Moffats’s father is dead; Mama is a kindly and efficient, though unobtrusive presence. In
Madeleine L’Engle’s Meet the Austins (1960) there are two wise and loving parents; the
sweetness is cloying.
The Little House books of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) which began with Little
House in the Big Woods (1932) and finished with Those Happy Golden Years (1943) are
remarkable for their portrayal of the parents. It is a rarity, as has been said, for there to
be two parents, even more so to give them such a dominant position. This pioneer family
of the 1870s and 1880s is seen uncritically through a child’s eyes. Even so, the
character of Pa emerges—restless, reluctantly held back from further adventuring by the
greater prudence of Ma. The journeys, the joyful triumph when a new home is
established, the sense of security when they sit round the fire with the door safely
barred against the dangerous world outside, the strength of the family’s love for each
other, all described without a trace of sentimentality, make this series the most satisfying
of all accounts of happy family life.
The search for a home has always been a favourite theme with American writers.
Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children (1942), which describes four orphans
setting up house in an abandoned railway truck, was so successful that the author
followed it with eighteen more. Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming (1981), far more
sophisticated, describes the weary trek made by four abandoned children to find the
grandmother who may take them in. Dicey, the resolute sister who leads them, is a
heroine of a particularly American sort: strong-willed and independent.
Such girls have been a feature of family stories. In the previous century there were
heroines like Elizabeth W.Champney’s Witch Winnie (1889), a high-spirited, though
fundamentally serious prankster; or like Gypsy Breynton in the series by Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)—an engaging tomboy whose skills win the admiration of even
her brother. There is something of Gypsy in Leslie of Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to
Terebithia (1977), a girl who can outrun all the boys. This girl is also imaginative, and
with her special friend Jesse she creates a secret kingdom.
American heroines can be craggy or cussed. There is the single-minded Harriet of
Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964), or Claudia in E.L.Konigsburg’s From The Mixed-
up Files of Mrs Basil E.Frankweiler (1967) who runs away with her brother and
successfully camps out in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. On a more serious
level is the 14-year-old Mary Call Luther in Vera and Bill Cleaver’s Where the Lilies Bloom
(1969), who holds the family together when the father dies. Here is the flinty spinster in
embryo: ‘I sure would hate to be the one to marry you, Mary Call...You’re enough to
skeer a man, standin.’
Home life in the last third of the century is more often shown as shattered, if not
posing appalling problems, as in Marilyn Sach’s The Bear’s House (1971) where Fran
Ellen’s only refuge from abject squalor and a demented mother is a fantasy world. Two
black writers have elected to show black families ‘united in love and pride, of which the
reader would like to be a part’, as Mildred D.Taylor said of her own Roll of Thunder, Hear
My Cry (1976). Virginia Hamilton’s M.C.Higgins, the Great (1974) creates another family
welded together in the face of hardship. Otherwise the brightest message seems to be ‘If
you take the letters in the word DIVORCES and rearrange them, they spell DISCOVER’,
as the concluding sentence in Paula Danziger’s The Divorce Express (1982) avers.
TYPES AND GENRES 343