In the Little House books, Laura spends five or six books telling us how her family was poor but wonderful. They are a loving lot, those Ingalls, and even when things are crappy they still have a cozy home filled with love and blackbird pie.
Then Laura takes a teaching job in a neighbouring township twelve miles away from Pa and Ma and Carrie and Baby Grace. Part of her pay is that room and board are covered, so she lives with the Brewsters free of charge. It’s a scary place full of dirt and anger and bad meals. No Ma, here! The Brewsters make her sleep on a couch behind a sheet and feed her bad food and gripe and yell. It’s just horrible and the only salvation is when Almanzo** rescues her every Friday by taking her home to the warm happiness of the Ingalls.
(Yes, I’m going somewhere relevant with all this.)
We’re getting a roommate. And I’m nervous about it. I’m nervous because while I find myself mostly harmless and sometimes droll I imagine that life with me for the uninoculated might be a bit much. I’m just sure, as I write this in the dead of night, that poor Victim (we’ll call him that, even though it isn’t his given name) will just check right back into his Extended Stay Hotel after one night of Teh Crazy at Casa de Kat in the ‘Tage Mahal.
Victim is a newish employee at my husband’s job, and he lives here while the rest of his family lives in another state. They’re looking for a house in Nashville, but that is taking some time. He’s been staying at one of those hotels where they try to make businesspeople feel at home but everyone ends up just wanting to drink themselves to death out of the sheer prefab loneliness of it all. Since we built a big house in anticipation of children that never showed up [now I just tell myself the four bedrooms make for better resale value] we can give Victim a whole story to himself. Two rooms and a bath and all the crazy he can stand.
When The Husband and I discussed it I was eager to have him stay, but said “does he understand about me?” Then I realised that has to be the most pathetic question EVER. But really. I hope he does understand about me.
Isn’t it just like Laura Ingalls? Poor guy. His wife doesn’t even have a cool sled to drive him home on…
**At what point did we all agree to not become creeped out by Almanzo Wilder and his courting of a 15-year-old girl when he was in his mid-twenties? I mean, honestly. When I was a kid, These Happy, Golden Years was a romantic book. Now that I’m nearing 40 and have nieces I can’t help but think it’s a little bit disgusting and loser-ish.
And I won’t touch on how Laura’s Daddy Issues led her to marry an old broken-down friend of her father’s. “Thanks for the pancakes and the game of checkers, my good man. Now how’d you like to take my middle daughter for your child bride?”
Yuck.
Back in the day it was okay to marry 15-year-olds. There’s grass on the field, so you might as well play ball considering most people didn’t live too much past 40. His life was half over at that point or so he thought.
Akshully, in one of the books Laura/the narrator makes a big point of how Almanzo is only passing as being in his mid-20s, but is actually younger. He lied about his age to get a homestead (which I guess makes him not just on welfare, but a welfare cheat to boot) when he was still in his teens. So Laura starts out wondering why this older guy is interested in her, then finds out that he isn’t such an older guy after all.
Just think, though, that even if you were Mrs. Brewster, that would make your husband Mr. Brewster, who is always able to take the knife away from her before she hurts anyone. So your visitor is safe.
Oh, but Ron’s demographic info is skewed. People didn’t live too much past 40 in the 1890s? If they made it out of childhood at all (which was less likely then than now) they certainly did.
@nm (and Ron) Yeah I was going to say the same. While working on my genealogy I noticed that not only did people seem to have a fairly generous life span, they also rarely married much younger than 17 or 18, with early 20s being typical and later ages not really very exceptional. Although, I have noticed that some fairly large gaps in age difference. For example, one of my great-parents married when he was 27 and she was 18:
http://www.somegeekintn.com/roots/familygroup.php?familyID=F36&tree=Main
They also happened to be first cousins once removed, which wasn’t too uncommon.
Now that I’ve typed this I realize those two happened to die off pretty young. What were we talking about again?
I guess you guys said what I was gonna say to Ron.
nm, I think that bit about the lying about his age thing was something Rose Wilder Lane put in there to make her dad less unseemingish.
Because according to all records he IS 10 years older than Laura.
Age gaps I don’t mind as much, but I’m still skeeved out by the young girl aspect of it.
The libertarian in me doesn’t care that they did it, as long as I can say I find it creepy. ;-p
You may be right about who put that detail in and why, Kat. But if “all the records” are based on the age he put down when he filed for his homestead and if he lied when he filed, well …. I mean, I don’t care about this, I was just tremendously impressed by his courage (taking this on at 18 or whatever) when I read about it, so it’s stuck in my mind. Though I was a lot more impressed and creeped out at the idea of having a 15-year old teach school.
And at least Laura was what today would be a legal adult before she got married.
He was born in 1857. She was born in 1867. He took up his claim at the age of 22 in 1879. The bit about fudging his age was just thrown in there (probably by Laura) to make the age gap less startling to 20th c readers.
My mother taught in a one-room school at the age of 17. It was very challenging work.
Throughout the books the most frustrating thing for me as I get older is the way both Pa and Almanzo are ideallised. I don’t know whether Laura or Rose (who did a great deal of ghostwriting) is responsible. I just know that it continues to present a problem for a large subculture within Evangelical Christianity. Many women–like a few in my husband’s family–take up with much older directionless men and get stuck having a ton of babies they are unable to handle and running a household and homeschooling while the men remain drastically underemployed and shiftless.
The young girls think it’s romantic when a twenty five year old guy flirts with them and pursues them, in large part because of the template they’ve formed from these books. What they don’t get is that this is a different time and a radically different culture. Almanzo, even wo the idealization, had a degree of ambition and drive. He had to in order to make it out west. Nowdays 25 year old men without advanced schooling who work in maintenance for a Christain camp and flirt with the young girls are not the same kind of husband material.
Not that I’m talking about specific situations or anything.