Beyond “Ma”
/Caroline: Little House, Revisited
By Sarah MillerWilliam Morrow, 2017A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. They drove away and left it lonely and empty in the clearing among the big trees, and they never saw that little house again.They were going to the Indian country.So begins Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1935 children’s book, Little House on the Prairie, part of a classic series of nine books that tell the story of Wilder’s nomadic pioneer childhood in the 1870s and 1880s. Beloved in their own right, the books (five of which were named Newbery Honor books) were then bolstered by the 1970s TV adaptation, co-directed by and starring the scintillatingly wholesome Michael Landon. Spin-off books, historical tourist attractions spanning six states, and a 2008 musical adaptation have all helped maintain the prominence of the original series. As a longtime librarian, bookseller, and young adult historical novelist, Sarah Miller is well-equipped to take on the Little House behemoth in the novel Caroline: Little House, Revisited, a reimagining of the family’s time in Kansas from the perspective of Caroline (“Ma”) Ingalls.For the most part, Miller doesn’t challenge Wilder’s creation (which explains the title page’s proud statement that Caroline was written “with the full approval of Little House Heritage Trust”). Both the family members’ personalities and the family dynamic remain essentially unchanged. Charles Ingalls is a devoted father and husband with a restless, wanderer’s heart, making him “prone to rusting the moment his momentum was stilled.” His blue eyes twinkle while he serenades the family on his fiddle. Five-year-old Mary is a beautiful, prim, fastidious child who always seeks to please her elders. Three-year-old Laura is much more of a tomboy, with her Pa’s spirit of adventure and a habit of unwittingly creating more work for the grownups. Shared appreciation and bliss envelope the family; whatever irritation, jealousy, or anger may be felt in the moment, the tenor of their interactions is overwhelmingly loving. In that respect, Caroline shares the idealizing tendencies of the TV series, which centered itself on the Ingalls family’s bond. In an interview about her role as Caroline Ingalls, the actress Karen Grassle remarked, “I wanted to bring a little grittier reality to the show. And that was not the show that Michael [Landon] was producing. So I got it, that this was like, let’s pretend on the prairie – which has its own value.”Caroline’s main value lies in the fact that the Ma Ingalls of the Little House books is a buttoned-up, stoic character ripe for further exploration. Miller’s Caroline is still proper and fiercely competent; she cooks, bakes, cleans, washes, mends, irons, gardens, and raises her daughters, all while wearing a steel corset (a clothing item she appreciates because it makes her feel strong and contained). But Miller’s portrayal takes advantage of the holes in Wilder’s narrative, recognizing that no young child can imagine the emotional breadth of a parent. This new Caroline experiences crises of confidence. After comforting her daughters through a thunderstorm, she reflects:
It was a kind of sorcery: what her girls believed of her, they made real, and in doing so fed back to her. Every day it happened, though never with the magnitude as it had during the storm. Their faces cried out for a refuge, steady and serene, and that is what she had become, lifted from her own doubts by the sheer force of their need.Caroline closed her fist over Mary’s bare fingers. The palpable warmth she passed into those cold little hands left her wondering: How much of what they loved in her was real, and how much was fashioned from what they envisioned her to be?
Caroline recognizes her power as a role model, constantly reminding herself to speak gently but firmly to the girls even when she feels fatigued or frustrated. But she regularly second-guesses her choices as a mother, worrying that she’s “sown the wrong kind of modesty in [Mary],” inspiring her older daughter to be helpful and diligent 
only because she craves approval. When the girls think that Santa won’t find his way to their house in Kansas on Christmas, Caroline reminds them that they’re lucky to have a warm house and food on their table. But then she realizes, “She had as good as rubbed her daughters’ noses in their disappointment.” Despite the occasional anachronism, these moments of regret, and of resolution to be a more patient, compassionate parent, make this Caroline more flawed and multifaceted than her previous incarnations.Miller also complicates Wilder’s portrait of Caroline by including details of her childhood. Caroline’s father died in a shipwreck when she was young, leaving her pregnant mother a struggling widow with many mouths to feed. Her memories of eating “bread crumbled into maple sugar water” all winter long compel her to save every possible scrap of food and material. What she fears above all else is that, through some miscalculation on her part, her girls will know the hunger and want of her own childhood. Cast in this light, her frugality and practicality become more compelling than those same qualities in the Ma Ingalls of Wilder’s books. These qualities also add tension to her otherwise idyllic marriage. Charles craves the freedom of wide-open spaces and new beginnings, but Caroline craves security and stability. She “accommodate[s] [the] many trifling inconveniences” of traveling across the country in a covered wagon because she knows that a life in Kansas is best for Charles, but she secretly longs for solid walls, kitchen shelves, and beds that “lay ready and waiting, with the nightclothes hanging neatly on their pegs.” Despite Charles’s care and attention as a husband, her desires ultimately come second to his.Yet, even as Caroline dreams of the new little house that Charles will build for her, she dreads confinement:
All in one great swoop, the same vastness [of the prairie] that held so much promise for Charles revealed to Caroline how small the places that could belong to her and the girls were by comparison. The square corners of the imagined house, the neatly turned edges of the garden, seemed sharper, narrower….[I]t pinched ever so slightly to watch Charles unfurling like a beanstalk beside her, knowing that Kansas offered her no similar satisfaction, no chance to reach beyond what she had been for the last ten years: Mrs. Ingalls, Ma. She could stretch forever toward that horizon and grasp nothing new.
Watching Charles stack the walls of their house stirs her jealousy again, inspiring her to offer to help him:
Always, the scale of Charles’s work dwarfed her own. In the time it took him to build a wall or plant an acre, she might knit a sock or churn a pound of butter. One task was no less vital than the other; he could not build or plant barefoot or hungry. Charles knew that as well as she did and never failed to thank her for a new shirt or a good meal. But to have a hand in fashioning something that would not be consumed, worn out, outgrown – something as grand as a house? To be able to lean against that solid wall for years to come and know that she had helped put it there? Caroline thrilled at the thought.
These passages about the limited scope of her life add to Caroline’s complexity. After all, humans are creatures of paradoxical desires, and a woman can yearn for a snug home while foreseeing that that snugness could be suffocating. But sometimes these moments of envy feel more like modern authorial insertions than a faithful exploration of a domestically-minded woman of the 1870s. Occasional wistfulness over her husband’s freedom of movement is understandable, but would tidy, corset-loving Caroline Ingalls really watch her sweaty husband haul logs and think, “Gee, I wish I could join in”?Plausible or not, Caroline’s bursts of jealousy are prime examples of the way she stifles her emotions. Any strong emotion is deemed “childish” and relentlessly crushed. This proves inconvenient, as Miller’s Caroline is a roiling mass of emotions. At one point, Caroline laments, “It was as though a single droplet of any one sensation had the power to soak her through.” When she interacts with Charles and the girls after giving birth, she thinks, “Not one fleck of emotion had entered the cabin without leaving its print upon her, and she thirsted for a space out of reach.” She’s constantly gauging the moods and needs of those around her and calculating how best to avoid conflict.Miller demonstrates that this fear of emotion stems from both Caroline’s controlling personality and the cultural norms of the time. Displaying your feelings was considered unseemly, indulgent, and attention-seeking. Even while Caroline watches Charles nearly drown, she rebukes herself: “She must not scream, must not frighten the girls, must not frighten the horses.” When a man calls for Charles outside a store, Caroline wonders how to get her husband’s attention, thinking, “She did not want to shout or point with the girls looking on.” When Laura says something funny, Caroline says that her “cheeks twitched with a laugh she could not spill.” But what Caroline dreads more than anything is tears, which are “shameful,” especially for men. After she severely sprains her ankle, Caroline pretends to feel fine so that Charles won’t embarrass himself by breaking down in front of Laura.This constant battle between Caroline’s extreme emotions and her determination to smother them is heightened by the way Miller roots emotions in Caroline’s body. After a prairie fire, “Caroline felt a swelling within herself. It pressed against every edge of her body, so light she was utterly weightless. Relief.” She doesn’t hug Charles after he narrowly survives a flood because “there was enough thankfulness in her to crush him, and just the other side of that, a hot spurt of outrage.” When she’s angry over government concessions made for the Indians, Caroline feels as though “[e]very tiny grain of her was loosening, preparing to fly apart.” The way her feelings are physicalized complements her experiences throughout the book of pregnancy and nursing. (Wilder wrote her baby sister, Carrie, into her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, not knowing that she would continue the series. Carrie was in fact born in Kansas, a timeline that Miller follows in Caroline.) Her pregnancy leaves her raw, uncomfortable, and exposed, but also fills her with wonder and inextricably links her to her baby’s birthplace. The parallel experiences of bringing a new child into the world and making a home in a new place anchor Caroline to her life on the prairie.
The other aspect of Caroline’s thoughts that manifests physically is her racism of Indians. She recognizes that her husband doesn’t understand her fear of them:
Charles would never share her sentiments toward the Indians. He could stand before an Indian man without feeling his viscera clench and his bowels shudder, without the fine hairs on every surface of his skin rising up in a feeble attempt at protection. Caroline’s body told her to be afraid, and she obeyed it; there need not be a reason.
Caroline admits that she hates Indians; their behavior confuses her, their “bareness” disturbs her, and their repulsive heathen worship makes them unfit company for God-fearing Christians. When Charles asks her to move to Kansas at the beginning of the book, she wonders, “How might it feel to [make a home] on land that bore no mark of another family?” In such moments, Miller both preserves the historical racism of the period and exposes the narrowness of Caroline’s perceptions.But the most delightful thing about Miller’s writing is how she conveys Caroline’s more pleasant perceptions, filtering descriptions through Caroline’s everyday priorities. At one point, Caroline observes that “the sun was sinking between the hills like a coin tucked into a pocket.” When she tells Charles that she’s pregnant, she thinks, “Her news had dyed the fabric of the coming year twice as brightly for [him].” As a mother, she frets that “[t]he children were like little tops that must be kept spinning, always spinning.” When she calls the girls brave, she notes that her praise “starched them up.” Worrying alone at home one night, she tells herself not to think about Indians, but admits that her mind “rubbed and rubbed at that thought until it shone too brightly to ignore.” On a Christmas Day filled with gifts, food, and family, Caroline feels a memory forming in real time, noting, “Her mind was bottling [the day] whole, so that it would remain fresh and glistening as a jar of preserves.” Caroline is brimming with these poetic, joyful little acknowledgements of the way that Caroline’s work shapes her view of the world. Miller then juxtaposes this clean, polished inner world with the unpleasant physical realities of journeying by covered wagon and living on the prairie. Rain, chamber pots, mosquitoes, sweat, campfires, and mud surround this woman who longs to take a rag and scrub the world clean.Although Miller’s detailed descriptions give the book such character, they’re also responsible for its main weakness: sluggish pacing. Miller regularly sacrifices the reader’s excitement on the altar of emotional precision, using critical moments to map Caroline’s every thought and feeling. On the surface, Caroline retains the most exciting scenes from Little House on the Prairie: crossing a dangerously rising creek, fighting a prairie fire, saving a man from a well. But the more intense the scene, the more laboriously Miller draws it out, the end result being that readers might enjoy a passage about how fast Caroline’s heart is beating without ever feeling their own hearts speed up. For the most part, Caroline adds to the Little House story, but in these moments it loses the simplicity that made the original book’s drama so immersive.Nevertheless, Caroline succeeds in its main goal, transforming the remote, two-dimensional mother of Wilder’s books into an accessible, flesh-and-blood woman. Miller firmly aligns herself with the Little House canon, rarely challenging her source of inspiration. But an adult perspective on an established figure is in itself a gentle challenge to the way generations of readers have interacted with the Ingalls’ pioneer story. By converting “Ma” to “Caroline,” Miller adds nuance and richness to the original books, providing both old and new fans with a satisfying combination of tenderness and grit.____Jennifer Helinek is a book reviewer living in Russia.
