LIFE:
   Griffith and Frey note that Little Women draws extensively on the author's own personal and family history - with Jo as Louisa.  She lived in Concord, Mass, the second daughter of transcendentalist philosopher Bronson Alcott.  Her mother (Abigail) was the model for Marmee, her three sisters for the other “Little Women” (Anna/Meg, Elizabeth/Beth, May/Amy).  Alcott wrote it intentionally as a "girl's story," although she was not fond of the genre; nevertheless, it has become one of if not the most popular such stories ever written.
    Note that her own family life was less "normal" than that of the Marches.   Her father was impractical and improvident - e.g., he nearly starved family to death pursuing utopian vegetarian dream at farm outside Concord.  So Aunt March’s complaints about Mr. March were more justifiable applied to the Alcotts.  The Alcotts were saved because Abigail took control of the purse strings, leaving father to philosophize.
    Alcott began early to work to help support her family through various domestic or teaching positions.  She volunteered as a nurse in the Union Army in  1862, serving around Washington (whence comes Mr. March’s war service in the novel).  She became ill on this service, leaving her a permanent semi-invalid (from mercury poisoning via the medicine she took).  She never married.  According to Showalter, the experience of curbing her imaginative life to accommodate the moral climate of Concord and her family, and commercial demands on her  time, kept her from achieving her full promise - but she does reflect the "tension between female obligation and artistic freedom."
    Alcott first published a collection of moral stories at age 16.  She went on to write many thrillers for popular magazines, full of scandalous goings-on, including incest, adultery, and violence - think of the more lurid of today's romance novels.  However, she first reached prominence with Hospital Sketches (1863) based on her wartime experience.  Little Women (1868) helped her lift her family out of poverty, along with its sequels; within a month of publication, 2000 copies of the first part of the novel had been sold.  13,000 copies of Part II went within a month of its publication.  Foster and Simon call it one of the most enduring of 19th-century children’s books, and cite Showalter on the influence the book has had on a diverse assortment of women today.

LITTLE WOMEN:

Socialization Alcott once referred to Little Women  as "moral pap for children" and is believed by many scholars to have preferred the thrillers that Jo renounces.  Little Women  was written at the suggestion of the publisher, who wanted her to try a "girl's story"; the only thing she could think of that would fit the bill was her own life.  These "girl's stories" "bridge[d] the gap between the schoolroom and the drawing room" (Showalter xv); they were supposed to reconcile the young women to the subservient role of 19th-century women - to help girls come to terms with their possibilities within their society.  The novel models this coming to terms, in various ways, for three of the March girls -- all except Beth, who never struggles very hard against women's role and is translated into heaven early for her acquiescence.
    Foster and Simon point to the novel as one of female development:

Little Women is one of the first fictional texts for children to convey the difficulties and anxieties of girlhood, and . . . suggests that becoming a "little woman"’ is a learned and often fraught process, not an instinctual or natural condition of female development. (87)

Lesbian subtext?  Alcott may have been a repressed lesbian - hinted at by, among other things, a comment she made in an interview late in life ("I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.") Certainly, Jo’s self-identification with males early in Little Women  suggests, if not repressed desire for her own sex, a sense that she was born into the wrong gender.  Jo seeks to provide for her family and be “the man of the family” in her father’s absence, takes the male roles in her games, etc.  And Laurie comes across as a slightly feminized boy -- for instance, showing sensitivity toward Amy when she is exiled to Aunt March’s during Beth’s illness.  The gender ambiguity of their names may also be a clue.
    Whatever her own sexuality, Alcott did write about marriages of true equals, evidently seeing that as an ideal.  (This by the way is typical of the girl’s book and of the novel of manners from which such books ultimately derive.)  Showalter argues that the marriage of Jo and Bhaer is such an egalitarian match (so, in some ways, is Amy's marriage to Laurie - it seems to me.  Only Meg has a truly subservient marriage.)  We can see Meg's and Amy's marriages to some extents as foils of Jo's - Meg revealing the problem of being too submissive, Amy of being too much in control (Consider Laurie's excessive influencibility by all of the March girls, not just Jo).

Pilgrim's Progress   Ruth MacDonald notes that Pilgrim’s Progress was enormously influential on American girls’ books during the 19th century because of the book’s emphasis on spirituality and the subjection of one’s will to God (115).
    Marmee’s story to the girls in the chapter of Little Women entitled “Burdens” is a microcosm of the book as a whole.  The story takes the girls’ experiences and turns into a moral story, teaching them to moderate their desires to fit their circumstances.  But the story also offers different ways to interpret such moral exempla, including Little Women itself.  Meg sees this as a betrayal of storytelling to create a sermon, Beth seems happy to listen to a “partriarchal sermon,” and Jo attempts to humorously subvert the story.  In the process, though, she ends up equating the March women’s lot to that of slaves.  These variants invite the reader to transform the novel itself into a protest (Keyser 61-63).

Is this a children’s book?  If so, in what sense?  An early reviewer of Little Women found it “a rather mature book for the little women, but a capital one for their elders” (Payne 29).
    This is especially problematic for the second half of the book.  Consider the age of the sisters --Meg is about 20-21, Jo 19-20, Beth 17-18, and Amy 16-17 at the beginning of Part II; Meg is 32, Jo 31, and Amy 28 by the end of chapter 47, five years after Jo’s wedding (p. 486).   And the dominant concern of the second half of the book is the marriage problem typical of the novel of manners rather than more juvenile interests.  However, the problem of how to have a happy marriage is part of the instruction implied by a “girl’s book.”
    Nina Auerbach says that, unlike the romantic ideals of some adult and children's texts, in Little Women the girls are forced to grow into their adult selves: “Little Women’s implicit paradigm is not an escape to childhood innocence, but the formation of a reigning feminist sisterhood whose exemplary unity will heal a fractured society.” (37)
    The chapter entitled "On the Shelf" (p. 391 et. seq.) discusses female advice for a good marriage - from mother to daughter.  Compare how Alcott's Marmie advises Meg to how, say, Roseanne (from the 1988-97 TV series) would talk to her married daughter about similar concerns.  What is a marriage manual doing in a children's book? Is this like present-day soaps and sitcoms, which may be seen by children as well as adults?

The story of a writer The novel can be read as a bildungsröman about Jo's development as a writer. (A bildungsröman is a narrative about the creative growth of a young artist.)  In this regard, and in relation to Alcott's own life story, how are we to understand the book's specific comments on writing (chapter 34)?
    Jo's life in New York begins in chapter 33, through her letters home. This is where she first meets Prof. Bhaer and (p. 342) admires him as a teacher mixing studies with stories so as to make it all pleasant.  Chapter 34 describes her writing sensation stories (note how Jo really begins to take over the narrative).   How do students react to her claims about writing in this chapter?
    Jo abandons her literary ambitions, at least temporarily, under the influence of Prof. Bhaer.  The chapter seems to show severe ambivalence about the literary world - her faith is jeopardized by the intellectual talk, her morals are threatened by the type of story she has to write (and to read, so as to write them).  Unlike the author, she finds that moral and/or children's stories won't sell, and at the end (359) she renounces her literary ambition, claiming to be happy to have made a friend.  She seems to be submitting oneself to male opinion, even if it is as attractive a character as Bhaer, and the undeniable fact is that Jo’s experience here is the opposite of Alcott’s.  Alcott did write sensation novels but also found that moral fiction did sell -- and was rather dismissive of her moral tomes.

Structure  Structurally, the first part of Book II parallels the beginning of Book I, with a chapter given to each of the girls individually after introducing them collectively.  Thus we have "Artistic Attempts" (Amy), "Literary Lessons" (Jo), "Domestic Experiences" (Meg) - Beth doesn't get her chapter here.  Each chapter reveals something about the heroines' main role in this section - Amy the social climber, Jo the serious writer earning a living through her words, Meg adapting to married life.  Beth, the angel in the house, will not progress further and, indeed, Alcott would have had to kill her off even without the logic of autobiography.

Death in children’s literature   Chapter 36 ("Beth's Secret") begins the central event of the second part of the book - the prolonged death scene.  It is sentimentalized and symbolic (p. 375) but effectively underplayed compared to many deathbed scenes in literature from the time (most notably, the death of Dickens' heroine Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop - about which Oscar Wilde reportedly said, "Anyone who can read the death of Little Nell without laughing has a heart of stone").  Deathbed scenes in literature, especially children's literature, were supposed to provide moral lessons for those left behind and, not coincidentally, the reader.  Think about the old saying, "only the good die young" - the dying character is almost always, like Beth, an unusually pious individual who has remained devoted to duty and avoided adult romantic entanglements.  The deathbed scene concludes in ch. 40, "The Valley of the Shadow."  Again, this scene is underplayed in comparison to most.  It connects Beth's death to Jo's renunciation (418-19), which in turn connects that renunciation of her art to the strongest Christian theme of the book.  But also note that the book emphasizes the difficulty that Jo has living up to her religious principles (p. 432 et. seq.)  AND she learns to write "a simple little story" from the heart (436), so she does not need to abandon completely her literary ambitions.

SOURCES:  Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978; Shirley Foster and Judy Simons, What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of “Classic” Stories for Girls, Iowa: U of Iowa P, 1995 (85-106); Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993; Ruth MacDonald, “The Progress of the Pilgrims in Little Women,”  In Priscilla A. Ord, Ed,. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference of the Children’s Literature Association,ChLA, 1982. 114-19; Alma J. Payne, “Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888),” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 6 (1973) 27-43.
 

A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD  57401

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