Sandra’s excellent post last week about Rose’s contributions to On The Way Home made me think about our expectations of Laura. Not Laura the book character but Laura, the real woman.
Most people probably think of Laura as the embodiment of sweet, simple, old-fashioned things. I often see her quote - ”I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all” – in blogs that have nothing to do with LIW herself. It’s a great quote and it comes from an even greater Ruralist article but sometimes I think if I see it one more time, I’ll throw up. Please don’t misunderstand me, I like the quote too but I think the overuse of it epitomizes many people’s very one-dimensional view of Laura. We think of her as good and sweet, representing everything that’s lovely in the world and we forget that she was a very human woman with all the contradictions and complexities that exist in each one of us.
We know Laura had a bit of a temper in the books as a young girl but she seemed to grow out of that as she matured, learning to curb her tongue while she absorbed the lessons that Ma and Pa taught her about how a young woman should act. Yet she admits to a temper as an adult in her Ruralist articles and at least one memorable first person interview, with a woman whose mother was friends with Laura and Almanzo, talks about the fact that Laura had a flaring temper. I must admit I was a little shocked the first time I read this, I tended to think of Laura as a sweet, quiet lady – more like Ma.
Yet another contradiction – who among us hasn’t been inspired to cook, clean, bake or garden because of Laura’s writings but the truth is that Laura didn’t really like doing any of these things. I had such an obsession with baking bread as a teenager, trying to connect with my “inner Laura” so it was a shock to learn that Laura never enjoyed baking bread, hating the feel of the dry flour on her hands.
One thing that many Laura fans discuss is her relationship with her daughter Rose. To say it was complicated appears to be an understatement. When I was younger, I blamed Rose, thinking that she twisted and exaggerated everything in order to justify feeling sorry for herself. Now, as an adult survivor of complicated mother/daughter relationships I realize there’s probably some truth on both sides and that Laura might not have been a perfect mother any more than Rose was a perfect daughter.
Do we need Laura to be “good” or could we handle finding out information that contradicts our mental picture? As a fan, would you be shocked to find out something about Laura that was less than favorable? Does finding out more about the real woman take away your enjoyment of the books at all? I know for me, it’s been a journey and sometimes I find it hard to give up my own ideas of who Laura was. I guess we’ll never really know, all we have left is what she wrote and what others wrote about her, but I’d love to hear how you feel about it.
Well, if I could learn more in little doses…
Last summer I stumbled into reading the collected journals of L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. I knew nothing about her life and expected the journals to be just like Anne. Imagine my shock as each subsequent volume (she was prolific–there are 5 thick volumes of journals) found her sinking further and further into depression. Just as I was finishing reading the journals, which were terrifying by the end, I found an article in which her granddaughter was quoted as saying Montgomery had committed suicide, something the family kept quiet for a long time. Well! That didn’t exactly jive with Anne of Green Gables!
That said, once I absorbed it, I had an entirely new appreciation for Montgomery and her work, and the battles she’d gone through to write it. So, yeah, I don’t really mind finding out Laura wasn’t all sunshine and sugar. And since I’m also the adult survivor of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, I’d really like to know more honest details about that.
Oh, that “sweet, simple things” quote makes me weary, too. I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks that.
And I seem to remember reading in one of the biographies (and now I can’t recall which one), that Laura sometimes liked to drink beer and fretted to Rose about what the folks in Mansfield must think. I hadn’t expected that, but I can’t say I mind knowing it!
Amy, I’d encourage you to read The Gift of Wings, by Mary Rubio, for another perspective on Montgomery and her journals.
As for me, I don’t expect Laura to be perfect at all, and I think she’d be surprised that people have come away with that impression. After all, she certainly doesn’t paint herself as perfect in her self-characterization — it’s all about how perfect Mary is, and how very hard it is for her to be good. Yes, she improves as she grows, but that temper still erupts from time to time and I’m glad. Perfect people can be dreadfully dull — Laura’s fiery temper spices things up.
I’m with Rebecca — I never expected her to be perfect, which is one reason I loved her.
My favorite Laura anecdote is that she cried and carried on until Almanzo consented to replacing the brick chimney with a natural stone chimney. Sounds so like me!
I remember being very disheartened when I met two female gospel singers who were older and that I had pictured as “sweet gray haired old ladies”. There was nothing sweet about either of them!
I have to admit, I think I would like to know the unperfect side of Laura. It would make her even more human.
I have to admit, I always liked Nellie’s tantrums on the tv show. So, a few real tantrums would be great and fun to read about!
I have to go with Dr. Laura on the stone chimney. When I visited Mansfield, when they said she cried to help get her way, my husband nudged me with his elbow.
I absolutely love the chimney story too, Dr. Laura! It it exactly something I would have done.
My thought is that those who read the Little House books and maybe the “Rose books” may idealize what they see as the “perfect Laura”. They read that Laura married Almanzo, had her little Rose, moved to the Land of the Big Red Apple and decided, one day, to start writing about her life. They don’t know, or care to know, the real Laura. And that’s okay for them.
I have loved learning about the real Laura. It makes her seem all the more human to me and not just a character in a book. I agree with Rebecca. She never tried to portray herself as perfect and I never saw her that way.
I loved reading that Laura actually used some of that “rough language” she wondered about as a child. I never knew she liked to drink an occasional beer, but that’s just another quality that endears her to me. Please, please don’t tell me she smoked a pipe down in the Ozarks. I just don’t know if I could picture that. lol
As far as her quote about the sweet, simple things in life, I find it to be true. My favorite thing to do in the evenings is sit on my porch swing with my husband, drinking a cup of coffee, watching the birds at the feeders. Just because I like that particular quote doesn’t mean I think Laura was all sweetness and sunshine. It just wouldn’t be possible.
I never thought of Laura as being a goody-goody, but merely as a decent person.
It was Mary who was the goody-goody, while Laura always had some “spice” to her. I always thought of Laura as being more like Pa, and playing the role of the son he never got to raise, and Mary being more like Ma. And I saw Carrie as one who split the difference between Laura and Mary — not quite as independent as Laura, but not anywhere near as passive as Mary.
As a kid reading the books, I always imagined that it would be Laura who would have adjusted better if she’d been brought forward to live in the 1960s with me, than would Mary, who was Victorian through and through.
Laura’s independent, rebellious, curious, and dare we say…feminist…streak was always prominent in the books for me. I also got the message that it was the spunky girls who got to do things and have fun, rather than the proper passive ones.
Laura’s naughty side showed clearly in the Tay Pay Pryor passage in LTOTP, where she laughed at the men, much like a man would have at the time, rather than getting the vapors and being horrified and shocked like a proper lady was supposed to feel then.
In sum, I’ve always viewed Laura and being quite human, which served to endear the books to me even more.
Count me as one who loves the crying-to-get-her-way story.
This is such an excellent post, Jonni. Again, as I seem to do repeatedly — and annoyingly — I’m drawn toward the timeline. Laura the person wrote about Laura the character after she grew up and began to drink beer and swear. I turn this over and over in my mind a lot. What made her decide what parts of her character to accentuate? We do see growth in Laura the child as she matures into Laura the young woman. Laura (the writer) was familiar with these struggles (as was, one presumes, Rose) as something that would be relatable with a young reader.
Relocating as I did as an adult to farm country and marrying a farmer (who would have thought?) I have also thought about these things on a personal level. Preferring my bread machine to making bread from scratch was somehow more acceptable knowing how much Laura hated making bread.
As most have said here, she was just human. And that quote is certainly overused, but she DID say it, and it is indeed one of those timeless truths that we can carry into tomorrow. Encapsulating sentiments like those is one of the things that makes her Laura Wilder — not Laura Ingalls the girl or Laura Ingalls Wilder the writer, but Laura Wilder, the adult who lived in on a small-town farm in Mansfield, Missouri for fifty years.
I was always bothered by the tv show because it made the Ingalls seem so different from how I came to know them as people. The books were written for children, to tell them something of what the pioneer life was like but there was so much more to Laura and her family–and what happened to them after the first four years ended. They were people just like anyone else, who lived a tougher life than most of us ever will.