I really do think there's benefit to acknowledging complexity in flawed people.
"'It Was in Armenia That I Learned Fear'
Rose Wilder Lane and the Armenian Genocide"
Sallie Ketcham
(See the link to the PDF.)
Like I feel as if the Rose Wilder Lane of that article and the Rose Wilder Lane of this tweet are just two totally different people.
Laurie Kilmartin on X:
"Really great. Their lives were grueling. I wanted to punch Laura’s annoying daughter Rose Wilder Lane repeatedly."
https://x.com/anylaurie16/status/1977602712851370092
(Praise for "Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder" by Caroline Fraser)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33911349-prairie-fires
Anyways, yeah there seems to be different versions or interpretations of the kind of personality that her daughter was floating around. For example, this is from the article:
"After cradling a six-year-old girl who “weigh[ed] as much as a normal child of eighteen months,” Lane fled the hospital. At the American soup kitchen in Schonbrunn Palace, a “ragged horde” of starving children ate their only meal of the day, a soggy flour dumpling, in “ferocious silence.”As Older informed his readers, “There has been nothing written about conditions in Vienna that gives such a vivid picture of a dying city as Mrs. Lane has drawn.”
Lane left soon afterward, admitting she “could not have endured another twenty-four hours of Vienna.” A few days later, she fainted and was hospitalized in Prague, an incident she blamed on the “peace scenes” she had witnessed in Vienna. What she later described as the war’s “destruction of childhood” and the fate of children “whose families had been murdered by the war” traumatized her from the outset, so much so that she seriously considered adopting a war orphan.“If I were an Austrian and saw no end to wars,” Lane confided to her mother in a long letter venting her frustration at the rush to refit American and European armed forces after the armistice in 1918, “I would commit suicide. The patient, never-ending stupidity of the world overwhelms me.'"
~ Sallie Ketcham
"'It Was in Armenia That I Learned Fear'
Rose Wilder Lane and the Armenian Genocide"
Sallie Ketcham
(See the link to the PDF.)
I have enjoyed listening to some parts of the book ("Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder" by Caroline Fraser) via audiobook on Libby but I'm on chapter 8 and have noticed the book makes it seem like Rose was really cold-hearted, and I just don't believe it. Is there a proclivity on the part of the reader to placate some kind of internalized misogyny? I mean, when she faints and gets hospitalized because she's traumatized by what she's seeing, that doesn't make it seem like she's cold-hearted. And there was so much summary of the Little House books in the earlier chapters. I wanted it to be broken up with some new insights or quotes from letters or something, and you can't skim over the summary so easily with an audiobook. I'm sure there's more that could have been added.
No comments:
Post a Comment