What Laura Ingalls taught Japan — Part 4

Life in Japan

If the severe winter Laura's family survived was quite similar to what the Japanese experienced in the devastating war, The Long Winter also would seem to promise a "restful" future for the Japanese in the end. Just as spring finally arrives in the book with the train from the East bringing food, the Japanese readers also wished that a new peaceful life would be promised after the hardship of the war they had survived.

However, the Japanese readers' creative misreading of The Long Winter does not end here. The Japanese read The Long Winter also as a book rationalizing the patriarchal gender relationship between the sexes in which women belong to the domestic sphere and men to the public.

The Long Winter is written as Laura's bildungsroman. Laura, the eldest daughter next to blind Mary, tries to help the family as much as possible during the hard winter. She helps Pa twist hay, which was usually big boys' work. Laura feels proud of being a real help to Pa and the family. In addition, Laura learns to keep house by helping her mother. In no other book in the Little House series is Ma Caroline more in the foreground than in The Long Winter. Throughout the Little House series, Ma is depicted as a gentle and affectionate, if conservative and disciplinary, mother. She is a good wife and mother who saves food, organizes the house neatly, is obedient to her husband and enthusiastic about her children's education. She embodies the Republican Motherhood ideal, in which women/mothers are expected to raise patriotic children for the nation.

By contrast, her daughter Laura is a tomboy who negates such a putatively feminine ideal. Laura hates domestic chores such as sewing and ironing, and she always looks to the prairie where Pa works. In The Long Winter, however, because of the unprecedentedly severe blizzard, Laura spends most of her time at home helping Ma. As a result, she learns more about women's roles and comes to understand and appreciate Ma. By virtue of Ma's domestic creativity and cheerfulness, Laura's family manages to survive the hard winter.

Laura learns that a woman can be creative in her domestic arena, something she had thought monotonous and restrictive compared to Pa's sphere outside of the home. For instance, when an unexpected early frost catches unripe green pumpkins and disappoints Pa, Ma invents a surprise for her husband:

"Girls, I've thought of a surprise for Pa ... Hurry and get the work done," said Ma. "And then, Laura, you go to the corn-patch and bring me a green pumpkin. I'm going to make a pie!"

"A green pumpkin pie? I never heard of such a thing, Ma." "Neither did I," said Ma. "But we wouldn't do much if we didn't do things that nobody ever heard of before ... The only way to find out is to try."

When Pa comes home and knows that Ma has successfully made a pie from an unripe pumpkin, he is deeply impressed and praises her: "Ma always could beat the nation cooking." Ma's creativeness brings great laughter and happiness to the family, which has been depressed by the dark, monotonous winter life, and she wins Laura's deep respect and admiration. Laura realizes that as a 13-year-old girl, she has to get settled in the women's sphere like her mother. Although Laura still has a dilemma about becoming an adult woman, this book illustrates most clearly in the Little House series the rise of Laura's consciousness as a capable, grown-up woman as well as the beginning of Laura's identification with her mother. The Long Winter thus reads as a story in which Laura, a tomboy, grows into womanhood in accordance with the gender definition of her time.