You Cannot Read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Self-Insert Mary Sue Fanfiction as a Historical Document

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us About the Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish by Barbara Boustead
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To me, the hardest concept to grasp about the Little House on the Prairie books is that they’re fiction. And to be honest, that’s because they’re not completely fiction! But also, they are! Confusingly for fiction, the main characters all have the names of the author and her real family. Confusingly for non-fiction, the characters don’t adhere to the timeframe of the author’s life. But confusingly for fiction, they operate in a similar timeframe. The stories that are told most resemble fanfiction, i.e. the retelling of a canonical story in a different way to achieve a different effect or result. And because Wilder wrote them about herself, I guess they MOST most resemble self-insert fanfiction, although even that isn’t quite right because the canonical story IS about Wilder. Does Laura sometimes come off better in the stories than she did in real life? Then maybe she wrote self-insert Mary Sue fanfic. Or should we just ignore the self-insert part? Then maybe she wrote AU fanfic.

Or we could just admit that Wilder invented, and is nearly the only author within, a specific sub-genre that conflates memoir with fiction. The other authors within this genre are the ones who claimed they wrote memoirs but then got caught lying in them. It’s interesting that Wilder chose to overtly fictionalize her story rather than push her memoir forward, but of course that’s the fault of those who wouldn’t publish Pioneer Girl as-is. BUT it worked out for the best, because her Little House books are much stronger than Pioneer Girl. And so back we go to the scenario in which Wilder invents a new sub-genre of literature!

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

All this to say that I did find it problematic that Wilder Weather sometimes seems to conflate fact with fiction, or rather, doesn’t always overtly distinguish between the two when discussing the Little House books and/or Wilder’s actual life. There were absolutely some acknowledgments, but the awareness didn’t feel explicit on a case-by-case basis. An example that stuck out to me was the discussion of the scene in These Happy Golden Years in which Laura and Almanzo see a tornado. Boustead writes, “In These Happy Golden Years, Laura immediately notices the heat and humidity on Thursday, 28 August 1884 (not a Sunday as her book narrative would indicate).” That reads as a clear acknowledgment that the Little House books and Wilder’s life are not the same, but it doesn’t feel like an acknowledgment that Wilder did this on purpose, or that perhaps she simply made no effort to verify a specific date because it didn’t matter in her work of fiction--it just as easily reads as if Wilder made a mistake with her dates.

The day is important because this is the day of the tornado. In These Happy Golden Years, Almanzo and Laura are out riding in Manly’s buggy, when a storm begins to form in the distance:

“Almost overhead now, the tumbling, swirling clouds changed from black to a terrifying greenish-purple. They seemed to draw themselves together, then a groping finger slowly came out of them and stretched down, trying to reach the earth. It reached, and pulled itself up,and reached again.
“How far away is that?” Laura asked.
“Ten miles, I’d say,” Almanzo replied.
It was coming toward them, from the northwest, as they sped toward the northeast. No horses, fast as they ran, could outrun the speed of those clouds. Green-purple, they rolled in the sky above the helpless prairie, and reached toward it playfully as a cat’s paw torments a mouse.
A second point came groping down, behind the first. Then another. All three reached and withdrew and reached again, down from the writhing clouds.”

Boustead notes about Almanzo’s estimate of the distance to the tornado that “[h]is memory was probably quite accurate; though Wilder tended to exaggerate distances in her books, Almanzo had a clearer sense of distance.”

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Here’s the thing, though: that version of the tornado anecdote is from the fiction book. The Almanzo who estimated the distance is a work of fiction, his placement in a buggy with Laura as they witness the tornado ten miles away is also a work of fiction. There’s no indication that the real Almanzo’s memory was consulted for this fictionalized anecdote, nor that the real Wilder’s authorial estimates of distance were “exaggerations” and not purposeful components of her descriptions of her fictional world.

Here’s the anecdote from Pioneer Girl, Wilder’s memoir:

“One afternoon we saw a bad storm rising in the northwest. It came up for awhile, then turned and swung around passing to the west of us going south. The large bank of clouds was first black, then turned a queer greenish, purple color and from it a funnel shaped cloud dropped down until its point touched the ground. With its point on the ground and the large end of the funnel in the cloud above it began whirling and traveled southward with the purple green cloud above it.
Then a second funnel point dropped, touched the ground and followed the first, then another and there were three under the cloud and traveling swiftly with it.
The wind was almost still where we were and we stood in the dooryard and watched the cloud and its funnels pass on the west of us.”

The memoir narrative is clearly describing the same tornado (there’s even a photo of what most academics assume to be the tornado being described--it was a famous tornado!), but in this narrative, which is intended to be factual, the “we” is likely referring to the Ingalls family, and they are at home, since they stood “in the dooryard” and watched the tornado pass to their west. Unless there is some kind of correspondence or interview notes that also support the factuality of the These Happy Golden Years anecdote, it feels like an odd choice to discuss the factual accuracy of minor details in the fictional account when there’s a fact-based account that could be discussed. It would have been super interesting to theorize whether or not that famous tornado’s path could have been seen from the doorway of the Ingalls’ homestead!

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Boustead also mentions the floating door that merits a story of its own in These Happy Golden Years, noting that it “stretches credulity.” The door story is told a little more sedately in Pioneer Girl, but as hear-say, not witnessed by Pa and Almanzo as is told in the fiction book. Whenever there’s an exciting incident in the Little House books that doesn’t happen to Laura, I always wonder if that was a part that Rose Wilder Lane authored, since she was the sensationalist.

Also, the Pioneer Girl anecdote would have better supported Boustead’s claim that the tornado they saw was THE famous tornado, since it’s much more likely that the family would have been in their dooryard on a Thursday than that Laura and Almanzo would have been buggying about the plains on a Thursday. Laura and Almanzo courted on SUNDAYS!

Tangent, but when I went to look up the tornado anecdote in These Happy Golden Years, I saw that it was very near the end of the book, so I obviously sat down to keep reading, and omg the scenes in which Laura is preparing to leave her home and family to move in with Almanzo, feeling sad and nostalgic and homesick even though she hasn’t left yet, excited about what’s to come while mourning everything she’s leaving behind--well, I don’t know if you need to be putting those words in front of perimenopausal empty nesters, because I cried so many cries for a Tuesday afternoon! It was beautiful in a way that I absolutely did not appreciate until this read-through.

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

All that being said, I was VERY interested in reading about all the historic weather events and patterns that occurred during Wilder’s life and that informed her books. It’s obvious from page one of Little House in the Big Woods that Wilder has a mind for detail and a knack for description, and it was fascinating to see how many famous weather events can be matched to their fiction counterparts just by description alone. It was also interesting to see points where the factual accounts didn’t match the fictional counterparts, and it made me wonder what other authorial purpose they were then serving, what Wilder might have wanted to convey differently. Why, for instance, would she have Laura and Almanzo witness that tornado from Almanzo’s buggy? Perhaps because, unlike in the previous books in which Laura is a child and her family comprise her other main characters, in this book she saw Almanzo as the other main character, so the most exciting events should happen in his company? Or perhaps because those Sunday buggy rides actually read as pretty boring, and this was a more exciting way to convey that the courtship is still happening?

I also thought that the discussion of the climate during Wilder’s time, both in itself and vs. our time, was incredibly interesting, and I wouldn’t have skipped reading this book for the world just for that info. It was heartbreaking to learn that those Dakota tree claims that gave the Wilder family such agony during their four-year homestead duration would never have worked… although Pa’s cottonwoods at his own homestead did survive. I’ve seen them!

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