logo

59 pages 1 hour read

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Little House in the Big Woods

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1932

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Character Analysis

Laura Ingalls

Laura Ingalls is the main character in the story and the alter ego of the author of the “Little House” series—she even shares the author’s name. When Little House in the Big Woods begins, she is a four-year-old middle child living in Pepin, Wisconsin. When it ends a year later, she is five years old. Her first experiences in the book involve the awareness of the wild animals around the small gray house where she lives. Unlike her older sister, Mary, who is described as a good, well-mannered girl, Laura sometimes runs and makes noise when she shouldn’t (in an age in which children were taught to be seen and not heard) and forgets to say thank you when she is emotional. She occasionally expresses a feeling of restriction in terms of her clothes, activities, and behavior. Overall, she is a well-disposed, strong, idealistic child who tries to follow the rules and already understands how important it is to pull her own weight with housework and other duties.

Laura sometimes struggles with selfishness as well. During the course of the story, she experiences many “firsts” because she is so young; she sees wolves, receives her first rag doll, attends a dance at Grandpa’s house, has maple sugar candy, goes into town, meets new people, and sees her first machines. Her story includes learning lessons from her father’s stories and songs, helping her parents with daily chores that are described in detail, such as encountering dangerous wild animals and experiencing the daily adventures and duties that go with living in a frontier region of the United States during a time of booming westward expansion. Though her family’s life includes much hard work because they must do everything themselves, from finding and growing food to building their own homes, the natural world and their cozy home within it provides an often pleasant and comfortable life for this small girl who lives in the big woods.

Charles Ingalls

Laura’s Pa is a comforting, capable, fair, and disciplined presence in her life. When introduced, he calms Laura’s fears of the wolves and then takes her to see them. He is the provider and protector of the family, and his duties include everything from cutting wood and scaring off bears to setting traps to catch animals. He is also the moral center of the family, meting out punishment when it is needed and telling stories that impart lessons of importance to his daughters both in terms of behavior and survival. When Laura is goaded by Mary and slaps her when Mary boasts about her blond hair, it is Pa who whips her, then comforts her. When Charley, a cousin, acts badly while he’s supposed to be helping with the harvest and then is stung by many yellow jackets, he says, “It served the little liar right” (211). Laura clearly gets her love of exploration from him; he calls her “a little half-pint of cider half drunk up” (35). When he isn’t too tired from all the work he does daily, he loves to play the fiddle and sing. While he does what he must to provide for his family, he is not immune to the love of nature. During the spring, he tells his girls they will not have fresh meat until fall because he won’t shoot the baby animals. At the end of the book, he is so enchanted by the creatures he sees he doesn’t shoot any of them, and comes home without meat. Pa’s stories and songs enliven his family’s lives and provide structure to the narrative of Little House in the Big Woods

Caroline Ingalls

Laura’s Ma is a quieter, gentler, yet nonetheless solid presence in the young girl’s life. The book references Caroline’s previous life before marriage, when she lived in a more settled East Coast: “Ma had been very fashionable, before she married Pa, and a dressmaker had made her clothes” (128). Laura is also proud when she hears her aunts talk about how small her mother’s waist was when she and Charles were married. Now she spends her days in a very different way. The book uses her character to laud traditional gender roles within the domestic sphere: cooking, making lard and cheese, churning butter, washing dishes, and baking. She is a good cook; her husband remarks, “Nobody’d starve to death when you were around, Caroline,” (193), to which she responds that this is true as long as he provides for them. The two clearly have a loving partnership and a strong relationship. It may be noted that in later installments of the Little House series Caroline sometimes stands in the stead of her husband, as when he is lost for several days during a snowstorm and she does all his chores in On the Banks of Plum Creek, or when she takes in boarders while protecting her children from their rowdy behavior in By the Shores of Silver Lake. Wilder has also been more recently scrutinized for her exoticism and negativity about Native Americans, and Caroline is the main source of fearful, genocidal sentiments about “Indians” in On the Banks of Plum Creek, since she believes that the only good Indian is a dead one.

Mary Ingalls

Mary is Laura’s older sister by one year. The two sleep together, play together, and work together. Mary is a less boisterous, well-behaved child with blonde hair that Laura envies; Laura also compares herself to her sister in terms of manners, looks, and in material possessions (as with the candy they both receive in town). As the older child, Mary sometimes receives benefits that Laura does not get; for example, at the beginning of the book she has a rag doll named Nettie while Laura has a corn cob in a handkerchief to stand in for a plaything. Ever the model of ladylike generosity, Mary lets Laura play with her doll. Like many sisters, the two of them fight, as when Mary tells Laura that golden hair is prettier than brown—but they also protect and care for one another, as Laura does when Pa is pretending to be a mad dog chasing after them and Mary is too scared to move: “But as Pa came nearer Laura screamed, and with a wild leap and a scramble she went over the wood-box, dragging Mary with her” (Page 35). Mary gives Laura a dress for her new doll for her birthday, too, which she made herself while Laura thought she was doing something else. In By the Shores of Silver Lake, the author reveals that Mary, along with other members of the family, suffered from scarlet fever—and as a result, Mary lost her eyesight. In the later books in the series, Laura’s goal is to raise enough money to send Mary to a special school for the blind in Iowa. In addition to baby Carrie, the two girls eventually gain another little sister named Grace, who is also introduced in By the Shores of Silver Lake.

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text