ABSTRACT
In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, the Ingalls girls frequently state their desire for an eternal childhood, expressing contentment with the family’s daily life and preferring it to continue along its idyllic path; in particular, they eschew their inevitable maturation into adulthood with its concomitant demands of marital sexuality.1 The narrative trajectory of the series ends with Laura’s marriage to Almanzo Wilder, and thus, despite her misgivings, Laura must metamorphose from her tomboyish childhood of sexual innocence, in which horses are the primary object of her erotic attention, to adulthood as a wife. Rather than facilitating her resistance to ideological constructions of gender and sexuality on the Western prairie, horses paradoxically assist in domesticating this unruly girl into her uxorial duties. Within the Little House novels, horses represent Laura’s investment in sexuality, in which the animals are eroticized as a surrogate for adult sexuality, but the apparent innocence of equine desires only masks how they eventually engage her within the realm of adult sexuality that she so determinedly avoids throughout the pages of the series.
