The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure Page B

World than it did in real life.
    I must have also appreciated the way the first few Little House books keep boys at the periphery. (The one major exception, obviously, is Farmer Boy, but that’s a book about a boy.) Boys are minor characters throughout the preadolescent chronicles of the Laura books—a cousin here, a classmate there, a younger version of Pa or Grandpa conjured up for the sake of a story. Boys in these early books rank at about the same level as bears: obviously not as dangerous, but like bears, their exploits make for swell anecdotes once in a while, the sort of story that invariably ends with a good whipping. At worst, the boys in Laura World will hurl a few witless taunts (“Snipes! Snipes!”) and are promptly told to shut up; at best, they might do something spectacularly stupid, like get themselves stung by a whole hive of yellow jackets. Remember Cousin Charley in Little House in the Big Woods ? Remember the illustration, page 209, in which the poor kid gets plastered with mud and wrapped up like a sad giant burrito while the other cousins look on with vague disgust? Notice how most of them are girls. Notice how they clearly know better.
    This is yet another reason why tomboy never sounded quite right as a way to describe Laura. Boys are such a remote presence in these early books, the prairie where the Ingalls girls played so empty of them, that it’s hard to imagine that Laura would want to emulate them, as the term implies. Only once does Laura ever seem to express jealousy: when her little friend Clarence in the Big Woods, he of the fancy outfit and the shiny copper-toed shoes, comes to visit. She loves his shoes, but, as the book states, “Little girls didn’t wear copper-toes.” Her one pang of boy envy, and it’s about fashion.
    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