The Wilder Life (13 page)

As it happened, my first acquaintance was by accident in 1992. “What the hell is this?” I'd asked my college roommate, Kelly, when the catalog showed up in our apartment's mailbox. “Why are we getting this creepy doll stuff?” She didn't know how it had come to us, either; it seemed the catalog had been addressed to a previous tenant or otherwise mistakenly sent. Yet neither of us could bring ourselves to throw it out.

“I can't stop looking at it,” Kelly admitted one day.

“I know!” I said. When I wasn't writing English papers, I'd curl up on our thrift-store couch with a Camel Light 100 and flip through the pages studying each of the historical dolls. At the time there were only four American Girls: Kirsten, of course, and Felicity from Williamsburg; also Samantha, the Victorian one, and Molly, the bespectacled girl from the 1940s. The accessories amazed me: little wooden armoires and kitchen chairs, tiny baskets for bitsy golden brown loaves of bread, straw hats, bandanna-sized quilts, mini trunks. Felicity had the snobbiest accoutrements, but Kirsten's things had a folk-art cuteness, and I wanted some of Molly's stuff full-sized for my apartment, especially that retro dinette set.

I wouldn't fully give myself over to it, though. It was decadent, useless, expensive crap. The dolls themselves cost as much as a monthly car payment, and even the accessories were pricier than most of the clothes I bought at Ragstock. American Girl represented a spendy middle-class existence that I didn't want to partake in.

I still felt a little of that as Kara and I walked around the store's first floor, watching the families carrying big red American Girl Place shopping bags along with their bags from Bloomingdale's and Banana Republic. More than once we spotted a little girl whose American Girl–purchased outfit matched her doll's clothes, and group outings where gaggles of well-groomed mothers blocked the aisles.

“A little Stepfordish in here, isn't it?” Kara whispered.

“I know. Sorry,” I said. “Let's look at the books.” I steered her over to the appropriate section.

As a children's book editor, I've come to grudgingly admire the American Girl books. Their very first books were historical fiction chapter books that accompanied their doll characters. They were full of tidy morals and prefab story arcs that even the boilerplate titles give away: each girl Learns a Lesson and Saves the Day and so on. Imagine the Little House books written by literate robots, and you get a sense of what the early books were like.

But that was then: these days American Girl courts established children's writers to write their fiction titles and have a respectable line of expert-approved nonfiction guides that cover self-esteem, bullying, and other tough subjects (an impressive feat, because, really,
you
try explaining eating disorders to a ten-year-old).

We wandered around the book displays, looking at the rows and rows of novel covers showing spirited heroines getting their skirts muddy in the midst of brave rescues or tomboyish adventures. Across from the wall of the historical books were all the guides and advice books, including
The Smart Girl's Guide to Parties, The Care and Keeping of You, Stand Up for Yourself and Your Friends.
There were books about dealing with boys, siblings, emotions; books about dancing, knitting, food, diaries, hair. It seemed American Girl had a book for every aspect of girlhood, collectively forming an encyclopedic master guide to being a girl. It made me feel a little jealous, though I think American Girl has a book for that, too.

A lot of what
I
learned about being a girl I learned from Laura Ingalls. I discovered that it helps if you try to love your own brown hair as much as you love your pa's. Not for nothing, it also helps to know that feeling bad about your looks is apparently such a universal thing that even little girls who live in isolated Wisconsin cabins (as far as one can get from fashion magazines) can experience it. I also have this crazy theory that the scene when Laura gets leeches on her legs in
On the Banks of Plum Creek
is a metaphorical preparation for menstruation, so that when Laura finds it terrifying and gross at first but quickly learns to deal with it, it brings us girls all one step closer to being able to handle
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
Of course you're welcome to disagree.

However, I never agree with those who characterize Laura as a “tomboy.” I know it's a widely held notion, no doubt put forth and perpetuated by folks who identify with Laura and who, unlike me, considered themselves to be tomboys in
their
childhoods. While I'm willing to accept many things as matters of interpretation, wherein your Laura Ingalls Wilder is different from mine, I'm holding my ground here: LAURA IS NOT A TOMBOY.

I will not deny that Laura did some decidedly un-girly things in the books, especially in
On the Banks of Plum Creek.
I understand that haystacks were climbed and old crabs were taunted. However, I refuse to believe these things make Laura a tomboy. I will also cite page 146 of my
Little Town on the Prairie
paperback, which states that Laura “was not really a tomboy,” just a girl who sometimes likes to play catch and ante-over (whatever that is) with the younger boys at recess, and is therefore merely “tomboyish” (see page 145), a distinction that I maintain is important. It's enough for her just to be a
girl
, even if she doesn't throw like one, okay?

I suspect a good deal of the tomboy associations come from Melissa Gilbert's rendition of Laura on the NBC television show, with her chirpy voice, spunky demeanor, and occasional tendency (inherited, of course, from her TV dad) to throw punches. I'll accept
that
Laura as a tomboy, I suppose, but not the book Laura. Plus the TV Laura had a sort of string-beany awkwardness to her and stomped around in her tight pigtails as if waiting for adolescence to relieve her from skinny androgyny. (Though in Miss Gilbert's defense, I don't imagine that “as round and strong as a little French horse” is a type much in demand among Hollywood actresses.)

Whereas the Laura who lived in those yellow paperback pages appeared, in those Garth Williams illustrations, much more unabashedly feminine, with her bare feet and the gently rippling skirt she lifted to romp through the grass on the cover of
On the Banks of Plum Creek.
I held that image in my mind constantly while growing up: in all its sensual freedom, it seemed to me the very essence of girlhood.

Maybe what bugs me the most about the tomboy designation is the way it implies that Laura's grubby antics are somehow beyond the realm of ordinary girl experience. Certainly
Plum Creek
never draws that line, and by the time I'd reached that book in the series I understood that Laura did more so-called boyish things because she was a pioneer girl. Children's book reviewer Christine Heppermann, in an essay in
Horn Book Magazine,
describes a typical frontier experience for girls, one that matches Laura's almost exactly:

These hard-working, nature-savvy girls couldn't have all just happened to be tomboys, could they? I loved that Laura trapped fish with Pa and rounded up oxen run amok because she
had
to. Or maybe I loved that she had to and still got to be a girl.

My earliest years were spent watching my brother Steve's life and trying to decipher all the ways in which I could or could not follow his example. I was often fascinated with his Cub Scout activities but eventually figured out that my interest could only remain vicarious: there would be no Pinewood Derby for me. My parents were fairly progressive and I doubt they ever discouraged me from so-called boy things like sports and other pursuits, but I could intuit, the way kids seem to understand, that my brother's world wasn't quite mine. I distinctly remember sitting in his room and flipping through one of his magazines feeling profoundly bored and left out. Never mind that the magazine was
Boys' Life
! It still didn't seem fair.

This is not to say I rejected “girl things”—dolls and dresses and so on. Rather I pursued them fervently, partly out of the need to distinguish my existence from my brother's, and partly out of the terror that perhaps I wasn't
Enough
of a girl.

I was particularly obsessed with both long hair and long dresses. The hair was really the sore point. Mine was cut in a very short pageboy because my mom had found my fine, straight hair difficult to manage; it was different from her own, which was thick and wavy. Sometimes, especially when I wore my brother's hand-me-down clothes, strangers in restaurants would mistake me for male. I thank God and the '70s that maxi dresses were in style, allowing me to own a floor-length pink gingham dress that I would've worn every day if given the chance.

But being the '70s, it also meant I was part of one of the first generations of girls to grow up hearing the message that we could be whatever we wanted. So much well-meaning children's programming, like
Sesame Street
and
Free to Be You and Me
, encouraged us to defy social rules we had yet to fully understand; all the while, the pink and pretty trappings of conventional girliness called to us, too. Years after I wore out that gingham dress I had a college job at a preschool and watched one of the four-year-old girls, whose hair was as short as mine had once been, race around the playground with a skirt on her head to simulate a wig. “Don't tell her to take it off,” the teacher told me. “She gets upset.”

I found the world of the Little House books to be so much less confusing, not just because it was “simpler,” as plenty of people love to insist, but because it reconciled all the little contradictions of my modern girlhood.
On the Banks of Plum Creek
clicked with me especially, with its perfect combination of pinafores and recklessness. (I will direct your attention to the illustration on page 31 of my
Plum Creek
paperback, where you will note how fabulous Laura looks as she pokes the badger with a stick; her style is casual yet feminine, perfect for precarious nature adventures!) At an age when I found myself wanting both a Webelos uniform
and
a head of beautiful Superstar Barbie hair,
On the Banks of Plum Creek
was a reassuring book. Being a girl sometimes made more sense in Laura World than it did in real life.

I must have also appreciated the way the first few Little House books keep boys at the periphery. (The one major exception, obviously, is
Farmer Boy,
but that's a book
about
a boy.) Boys are minor characters throughout the preadolescent chronicles of the Laura books—a cousin here, a classmate there, a younger version of Pa or Grandpa conjured up for the sake of a story. Boys in these early books rank at about the same level as bears: obviously not as dangerous, but like bears, their exploits make for swell anecdotes once in a while, the sort of story that invariably ends with a good whipping. At worst, the boys in Laura World will hurl a few witless taunts (“Snipes! Snipes!”) and are promptly told to shut up; at best, they might do something spectacularly stupid, like get themselves stung by a whole hive of yellow jackets. Remember Cousin Charley in
Little House in the Big Woods
? Remember the illustration, page 209, in which the poor kid gets plastered with mud and wrapped up like a sad giant burrito while the other cousins look on with vague disgust? Notice how most of them are girls. Notice how they
clearly
know better.

This is yet another reason why
tomboy
never sounded quite right as a way to describe Laura. Boys are such a remote presence in these early books, the prairie where the Ingalls girls played so empty of them, that it's hard to imagine that Laura would want to emulate them, as the term implies. Only once does Laura ever seem to express jealousy: when her little friend Clarence in the Big Woods, he of the fancy outfit and the shiny copper-toed shoes, comes to visit. She loves his shoes, but, as the book states, “Little girls didn't wear copper-toes.” Her one pang of boy envy, and it's about fashion.