Although little-known or studied today, Frederick Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh in 1925 ignited a firestorm that would serve to make it one of the defining American novels the first half of the 20th century. The loosely defined genre of “prairie fiction” had existed for half a century before Grove came along, but the bulk of it resembled the sentimental fiction that characterized so many other examples of regional fiction.
Little House on the Prairie does not really belong to that fiction which mythologized the West all out of proportion to its reality, but neither do the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder represent a hard unvarnished foundation for exploring the full truth about pioneer life. Of course, much of that has to do with the fact that Wilder was a woman and it wouldn’t have been appropriately delicate enough of her to portray life on the prairie which introduced some rougher aspects of real life to the portrait of rugged farm life on that land stretching from Nebraska into western Canada.
Even more to the point, however, is that by the time Grove set down to move from the travel literature he’d been writing to the more creatively satisfying job of making up stories, the mood of the reading public had finally been convinced almost as a whole to shift from the sentimental romance of the 19th century over to the more brutally honest realism and naturalism which characterized American fiction up to the mid-century. Although, as Grove found out in the case of Settlers of the Marsh, the movement was not yet totally complete.
It would be a difficult task to point out exactly why for the modern reader, but for moralists in the America that existed before anyone had even conceived of the terms Great Depression and Third Reich, the book was nothing less than a work of unwholesome obscenity that deserved to be banned. It is the introduction of a decadent plot device like a love triangle deemed more acceptable to European novelists who were (for many American readers) nothing but a bunch of obscene traffickers in the seamier side of life unknown to the godly examples of moral purity that occupied farms and small towns across the American and Canadian prairie.
The story that plays out in the novel is rough and unwilling to have its realism obstructed by misguided ideas about what does and does not take place far away from the dens of sin in the capitals of Europe. The protagonist of the Settlers of the March is not exactly Charles Ingalls, but, curiously, he actually does resemble the idealistic patriarch of the Little House series on the inside. Both men share a strong and honest foundation of morality that prevents them from doing certain things they consider sinful. Unfortunately, this very same rigid clinging to a moral code has a flip side that can potentially be quite dark, indeed. It is that dark side which Charles Ingalls never showed and which her creator could never have had him show. Niels Linstedt is a tragic figure who at times seems the victim of forces of doom that are out to destroy him, but the controversy at the heart of his story is that it is precisely his own ungrudging commitment to the forces of goodness that are the true agencies of his misery.
