Prof. Waller Hastings
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD 57401

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.

"Psyche’s Art"

           This short story originally appeared in Three Proverb Stories (1868), published the same year as Little Women, and could be seen as a version the better-known novel in miniature.  Psyche artistic passion for sculpture is like Amy’s for painting in LW, her departure from her artistic vocation to take care of family like Jo’s (as is the way she is influenced by an older male figure, the way that Paul Gage seeks her out in her domestic sphere, and the way that Psyche’s defining work of art is shaped by the experience of her sister’s death), and of course her sister’s death echoes the premature demise of Beth in LW.

 Questions:

o      To what does the title refer?  (Her sculpture or her “home” arts?)

o      How does the author convey her sense that domestic work is superior to artistic creativity? How does she convey her sense that artistic creativity may in some cases be superior to domestic concerns?  Is the story contradictory?

o      How are the sculptures of the male and female artists treated differently? (see p. 2181)

o      What is the symbolic importance of the subjects of Paul’s sculpture?

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