SubscribeAugust 12th, 2009
Mythologizing our past and its consequences
I was never able to read the Little House on the Prairie series, but when I came upon an article called Wilder Women: The mother and daughter behind the Little House stories, I took the time to read it before going to work.
I was glad I did, although I found it oddly depressing to have my sense of the perils of deprivation with respect to the human spirit so rewarded.
The Little House books always seemed to me to be an inaccurate reflection of what hardship actually makes of people. Those characters were always so good, so kind, and having lived around people in poverty and suffering from social and intellectual deprivation for much of my life, my experience is that whilst there are always flashes of kindness that come from even the nastiest of human beings, for the most part this kind of physical and social poverty makes of people’s spirits small bitter walnuts. I realize that makes me seem cynical and it may be so, but it could also be that I am correct in my assessment.
People thrive with hard work, but also required are the occasional waters of peace and rest. The article Wilder Women describes the apparently nearly unremittingly difficult life of both Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. More importantly, it describes the consequences to their politics and personalities.
For me, trying to read the Little House books, and later seeing episodes of the TV series, it always struck me that this was mythology, that is in the Frank Kermode sense, these weren’t narratives but a mythologizing of history, and thereby something deeply, even perniciously, untrue.
I never followed up on the Little House books as a child or as an adult. My sense of them as falsehoods wasn’t important enough to me to do my normal research into the author and times in which they were written. After all, they are just stories, right? I mean what harm can stories do?
I know better now. This kind of mythologizing of our history makes of us what we are – the people who think “birthers” are making a political stand – a people who can’t create our own version of Black Adder because we don’t have enough actual historical knowledge to make it work.
In the article: “There were no people” on the prairie, Laura, or Rose, had written. “Only Indians lived there.” (Hill writes that Wilder agreed to amend the sentence when an outraged reader objected, calling it “a stupid blunder.” It now reads, “There were no settlers.”).
I mean how can one make an American Black Adder with people who think like that…”there were no people…” Goodness.
It is this curious blindness of those who claim for themselves the high moral ground of the self-sustaining individual, the myth that we get along by our own efforts, that we as individuals (or nations) are self-reliant, without the acknowledgement (or even awareness) of the debt we owe to those around us and before us. As Louisa May Alcott pointed out in her hilarious little book Transcendental Wild Oats, high ideals of self reliance often come couched in rhetoric that shows an outstanding lack of awareness of the amount of work such ideals require of other people – in Branson Alcott’s case, of the wives and daughters. With all due deference to the experiment of Walden Pond and its successes, it was Thoreau’s mother and sisters who usually cooked his dinner and washed his shirts and it was Emerson’s success that allowed him to purchase the land upon which Thoreau was to spend those two years.
Of course the fact that Mrs Thoreau and her daughters took care of their male relative does not invalidate what we have gained from Walden Pond, but holding the idea of an Emersonian self-reliance up as a human goal without first acknowledging the laundresses who make it possible – that leads to mythologizing and not to a sustainable future or even a sustainable sense of self. The consequence of this mythologizing are people like Christopher McCandless, who think living off the land is something one can really do without the unseen labour of others. Or to those who would deport all the illegal immigrants in the US but still want to be able to hire a maid for less than minimum wage and pay her no benefits.
From Wilder Women: In 1936, the Saturday Evening Post published Lane’s own “Credo,” an impassioned essay that was widely admired by conservatives. Her vision was of a quasi-anarchic democracy, with minimal taxes, limited government, and no entitlements, regulated only by the principle of personal responsibility. Its citizens would be equal in their absolute freedom to flourish or to fail.
“Freedom to flourish or to fail?” So what do we do with the kids with CP? Or those with bipolar disorder? Regulated by personal responsibility? We’ve seen how that works in the corporate world – the labour of others has no value and so defrauding them is easy. What seems to be true of actual human behaviour is that for anything remotely like the idyllic world of Walden Pond to come to fruition, it must be first rooted in social awareness, and with human beings that means regulation. Awareness of others (or at least the concomitant idea of behavioural self-regulation with respect to one’s awareness of others’ needs) is not something that seems to come naturally.
August 13th, 2009 at 1:10 am
I wonder the extent to which my interest in subtexts was fuelled by reading the Wilder books as a child, and wondering about the experiences of the Indians that were on the periphery of the narrative. I recall how in The Long Winter it was a native leader who warned Pa that a big snow was coming. I wanted to know what the local people were doing while the settlers bedded down in their cabins; what were their survival methods in extreme weather and what was it like for them?
The “there were no people” motif was central to Pakeha (white) modernism in New Zealand from the 1930s, particularly in poetry, and is still prominent in identity thinking, which tends to emphasise isolation (rather than the Pasifika “sea of islands” by which Hau’ofa defined Oceania). Some writers (among whom Robin Hyde) pointed out that the notion of an empty land was erroneous at best and actively harmful at worst, but they were in a minority. It would be some decades from the ’30s before Pakeha society was in a position to read Maori writers who spoke up about this, and even then, readers wondered why they were so angry.
Which is all to say, thank you for this post.
August 13th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
harvestbird says: I wanted to know what the local people were doing while the settlers bedded down in their cabins; what were their survival methods in extreme weather and what was it like for them?
It was this kind of wondering, at least in part, that prompted me to take two degrees in Anthropology, so I have an answer that I can give from that perspective. But the more interesting answer is almost certainly the one I can give as a person who has lived “out” much of her adult life and has put in more than one winter up in Divide Country in the north western US.
To survive one needs technology, some foresight, luck and most importantly, other people. I lived for some time in a teepee and the way to handle extremes with that kind of lodging is to always keep up with the fuel gathering, to have a second exterior wall about a foot from the main wall of the teepee and to fill it with brush and dried grasses. It provides insulation and protection from the wind. In the interior you can do a similar thing, lacing a second canvas wall between the poles and also lace canvas sheets about 4 feet up from the sleeping platforms to guide the heat from the fire to the living/sleeping area. You make sure the beds are up off the ground on branches or some other padding that keeps your body heat from leaching into the ground. You build small hot fires and make sure someone is always on fire duty. You can surround your fire with igneous rocks so that they radiate the heat. You make a pot of soup and keep it going. You keep warm water available. You pay attention to those who seem to know the weather before it happens, you keep your food stocks up as much as possible. You invest all year round in good relationships because if you run out of something essential, your neighbor may have some left, but you try really hard to be the one who has something left so you can help others – since in all probability they are kin.
harvestbird says:…wondered why they were so angry
For me the word is suyapi. It is a derogatory word I suppose, because although it has come to mean “white people” it really means “backwards people.” In many ways, white settler (and immigrant) cultures were backwards with respect to Native cultures, because all Native cultures that I am aware of emphasize groupness where most immigrants, by virtue of leaving home, have discarded the group and so emphasize individual rights. The behavioural consequences to this have proved enormous.
I live with that anger all the time, and yet I can see why it can also be counter-productive, because many people don’t understand it and, frankly, it frightens them.
A saying I have is that sometimes the best thing a minority can do is survive the majority. I know that the majority also has some responsibility, and perhaps even a moral obligation to acknowledge where their power comes from, but what good is that “obligation” if it is ignored or cannot be enforced? What many tribes have decided is that the only way out is to “outsmart” the majority with their own laws and history – hence the casinos and land buy-backs, etc.
Still, I have to say I am always so very surprised when the hurt comes up with the phrase “why are they so mad.” I mean, how can they not realize that? How can the rage be a surprise? Remember that after 9-11? Some people tried to answer it as if it were a real question, Ward Churchill(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_September_11_attacks_essay_controversy) and others, for example. They were either simply not heard or lost their jobs as a long-range consequence of their answer.
The conclusion I have come to is that “why are they so mad” isn’t actually a question, and so of course there is really no answer to it. It is a bewildered cry, a refusal of history, a statement of an immigrant culture and a dislocated individual that have still not reformed themselves as something with actual roots and a real past. In Frank Kermode’s sense, people who ask this non-question are those who live inside a mythology. What we need are people to give up the myth for a narrative instead; to have a story, yes, but have it be one that is responsive to the existence of others and to the facts of the actual past. This responsiveness to time and place is what distinguishes a narrative from a myth. Still, what we need is something, that in my experience, isn’t always what we get.
And, thanks. I am glad you liked the post.