The Wilder Life (14 page)

But to heck with boys and girls and tomboys, because in the Little House taxonomy of childhood, the most crucial distinctions are between bad girls and good girls, which opens up a whole other can of leeches. It all goes back, of course, to Laura and Mary.

You know Mary's the good one, right? By
know
I mean the fact is seared into your mind from repeated exposure to her endless shining examples: Mary always sits quietly (though really, she does everything quietly). Mary doesn't interrupt. Mary doesn't mind Sundays one bit. Mary decides Baby Carrie can have
her
beads that she found at the Indian camp, even if a certain someone else would rather keep her beads for herself like a selfish little flutterbudget. If that wasn't bad enough, Mary's goodness is like a big blue sponge so absorbent that it passively sucks up all the positive attention, so that all the compliments and the candy hearts with the prettier sayings on them inevitably come her way. You have to wonder if her behavior keeps her hair golden as well, pumping a sort of virtuous Sun-In to her locks on a daily basis.

And yet the characterization of Mary Ingalls as a goody-goody with perfect posture and a soul like a springtime meadow seems to be mostly a creation of the books. The Mary who shows up in some of Laura's pre–Little House writing is bossier, has a “sharp tongue,” and lords her age over her younger sister. One story, written in 1917 for the
Missouri Ruralist
, has an account of the blond-hair-is-better-than-brown fight that goes on throughout
Little House in the Big Woods,
but in this version Mary really rubs it in (“Don't you wish your hair was a be-a-utiful color like mine?”) and tells Laura she has an ugly nose, too.

We'll never know if this reflects the real Mary, if perhaps she got a personality makeover for the Little House books, where she plays the perfect counterpart to Laura. In that sense she clearly serves a purpose: how else would we know how badly Laura's behaving if Mary wasn't around to give her weak little admonishments? (“Pa said we mustn't!”) But Mary is also so insufferably dull that it makes Laura's badness seem quite reasonable, especially to those of us with an inner girl who likes to let down her sunbonnet once in a while. Which is to say, most of us.

And yet don't you think that there's—yes, I'll say it—something about Mary as well, something deeply appealing? Maybe it's not so much that she's good but that she's mastered the act of it so well, what with her folded hands in her lap, all her gestures clear enough for the rest of us to follow suit if we wanted. I know sometimes I wanted to emulate her—and why not, since for the first few books Mary totally wins at life, with high scores in the hair, prettiness, and seam-sewing categories? Wanting to be Mary was a little like wanting to be Miss America: both seemed to offer so much reward in exchange for such a simple performance.

Years later, in a sisterly heart-to-heart talk with Laura in
Little Town on the Prairie,
Mary cops to the truth:

“I wasn't really wanting to be good. I was showing off to myself, what a good little girl I was, and being vain and proud, and I deserved to be slapped for it.”

Laura was shocked. Then suddenly she felt she had known that, all the time.

Oh, yes, and so did we.

But maybe the whole goodness thing shouldn't be written off as just a racket; after all, what of the girls and women who really
do
identify with Mary? They're out there. In my own observations, Team Mary folks are often self-contained older siblings who feel less compelled to rebel, more inclined to prove themselves by their accomplishments: the Marcia Bradys of the world with their shelves full of trophies.

Rebecca Steinitz, in an essay in
Literary Mama
magazine, writes about discovering that her oldest daughter favored Mary, as well as Meg in
Little Women
, despite her own long-held belief that one is “supposed to like” Laura and Jo. Eventually Steinitz concludes that not every girl wants to be the “smart, tormented girl.” “[My daughter] is an optimist who prefers life to go smoothly, and, like Mary and Meg, she will do all she can to keep it that way,” she realizes.

Anita Clair Fellman, in her book
Little House, Long Shadow,
thinks the Mary proclivities are culturally ingrained: “Whereas the current preference is for spunky girl heroines, previously there was more ambivalence about such female role models, and even today there is still much in female socialization that makes Mary's desire always to do the right thing resonate for many female readers.”

In pointing out that the gutsy gal archetype is more the standard these days, Fellman mentions another interesting bit: until the 1960s, the Little House books were often referred to as “the Laura and Mary books.” It must be a sign of how much our cultural inclinations have shifted that as a reader from a later generation, I found this hard to believe: how could anyone ever have seen them as anything other than the
Laura
books? And yet the phrase turns up in vintage book reviews, and a Google search confirmed that, indeed, people of a certain age use the phrase when discussing the books online—proof that Mary wasn't always thought of as the boring, pretty also-ran. Instead she was the yin to Laura's yang, the two sisters together forming an ideal girlhood filled with equal measures of safety and danger.

I had to show Kara the historical doll section of American Girl Place, which displays all its expensive accessories behind glass, like a museum exhibit. To buy something, you'd take a tag with a little color photo of the item and bring it to the cashier. We lingered at the display for the doll character of Kit Kittredge, a nine-year-old growing up in the Great Depression. We agreed that Kit had some of the best furniture (
don't worry so much about the hard times, Kit! You can always just sell your stuff to us people who live in the future!
), and Kara, who collects vintage typewriters, fell in love with Kit's tiny one. I found a tag for it and slipped it into my pocket.

“What, are you going to buy that typewriter?” Kara asked.

“No,” I admitted. “I just like taking the tags.” Something about them, with their images of doll-sized treasure, always buoyed me. I loved the simplicity these miniature things evoked, the way they called to mind uncluttered lives where each carefully crafted object shone with significance. Kirsten's quilt, Molly's locket—they exuded something of the same aura with which things in the Little House books appeared; I could see them with a bit of the charmed sight of Laura World. On some level I recognized that the things on display at the American Girl store purported to be as cherished as Ma's china shepherdess, Charlotte the rag doll, and the butter mold with the carved leaves and strawberry.

Obviously, that was one thing my Little House and American Girl fascinations had in common: the
stuff
. In both instances, I felt like I was glimpsing the lives I'd once desperately wanted. In the case of American Girl Place, it was an indulged and solidly uppermiddle-class existence where both me
and
my doll had everything we needed. And yet when it came to Little House, it was sort of the opposite feeling, in that the world I wanted to inhabit was an uncomplicated one, full of sunlight and clean-swept floors.

There was still another feeling, too, one I noticed as we perused the display cases for Felicity, the Colonial Williamsburg character, whose accessories were by far the most patrician of all the American Girls—china teacups, lacy fans, delicate pretend cakes, embroidered pillows, satin slippers. They were so lovely that to look at them inspired a mildly masochistic delight, the realization that someone (even if it was a fictional-Felicity someone) lived a life that was far prettier than mine. That sickening sensation, I recognized, was none other than That Nellie Oleson Feeling.

All hail Nellie Oleson, New York–born daughter of a Walnut Grove mercantile proprietor, later the most exquisitely dressed country girl in Dakota Territory! With her utterly scrumptious nastiness she completes the spectrum of Little House girlhood types, from good Mary to not-so-good Laura to bad, bad Nellie. From the moment she's introduced she gets right down to her bratty business, wrinkling her nose, sticking out her tongue, and yanking hair.

Fine, so it's not much of a repertoire—even by nineteenth-century school-yard standards these seem like awfully basic moves. What
really
gives Nellie her evil superpowers, though, are the enviable shiny details of her life—her ribbons and lawn dresses and wax dolls and candy sticks—all of it paraded before Laura and Mary when they visit her awesome carpeted house in the “Town Party” chapter of
On the Banks of Plum Creek.
While I'm fond of the swaying prairie grasses of my Laura World, somewhere in my subconscious dwells a Nellie World, too.

Which, well, looks an awful lot like American Girl Place. Though while Nellie Oleson is exactly the kind of girl who would own an American Girl doll, had they existed during her time, she herself could never be an American Girl character. Really, one of the most brilliant things about the American Girl marketing concept is that Felicity, Kirsten et al. are like
nice
Nellies, friendly girls who wouldn't yank their possessions away from you, the way Miss Thing in
Plum Creek
snatched back her doll from Laura (see the page 164 illustration: ooh, the
burn
!). A visit to American Girl Place always satisfies the secret hope that I used to have reading that chapter as a kid—my wish that Laura would just suck up a little and try to work things out with Nellie so she could play with her stuff. (Pathetic, I know.)

I've always appreciated the way Nellie's hatefulness evolved with age. By far my favorite/most dread-evoking Nellie moment is in
Little Town on the Prairie
when, years after her ignominious scene back at Plum Creek (remember the “Country Party” chapter—the crab, the leeches, the screaming?), she shows up on the first day of school in De Smet late, and fashionably so: