47 pages • 1 hour read
Laura Ingalls WilderThe Long Winter
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1940A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Self-Sacrifice for the Greater Good
In The Long Winter, the Ingallses and other families in De Smet survive for seven months of near constant blizzards, and many characters exhibit Self-Sacrifice for the Greater Good. Because fuel and food become scarce, everyone must sacrifice something so that the family and the community can survive winter. Often, it is through self-sacrifice that character growth occurs.
After a memory game between Laura and Mary, Laura feels ashamed for always having wanted to beat Mary at something. In that moment, she has an epiphany, and “for the first time Laura wanted to be a schoolteacher so that she could make the money to send Mary to college” (129). Laura’s parents have shown her repeatedly that maturity means self-sacrifice, and this passage suggests that Laura’s development lies in her willingness to set aside her own wants to help her family. When Christmas arrives and there is no train, Laura sets aside her only items of beauty—an embroidered picture and lace she knitted—for Carrie and Mary. Furthermore, Ma and all the girls contribute what little change they have to purchase suspenders for Pa. These smaller sacrifices for the family unit mirror the broader sacrifices in the novel that aid survival.
Originally, Almanzo Wilder is determined that nothing will threaten his wheat no matter what. However, as the winter continues to worsen, the families around them begin to run out of food. Almanzo and his brother have enough supplies to survive in relative comfort, but when Pa takes wheat from Almanzo’s hidden store it reveals the depth of Pa’s desperation to the Wilders. Almanzo realizes that “there’s folks in this town that are starving” (255). Almanzo realizes that he must risk his own well-being to retrieve the wheat from a distant homestead or many in his community could die. This mission nearly kills him, his horse, and Cap when the blizzard descends, but his sacrifice brings wheat that keeps the town from starving. It also shows that he has grown, shifting from thinking only about the good of his future crops to thinking of his community’s welfare. Wilder suggests that self-sacrifice is necessary to survival in The Long Winter and that those who do it are those who grow the most in character.
Pioneer Resilience and Ingenuity
The characters in The Long Winter show their adaptability by creating new things out of necessity. Scarcity encourages ingenuity and adaptability, and Wilder shows the problem solving necessary to survive on the frontier. The Ingalls family and the fellow homesteaders are capable of surviving the winter because of their resilience and creativity with using all available resources.
When Pa buys a mower, he does not have the money to pay a laborer to help in the fields. Instead, Laura offers to help him with haying. While this is difficult Laura loves working with her father, demonstrating one of the text’s first examples of resilience even before the hard winter sets in. Eventually, the blizzards stop trains from running until spring, which means there are no more supplies coming. One crucial necessity that the family does not have is coal, and they cannot afford to buy the lumber that some families are using as fuel. Pa decides to twist hay into sticks. Ma is surprised and delighted: “What won’t you think of next? Trust you, Charles, to find a way” (186). Her mention of what comes “next” highlights the fact that their circumstances require constant ingenuity to survive.
Ma also invents things for the family’s survival. Pa is not able to get flour, but he brings Ma wheat. Ma makes bread using wheat, which she has never used before. She has one of her children grind it using a coffee grinder so that she can make it into bread. Furthermore, when Ma wants to make a surprise for Pa after he has worked tirelessly, she decides to use what is available and make a green pumpkin pie. When Laura says, “I never heard of such a thing,” Ma replies, “[W]e wouldn’t do much if we didn’t do things that nobody ever heard of before” (32). This exemplifies the need to practice ingenuity to survive and thrive in extreme circumstances.
Even when trains are running in the early portions of the novel, the family does not have much money and must make most of what they need. This ingenuity is necessary for homesteaders on the frontier because they are isolated from town and resources, and it allows the town to survive one of the hardest winters in history.
The Beauty and Danger of the Natural World
In The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls loves the natural world, but she is also wary of its dangers. This duality is explored often in the novel. Early on, a frost comes that kills the Ingalls’s garden:
Laura loved the beautiful world. She knew that the bitter frost had killed the hay and the garden. The tangled tomato vines with their red and green tomatoes, and the pumpkin vines holding their broad leaves over the green young pumpkins, were all glittering bright in frost over the broken, frosty sod. The sod corn’s stalks and long leaves were white. The frost had killed them. It would leave every living green thing dead. But the frost was beautiful (28).
While the frost kills their garden, and they are left with less produce than they need, Laura still admires the beauty. Her vivid descriptions of the natural world throughout the novel show its beauty, but often those descriptions are tempered with her understanding of the natural world’s unpredictability. The contrast of the beauty and the danger suggest that humans should feel awe for the power of the natural world to remain both safe in and appreciative of their surroundings.
Laura has been raised in the wilderness and she—similar to her Pa—has both an appreciation of nature’s power and awe for its beauty. Pa and Laura are deeply connected with the natural world, and they both see the signs foreshadowing a hard winter, to which other characters are less attuned. Pa shows respect and love for the natural world, including saving a little bird he found in a haystack. The family keeps it for the blizzard and then releases it when the storm ends.
Laura appreciates the duality of nature—it works against her and her family’s survival and is a thing of incredible beauty. In Chapter 14, Mary and Minnie from school playfully discuss what they would do if they were caught outside in a snowstorm. Both girls have come from the east recently and have not been on the frontier during a winter. Laura is uncomfortable with the conversation because she has lived on the frontier for her entire life. Laura is aware of the stakes and the true dangers of the natural world, and she knows that if she were caught in a blizzard and unable to find shelter then she would die. Laura is uncomfortable sharing this with her new friends. Mary and Johnson still view frontier life as an adventure, but Laura knows that the consequences are deadly serious. Wilder suggests that all people should learn about nature’s danger even while appreciating its beauty.
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By Laura Ingalls Wilder
