Are you a “fan” of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or an “admirer”? Do you need to know every detail of her life, or are you satisfied with the books and television series? Have you ever wondered whether Albert existed, or whether Mary really was blind?
And have you ever felt as though there are people in your life who simply don’t understand why you’d be so, ahem, obsessed?
You’re not alone.
As planning gets underway for LauraPalooza 2010: Legacies, I find myself reminded, again, how often people look down on the “fan” of any kind of popular culture phenomenon, especially one that originates with a character in a media form. I’m intimately familiar with the feeling, as a Laura-lover, Fan of Lois and Clark, and a Trekker. (Seriously.) There’s always that one person in a crowd who raises an eyebrow at the list, and a comment made that might be followed with, “You don’t get out enough.”
(I might notice these same people, however, wearing green-and-gold Packer colors every Sunday during the regular NFL season.)
As a scholar, my interest has been primarily in how media create, shape and sustain community. As an historian, I’ve looked back at how women’s magazines brought together a community of readers that sustained itself despite huge differences in geographic location. As a web designer and writer, I’ve been fascinated by bulletin boards, listservs and, yes, blogs, as media that somehow perform the same function. What all of these communities have in common is one central interest used to bridge a gap between members of the community.
Fandom, in this way of thinking, is much more than an obsession with a media character; it’s a means of reaching out to others with the same interest, creating networks of friends and acquaintances with whom members can be utterly themselves.
What makes Laura fandom unique, however, is that the media-constructed character at the center of our interest is based on a real, living person. And because of that connection, we need to practice restraint in our obsessions. Laura and Mary aren’t just fictional characters in a fictional series; they were real young girls who grew into accomplished adult women in an era full of change in a variety of forms. These women lived and breathed; the “characters” in the books also lived and breathed.
And because they’re no longer with us, they can’t provide answers to questions we have, and they can’t defend themselves against our ruthless speculation and gossip.
One of the stories related by Laura in a column she wrote for the Missouri Ruralist (which she contributed to regularly well before she wrote the Little House books) discusses gossip. Laura was not a particular fan of gossip, if we believe what she wrote in those pieces. She believed it to be a destructive force, unleashed in thoughtlessness and difficult to control.
Perhaps this perception is also why some look down on “fans.”
So, shall we consider ourselves a community of admirers? A community of scholars? A community of Laura-lovers?
As we think ahead to what we might want to discuss at LauraPalooza 2010, consider these questions. The subtitle of the conference is “Legacies.”
What legacy do we want to leave?
Georgiana, Florida, doesn’t really exist as a town anymore even though you can find its name on a map. It probably used to be a bustling community but all that’s left now is the historic Methodist church, where Alice and her husband worshiped and daughter Myrtle was married in 1902, and the graveyard across the street. Still, you can get a sense of how it must have been in Alice’s time. Perched on the shore of the Indian River with plenty of citrus orchards for work, it probably was a pleasant place to live. Apparently the Florida heat and humidity didn’t agree with Alice though. She and Albert moved to Florida to improve his health, which worked for him but her health declined and Alice died in Florida in February 1892 at the age of 39. Laura and Almanzo were living in a completely different part of Florida at that time but I would like to believe that they were able to take a train to Georgiana to visit with Alice before she died.
