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.