Help! I Might Be a Tradwife!

Ms. Novak, a poet and a professor of creative writing, writes a newsletter on culture and parenting.

When I heard that Netflix was rebooting “Little House on the Prairie,” I was hopeful, if a little wary. Though I’d never watched the original TV show, I’d grown up so besotted by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels that not only had I read them all but I even owned the supplemental “The Little House Cookbook,” by Barbara M. Walker. I paged through frontier recipes for fried salt pork and gravy with the same longing I experienced when reading Wilder’s prose: the wish to be transported. Tuning in to the new Netflix offering a few weeks after giving birth to my second son, I suppose I once again had that hope.

The new “Little House” isn’t exactly transporting, and that’s why I feel a little disappointed. To the contrary, it seems all too familiar, like cosplay for a fantasy frontier. It’s a visual feast of chemises, bonnets and limpid-eyed girls with flower crowns haloing their pre-Raphaelite coifs. The show also appears, perhaps inevitably, like an infomercial for the tradwife lifestyle, set to a soundtrack of whinnying........

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