Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellmann

Author:Lucy Ellmann [Ellmann, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913111212
Amazon: 191311113X
Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
Published: 2021-06-29T23:00:00+00:00

Her clued-up daughter, the writer and journalist Rose Wilder Lane, warned Wilder there was no market for children’s fiction. But, in need of money, Laura pressed on and between 1932 and 1943 produced a big hit, her eight-volume series of autobiographical novels. Beginning with Little House in the Big Woods, set in Wisconsin, the books, based on Wilder’s experiences as a child, were aimed at a young audience. They’re adventure stories but also catalogue her absorption in nature and the domestic realm. They illustrate the female side of the Western Expansion, and follow a family triumphing against tremendous odds to retain a way of life that incorporated play, music, education, and kindness. Not a bad way to live, on the whole.

Yes, there are troubling blunders and omissions: the chapter on the minstrel play, for which Wilder’s father wore blackface, is unbearable to read. It is now a chastening record of a tributary of racism that for some time people regarded as merely lighthearted pranks: dressing up as African Americans. And Wilder is not sympathetic enough toward Native Americans either. She’s hardly cognisant of them. She isn’t callous, exactly – leave that to Betty MacDonald in The Egg and I (1945). MacDonald never stops bad-mouthing in the bitterest of terms all the Indians she encountered during her own Western adventure (at the age of twenty, she married the first bloke that came along, and to her surprise he wanted to live on a farm). Macdonald speaks more highly of the local drunks! Wilder, on the contrary, had a humility and innate morality that saved her from outright bigotry. She even admits to some shame about the treaty betrayals, abuse, genocide and displacement of Native Americans that were taking place around her as a child.

She has a refreshingly pragmatic attitude to the idea of America too, that is never overly obsequious or smug – a respectable stance in a country that has now gone belly-up under the weight of self-styled patriots. Wilder could tell an ignoramus when she saw one. She was not unaware of Native Americans, nor intolerant of them, but had very little contact with them. So, compared to MacDonald’s obnoxious hostility, Wilder’s occasional hesitancy on the subject seems fairly mild for the times. A pity that in her first book, she myopically claimed their little house in the Big Woods was far from any other people, when in fact many Native Americans lived nearby. She also treats her mother’s distaste for Native Americans as a legitimate point of view, though Wilder herself isn’t sold on it. Jack the faithful bulldog is: he was so antagonistic towards Indigenous Americans that he became a liability. When the family built a cabin – illegally – in Indian Territory, Jack had to be tied up a lot so he wouldn’t make trouble.

Wilder mentions in By the Shores of Silver Lake that white men slaughtered all the wild buffalo (on which Native Americans depended). So she’s somewhat aware of the sins of colonialism, and disapproves.

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