Documentation // Little House in the Big Woods

As a college student, I often find myself floating. I’m exposed to so many new ideas, concepts, and visions that I tend to often dwell in an abstract, intellectual world. As I lose myself in this world, I forget how important the physical world is. The physical world is the world I explored as a child as I ran barefoot in grass, stacked rocks, built snow forts, ate fluorescent orange mac and cheese, and grew bean plants in my backyard. My memory, another component of the abstract world, is unfortunately the only documentation I have of these times. But when I come across physical archival footage of my childhood, an old journal, a photograph, or a drawing, and immediately I am grounded. I am anchored down from the floating world and remember I was once a child in a small body that broke bones, scraped knees, and touched Earth. One particular physical artifact that does this, is my hardback copy of Little House in the Big Woods. The stories of Laura Ingalls transcend time because the pages contain more than ideas, they contain soil, labor, life, textile, and trees. This book is a reminder that the physical world and childhood cannot be separated, and that the documentation of this is what will keep us grounded as adults prone to drifting to the floating world.

Little House in the Big Woods differs from other children’s books in several ways that might account for its longevity. It’s autobiographical, yet the author distances herself from the narrative by telling the story in third person. The book starts with a very brief introduction then dives into descriptions of everyday life for the Ingalls family in their cabin in the middle of the woods far away from civilization. The book is filled almost completely with rich descriptions of smoking meat, churning butter, woodworking, sewing, telling stories, and fond memories of Ma, Pa, Mary, and baby Carrie. Laura Ingalls Wilder writes fondly about particular objects, like Pa’s rifle and her corn husk doll, spending as much time on them if not more as she does when describing her family. She offers a vivid description of the life of a young girl growing up in the Midwest in the 1870s. However, unlike The Diary of Anne Frank this text was written later on in Wilder’s life and is not a perfect documentation of a reality. By choosing to write in third person, Wilder is writing a character that is separate from her, one that is a representation of her memories of childhood rather than a representation of who she is. In fact, in Little House in the Big Woods Laura reads as a ghost or perhaps an extension of ourselves, the reader. She is not characterized in strong ways like other things in the book are. We understand Pa to be playful, humorous, and a bit rough. Jack the dog is protective and loyal, always watching out for the presence of wolves. It’s not as easy to characterize Laura, because perhaps the real life Laura didn’t think to characterize the gatekeeper of these memories or maybe purposefully left Laura ambiguous as a way of allowing her to be any girl-- any girl who might read this book.

This semi-fictionalization of the book Laura is an interesting example of how children’s media, that is, media intended for children about children, is authored by adults and may or may not truly depict the realities of childhood. Laura had to write her story from memories that were crafted sixty years prior and had to recall the rich details that are the grammar of this story. She has had sixty years to reflect on her childhood and filter it through age, experience, and a sea of other memories. Yet, Little House in the Big Woods is fresh and vivid. It feels like a current experience, even for a reader in 1980, 2004, or 2017. How is it that so many adults occupy a floating world and Wilder was able to craft a story about her childhood that acts as a bridge between childhood and adulthood, both for the writer and the reader? It is the precise act of documenting the bright, rich physical details from our childhood. The accurateness of chronology or words is immaterial, but her attention to the smell of smoking pork, the bright red calico dress, the taste of a lemon, and the sound of Pa’s fiddle shows that it is these very real, very physical things that are truly childhood, and when we document we are bridging the gap between that and adulthood. As adults we may conceptualize our childhoods, assign them judgment values, or extrapolate significance, but Little House in the Big Woods could not have functioned as a children’s book if Wilder had talked about the abstract meanings of her memories. Children quite frankly don’t care, they don’t know of the floating world yet except for the moments they escape to The Big Woods in Wisconsin, and even that still feels very real to them.