Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

A recent bout of food poisoning means a sick day read: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I read it sometime in my adolescence and not since, but Alcott’s been on my mind since I listened to the episode about her life from The History Chicks, which is a most excellent and recommended podcast. (The hosts have a side project called The Recappery which has also covered the recent Little Women miniseries.)

Book details:

Title: Little Women (American editions include vol. 2, originally titled Good Wives)
Author: Louisa May Alcott
Original publication date: 1868 (vol. 1), 1869 (vol. 2)
Setting time & place: 1860s Massachusetts, also New York City, various European locations
He is… A 40 year old German professor, poor and schlubby on the outside, but pure and philosophical on the inside.
She is… a 15 year old tomboy with a penchant for drama at the beginning, a 25 year old writer/school administrator at the end
Reasons to read this title: A classic tale for girls which reveals new aspects to the adult reader.

My review of Little Women

Is it a romance novel? No. Although the second volume ends with marriage, I don’t see romance as the main plot of the book, which is a family epic.
Is it a must read romance novel? Maybe. Alcott does some peculiar and provocative things with reader expectations about HEAs.

I went into this book with the memory that Jo doesn’t marry Laurie and that was wrong. As I read, however, it became obvious that Jo’s love life is only one of many threads of the story and the strongest thread, well… Pretty much every article about Alcott and her writing mentions the fact that she found writing Little Women dull, did it for the money (and the sequels moreso), and that she considered it to be “moral pap for the young.” The morality aspect is certainly what was most obvious to me this time around!

Alcott starts in with this straight off: the story opens on Christmas, the four March girls give up their holiday meal for a local family who are even poorer than they. They are quickly rewarded by their rich neighbor, Mr. Lawrence, who sees their generosity and sends them an even better meal than the one they gave up.

Now, you might wonder what the morality of the Marches giving up $10 to Hummels and getting $20 from the Lawrences? Why not have Mr. Lawrence send charity directly to the Hummels? Well, that wouldn’t give the March girls a moral lesson, or introduce Mr. Laurence and his grandson. It does put me in mind of this Wondermark take on Batman though!

But hey, we’re here for literature, not for socialism. Or something. In case you miss the message of the just reward for the Marches’ charity, here’s Jo speaking to her mother, Marmee.

“Tell another story, Mother, one with a moral to it, like this. I like to think about them afterward, if they are real and not too preachy,” said Jo, after a minute’s silence.

Marmee obligingly points out the moral lessons in the episodes of the story so far, and the story continues with periodic moral lessons. We learn many good lessons, and a few that made me either roll my eyes or sigh with frustration at the role the Victorian woman was relegated to. This conversation between Jo and her mother especially made me sad.

Jo, dear, we all have our temptations, some far greater than yours, and it often takes us 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.”

In many ways, Marmee as saintly figure ministering to the local poor reminded me of Scarlett O’Hara’s mother, Ellen. Given the widespread popularity of Little Women, I think it’s safe to assume that it was part of Margaret Mitchell’s reading even though it is a Northern story and the Alcotts were abolitionists. I wonder if Mitchell was thinking a little of Marmee when she gave Ellen a selfless nature, and a dramatic backstory.

Despite the hints about her past temper, we don’t get any backstory about Marmee. Her father knew old Mr. Lawrence and… now she is a mother of four teenage girls, holding the family together while her husband is away as a chaplain in the Civil War. We do get plenty about Lou–ahem, Jo‘s writing career, which I expect would please anyone who has been through any part of the publishing experience.

Having copied her novel for the fourth time, read it to all her confidential friends, and submitted it with fear and trembling to three publishers, she at last disposed of it, on condition that she would cut it down one third, and omit all the parts which she particularly admired.

I enjoyed the writing bits up until the moral lesson about writing lurid literature. Jo has been writing dramatic stories full of poison, murder, betrayal, etc, skimming newspapers for tragic tales as inspiration, and putting away a nest egg with which she intends to take her sickly sister Beth for a recuperative vacation. Sounds great, right? Literary woman making a living by her pen! Just what I am aspiring too.

However, don’t forget that we’re in moral pap land. The best literature is the improving sort, and blood and thunder stories are only going to corrupt the weak-minded. Jo might as well be selling crack cocaine, at least to judge by Professor Bhaer’s subtle insinuations.

“All may not be bad, only silly, you know, and if there is a demand for it, I don’t see any harm in supplying it. Many very respectable people make an honest living out of what are called sensation stories,” said Jo, scratching gathers so energetically that a row of little slits followed her pin.

“There is a demand for whisky, but I think you and I do not care to sell it. If the respectable people knew what harm they did, they would not feel that the living was honest. They haf no right to put poison in the sugarplum, and let the small ones eat it. No, they should think a little, and sweep mud in the street before they do this thing.”

Look, if you’ve been in Romancelandia for five minutes, you have probably heard this argument before. I might have tossed the book right then and there if I thought Alcott believed it, but I’m pretty sure she was rolling her eyes while she wrote it. This is the in the second volume of the book, published after the first book was a runaway success and she was inundated by fan letters… The New Yorker quotes a letter she wrote to a friend:

“Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her.”

The character of Friedrich “Fritz” Bhaer is a certainly a perverse one, in the sense of turning against expectation. Laurie is young, athletic, half-Italian, rich, and in school for most of the first book. Instead of matching him with Jo, Alcott brings in a new man who is old, fat, German (compare your stereotypes of Teutonic and Latin Europeans), poor, and a teacher.

Here’s Laurie in Europe, about to meet and fall for Amy:

a tall young man walked slowly, with his hands behind him, and a somewhat absent expression of countenance. He looked like an Italian, was dressed like an Englishman, and had the independent air of an American—a combination which caused sundry pairs of feminine eyes to look approvingly after him, and sundry dandies in black velvet suits, with rose-colored neckties, buff gloves, and orange flowers in their buttonholes, to shrug their shoulders, and then envy him his inches. There were plenty of pretty faces to admire, but the young man took little notice of them, except to glance now and then at some blonde girl in blue.

And here’s Jo’s first impression of Bhaer, in a letter home:

A regular German—rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, good nose, the kindest eyes I ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one’s ears good, after our sharp or slipshod American gabble. His clothes were rusty, his hands were large, and he hadn’t a really handsome feature in his face, except his beautiful teeth, yet I liked him, for he had a fine head, his linen was very nice, and he looked like a gentleman, though two buttons were off his coat and there was a patch on one shoe. He looked sober in spite of his humming, till he went to the window to turn the hyacinth bulbs toward the sun, and stroke the cat, who received him like an old friend.

There’s something to be said for the perversity of Bhaer as a romantic character, but, at the end of the day, I do rather wish that Jo could have stayed a literary spinster as Alcott was. It’s easy to speculate about authorial self-insertion with a line like this from Jo, just before Bhaer comes back to woo her:

A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps, when, like poor Johnson, I’m old and can’t enjoy it, solitary, and can’t share it, independent, and don’t need it.

I have more thoughts about Jo’s marriage and the stop it puts to her literary career, but they need more time to sit, because they also involved George Eliot and the whole romance genre, and I need time to work them out in a sensible way.

As for Alcott, she kept writing books for children–and for money. After a childhood of crushing poverty, she was quite willing to write whatever she was well-paid for–a theme I also saw in Georgette Heyer’s biography! However, I find myself quite interested to see what her sensationalist stories were like. Given the timeline, several of her known works (she published under pseudonyms, so not all are known) are available on Gutenberg and other places. I’m particularly interested to read A Long Fatal Love Chase, which was unpublished until 1995 but apparently has shades of Jane Eyre in it!