Margie Taylor Reviews Little Women
Concord,
Massachusetts in the mid-19th century was an exciting place to be, if you were
of a thoughtful bent. For a small town, it was home to a substantial collection
of philosophers and writers, the most prominent being Ralph Waldo Emerson, one
of the leading lights of the Transcendentalist movement. Emerson’s neighbours
included Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the philosopher,
reformer, and teacher, Amos Bronson Alcott, whose daughter, Louisa May, wrote
the classic Little Women.
If you, like
me, were an adolescent girl in the early 1960s, you no doubt read Little
Women and enjoyed it. I certainly did. I identified strongly with Jo, the
bookworm, although I wasn’t a tomboy like her. For a long time I could recite
whole passages of the book, and I remember being very affected by the death of
one of the sisters, shy little Beth. I would say that Jo’s journey into the
world of writing and publishing was at least one of several early incentives I
experienced to become a writer.
Which is why
it grieves me to say I really wish I hadn’t re-read it for the purposes
of this blog.
First, the
summary. Published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, Little Women is the
story of a family of girls – Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March – who live in genteel
poverty with their mother, their servant, and their father, who is away serving
as a chaplain to the Union forces during the American civil war. Meg, the
oldest, is the pretty one – she’s modest and conventional, and most like her
mother in temperament. Jo is the “man of the house” – she wishes she was a boy
and hates all things “girly”. Beth is a shy little homebody, with a gift for
music. In a foreshadowing of her early death, Alcott writes:
“There are
many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and
living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little
cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence
vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.”
Amy, the
youngest, is a budding artist. She’s pretty, graceful, and ambitious: “Her
little airs and graces were much admired, so were her accomplishments, for
besides her drawing, she could play twelve tunes, crochet, and read French
without mispronouncing more than two-thirds of the words.”
The two
older girls work outside the home to earn money – Meg teaches the children of a
neighbouring family, and Jo acts as a companion and helper to her crotchety
Aunt March. Beth stays home and helps with the housework, and Amy attends
school. Although all four girls revere their father and regard him as the fount
of all wisdom, their mother, Marmee, is the mainstay of the family. Her advice,
frequently but kindly offered, guides all their actions.
When the
story opens, the girls are bemoaning the approach of a very frugal Christmas
– as Jo says, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.” The
family has recently moved into a poorer neighbourhood, their father having lost
all his money, and their circumstances are much reduced. Each of the girls
struggles with a particular challenge: Meg longs for past luxuries, Jo is
impulsive and quick to anger, Beth is far too shy, and Amy is selfish. Their
mother reminds them that when they were young they used to play Pilgrim’s
Progress, working their way from the cellar, which was the City of
Destruction, to the rooftop, which was the Celestial City. She suggests they
play the game now for real, bearing their burdens cheerfully as Christian did,
and this becomes the theme of the narrative.
While the
book is not strictly autobiographical, it’s clear that Alcott based much of it
on her own family and her experiences growing up in Concord. Like Jo, she had
three sisters, one of whom, Elizabeth, died young after a lengthy illness. The
oldest sister, Meg, is based on Anna, who was dutiful, self-sacrificing, and
conformed to the model of Victorian womanhood. Her youngest sister, Abigail
May, provided the model for Amy. Like Amy, she moved to Europe and studied
sculpture, sketching and painting and eventually came into her own as a copyist
and a painter of still life.
As for
Louisa May, she, like Jo, was a tomboy who preferred running wildly through the
countryside to sitting nicely and being a “lady”. She once confided to an
interviewer, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul put by some
freak of nature into a woman’s body … because I have fallen in love with so
many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.” She was an
abolitionist and a feminist; having read and admired the “Declaration of
Sentiments” published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s
rights, she became the first woman to register to vote in a Concord school
board election. She never married and various scholars have speculated about
her sexuality. At the very least I think it’s fair to say Alcott was a more
complex and compelling character than any of the women in her book.
It’s
interesting to me that she didn’t particularly like Little Women. She
was encouraged to write it by her publisher who wanted her to come up with a
girls’ book that would have widespread appeal. She agreed but loathed the
process: “I plod away,” she wrote in her diary, “although I don’t enjoy this
sort of thing.”
Nor do I. If
I didn’t admire the woman herself – which I do – and hadn’t loved the book so
much – which I did – I’d be tempted to conclude that Little Women is a
compilation of sentimental homilies written to convince little girls that the
point of growing up is to be submissive, subserviant and meek – none of which
the author believed for a moment. If the little girls of 1868 accepted that –
and many, many didn’t – I can guarantee you it won’t resonate with a child of
today.
Yes, Alcott
gave us Jo, the rebel, the female anti-hero. But Jo marries in the end and
Marmee gets the last word: Surrounded by her children, her grandchildren, and
her husband, she reaches out her arms and cries, “Oh, my girls, however long
you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!”
Coda:
Ten Little
Women homilies, taken entirely out of context, offered here for your
edification, without editorial comment:
- Work is a blessed solace.
- Rich people have about as many worries as poor ones.
- It’s nice to have accomplishments and be elegant, but not to show off or get perked up.
- Women should learn to be agreeable, particularly poor ones, for they have no other way of repaying the kindnesses they receive.
- A kiss for a blow is always best, though it’s not very easy to give it sometimes.
- Don’t neglect husband for children, don’t shut him out of the nursery, but teach him how to help in it.
- Rich people’s children often need care and comfort, as well as poor.
- Wrongdoing always brings its own punishment.
- A woman’s happiest kingdom is home, her highest honor the art of ruling it not as a queen, but as a wise wife and mother.
- Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.
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