How to Be a Pioneer Woman Without Ever Leaving the Couch Every night before I peel the plastic seal off a cup of tapioca and watch "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" on my big-screen TV, I read a chapter of "Little House in the Big Woods" to my daughters, who are 5 and 3. For the first few chapters, Pa mostly tramps around in the woods, shooting at things. First Pa shoots a deer and smokes the meat. Next he catches a bunch of fish and salts the meat. One lucky day, he wanders up on a bear that's about to eat a pig. He shoots the bear, then lugs it home, along with the bonus pig. The family celebrates! My girls listen in stunned silence, more accustomed to picture books about Fancy Nancy and Olivia (also a pig). They never imagined that Olivia could be carved up and smoked, or that her tail might be considered a treat if fried in lard, or that her bladder might be filled with air and batted around like a balloon. But as we read on about corn husks that double as dolls and smoked-meat-strewed attics that double as playrooms, their envy of Laura and Mary becomes palpable, a sentiment I certainly understand. Something in the way the author lingers over the details - the meticulous smoking process, the daylong, harrowing walk into town, the way the dog bristles and growls when predators are afoot - has the power to make hardships sound soothing and delectable. But then, what girl doesn't dream of spending a long, cold winter huddled in a tiny cabin with her staunchly religious parents, nibbling on smoked deer and lard cakes, while panthers and bears and wolves lurk outside the door? The perverse pleasures of a pastoral narrative like "Little House in the Big Woods," which was written by Laura Ingalls Wilder in 1932 (it was a precursor to "Little House on the Prairie"), lie in the fantasy it offers about the deeply spiritual benefits of tangling with nature, whether nature takes the shape of swaying oak trees, giant snowdrifts or hungry predators. The pastoral genre has been around since ancient Greece, but it took a particular hold on the collective consciousness during the Industrial Revolution, when visions of a serene existence in the country were painted in sharp contrast to the indignities of urban life. The literary critic Terry Eagleton explained in The Guardian that the pastoral is "largely the creation of town dwellers. It is the myth of those for whom the country is a place to look at rather than live in. What's interesting about "Little House in the Big Woods" in particular, though, is that instead of exalting a leisurely life in the bucolic countryside, it paints hard labor and the constant threat of death in hues that make them seem as relaxing as a trip to the spa. Or maybe that's just how it looks from this modern vantage. Because after Ma and Laura narrowly escape a run-in with a giant bear and Pa gets back from town and plays everyone a ditty on his fiddle, my two girls step over a sea of plastic toys to get to their beds, and I remove the sealed top from my tapioca and proceed to become agitated over ladies with surgically redesigned bodies who weep an endless river of tears over casual slights. Eleven hours later, I'll be pouring my girls" breakfast out of a cereal box and walking them to their respective concrete schoolyards, where they will play with Disney-princess action figures and eat off-brand Oreos at snack time, while I spend my day squinting at a computer screen until my head throbs in sync with the drumbeat piped into my earbuds. Being stalked by wild panthers sounds sort of refreshing, compared to this. This is why the pastoral narrative needs sharp teeth: it's not that we crave suffering so much as we crave suffering for valid reasons, in contrast to our laments that our supposedly ergonomic chairs make our backs ache, or the Twitter apps on our iPhones don't load fast enough. Wouldn't it be better if I were breaking a sweat from hacking chunks off a bear carcass right now? I ask myself this while working out on the elliptical trainer at the gym. Wouldn't I be more serene if I spent my days pickling beets or hunching over a laundry pail? And shouldn't my children be right here with me, sewing on their nine-patch quilts? Wouldn't we all be happier if we spent our time together, just us and no one else, learning about what's really important, never getting distracted by what isn't? The fantasy enabled by "Little House in the Big Woods" goes beyond the pastoral's focus on communion with nature and with your own instincts or even with the satisfaction of muscles that ache from a day of hard work. At its heart, "Little House" is also a fantasy of total isolation and total control.