Little House on the Prairie Reboot!
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Anonymous
Have you read the books? In the first couple of books Laura and Mary absolutely had to have solemn Sundays were they couldn't run, plays, or make noise. It was about quiet reflection, studying the Bible, playing quietly. Historically this was very accurate that many families kept Sundays as a day of rest in the 1870's when Laura was a child. No work or play. Pa tells her about her grandfather because she was in trouble for playing with Jack their dog and running around with him making noise. Her grandfather's times were even stricter but even in Laura's time period Sundays seemed really awful for a kid. I only remember this part because I read first book out loud to my boys when they were around 5 and 7 and they kept asking about why they had to be so quiet and talked about how hard that must be. |
Anonymous
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It's funny how the critiques of the LH books are both that they are too racist AND that they whitewashed too much.
Whether Pa was a good guy or a bad one in real life doesn't matter because LIW was writing fiction, not autobiography. And as fiction, the Little House books are superb. There is no better depiction of pioneer life in children's fiction than the Little House books. They are unparalleled. |
Anonymous
Not PP, but my dad was much, much better than this. Sorry that your dad was so terrible. |
Anonymous
Is Greta Gerwig looking to ruin Narnia the same way she ruined Little Women? Get that woman out of Hollywood. |
Anonymous
100% agree. |
Anonymous
Yes. But the producer is worse. She is gleeful about ruining Narnia in all her interviews. |
Anonymous
[twitter]
I was prepared to hate it after reading criticism on dcum because I am an anne traditionalist but I actually really liked it and don’t know what the naysayers were complaining about. Definitely not horrific dark and twisted. I thought it was very sweet. |
Anonymous
F— you. My dad was great and he died recently so I hope you feel really good about yourself. |
Anonymous
A PP. I think it's definitely interesting for adults to understand the real lives of the people in the stories. I do think Laura Ingalls Wilder felt she was conveying her truth. What she left out seems to have been stuff that would have been gratuitously depressing. Bonus hardships if you like. And I believe the daughter amped up the self-reliance. There's quite a lot of community-building and charity in the books so it's hard for me to feel that some aspect of their lives really got covered up. I think the real PA screwed up a lot basically because he was poor but had an entrepreneurial spirit and he was trying to do better than subsistence agriculture. In established settled lands, land cost a lot of money and his family apparently didn't have much money to help him set up a household. So he tried a bunch of ways to get a farm set up through sweat equity. One thing we haven't talked about here was the possible impact of not having sons on the dynamic. I believe I read in real life the Ingalls had a boy baby who died. With all daughters, it was just Pa who could do the jobs requiring a man's physical strength. Of course the girls helped, but the lack of boys might have been an aspect of bad luck for the Ingalls with respect to farm production capacity. Also Mary really did go blind. So they also had a special needs kid who couldn't do all the normal chores. I've visited the Almanzo Wilder birthplace in Malone, NY. It's a pretty decent farmhouse- not a crude cabin. He and several of his siblings went West to get free farmland. It was their way of getting established in life. They seemed to do o.k. at getting established until Almanzo got that disease which made him limp. |
Anonymous
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Ugh, I’m not happy about this.
Look, I loved the books as a kid. They’re great fantasy. But the actual history behind the books is absolutely twisted. Laura’s daughter, Rose, was a huge libertarian/individualist (along with being anti-Semitic) and heavily edited the books to match her political beliefs. From what I remember, Pa was a drunk and left his family so destitute they received public aid along with aid from their neighbors, or else they would have starved. He dragged them around so much to escape debts he owed. Laura was worried she would be sold into servitude. Prairie life was also absolutely horrific. Prairie madness, abuse, and death was common. But this series is just most political indoctrination into the whole “America was great!” BS that men were men, women were women, families were happy, people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and we need to get back to those times. |
Anonymous
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PP. But weren't the debts mostly related to the farms not working out? I don't think Charles had much other skill to offer. You will remember the many disasters they experienced with weather and crops.
As for alcoholism, I'm not going to condone it but that was pretty much the most common escapism/entertainment they had. I've been doing my European genealogy and they were pretty much living the same life ... hand to mouth farmers with a tendency towards alcoholism. Moved to the U.S., became factory workers, got compulsory public education, started bettering themselves and joined the white collar world. I think this was a ubiquitous part of the Agricultural Revolution transition. |
Anonymous
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I suspect they had a x related genetic disorder. Ma, Laura and I think Rose all had still born sons or ones who died in infancy. Not having sons definitely had a negative impact on their financial condition. Plus Pa’s really obvious adhd and then a string of bad luck with weather.
I think leaving out the particularly depressing parts was absolutely a common thing for almost all people born before maybe 1950. How many of you have grandparents that suffered through the Great Depression or survived/fled the holocaust and how much did they talk about the really awful stuff, versus talking about the happy memories, or even telling the “it was tough but we banded together” type stories? Or grandparents who lost a young child and never told the surviving children about it? My grandmother was raised by a woman who lost almost all her family in the Irish famine and probably spent most of her childhood starving (and possibly in a work home) but never said word one about that to her grandchildren. She talked about the herbs and flowers they had, the language, etc etc. No one taught the Irish famine in school back then so my grandmother didn’t even know to ask her grandmother to talk about it. The view was that it didn’t help anybody to relive all the worst memories. But even with that said, the books are pretty horrific. When her dad left to go find work and they didn’t hear from him for months and months and probably thought he had died and they’d never know how/when/where, and he almost froze to death/starved getting back to them…. Or the story where they all had. Cholera or whatever and were dying in their beds all too weak to stand and get water until a doctor just happened to be passing by and stopped in their cabin? That’s insane. |
Anonymous
PP here. From what I remember, there were issues where Pa would be too drunk to harvest their crops, and the whole family would have starved if not for the help of others. The debts came because he was a terrible businessman. The real problem, though, is this idealized version of what prairie life was like. The "Good Old Days" fallacy, similar to what we do with the 1950s. It sets people up to think we need to go back to those times. Which is why there's a growing number of men (and sadly, women) who want to revoke women's rights, because they think that they would be successful and their wives would support them and everyone would be happy if only we could go back to those times when people had zero other options. See: MAGA. When the reality is that most men wouldn't be successful, women would be trapped in abusive marriages, children would die and be abused, substance abuse and mental health disorders run rampant, and most would be in poverty. I would fully support a historically accurate version. Show people what life was really like and that the American Dream wasn't a reality. We want progress, not reverting back to the past. |
Anonymous
I understand what you're trying to say. However, as a girl reading those books in the 1970s, I enjoyed them but definitely did not want to join that world: -Everything you owned in a wagon -Dangerous animals that could kill you -Your toys are mostly made of fruits and vegetables except maybe one or two things -Christmas is 2 pieces of candy, an orange, and new mittens, and maybbbe one good toy -Lots of behavior control -All your houses are crappy - especially the mud cave sod house - didn't the roof fall in? -About once a year you get a barrel from back East with some rations and a few magazines (The Atlantic!) -You have to keep moving because your Dad is not able to successfully execute his occupational plans -Your sister goes blind because of incurable diseases Fascinating books but the circumstances were not enviable. |
Anonymous
Can you provide a source for Pa having a drinking problem? |