by Sharon Barrett
Hillsdale College
[editor's note: Miss Barrett, the daughter of a Texas preacher, a music major at Hillsdale College, and a member of the HC Honors Program, is a fine writer and thinker, full of beauty and conviction. I am honored to post her essay--with her permission--on the importance of fathers to daughters in the Little House series. As many readers of the Imaginative Conservative probably know, Laura Ingalls Wilder despised every aspect of the New Deal. Her stories, in part, offered alternatives to the mechanization of the citizen by the federal government. Each of her stories, exploring the imagination of a child encoutering the frontier, provid a vision of true community and true personhood. Such stories, Vigen Guroian reminds us in his Rallying the Really Human Things, nurture our "natural sense of wonder." Miss Barrett wrote this paper for a course my wife, Dr. Dedra Birzer, is teaching this semester on the fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder.]
Rereading the opening Little House book for the first time in probably half a decade, I was struck by the ways Wilder establishes the point of view for her protagonist—a four-year-old girl and second-born child. She expresses Laura’s thoughts about family members and fairness, for instance, with a simplicity that resonates with children, but with an honesty (untainted by any saccharine attempt to write a “happy,” and thus sappy, children’s book) that appeals to the adult reader as well. The moral and mental universe that she sets up is an appropriate world for a four-year-old, yet it also sets the tone for Laura’s—and the reader’s—maturation throughout the rest of the Little House series.
