Is Laura Ingalls Fit Reading For Children or Not?

Parent Cafe
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Taking Huckleberry Finn out of libraries is far, far worse, no doubt. But really a very different case.

As far as I know, there is no legitimate debate about the literary (and historical) merit of Huckleberry Finn. There is near-unanimous agreement that (a) it is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, works of American fiction during the 19th Century, and (b) it was remarkable, especially in the context of its time, for its portrayal of an escaped black slave as a complex, sympathetic character, and for the nuanced relationship between a black man and a young, poor white man. Objections to it are almost entirely based on its frequent use of the “n-word,” which of course was ubiquitous both at the time in which the novel takes place and the time when it was written. Whether any whites understood at either of those times that it could be considered derogatory is open to debate. Some people are also sensitive to the many reminders in the book that whites treated blacks as subordinate and inferior, although one of the central themes of the book is that Jim is neither.

The Merchant of Venice is much tougher. While Shakespeare shows some empathy towards Shylock, as he does towards most of his villains, Shylock is pretty clearly a compendium of 16th Century cliches about Jews, and there’s little or no indication that Shakespeare questioned their validity. But it’s relatively easy simply not to teach The Merchant of Venice and to focus on Shakespeare’s other work, and his status as one of the most significant artists, not only in English, but in the entire Western tradition. (People struggle with Caliban in The Tempest, too . . . and that’s a work that can’t be disregarded so easily.) With Wilder, it’s hard to ignore what’s in her most famous book, although it’s true (as many have mentioned) that the Native American issue is absent in most of her work.

Anyway, no one is talking about taking Wilder out of libraries, or even out of curriculums (because I think she was never in many curriculums). We’re talking about taking her name off a prize. She didn’t endow the prize or anything. It was just named for her because she was (and still is) a popular author of books mainly read by or to children. The people who award the prize can clearly call it anything they want. You can think it’s not a good idea to change the name of the prize, or that it is a good idea, but the consequences either way are not so great.

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Because this thread got me to wondering - here’s a list of named literary awards (note that the Wilder award is still listed!) I’m sure this list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s interesting. I didn’t know that Flannery O’Connor had an award! I love her writing, and I’m not sure if she was biased/slanted against anyone except for fools, whom she did not suffer well.

https://earlybirdbooks.com/literary-awards

For the record - I was a voracious reader as a child and I really disliked the Little House books. I gave them another shot when my D was young but my opinion did not change the second time around.

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Renaming the award is just one more step in our culture that may be becoming too politically correct. My children have missed out on so many great classic novels because of fears of racist attitudes. I’m not exaggerating. Every book on their summer reading lists are either about a non-racial dystopian existence or a racially sanitized book about an African American. No Mark Twain. No JD Salinger. No Harper Lee. No John Steinbeck. Yes, our history has issues, our heroes are imperfect, and our literature reflects that. But pretending that only “good” people make “good” decisions is flawed. Rewriting history, or not addressing the ugly parts, won’t make today’s problems go away. In fact, it seems as though it makes them worse.

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What? What is preventing your children from reading whatever novels they feel like reading? I just assume that most of the posters in this thread, and their kids too, read widely. It may be that kids are required to read books of little merit; I know I was as a school kid. But the pages of other books are not glued shut.

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I believe renaming an award does address the ugly parts. As has been repeatedly said, people on this thread aren’t advocating censoring the LIW books – @JHS made the perfect distinction between censorship and censuring. Keep reading the books. Put them in school curricula. Point out what’s out of line, explore the complexity of opinions then and now, the progression of our assumptions, laws, etc.

As for the term “politically incorrect,” perhaps we should translate it accurately to its essence: “biased,” “prejudiced,” or “discriminatory” all fit the bill nicely, IMO. Use of “politically correct / incorrect,” in a disparaging sense sounds like an attempt to deflect attention from how ugly some characterizations and behaviors can be.

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Or we could call them “historically accurate reflections of that time”

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I wouldn’t call the Little House books historically accurate. If they were historically accurate, they’d have a lot more miscarriages, infant deaths and child deaths, not to mention lawlessness and lynchings.

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IIRC, her original manuscript, Pioneer Girl related a lot more unpleasant realities, but once it was decided to write the books for children, those incidents were not considered appropriate.

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My D was a very advanced, voracious reader - she was reading the Harry Potter books at the end of kindergarten.

When she was 7, the only thing on her Christmas list we could get her was another bookshelf (she also wanted a litter of puppies). We went to library book sales and she’d often get more than she could carry, but it was her allowance and we were happy to encourage reading

I vividly remember one conversation with her as she picked up the Little House books in first or second grade - she was concerned about the fact that Laura and Manly began courting when she was 15! D had figured out that she wouldn’t even be done with high school at that age.

I reassured her that expectations were different way back in the olden days, and told her that girls weren’t allowed to vote back then, their opinions didn’t count, and they hadn’t invented a flashlight to read at night with - if they were lucky they’d have one book in the house - a bible. Then she said “I know it was really hard back then.” And she gave me back a flashlight she had taken and hidden under her pillow. Turns out, her father caught her later that night with another flashlight - she had taken two of them.

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There seems to me something disingenuous in the claim that it shouldn’t matter because no one is censoring anything.

The ALA is not some tiny fringe organization, and the logic behind this decision is not a bizarre aberration. Neither is it an unjustified extrapolation to think that some of the people who made or support the decision would also be likely to refrain from reading the books to their children, object to it being read to them at school, and, in the case of the librarians, silently strike it from the recommendation lists for young readers.

It isn’t necessary for the government to be jailing people with unpopular opinions for me to believe that the narrowing of the range of accepted views on college campuses is a problem. Similarly, it isn’t necessary for people to be burning Wilder’s books in the square for me to see this as indicative of a worrying cultural trend in which the salutary reassessment of our history has begun to cross the line into a shaming and shunning that is, ironically, thoroughly insensitive to historical realities.

Renaming this award is not a recognition of Wilder’s flaws. It is a statement that someone who holds the views she held is unworthy of being honored. If Wilder’s views had actually been those expressed by Ma in the books, I’d agree. But they weren’t. And it is concerning to me if the bar for deeming someone unworthy of being honored has now been set this low by a national organization filled with people who do have some role as cultural arbiters and who, perhaps more to the point, serve as an indication of a certain mindset that is hardly unique to the members of the ALA.

I’m not a relativist. I am perfectly comfortable saying that cultures and eras that are sensitive to diversity and respectful of human difference are, in that respect, superior to cultures and eras that aren’t. Neither should cultural or historic context always serve as sufficient mitigation. There are people who committed deeds and espoused views that were extreme even by the values of their time and place. There are also certain acts that are so shocking to our most basic sense of decency that the fact that it may have been the norm for a certain culture can’t meaningfully lessen the guilt of their perpetrators (I would consider someone like Christopher Columbus to fall into this category - I don’t think we need to change the name of Columbus, Ohio, but I’d get rid of Columbus Day). There is obviously going to be disagreement about where we draw these boundaries. But as I said in an earlier post, once we’re including a woman whose crimes are 1)relatively mild stereotyping, 2) writing a narrative of the American west that is less mindful of the perspectives of Native Americans than it should have been, 3)not explicitly condemning a truly vile opinion espoused by a character in a novel, I think things have gone too far in a way that does have potentially disturbing and destructive implications.

We can acknowledge the flaws of the past without writing off the people of the past.

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@apprenticeprof, Let’s say you were Laura Ingalls Wilder’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter, you had access to her diaries, the Little House books had not been written, and you were writing them today. How would you handle Ma’s casual racism? Would you handle it like Laura Ingalls Wilder did? Leave out the racism entirely? Leave it in, but make it clear that you the author don’t like it? How should we of today handle this?

How should she, writing then, have handled it? Suppose she loved her mother and wanted to portray her favorably, but didn’t like the racism. What should she have done?

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By definition, if you are debating, you are disagreeing.

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@“Cardinal Fang” That’s an interesting question, although I’m not entirely sure what point you’re trying to make in asking me.

One possibility would be not including the line. This wasn’t autobiography; she could have NOT represented her mother as extremely bigoted. Fear of Indians is one thing, and might have been unrealistic to avoid entirely, but she didn’t have to have her mother say “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” out of fidelity to history.

Alternatively, she could have had the other characters push back harder at what Ma was saying in the moment (assuming that they didn’t), and even perhaps get her to admit that she’d been speaking hyperbolically. I’m far from sure that even Ma really would have supported Pa and the other men going out and engaging in an actual massacre of Native American men, women and children.

Then, of course, there are more extreme alternatives, like having a subplot in which a positive encounter with a Native American makes Ma soften her views, but I certainly wouldn’t demand this.

If you’re writing children’s literature today, I don’t think it is too much to accept that, like swear words and extreme violence, background depictions of casual racism aren’t OK. If it is a book explicitly about racial issues, obviously you’re going to have some prejudiced characters, but otherwise that’s one place where I can accept a little bit less realism.

What I think is a somewhat more troubling question is that of how thoroughly a modern LIW would have an obligation to engage deeply with the issue of US treatment of NA at all. Is it and should it be possible for someone to write a historical novel (especially a children’s novel) set in the west in the nineteenth century that more or less deals with the logistics of pioneer life and the interpersonal struggles of one white family without really addressing the overriding ethical issue? Or can someone only write about a family of settlers during that period if they’re going to fill it with lessons in tolerance and criticism of the whole enterprise? I think there should be space for the former kind of story. I don’t - when it comes to children’s books – generally have the same feeling about a story set in the antebellum south.

There was a controversy several years ago when a children’s book about two of George Washington’s slaves baking a cake came out. I think the book wound up being withdrawn, and I was torn over it. From what I could see, the author’s goal was to represent black lives in a story that wasn’t explicitly about slavery, even if the characters were themselves enslaved. And if you want to talk about historical realism, it is certainly true that not every slave was miserable every single day, or that every slave hated his master. Yet, I cringed at the idea of a book for young children that presented a normalized picture of slavery in which a black father and daughter were happily taking pride in baking a cake for Master Washington. On the other hand, we’re then conceding that there are certain types of stories about African-American lives that simply shouldn’t be told because they don’t fit the narrative.

Again, drawing lines is hard.

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Of course, that’s not so far removed from what actually happened, except there were no diaries. The Little House series was written when Laura Ingalls Wilder was in her 60s and 70s, although she had done some local journalism starting in her 40s. Her daughter, Rose, who lived with her, was a very successful author and journalist (ghostwriter, as well, and later Ayn Rand associate), and encouraged her mother to write a memoir of her pioneer childhood as a moneymaking venture. She edited the books, and arranged for their publication. She maybe went so far as actually to write them, too; lots of dispute about that. She had a huge hand in converting the original manuscript into a book for children at the suggestion of a publisher, and she simultaneously wrote some adult novels using the same materials.

Little House on the Prairie is the most artificial of the books. The Ingalls family settled in Indian Territory when Laura was 2 years old and left when she was 4; there’s little or no chance she actually remembered much about their time there. Laura and Rose substantially changed the chronology to make literary Laura older when the family lived there, even though that rendered the story of their settling and leaving completely senseless from a historical standpoint. As I understand it, very little about the book jibes with historical records even of the time the family actually lived there, other than the basic fact of a land rush by settlers who believed Indian land would soon be opened to homesteaders.

In other words, Little House on the Prairie is anything but a faithful personal recollection of Laura’s childhood. It’s a story Laura clearly wanted to tell, probably because it was likely to sell. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it does emphasize that she (and her daughter) was responsible for what story she chose, and how it was told, in 1931. not 1871.

(By the way, Wikipedia reports that Rose Wilder Lane spent a good deal of time in the 1940s as a columnist for an African-American newspaper in Pittsburgh, where she railed continuously against both racism and New Deal collectivism. It seems likely that Rose, at least, would have disagreed with “Ma’s” racism, although it may be equally likely that she thought the Native Americans were doomed by clinging to their primitive socialism.)

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@jhs. Thanks for reading my posts. I think my points are valid. But I was commenting on the world in general in my prior post. Have a nice night.

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I hoped for just the kind of thoughtful response you provided. Thanks.

Edited to add: I particularly like the comments about how the slaves baking the cake is, perhaps, a children’s story we can’t publish, even though there were undoubtedly slaves who were bakers and proud of their pastry skills. (Adults who are interested in slaves who baked should consider Michael Twitty’s wonderful The Cooking Gene.)

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I loved the books I read as a child and suggested one to my then 5-year-old as a harmless novel for very young but strong readers. She got 2 chapters in to book one and wouldn’t go further. Her little vegetarian heart couldn’t handle a chapter detailing pig slaughtering at that age (yep, forgot about that.) She refused to ever give them another try.

I think the issue with Ingalls books is that they seem “innocent” and so we don’t discuss the material with our kids like we would with Huck Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird. If we did, I think they would be great tools for real discussion on what life was like then outside of how sweet it was that a tin cup was a glorious Christmas gift. People would feel less betrayed by the dealings with native and African Americans if they actually remembered that their kids were going to be seeing some language that is so unsavory today.

As to the award, I get why they pulled the name. No issue with that. I just think they handled it incredibly poorly.

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True, that’s why it is called fiction. Sure, there are certainly some autobiographical elements, but based only on the actual words said by characters in a fictional novel, it would be patently unfair to assert that LIW was a “bad person,” or racist (not directing that comment at you). In LHOTP, the character of Laura is only supposed to be 4 or 5. It would not be believable that a child of that age could fully understand the implications of Ma’s attitudes, nor would a child raised to be submissive and obedient be able to effectively and passionately counter that POV.

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Just a sideline here, but people write a lot about authors being imprisoned in their time. But even in their time, authors can learn and evolve their depictions. Dickens’ Fagin was a terrible stereotype of the “evil Jew,” but after some notice by members of society and the Jewish pressand a some thought and change of attitude, Dickens, I think obviously deliberately, wrote the character of Riah in Our Mutual Friend to counteract his other prominent Jewish character, as well as societal prejudices (and probably addressing Shakespeare’s earlier depiction of Shylock, as well.)

Full disclosure–never read any LIW, so I’m not commenting on her approach.

I will add to what JHS said about Huck Finn, though–that is a specifically anti-racist book, and the people who are racist overtly are idiots, while those who need to learn and rise above what they’d been taught, like Huck, do so (“All right, then, I’ll GO to hell”).

Objections to the book are because of the use of the N-word, which was the norm for the time and the characters, not for implicit or explicit condoned racism.

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It seems that even William Shatner has weighed in via his Twitter feed, per my Inside Higher Ed e-mail blast this morning:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/07/06/william-shatner-unleashes-academics-twitter-after-he-criticizes-librarians-over?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=b14eb52958-DNU_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-b14eb52958-198407761&mc_cid=b14eb52958&mc_eid=f7d637b138