INTRODUCTION

On March 22, 1927, the New York Times printed the results of a poll of high-school students who had been asked, “What book has interested you most?” The respondents overwhelmingly chose Little Women as their favorite, as the book that had most influenced them, surpassing even the Bible, which stalled at the number two position. Pause a moment to absorb this: Fifty-eight years after its publication in full, Louisa May Alcott’s domestic novel Little Women bore more influence on the lives and thought processes of American high-school students than did the Bible. Little Women, as John Lennon would claim of the Beatles forty years later, was more popular than Jesus. Although one may want to interpret this poll primarily as an indication of the increasingly secular interests of twentieth-century American youth, one must allow that, with all the other choices of reading matter available, beating out the Bible is clearly a tremendous feat. As related proof of Little Women’s influence, John Bunyan’s unusual 1684 religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress—which is the March family’s favorite book and guide to life in Little Women, and which provides an organizing framework for Alcott’s novel—came in at number three in the poll. I do believe Bunyan must thank Louisa May Alcott for his book’s second wind.

In remarking that Little Women has been an incredibly popular text, a commentator risks making a gigantic understatement. Part one of the novel, released on September 30, 1868, sold out its first print run in four weeks (at $1.25 a book—some sources note that the price was jacked up to $1.50 after the book’s ability to sell had been proved), though its generally positive early reviews had not yet labeled the story a must-read. Part two, released on April 14, 1869, also sold out quickly, even with the dramatic increase in its initial print run. In 1932, a few years after the novel went into the public domain (meaning that any publishing firm could print it), its long-authorized publisher, Boston’s Little, Brown and Company, reported having sold a total of more than 1,500,000 copies since 1898—thirty years after the book was first published. Little Women was also an international phenomenon. Publishers’ Weekly noted in 1929 that, in addition to its longstanding popularity in England, Little Women had been translated into French, German, Dutch, Greek, and Chinese (it was a favored Chinese New Year gift). By 1969, one hundred years after the publication of the full text, the list of translations included Arabic, Bengali, Indonesian, Irish, Japanese, Russian, Swedish, and Urdu. On a more personal level, by the end of 1869 Louisa May Alcott had attained clear celebrity status at age thirty-six; her widespread fame far surpassed that of her well-known philosopher father, Amos Bronson Alcott (just as the first part of Little Women had far outsold his own 1868 offering, an essay collection called Tablets).

Prior to Little Women, Alcott had written primarily for adults, with the exception of Flower Fables, an 1854 collection of children’s fairy stories (Alcott also edited a monthly children’s periodical, Merry’s Museum). In 1863 she had begun publishing sensational Gothic-style stories in newspapers and magazines, anonymously or under a pseudonym, mainly to earn the ready money that these popular narratives commanded. Her serious novel Moods (1864) had met with neither critical esteem nor commercial notice; but the success of Little Women turned its author into a revered, wealthy children’s book writer. The book’s popularity would seem to have been nearly ordained when one considers the circumstances of its birth and its contractual engineering. Both its publisher and its author envisioned Little Women primarily (if hopefully) as a moneymaking venture. The original publisher, Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers, had to persuade Alcott to write a tale for girls to compete with a new type of boys’ book by prolific novelists such as Horatio Alger (Ragged Dick) and Oliver Optic (Poor and Proud), which were in wide demand. Novels like these introduced a genre of children’s fiction written as entertainment, not mainly for moral instruction—a somewhat controversial innovation at the time. Alcott resisted the idea of writing a girls’ book; she doubted both her interest in a project for a young female audience and her ability to write it effectively. She claimed that she didn’t know how to accomplish the task: She wasn’t even especially concerned with the lives of girls outside her own household of four sisters. As a way to overcome her reservations, Alcott would eventually mine her own family’s experiences as the basis for Little Women’s March sisters, their characterizations, and many of their pastimes, conflicts, and daily duties. Alcott finally convinced herself that “lively, simple books are very much needed for girls, and perhaps I can supply the need.”

The promise of earning more money to assist her financially struggling family also helped Alcott to agree to the project. Niles offered her royalties (a percentage of future sales) rather than a simple flat author’s fee paid upon acceptance of the manuscript. This was a fantastic deal: In Little Women novice writer Jo March is thrilled to be paid $300 for her first novel; although Alcott, as a better-known writer, would have received a larger flat fee than this, her royalties plan would earn her $8,500 by the end of 1869 alone. Despite Alcott’s and Niles’s initial fears that the novel’s opening chapters were too dull, and thus wouldn’t sell the book well, the first part of her fictional experiment—detailing the homey adventures through which the four New England March sisters begin to mature during one year of the American Civil War—was an immediate, unqualified best-seller.

All these numbers, statistics, and editions clearly indicate that Little Women has universal appeal. One strong reason is the story’s essentially domestic, apolitical nature. After determining that her inclusion of too many controversial ideas about marriage had hurt sales of Moods, Alcott decided to make her girls’ book idea-free: “My next book shall have no ideas in it, only facts, and the people shall be as ordinary as possible.” Most readers would agree that Alcott doesn’t necessarily hold to such a strict scheme—she repeatedly reinforces her moral ideas about self-sacrifice and altruism—but overall the novel does place plot considerations above politics, cultural or otherwise. For example, Little Women is set during the Civil War, but Alcott declines to comment on this potentially polarizing topic, even though she had disturbing firsthand experience of its effects as a nurse in Washington, D.C. (she had previously published her wartime observations and opinions in Hospital Sketches, written for adults and published in 1863). Her grueling, gruesome nursing duties left Alcott sickened and exhausted, and she was forced to return home after spending only six weeks tending the injured and dying soldiers. Although Mr. March in Little Women ministers to Union troops, the novel includes very little commentary on his experiences in doing so, or even on the causes or goals of the war. Alcott instead substitutes general praise for the soldiers and demonstrates the supportive sewing and knitting work that women like the Marches performed on the domestic front. Similarly, contemporary controver sial reform issues such as the abolition of slavery, which was very close to the Alcott family heart, are also left untouched in the novel. We know that Jo is a great believer in social reform—she allows a mixed-race child to attend her school, and she is vocal about women’s rights—but Alcott doesn’t give us many details. Jo makes several feminist declarations, but her own family and friends constitute her main audience, and she ultimately ends up living much more conventionally than she previously had forecast. A practical-minded author, Alcott specifically chose not to proselytize for her beliefs lest she risk alienating potential book buyers from different regions of the United States—consumers who, given her royalties arrangement, could provide her living.

The author’s strategy of ordinariness worked. An early anonymous review in the Nation (October 22, 1868) quietly praises Little Women as “an agreeable little story, which is not only very well adapted to the readers for whom it is especially intended, but may also be read with pleasure by older people.” The reviewer labels the March girls “healthy types,... drawn with a certain cleverness” yet complains of the text’s lack of “what painters call atmosphere,” its over-reliance upon local color, and, strangely, “things and people [in the novel] ... remaining, under all circumstances, somewhat too persistently themselves.” As has often been the case with extremely popular books, this early review did not anticipate its subject’s wild success. Another anonymous review, from the December 1868 issue of Arthur’s Home Magazine, gives advice that has been followed for generations: “Parents desiring a Christmas book for a girl from ten to sixteen years cannot do better than to purchase this.”

Alcott hinted at the end of the first part of Little Women that a sequel might be forthcoming, “depend[ing] upon the reception given to the first act of the domestic drama” (page 229). She included this teaser even though she would later claim, upon learning that a second installment was in fact demanded of her, that she disliked the very idea of sequels. Part two of Little Women, originally titled Good Wives to portend the girls’ development as married women, begins with the eldest sister Meg’s marriage. Upon its release, Little Women, part two, was hailed as extending the March story by “loading the palate without sickishness” (by an anonymous reviewer in Commonwealth, April 24, 1869), although some might have cause to argue such an assessment. A review in the National Anti-Slavery Standard (May 1, 1869) praises the ideal families the book portrays and predicts that life will imitate art: “Thousands of young people will read [Alcott‘s] story of these healthy, happy homes, and their standard of home and happiness must in many cases be raised.” The first part of this prediction has certainly come true; the second, although something to hope for in general, seems a bit much to ask even of this wholesome novel.

The sequel was written to appease Alcott’s many fans, who had been begging the author for more information about the March sisters’ future experiences—namely whom, and how well, they married. Although as a feminist Alcott personally resented the implication that her March girls’ future happiness depended upon marriage as an end in itself, she did succeed in pairing off most of her characters, although not in the neat ways her romantic readers had desired or even anticipated. Alcott’s unusual choices in this regard mystified and disappointed not only many of her contemporary nineteenth-century admirers but generations of girls to follow, who wanted the outspokenly independent, ambitious second sister, Jo, married off according to their own fancy—not to mention future generations of feminist literary critics who bemoaned Alcott’s decision to marry her off at all.

Alcott absorbed much of her reform interests from her mother, Abigail “Abba” Alcott (nee May). Marmee in Little Women is an idealized version of Abba. Whereas Marmee represses her anger for the good of her family, Abba was known for her sharp tongue and occasional inability to get along with her neighbors. Abba actively participated in various contemporary reform movements, agitating against slavery and for temperance and women’s rights, among other causes, and providing an excellent example of activism for her daughters. Even more than Marmee does, Abba Alcott worked and struggled to keep her family financially afloat; the shabby-genteel aspect of the March household stems from the Alcotts’ own straitened financial circumstances. Papa Alcott, unlike Papa March, however, was not absent on such a selfless mission as army chaplaincy. Writer and educator Bronson Alcott was associated with the original group of New England transcendental philosophers, and he tended in practice to worry more about how his family conformed to his social theories than about its livelihood.

The transcendentalism Bronson Alcott espoused was an extremely influential quasi-religious American philosophical movement that flourished in the 1830s and ‘40s, most neatly summed up in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature. As a behavioral program, transcendentalism promoted living simply, in intellectual fellowship with other like-minded thinkers and in close contact with nature, and keeping one’s body pure by avoiding alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and often, as in the case of the Alcott family, meat. As an explanatory counterpart to these lifestyle recommendations, transcendentalism’s more mystical aspects emphasized human beings’ metaphysical, intuitive spiritual core, which, in turn, evidenced mankind’s inherent personal divinity. The reverence for nature, manual labor, and self-reliance took its most notable form in Henry David Thoreau’s famous Walden Pond experiment in self-sufficiency (1845-1847). Emerson and Thoreau, friends of Bronson’s (Emerson had provided funds toward the Alcott family’s support), were two of young Louisa’s romantic crushes; some scholars have suggested Emerson as a partial model for Professor Friedrich Bhaer in Little Women. Bronson Alcott raised his daughters according to his own transcendentalist-influenced educational beliefs, encouraging stringent self-analysis from them starting at an early age, through written assessments of their behavior and development that they would produce about themselves for his perusal.

Bronson Alcott seemed to have absolved himself of nearly all financial responsibility toward his wife and children; this would have been scandalous or unforgivable at the time in most social circles, except that he styled himself as a genius—a philosopher, not a worker. Yet a family cannot live on social and educational theories alone. At one point, around the time of his ill-fated utopian communal-living project, Fruitlands (1843), Bronson seriously considered formally abandoning his wife and young children; his abstract intellectual nature led him to raise the issue with them as a matter for family debate. Facets of Bronson Alcott do appear in Father March: His favorite place is his study, and he loves his books and discussing philosophy. But a reader who knows that Bronson Alcott’s own family skills left much to be desired will find even more poignant Father March’s gentle strength and paternal perfection, as well as the confidence his daughters have in his emotional support and devotion to his family.

The eldest March sister, Meg, is based on Alcott’s oldest sister, Anna. Alcott uses her own dismay at the rupture of the family household brought about by Anna’s wedding to parallel Jo’s (and Meg’s) resistance to Meg’s marriage in Little Women. The prototype for shy Beth March was the third Alcott sister, Elizabeth (“Lizzie”), who, similar to Beth, had contracted scarlet fever after nursing a neighbor in 1856. Lizzie never fully recovered; doctors suggested various physical and mental sources, including hysteria, for her continued frailty. She slowly wasted away over a period of two years, eventually refusing even to eat. Alcott’s youngest sister, Abba May, served as the model for the petulant, spoiled, and beautiful Amy March, an artist like her real-life counterpart. May’s somewhat naive published illustrations for the first edition of Little Women unfortunately met with widespread critical disapproval (an early reviewer called the engravings “indifferently executed” and “betray[ing] ... a want of anatomical knowledge”). However, she later studied painting in Europe (a trip financed through Louisa’s earnings from writing), lived in the Mont martre neighborhood of Paris near the experimental Impressionist painters of the day, and became acquainted with American Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt. May’s skills improved, and her artwork ultimately was accepted into Paris salon galleries in 1877 and 1879. Alcott claimed to have based Theodore “Laurie” Laurence, Jo’s best friend and neighbor, on two of her own admirers: her friend Alfred Whitman and Polish revolutionary Ladislas Wisniewski, who escorted Alcott around Paris during her 1865 European travels.

Louisa May Alcott based Jo on herself. Consequently Jo is the most fully realized, complex character and, not surprisingly, the one most beloved by Alcott’s readers across generations and most inspira tional for these readers’ own fantasies and ambitions. The character shares the author’s November birth month, strong concerns about women’s claims to independence and artistic expression, and the desire to be a writer and to broaden her experience through travel far from her provincial New England home. The titles of Jo’s sensational stories are identical to some of Alcott’s own early efforts. Louisa and Jo share the title of their first published story, “The Rival Painters,” for example; Louisa’s version appeared in print in 1852. Even the cylindrical pillow Jo uses as a silent marker for her approachability in part two of the novel—if Jo stands it on end next to her on the sofa, it means she’s in a good mood; lying flat, the cushion signifies the opposite and serves notice that her family shouldn’t disturb her—echoes Alcott’s own “mood pillow,” which remains on display at Orchard House, a former Alcott family residence in Concord, Massachusetts, that is now a museum.

Critics have often remarked upon the more masculine aspects (for her time) of Jo’s characterization: her boyish nickname, her husky voice, her desire to play only the male roles in family theatricals, the “gentlemanly” linen collar she wears, her natural use of the phrase “I’m your man,” her restless spirit, her ambition to do something splendid with her life, her desire for fame, her love of such sports as running and riding. Jo claims she wants to marry Meg herself to keep her in the family. She doesn’t care much for the company of other girls, with the exception of her sisters, of course, and she positively loathes girlish gossip; instead, she appreciates “good strong words that mean something” (p. 43). (When Amy forces Jo to accompany her on social calls in chapter 29, Jo’s humorous mockery of the girls they visit makes for one of the novel’s most unforgettable episodes.) Unlike her more traditional, ladylike sisters, Jo understands the need for social reform on a number of issues affecting women’s autonomy. Not inclined to domestic responsibility—or skill, for that matter—Jo views her future published stories as her children.

Jo’s masculine identification may begin to explain why at the end of the novel she opens a school for boys instead of for girls, which her social beliefs might dictate as appropriately reparative. Her empathy with the male gender seems to preclude any sympathy she might have for her fellow young women, and her decision to open a boys’ school, even given her unorthodox admission policies, is a fairly conventional one. Jo, depicted throughout Little Women as an eccentric, outrageously unconventional character, makes some customary choices in the end and is certainly no radical. Although her husband may be unexpected, she marries nonetheless. Overall, Jo’s feminism and mas culinity have suggested to some later commentators that a latent homosexuality lies beneath her surface, and, by extension, beneath her creator’s as well. Alcott’s own disinclination to marry and her devotion to feminist reform work and agitation have led these critics to question her sexual preferences.

Once one begins to think further about Alcott’s novel, certain contradictions emerge, particularly for more recent readers. There were always things about the March sisters that puzzled me, for example. The family complains of being poor, and indeed can’t even afford to buy each other Christmas presents, yet they keep a servant, the faithful Hannah. How impoverished, then, could the Marches be? The family’s financial situation must have been very bad indeed for Aunt March to offer to adopt one of the daughters, thus the Marches’ priorities are very interesting. Would it have been unseemly in its social circles for the family not to employ a servant? Is Hannah another charity case? That is, was it more important for the Marches to spend what extra money they did have to provide another person with a livelihood than to spend it on material luxuries (even if, as is the case with their Christmas breakfast, donated to a truly impoverished immigrant family, those material luxuries were food)?

Clearly the Marches are not as poor as Meg thinks they are. The sisters’ Christian-inspired self-sacrifice, however, can seem at times to border on masochism, which may lead one to question the girls’ motivations. Are they so generous and accommodating because they want to be, for altruism’s sake? Are they competing with each other in trying to please their impossibly good mother, the judge of their virtuousness? Or have they come to enjoy abnegation for what it represents: their worthiness to God and society? Beth and Jo’s selflessness competitions—when, for example, Jo wins a writing contest and offers Beth a trip away with her spoils—at times suggest the elaborate sacrifices of medieval saints. Beth, a household saint in her homely shrine, wears a metaphorical hair shirt and practically flagellates herself daily, even within her transcendental universe. One wonders how much Beth’s fate itself is actually a sacrifice in Alcott’s mind. Such a typical Marmee maxim as “a kiss for a blow is always best” is a bit disturbing when taken with her other advice as a reinforcement of the need for female sacrifice, even if it does echo New Testament doctrines to turn the other cheek.

Marmee displays her tremendous devotion to God in a few preachy monologues, particularly in chapter 9, yet the family, although clearly Protestant, is not described as belonging to any particular sect—perhaps another extension of the novel’s planned universality. As important as religion seems to be in their lives, the Marches offer little formal worship; they do not attend church services, for example, and their relationship to God seems very general, represented through praying privately, singing religious hymns, and imitating Bunyan’s questing hero, Christian, from The Pilgrim’s Progress. Aesthetic Amy’s fascination with the colorful, exotic Roman Catholicism of Aunt March’s French maid is thus understandable, and Marmee does not reject out of hand the religious objects, such as rosary beads and a devotional print of the Virgin Mary, that Amy brings back from her aunt’s house.

The March girls’ relationship with their mother is noteworthy for how it reinforces a rather claustrophobic household dynamic. Although many readers, particularly mothers, may find it touching that Meg reserves the “first kiss” that concludes her marriage ceremony for her mother, most others will note the utter strangeness of this choice. Marmee happily accepts what should be the new husband’s right. What’s going on here? Marmee’s total love sometimes seems to negate her daughters’ desire for adult romantic relationships, which they instead seem to fear. Marmee’s fully embraced devotion unsettles the normal course of the girls’ adolescent development from sheltered dependence into autonomous adulthood; indeed, the thought of one sister leaving the nest throws the household into emotional turmoil. Of course, nineteenth-century families thought of themselves differently than twenty-first-century families do, but Meg’s kiss is still quite unusual. Jo swears she’d never pop the family’s heretofore hermetic bubble, as Meg has done through marriage, yet she quickly moves to New York City to work and to try her talents as a writer. Proximity, apparently, does not define the word abandonment in the March household; rather, the commencement of a separate, conjugal life does. Jo seems to realize the danger—and demonstrates her progress from self-centered idealist to a more thoughtful, practical type—when she notes late in part two, “Mothers are the best lovers in the world, but... I’d like to try all kinds” (p. 422).

Marmee tells her daughters early on that being chosen and loved by a good husband is the best thing that could ever happen to them. Of course, this is better than being chosen by a bad one, but many readers may secretly wish that someone like Alcott hadn’t written such things! We know the author didn’t achieve this vaunted feminine ideal herself—she served instead as her family’s caretaker to the end of her life, dying just two days after her father. Glorifying marriage here reads either as a sad, perhaps even pathetic statement on the relationships her own spinster status had caused her to miss, or as a purely disingenuous commentary on what had traditionally been expected of women. Which is worse? Is Alcott bending over backward in trying not to instill her own “outlandish” beliefs in young girls? Is she trying to conciliate traditional values in order not to damage her book sales? Is this inclusion some kind of apology ripe for psychoanalytic critique? If, however, through the girls’ trials we are made to see Marmee as a comforting voice of reason, how are we to interpret her prediction, given as domestic gospel truth? The central question remains: Where is the real Louisa May Alcott, and why doesn’t she appear in Little Women? The most accommodating answer would insist that she does appear, frequently in specific autobiographical details. She isn’t present enough, however, to satisfy some critics, who view Little Women as a wasted opportunity for Alcott to have had her characters walk the feminist walk instead of, in Jo’s case in particular, make compromises.

Alcott’s cynicism about women’s traditional roles—and the impossible standards to which many women hold themselves in trying to adjust to a new prescribed role—does come across more directly on certain occasions in Little Women. The satirical “salute” to Babydom, which Meg and her husband, John, inhabit in chapter 38 following the birth of their twins, portrays one perspective on overindulgent parenthood but also reveals some limits on just how far the author was willing to stretch her patience in depicting the trinity of hearth, home, and husband as the pinnacle of success for any woman. “If [John] hinted at [attending] a lecture or concert,” Alcott writes, “he was answered with a reproachful look [from Meg], and a decided—‘Leave my children for pleasure, never!’” (p. 377). Alcott’s commentary on spinsters (her own social category) is also telling; she carefully entreats her readers not to laugh at older unmarried women, because “often very tender, tragic romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns, and many silent sacrifices of youth, health, ambition, love itself, make the faded faces beautiful in God’s sight” (pp. 424-425). Alcott undercuts the seriousness of these ideas by joking that her readers, as Jo has done in the part of the story these passages interrupt, have probably fallen asleep during her digression, yet her points are well taken. This defense of spinsterhood, if sentimental, also comes across as perfectly sincere, and for very good reason.

Alcott’s Gothic sensational stories—of a type popular with the masses (and with Jo, until she is instructed otherwise) but considered rather lurid by the literary establishment of her day—offered her a bit more freedom than Little Women’s realism did. In some of these, Alcott pushes harder on girls’ impulses toward independence, evidenced by the innate (but usually suppressed) disrespect for authority that Jo demonstrates in Little Women. For example, the frustrated, impetuous teenage heroine of Alcott’s sensational novel A Long Fatal Love Chase (written in 1866 but not published until 1995)—the evocatively named orphan Rosamond Vivian—shrieks in a fit of adolescent pique to her uncaring grandfather that she would sell her soul to Satan for a year of freedom, rather than have to endure her stultifying, lonely life with him (a vow she comes to rue shortly after her grandfather’s mysterious friend Phillip Tempest wins her in a card game). Words such as those never issue from the mouth of Jo March, who, although somewhat constrained, at least has a loving home life. When Jo approaches such sentiments, she gets a moralizing lecture from Marmee or another March sister by way of counterpoint.

Some critics also regret, early in the book, the girls’ having to assume masculine identities in order to compose their family newspaper, based on Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Alcott personally knew the influential feminist writer Margaret Fuller, who edited the main transcendentalist journal, the Dial, and she easily could have adapted Fuller’s experience for her March sisters and had them create the newspaper without resorting to male drag. But had Alcott written the scene without the girls’ imaginative adoptions of famous fictional personae, would the newspaper meetings have been as colorful? Probably not, nor nearly as entertaining for children. Essentially, although Alcott’s choices in Little Women may be frustrating, we have to remember that the author’s goals for the novel—to sell books and to entertain children, both of which she achieved—are different from the ones we assign to her with hindsight.

It’s true that Alcott’s most famous novel is a period piece; but when compared to traditional nineteenth-century literature for children available at the time, Little Women’s protagonists are remarkably complex, even slightly—if an emphatic slightly—subversive. Generally speaking, the young characters in popular American children’s literature prior to Alcott’s time were either wholly wicked brats who entirely deserved the strict punishment they received or purely angelic little saints in whose mouths the proverbial butter could never melt. In either case, these fictional children spoke like little adults; one early criticism of Alcott’s novel involved the characters’ (especially Jo’s and Laurie’s) use of slang terms (Jo often uses work in the revised text, when she had used grub in the original) and quasi-cusswords, like “Jupiter Ammon!” and “Christopher Columbus!”—bone-chilling language, to be sure. (Contemporary critics also bemoaned the March girls’ shocking practice of staging plays on the Christmas holiday.)

In 1880 Alcott’s British publisher suggested a revised version of Little Women, one that would not only eliminate quirks of New England regional language (the word quinydingles, for example, was changed to notions) but also reduce much of the slang terminology in general to provide for a more ladylike tone. (This 1880 version is the one most readers today are familiar with, and it is used in the present Barnes & Noble classics edition.) Notwithstanding such changes, critic Barrett Wendell in his 1900 Literary History of America still insists of Little Women, “instead of unquestioning self-respect, its personages display that rude self-assertion which has generally tainted the lower middle class of English-speaking countries.” It is a testament to Alcott’s skill as a storyteller that the text still retains a youthful spirit of play and naturalness that the revision could not obscure.

As such, this Alcott novel is no great fantasy, for even if the characters may seem outrageously obedient and good in a young twenty-first-century reader’s mind, they exist in the realm of nineteenth-century possibilities. The March girls struggle with real problems—vanity, restraint, shyness, envy. In large part, the terms of their struggles make the difference. If pickled limes are no longer the forbidden vogue in school, as they are at Amy‘s, perhaps illegally downloaded MP3 files are. Although the restrictions on Jo’s behavior and future doubtless are stronger than those today’s teens face, Jo’s choices demonstrate how she can begin to learn to live satisfactorily within those restrictions: She does marry, but we hope she only postpones her plans to travel the globe and her ambition to be a world-famous writer. Not every reader will view her compromise as positive, but young girls can still respond to Jo’s dilemma with understanding and empathy. And today’s young readers look to Little Women in particular, of course, to learn about what daily life might have been like for them had they lived in nineteenth-century America. Alcott’s detailed lessons, in this regard, work.

More than many other children’s novels, Little Women tends to compel commentators, female ones in particular, to discuss their own personal childhood impressions of the novel and how it affected their lives. This kind of retrospection in some ways can be frightening for what it reveals. Like many young girls, I was devoted to the book; I borrowed it from the library a few times a year and reread it obsessively in its entirety. (My mother eventually bought me a handsome illustrated hardcover edition, but it seemed somehow too pretty to mar through frequent use.) After my own childhood neuroses first helped me to identify in no small degree with Beth’s painful, extreme shyness, Jo ultimately won my allegiance as my favorite character. She was the kind of girl I wanted to be: outspoken, possessed of big dreams, a bit of a tomboy. I fancifully saw television’s nervous groundbreaker Mary Richards, from The Mary Tyler Moore Show— this character being a weekly combination of the petrified and the confident—as an adult Jo March for the 1970s (note, of course, Mary’s perpetually single romantic status). I too was disappointed in Jo’s choice of husband; I found Amy particularly annoying and liked Laurie very much. Later, I too was disappointed that Jo overcame her objections to marriage itself. I remember repeatedly feeling toward the book’s end as though the plot had run away from me; I’d gone along with everything up until the last few chapters. The book seemed to me to lose its charming day-by-day sense of detail once the marriage plots start weaving. The action speeds up dramatically, and the novel ends quickly following Jo’s marriage. I think my frustration at the result ruined all marriage-plot novels for me forever—after the marriage, I observed, comes the end of the story. Whatever happens after, I thought, isn’t even interesting enough to write down.

If I were a young girl in 2004 reading Little Women for the first time, would I compare Jo to some of today’s fictional teen heroines, such as Buffy Summers, of television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer? As teenage girls can now be seen on television annihilating demons with nigh impunity (after some natural concern, of course, over how this behavior will affect their popularity in high school—some things never change), Jo comes off as quaintly mundane at best, wimpy and suspiciously susceptible at worst. Yet it is curious, and in this context somehow appropriate, that the hugely popular series Buffy should reference the hugely popular novel Little Women directly. In one of the series’ last episodes, the town of Sunnydale’s outwardly insipid yet inwardly demonic founder and former mayor, Richard Wilkins III (who, a few seasons previously, had transformed into a giant serpent and been blown up along with the high school on Buffy’s graduation day), raises the topic of his favorite character in Little Women. He claims that most people would guess he’d like Beth—for her easy-prey weakness, one supposes; but he instead prefers Meg, for her propriety and ladylike demeanor. Meg is clearly a contrast, one might say, to Buffy, the mayor’s ass-kicking nemesis. Mayor Wilkins also fondly recalls a scene he treasures: the time Jo burns Meg’s hair with a set of curling tongs. The reason why this commentary is so funny lies at the heart of recent critical debates about Alcott’s most famous novel. What can Jo March offer young girls that heroines like Buffy Summers cannot—even after earlier marvels of powerful girlhood, such as Astrid Lindgren’s 1950s super-strong heroine, Pippi Longstocking?

Much of Jo’s charm and appeal lie in the idea that, unlike Buffy Summers, she is not a superhero (although Beth’s goodness certainly appears superpowered). As Alcott writes toward the end of the novel, “Jo wasn’t a heroine, she was only a struggling human girl like hundreds of others, and she just acted out her nature.... She had often said she wanted to do something splendid, no matter how hard; and now she had her wish, for what could be more beautiful than to devote her life to Father and Mother, trying to make home as happy to them as they had to her? And if difficulties were necessary to increase the splendor of the effort, what could be harder for a restless, ambitious girl than to give up her own hopes, plans, and desires, and cheerfully live for others?” (p. 420). We note, of course, that Alcott made such sacrifices in her own life, and her point, although it may be hard to swallow, is that heroics come in both big and small proportions.

Overall, then, how relevant can Little Women be to twenty-first-century youth? As Americans, for better or worse, remove themselves further from lifestyles like those of Alcott’s close-knit community of charitable neighbors, is Little Women to be relegated to solely period-piece status—fine fodder for costume-drama films and small children’s bedtime stories but not much else? Particularly following feminist critiques of Alcott’s domestic novel, readers have been more vocal about finding it sentimental, even sometimes cloyingly sweet, by more modern standards. Yet it is a testament to Alcott’s descriptive powers that though the family’s shared activities may seem strange to a twenty-first-century audience, their utter sweetness and quaintness are in their own way rather stunning and just might provoke wistful feelings for a simpler kind of family life among even cynical readers—paradoxically just as the family’s episodes of cloying togetherness may sometimes raise their gorge. We may wonder at how Beth, for example, could be so unnaturally shy as to dread being the center of attention at her own birthday parties—where members of her loving, indulgent family are the only guests! No matter how unrealistic or saccharine-sweet we may find Beth’s goodness, many readers find it difficult to avoid tears at her fate.

Other sequels in the March family saga followed Little Women and continued its popular tradition. The first, Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys (1871), describes events at the school Jo founds and the adventures of her diverse crew of pupils—all little boys, with the exception of Jo’s nieces and the extremely naughty girl Nan, an even more tomboyish specimen than Jo herself had been as a child. The last book in the trilogy, Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out (1886), would be Alcott’s final novel, published only two years before the author’s death. Written slowly, while Alcott was in poor health, the book centers on romance plots between the younger characters introduced in Little Men.

Several film adaptations of Little Women have appeared over the years, with appeals to successive generations of readers. Katharine Hepburn brought Jo so vividly to life in director George Cukor’s classic 1933 movie version (released only six years after the poll that found the novel more popular than the Bible) that Hepburn’s particular brand of sharp New England eccentricity has been forever linked to that character. Her portrayal has colored critics’ judgments of other screen depictions of Jo—such as June Allyson’s in the blander 1949 color version—and has set these later actors up for unwinnable comparisons. A more feminist film version of Little Women, from 1994, casts activist actor Susan Sarandon as Marmee, a very clear, pointed choice, and Winona Ryder, whose other roles many teen girl rebels have identified with, as a Jo March for the 1990s. This version also updates Professor Bhaer, doing the rumpled nineteenth-century scholar a tremendous favor by metamorphosing him into darkly handsome actor Gabriel Byrne.

New to bookstore shelves as I write this introduction is novelist Katharine Weber’s contemporary spin on the Marches’ story, titled The Little Women. Weber’s third novel disrupts the sweet perseverance the girls demonstrate in Alcott’s original. Here, the three New York City Green sisters—Margaret, Joanna, and Amy (Beth had been a doomed turtle)—find out via e-mail that their English-professor mother has been having an affair. They run away from home in disappointment and outrage after their father blandly forgives her, and the younger sisters move into Margaret’s off-campus apartment at Yale University, where they try to set up an independent household. Weber even includes a lesbian subplot. Rather than employ a moralistic, Alcott-like omniscient narrator, Weber has Joanna tell the story from her perspective, with critical commentary in the form of “readers’ notes” from the other sisters. By granting the Green sisters a kind of divorce from their parents, Weber addresses the wishes of those readers who wanted alternative plots for Alcott’s Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Although I haven’t yet found one, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an Internet site (like those that exist for pop-culture icons like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example) where Alcott admirers can post fan fiction they’ve composed based on the original. In fact, this is a great idea. If we don’t agree with the way Alcott handles the girls’ fates, we can take matters into our own hands—although we may find the task of creating an alternate universe as fully realized and as paradoxically timeless as Little Women’s much more difficult than we’d imagined.

 

Camille Cauti has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. Her dissertation concerns the Catholic conversion trend among the London avant-garde in the 1890s, including such figures as Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, John Gray, and Michael Field. Other academic inter ests have included nineteenth- and twentieth-century English poetry (in particular, John Keats, the Pre-Raphaelites, W. B. Yeats, and the connections between them), and Irish literature generally. She has also published on Italian-American studies. Cauti is a teacher, editor, and critic in New York. She also wrote the introduction and notes to the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.