satin slippers. They were so lovely that to look at them inspired a mildly masochistic delight, the realization that someone (even if it was a fictional-Felicity someone) lived a life that was far prettier than mine. That sickening sensation, I recognized, was none other than That Nellie Oleson Feeling.
All hail Nellie Oleson, New York–born daughter of a Walnut Grove mercantile proprietor, later the most exquisitely dressed country girl in Dakota Territory! With her utterly scrumptious nastiness she completes the spectrum of Little House girlhood types, from good Mary to not-so-good Laura to bad, bad Nellie. From the moment she’s introduced she gets right down to her bratty business, wrinkling her nose, sticking out her tongue, and yanking hair.
Fine, so it’s not much of a repertoire—even by nineteenth-century school-yard standards these seem like awfully basic moves. What really gives Nellie her evil superpowers, though, are the enviable shiny details of her life—her ribbons and lawn dresses and wax dolls and candy sticks—all of it paraded before Laura and Mary when they visit her awesome carpeted house in the “Town Party” chapter of On the Banks of Plum Creek. While I’m fond of the swaying prairie grasses of my Laura World, somewhere in my subconscious dwells a Nellie World, too.
Which, well, looks an awful lot like American Girl Place. Though while Nellie Oleson is exactly the kind of girl who would own an American Girl doll, had they existed during her time, she herself could never be an American Girl character. Really, one of the most brilliant things about the American Girl marketing concept is that Felicity, Kirsten et al. are like nice Nellies, friendly girls who wouldn’t yank their possessions away from you, the way Miss Thing in Plum Creek snatched back her doll from Laura (see the page 164 illustration: ooh, the burn!). A visit to American Girl Place always satisfies the secret hope that I used to have reading that chapter as a kid—my wish that Laura would just suck up a little and try to work things out with Nellie so she could play with her stuff. (Pathetic, I know.)
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