Monday, October 15, 2012
Little House
You want to talk about nostalgia? This book takes me back to grade school when we would read Little House and play "The Oregon Trail" on our computers. I was never into this book as much as other kids were, but I have a new found respect for it if you will. I recently moved for the first time in my life and I had some hard emotions giving up the only house I ever knew, with all the memories and good times. The security of moving into an unknown area felt weak at best. I can only imagine how the family felt from the point of view of everyone in the house. As a father I'm sure Ol' Pa Chuck had a lot on his plate to bear, not knowing the Unknown. Ma was trying to gather the family and keep them together during the rough times and the kids were worried about insignificant oddities outside of survival. I think its cool though looking back now how as a kid I seen this as a book, but now I can appreciate it's historical merit. We tend to stop telling the youth stories now through families and I see a noticeable shift to computers as the means of sharing social stories and whatnot. What would have happened if Ma, Pa and Mary couldn't tell Laura the story? We would lose out on one of the greatest American Historical series in literature. As I said on day one I am a fanatic of words and language, which is why I believe I have such an eclectic taste in music, so from this book I can extract what language was like in the 1800's and that is so unique. I'll never live in the past, at least I don't think. This book tells a story that is so important for that regard. Shouldn't we all write our stories down? Won't our stories be meaningful to students of the year 3000 learning about the 21st Century? These are all things I believe we should do in order to follow the lead the Ingalls shared.
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I like that you brought up this theme of moving for the first time. That aspect hadn't even crossed my mind as a theme in "Little House." But, now that you mention it, I can see a whole different narrative thread running through it. We never moved as a family when I was a kid (well, when I was one, but I don't remember any of that). However, I do remember the first time I moved away from home. It was when I joined the Army. I wasn't packing everything I owned away, but I was going into a den of wolves and would be amidst many other wild and scary things. I'd be encountering many types of people: helpful, savage, knowledgeable, accepting, and bigot alike. I've wrote about some in my attempt to get a memoir of my Army time going. In a lot of ways, there are narrative threads that link back to what Laura sees in the behaviors of other people, good and bad. I think that's just the way the world is and probably always will be. That's why I like how everyone is portrayed in "Little House." It doesn't try to mask behavior so much.
ReplyDeleteThe significance of story telling is something human history is indebted to, otherwise all of life's past events would've have been long lost and we could not have retained the vital knowledge and tools to progress and develop as a united race. The Oral Tradition is an incipient galvanizing of shared experience and "Little House" was largely constructed because of Laura Ingalls-Wilder's dependence on historical research that transcribed the prairie life for others to view and understand AND her parent's memories that helped shaped the fictionalized plot.
ReplyDeleteTo comment on your take of the Ingalls moving and how that was pivotal in their family life, I agree that they went into the "wild" part of the country, the Unknown with fears of facing the unfamiliar. However, there was the looming threat of the rumored enemies, the Osage Indians and their savage danger. Ma especially felt this danger to be very real and treated the manner with a stereotypical mix of fright and ignorance/misunderstanding.
I wondered about that too. How could he just keep uprooting his family and moving them to another place. What I didn't understand was why didn't he just go farther out that he initially did? If he would have just stayed out of Indian Country, they never would have had to move. I felt Ma was over the top in this novel and needed to watch what she said around her kids and how she reacted to things more than what other people were saying and doing.
ReplyDeleteI think moving from a familiar place is an experience many have experienced. It's one of the reasons why I think many can relate to this book. It's very cool to look at this book from a historical perspective, and despite the fact that we will never truly know what it was like to live in the 1800s, it's nice to sill be able to find similarities and relate to people from that time period.
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