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Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture. By Anita Clair Fellman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008.
Reviewed by Claudia Mills
Don't get her wrong: Anita Clair Fellman loves the Little House books. She shared the series with both of her sons, reading as slowly as possible, struggling against tears, willing the books never to end. She can't wait to introduce her well-worn, boxed paperback set of the books to her grandchildren. But it's also clear that the "long shadow" of the title refers not only to Fellman's assessment of Wilder's monumental influence on American culture but also to what she plainly regards as the darker side of that influence.
Fellman's book is itself a monumental undertaking, many years in the making; it is an innovative blend of literary criticism, historical analysis, and reader response theory. The first half of the book engagingly recounts the creation of the Little House books, calling attention to the ways in which Wilder, and her collaborator daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, deliberately deviated from the historical truth of young Laura's life to shape the series in a libertarian and individualist direction. The second half of the book offers an extremely impressive survey of the ways the Little House books have been used in schools, read in homes, and disseminated throughout popular culture. Fellman is scrupulous in making disclaimers about what she can and cannot hope to achieve through this magisterial work: her study can "never be more than suggestive"; she lacks "postelection polls in which voters tell us that they were guided by the lessons of the Little House books" (4). But the case she constructs here, in its painstaking accumulation of detail, is compelling.
The book's central argumentative chapter, "Revisiting the Little House," documents the numerous ways in which Wilder and Lane reshaped events from Laura's own life to highlight the themes of individualism, self-sufficiency, and anti-statism. Although the Ingalls family socialized...