Before I launch into the chapter summary, I’d like to address a few things from “Fair Weather“:
Did anyone catch the reference to Ma writing her letter? She writes it horizontally, the way one normally writes a letter, and then she rotates the paper and writes “crosswise” right over the sentences she’s already written, these new sentences perpendicular to the others. I never understood what this meant until I saw an example of it in the museum at Mansfield. Talk about recycling!
The Polar and Tropical Worlds
This chapter also marks the only time in the series I genuinely dislike Mary. “What a dreadful idea,” she says when poetic Laura suggests that the existence of the houses ruin the brilliance of the winter prairie. “We’d freeze to death.” When Laura gallantly offers to build her an igloo, saying they’d “live like Eskimos,” (no doubt pulling this knowledge from Pa’s “big green book,” The Polar and Tropical Worlds, not “The Wonders of the Animal World” as Laura had remembered) her response is to shudder, “Ugh, on raw fish. I wouldn’t.” Well if you had nothing else to eat, Negative Nancy, you would! No go have your baked potato and tea.
One more general observation — I wonder if anyone of our readers shares it. As one of the administrators of this read-along, I’ve had occasion to match up chapter names with numbers, as well as the events within each chapter. And I’ve realized that of all the books in the Little House series, this book –The Long Winter—is the only one whose chapters don’t adequately describe the contents therein. Matching chapters to plot points is difficult.
If I were to say to you “Summer Storm,” or “Wheels of Fire,” or “Sugar Snow,” or “Wonderful Afternoon,” you’d likely be able to peg not only the book the chapters are pulled from, but a reasonable synopsis of the chapter as well. I can’t do this with TLW; the chapter titles are so generic. When I think of “Cold and Dark” and “The Hard Winter,” while I may be able to say that The Long Winter contains those chapters, I have no idea what’s in them. Only a few chapter titles are descriptive enough to recall the action within them.
“The Wheat In the Wall” is one of them. Coming up.
Comments18
I actually have quite a few “Mary dislike” moments, but the time I get the most irritated with her is in Chapter 15, No Trains.
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“I do believe I have nearly enough done,” she said. “I’ll be ready for you to sew the rug tomorrow, Laura.”
“I wanted to finish this lace first,” Laura objected. “And these storms keep making it so dark I can hardly see to count the stitches.”
“The dark doesn’t bother me,” Mary answered cheerfully. “I can see with my fingers.”
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I just want to say to her, if the dark doesn’t bother you and you can see with your fingers, then why don’t you sew your own daggone rug??
Heh. Isn’t this one of those character-building moments for Laura? I think it was in this reading that for the first time I *didn’t* get all hot and bothered by this … it served as a bit of a turning point for Laura, where she learns to curb her impatience. But yeah, mostly I agree with you.
Mary hated getting dirty or pretty much doing anything that involved work. Laura was like Pa becuase she enjoyed the outdoors and didn’t mind doing hard work (even if it was someone else’s work). Mary needed to be taught to do something useful besides sewing. Laura and her whole family worked very hard for her to go to college and she didn’t even do much after she graduated. Mary didn’t mind the dark because she couldn’t help if she saw it or not. So, Mary was very ungrateful and had Laura and her sisters baby-sit her until she died.
Mary was blind and in a world where even seeing women were rarely allowed to flourish, I think she did beautifully. I think Laura would say so herself. “Babysit” Mary? I think not. I think in her world it was impossible to expect her to live alone and make a career- that would be difficult enough today for a blind person. Mary was courageous when she lost her sight- something the T.V. show did not accurately portray- and I admire her as I feel Laura admired her. Babysit Mary? I think this is unfair.
After College, Mary tatted nets that were put over horses faces & eyes to keep the flies out of the horses eyes. She sold these nets to supplement the family income. She helped with the housework & babysat Rose while Laura & Almanzo were working. Yes, I find myself irritated by Mary occsionally. She seems to have been the favored child. Sometimes, though, I get the impression that Laura was jealous of Mary & these jealousies or resentments were still present when Laura wrote her books. When I read certain passages in the books I feel Laura’s hard feelings toward Mary, Ma & even her Pa. I sympathize with Laura but also wonder how things really were in the family. Laura worked outside of the home when she was a little girl to help support her family. She worked for neighbors when they lived in Minnesota & worked in the hotel in Burr Oak. A very different childhood than the one portrayed in the Little House books.
I just read all the comments in this post. What were Mary’s experience during those two years? Did she work in the kitchen rather than the dining room in Burr Oak because she was older? What about back in Minnesota before she became ill? Did Mrs. Starr ask Ma to adopt Laura or Mary?
I read something in John Miller’s latest book that sparked an idea for me, but I haven’t thought it out far enough, but I know conventional thought is Ma/Mary & Pa/Laura. I wonder if it’s more Ma/Mary/Laura and Pa/Laura/Rose as Laura seems happy to have settled down to a traditional life in Manfield while Rose always moved around. There’s more to it than that, but like I said I don’t have it developed into a formal thing. But the point being that the authors drew the differences between Mary and Laura as greater than they were really, and I wonder if we see the personalities & arguments of Laura and Rose coming out in these fights.
Wow. Just found this site. I was googling for anything that could confirm or deny that Rose went to telegraphy school in Kansas City as per “Bachelor Girl.” At any rate, here I am, and can see myself wasting a lot of time on this site. I am a LIW junkie… I just finally finished replacing all my old yellow-covered books with the new collectors editions. Little Town on the Prairie was in 3 pieces!!!!
Anyway. I have to say I feel you’re all judging Mary a little harshly here. It does seem a little puzzling that after all the money and hard work it took her to go to college, that she stayed at home and “did nothing” with herself. But my feeling was that, after her blindness destroyed many of the hopes the Ingalls had for her, it was enough for her to have gained the confidence and skills that she gained by going to college. At that place and time, disabilities just weren’t as accepted as they are now – I don’t think she would have had anywhere near the options that a blind woman today would have. There was only so much a woman in that era could do, let alone a blind one! It was just a different world.
Granted, Mary always did have something of a princess mentality as a child, which probably made her much more likely to sit back and take on something of a helpless attitude, wrt her blindness. But the world in which they were living had a huge role in things and I don’t think we can really judge them through modern eyes.
Even today a lot of women – myself include – go to college and then don’t make use of their education. I stay at home and raise my kids, something I could have done without a degree. Mary may not have even had much chance to marry and have children – blindness did not make a good prospect for marriage, and meeting a blind man would have been hard since the blind school didn’t encourage the sexes to mingle much. She didn’t go to college to earn a degree the way we think of college today, but rather just to not be completely helpless and in the dark. To that end, she was successful.
Oh, I don’t think we’re all judging her too harshly; only one felt she did nothing with her life. I would disagree with that statement too — she did quite a bit under the circumstances, her blindness and the time period and the place in which she lived.
Mary was able to make things which she sold to help out a bit with income, especially after Pa died. She was active in the church, and even played the organ for them. And I think perhaps best of all, she was a companion for Ma for all those years after the other three girls grew up and left home, and Pa died. Poor Ma would likely have spent those years all alone had Mary not gone blind.
And I don’t believe the family ever expected Mary to actually *do* anything with her education, other than exactly what she did. Had she not learned to play the organ, there would have been all that musical enjoyment, both for the family and the church, lost all those years. Mary wrote letters to her sisters over the years, something she’d not have been able to do without the skills she learned in college. And as I said, she learned craft skills that brought in some income. She was able to read in New York Point which meant that she very well may have read to Ma as she worked, rather than having to just sit in a chair and wait for Ma to be done so she could read to Mary. Think of Ma’s reaction to Mary’s wanting to visit Blanche over her vacation, her reminder that this was an opportunity Mary would likely never have again. They didn’t expect her to to do anything but remain home — but the skills she learned in college gave her a much more useful and fulfilling life than had she never gone.
And as along as we’re discussing what Mary did or didn’t do with her education in real life, let’s also remember that in real life, Mary’s college tuition was covered by Dakota Territory! The money that Laura and her family earned went to Mary’s books and board and expenses.
Laura and Rose omitted that detail from the books because they didn’t want to portray the fictional Ingalls family as dependent on government assistance. I have a feeling they emphasized the “college” aspect for the sake of 20th-century readers, too, especially since the series ends before Mary finishes school and comes home, allowing us to imagine simply that she is destined for great things per the modern dream.
It all sort of changes the discussion, doesn’t it? The fact that there was an aid program to cover Mary’s tuition might indicate that the Vinton School was more about giving blind people useful living skills than it was about “college” in the sense that we know it today. And I wonder… would the family have even considered sending Mary to Vinton if the expenses were completely beyond them?
I just had to chime in and say that I agree about Mary being “Negative Nancy-( ha ha, love it) when Laura was only trying to be lighthearted and have a little fun. I don’t dislike Mary at all, but let’s face it, she was a major buzz-kill! Think of the other times she admonished Laura- one of the ones that made me maddest was on the trip to Silver Lake, when Laura was attempting to see out loud the scenery and the road. When she couldn’t find the proper words to describe it adequately, Mary told her she shouldn’t say things like that!! Ooh, this bugged me, and I wish Laura had said, well then, You just try to describe things to a blind girl”- but we all know that she wouldn’t have said that- or WOULD she?? Come on, these girls were SISTERS, no matter what century they lived in. I am a sister and I also have three daughters, and let me tell you, they never held back on voicing their opinions to each other!
Hello. This is the first comment I have left on this site, even though I have enjoyed reading all of the posts thus far.
I agree that Mary was sometimes a pain and she and Laura did not see “eye to eye” so to speak. However, what two sisters do get along? I have two daughters and as they were growing up, they had the same issues: my older daughter enjoyed reading and being inside; whereas my younger daughter loved to be outside.
As for Mary wasting her life: I think it was an honor for her to go the the School for the Blind, and even though she did not get married or “work” outside of the home, she did do many things besides sitting in a corner. As mentioned before, she wrote letters, she visited her sisters, she made crafts and sold them, she was a companion to both of her parents. I think Ma would have moved in with one of her other daughters after Pa died, if Mary had not been blind. Back then, women usually did not work outside of the home, so the things that Mary did were within the realm of what she was expected to do. Her other sisters were very different in the fact that they all held jobs.
I suppose the nondescript chapter titles deepen the Long Winter monotony, same as potato… potato……. potato…………..
At least they weren’t “And Then The Roof Collapsed” or “How To Cook A Fiddle”!
I agree that they did not say that Mary’s education was covered by the state because readers would interpret governement assistance…however, Mary had as much right to a public education as any other child, and Dakota did not have a blind school that I can find. The state would have paid because they could not offer the services. Imagine a child being turned away from public education today because of a disability!
I never much liked the goody two-shoes, but always liked how college matured her relationship with Laura.
Getting back to the letter that Ma was writing. How on earth could anyone read it if she wrote it and then turned it at wrote over top of the words already there?
Mary may not have had a job outside the home but she did have one inside it. She was an encouragement to Pa and Ma and to the others in De Smet. I’m sure that many children in the church would look up to Miss Mary who never complained about her disability. She had the bible in Braille and I’m sure she spent many hours studying it and giving encouraging words to the children. I know that this is not written anywhere but I have seen time and time again that people with faith who have a disability are very close to God and people look up to them, so to speak. I’m trusting that this is true about Mary.
If you were wondering about what a cross written letter looks like, here’s some information and a couple of examples. http://dulltooldimbulb.blogspot.com/2009/06/cross-writing-cross-written-text.html#.UGt3MK70Pss
It was fairly common at the time, but I don’t know that it really did save that much room. You have to write lines so far apart to make it work, if you wrote smaller and closer together wouldn’t it be just as good? Maybe it was easier to write larger with a dip pen. I don’t know.
The other question is … why was it even necessary to cram so much onto the page? By 1880 postage rates weren’t THAT expensive. (Quick google — 3 cents for half an ounce; which is about 2 sheets of standard sized paper; probably 3-4 sheets of note paper. Not beyond the means of even a relatively poor family like the Ingalls. What would have been expensive were the braille letters that Mary sent to her teacher and friends when she came home from college — that’s very heavy paper.)
Ah! Mary! Yes, I think at first Laura perceived Mary’s propensity for showing off and resented it. After all, they were siblings. In a later book, before Mary goes to college (I guess that’s Little Town on the Prairie), Mary admits that she was showing off and Laura thought to herself that she had known that all along. But by that time, I think Mary had mostly redeemed herself by being truly good. She tried very hard, at least, to overcome her faults. But I cant imagine how she did suffer from being blind, and by all accounts she did bear it well and did as much as she could to compensate. Also, one thing that Laura doesn’t write about was that Mary had bad headaches from the brain fever that caused her blindness. She went to several doctors to have it treated. No mention of this in the books.
Hi, I’m curious…is that photo at the top of this reading PA’S ACTUAL COPY?! An Ingalls Family artifact? I hope so! I go ga-ga over historical things and heirlooms. On my bucket list is to finally get to most of Laura’s homesites. When I was little, I could’ve hardly imagined that one could find them, and I thank everyone who plays a part in maintaining them. I may never get there, but it seems everyone here is as obsessed with Laura as I am.
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