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.

Silberer lived between 1882 and 1923. He was four years old when Emily Dickinson died. Dickinson had been influenced in her thinking by many things but one of them was Transcendentalism, or at least Emerson’s writings about it. Emerson was influenced by the various magical traditions of the west largely through Swedenborg (1688-1772) just as Ethan Allen Hitchcock (1798-1870) was. Although Hitchcock and Emerson focused on different things, one thing stayed the same, they were both obsessed by the notion of the transcendence of the individual human being, as was Dickinson in her own fashion.

Hitchcock was fascinated by alchemy. In fact, it seems as if the finest literary collection of early alchemical works in the United States was his. Hitchcock knew Emerson, and certainly Emily Dickenson had access to Emerson’s essays in her daily papers.  Emerson and Dickinson: arguably two of the most influential writers in American history. And of course there are the Great Awakenings, the first occuring between the (approximate years) 1730 and 1775 and the second between 1790 and 1840. The third rolled around only 10 years after that, between 1850 and 1900. I don’t think it can be underestimated how woven a magical world view is in American society and Letters.