Little Women—Louisa May Alcott

America's bildungsroman

Jo turns Laurie down

What a pleasant relief to read a book that replaces the F-word with “fiddlesticks”! Part One of Little Women came out in 1868, as a result of a request from Louis May Alcott’s publisher that she write a novel for girls. She had no interest at all in writing such a thing. She would much have preferred to write a blood-and-thunder melodrama and couldn’t imagine how anyone would find a story of domestic family life worth reading. So, after putting off the dread task with one excuse after another, she finally ensconced herself in her little writing attic and started chronicling the goings on of the March household, drawn largely but loosely from her own childhood. In an astonishing ten weeks she had submitted the roughly 400-page manuscript, which she thought boring and unlikely to justify a sequel. The final lines read,

... the curtain falls upon Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given to the first act of the domestic drama called “LITTLE WOMEN.”

Well, the book, a coming of age story for girls, met with greater success than she expected. Almost immediately she started receiving fan mail, much of which she found gratifying, but one type of letter incensed her. According to Susan Cheever’s biography, Louisa May Alcott,

Dozens of young women wrote ecstatically to praise the book and to urge Alcott to allow Jo to marry Laurie at the end of the second part. To this Alcott responded with fury. “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life,” she complained in her journal in November. “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.”

Indeed, by refusing to marry Jo to Laurie, Alcott succeeded in putting forward a very subversive concept of how a woman could find genuine fulfillment in life by some means other than by marrying well. She did not condemn or belittle the traditional models of domestic womanhood, but showed rather that the world had room for other models.

Her publisher asked her to follow up with a Part Two, which she did, picking up the story five years after the curtain had fallen on the previous part. The continuing saga of the March sisters sees them each finding their own satisfying path into adulthood, whether that path leads them to settle into a traditional household or to pursue a career in the outer world. The narrative style changes from fairly straightforward storytelling and now includes a liberal dose of letters and journal entries. Louisa did not think the second part would meet with the same success as the first part, which had sold 5,000 copies. To everyone’s surprise, within the first month, 14,000 copies had sold. Over the next century and a half, the not so little book has seen translations into over fifty languages, and adaptations into numerous television productions, plays, musicals, operas, and seven films, the most recent of which, directed by Greta Gerwig, came out in 2019. The book’s appeal clearly transcended Louisa’s own times.

In the first part, we meet the small cast of characters: the eldest sister, Meg, the more conventional one; the second sister, Jo, a reflection of Louisa herself, an aspiring author with an ungovernable temper; Beth, the sweet-tempered, musically inclined sister, referred to as “the peacemaker”; and Amy, the youngest, a budding artist who chafes at the family’s poverty and hungers for glamorous society and material possessions. The girls, not buried like modern children under mountains of toys, games, and other consumer goods, fall back on their own company and resources while mom (Marmee) does the parenting. Alcott makes it seem perfectly natural for young teens to write scripts, dress up in costumes, and act out melodramas in the living room for their own entertainment. What more natural thing for poor children to do than create their own Pickwick Club, in which they hold formal meetings, and publish a family newsletter? And who doesn’t have their own family post office where people living under the same roof can carry on epistolary relationships with each other? When you add into the mix a shy boy living in a gloomy mansion next door with his rich, overprotective grandfather, much innocent mischief must surely ensue.

Interestingly, despite their constant interaction, none of the sisters mentor each other’s activities. In many families I’ve seen, two or more siblings will take up the same interest and challenge or teach each other. Musical families, for instance, might form a chamber ensemble. I suspect that parents have a lot to do with sparking that sort of symbiosis. In the March household, however, Father has gone to serve in the Union Army while Marmee has too much on her hands to engage with the children in their pastimes. So the girls, like members of some sort of utopian community, each stake out a role in their tiny commune and monopolize it. They do collaborate, but from opposite corners of the room. It seems to me that this isolation in the midst of community captures an important aspect of the American character. Jo exemplifies this quality most of all. Writing, for her, requires solitude, privacy of the content, and personal ownership of the result, unless she writes for an audience. So one of the novel’s greatest crises occurs when Amy takes a book Jo had secretly written and burns it.

One scene particularly moved me: In chapter eight, Marmee tells Jo about her own struggle with her temper. Children, after all, see their parents fully matured, not still growing, and don’t realize that they had to go through the same stages and often struggled with the same demons.

“Jo, dear, we all have our temptations, some far greater than yours, and it often takes all our lives to conquer them. You think your temper is the worst in the world; but mine used to be just like it.”

“Yours, mother? Why, you are never angry!” and, for the moment, Jo forgot remorse in surprise.

“I’ve been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.”

The patience and humility of the face she loved so well was a better lesson to Jo than the wisest lecture, the sharpest reproof. She felt comforted at once by the sympathy and confidence given her; the knowledge that her mother had a fault like hers, and tried to mend it, made her own easier to bear and strengthened her resolution to cure it; though forty years seemed a rather long time to watch and pray, to a girl of fifteen.

I noticed also that this ideal world of Alcott’s has no room in it for villains. Everyone goes about their work or play with an innocent energy. While some of the children may resent their treatment at the thoughtless hands of others and may even seek to avenge the felt wrong, they eventually recognize their own envy or resentment as a curable personal flaw. They seek to correct their own shortcomings, and almost every conflict sooner or later dissolves into mutual apologies.

Only a Mr. Davis, the schoolteacher, who makes a brief appearance in chapter seven, comes close to villainy when he makes an example of Amy by striking her hand and making her stand on the platform at the front of class for fifteen minutes. Mr. Davis had made several rules in an effort to keep order in his class of fifty girls. He particularly likes Amy, but she has broken one of the rules, so he feels he has little choice. He announces to Amy before the whole class, “I am sorry this has happened; but I never allow my rules to be infringed, and I never break my word. Now hold out your hand.” No sooner has the narrator reported this speech than she reassures us, “it is my private belief that he would have broken his word if the indignation of one irrepressible young lady had not found vent in a hiss. That hiss, faint as it was, irritated the irascible gentleman, and sealed the culprit’s fate.” At recess, Mr Davis dismissed the class, “looking, as he felt, uncomfortable.”

Just in case we feel inclined to demonize Mr. Davis, the narrator piles up excuses for him. “Mr. Davis had evidently taken his coffee too strong that morning; there was an east wind, which always affected his neuralgia; and his pupils had not done him the credit which he felt he deserved...” In other words, he feels that his role as teacher forces him to suppress his humanity and compassion. Considering some of the terrifying teachers we’ve seen in other books, this halfhearted tyrant pales in comparison.

As a biographical aside I’ll mention that in Louisa’s early years, her father, Bronson Alcott, had taken up the banner of educational reform and had run an experimental school. He rejected the then current view of children as devils who needed frequent beatings to civilize them. He viewed children instead as angels with an inner wisdom worth hearing, or at least as persons possessing the same human dignity and worth as all of us. Unfortunately this democratic view of children didn’t keep him from playing the autocrat himself at times. One can’t help but notice that almost all of Louisa’s family and friends provide inspiration for characters in the novel—all except her own idealistic, volatile, domineering, and contradictory father. In the novel, the father stayed conveniently out of the picture throughout. But Louisa still manages to slip in a little critique of public education through the petty Mr. Davis.

Louisa May Alcott’s own life may have inspired the world of Little Women, but she repurposed that life almost beyond recognition. For one example, Jo seems a bit more aware of philosophy as a serious topic than most American children. But after all, the Alcott family had very close ties to the families of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. For another example, when the novel begins, the American Civil War had started, but it only served to pull the father out of the picture for most of the novel and the mother for a few chapters. In the real world, however, Louisa volunteered as a nurse at an army hospital and surely had horrific stories to tell. In general, though fully aware of the realities surrounding her, she paints the world of the March family in pastels.

Despite its obvious toning down for younger ears, the book engaged me more than I expected. The entire novel, but mostly the first part, reminded me of the many agonizing lessons that accompanied my own coming of age—all those times when I said something mean, or played a cruel trick, or made light of someone’s suffering; all those things I still wish I could retract or redo. Those cringeworthy moments mostly involved mistakes in my treatment of others, and my shame always drove me to confess the wrong and apologize, as the March children did. So many memories of growing up flooded back as I read Little Women. It may have started out as a book for young girls, but it spoke to me, too.

§ § §

Just yesterday I paid a visit to my friend and colleague who put together the Decade List so long ago, and he requested that I tackle a batch of lyric poetry next. So, in honor of Glenn “Chip” Hughes, I will read a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems, guided by the relevant chapters in two of Chip’s own books, A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art, and From Dickinson to Dylan: Visions of Transcendence in Modernist Literature. I do not propose to read all 1,775 poems in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, but I’ll do the best I can. I’ll also read the biography by Alfred Habegger, My Life Is Laid Away In Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. This adds up to quite a lot of reading, and I’ll travel out of state again, so it may take me more than a week to post these reflections.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Lousia May Alcott: A Personal Biography, by Susan Cheever

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson

A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art, by Glenn Hughes

From Dickinson to Dylan: Visions of Transcendence in Modernist Literature, by Glenn Hughes

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, by Alfred Habegger

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