Reading Little Women
FOR A LITERARY WORK to have cultural longevity it must contain themes and characters about whom people care deeply, inspiring debates as if what happens on the page is real life. Reading such a book is a rewarding if sometimes unsettling experience. We may find that the person next to us in a class or book club feels so differently about it that we wonder if we read the same text. Or we may read it again as adults and wonder what we were thinking as kids. What we thought was thrilling now seems preachy, or what appeared a light frolic now has dark undercurrents. As a result, we may turn against our childhood favorite or appreciate it more deeply than ever. Little Women is just that kind of rich, complex, often contradictory book that can inspire such intense reactions.
There has never been much agreement about how to read or what to think about Little Women. Is it a realistic tale of a New England family during the years of the Civil War or a nostalgic, even sentimental portrait of a family life that never really existed? Is it a rebellious tale of one young woman’s resistance to the restrictions of her era, or a dispiriting portrait of her capitulation to the status quo? Despite 150 years of discussion, the debates over these questions remain unresolved. The one constant has been that while the possibilities for women’s lives have expanded and shrunk over the generations, young women continued to read themselves into the book, mapping it onto their lives as they grew into adulthood and then looked back on their formative years. Little Women has been enjoyed, discussed, and picked apart by early-twentieth-century new women and flappers, midcentury baby boomers, and late-twentieth-century feminists, never losing its power to delight and provoke.
The critic Margo Jefferson has called it “a divided house of a book [that] still stands, ramshackle[,] worn and full of life.” Little Women has a split personality, simultaneously looking backward and forward, inward and outward. It points backward to a simpler time of family cohesion and looks forward to a complicated time when women would find work away from home and family. It also turns inward toward the family gathered around the hearth and faces outward toward a world of adventure and possibility. As a result, Little Women has been read as conservative and progressive, such that reviewers of the 1994 film noted its ability to appeal to feminists as well as proponents of family values. However, the tension between those two visions has been there since the beginning. Critics and scholars have disagreed about how traditional or modern the book and its various adaptations really are—whether it is essentially wholesome family fare or a deeply radical book, a didactic sermon or a novel that brings its characters to life. Such “critical commotion is one mark of a masterpiece,” as the critic Alice Kaplan has written about a very different book, Albert Camus’s The Stranger.1 Books that we disagree about simply last longer, particularly if the debates they generate still matter to us. That is certainly the case with Little Women.
FOR THE BOOK’S first hundred years of life, the discussion about Little Women focused on whether it was a realistic or a sentimental, idealized portrait of life. To those for whom the book still lives, Little Women is a work of realism. Alcott promoted realistic writing within the novel itself: Jo declares, “I like good, strong words, that mean something,” and Professor Bhaer encourages her to avoid the types of sensational literature and “study simple, true, and lovely characters, wherever she found them, as good training for a writer.” Throughout the novel the characters speak naturally, moving the dialogue along with an energy that reminds us of how real people talk. Take, for instance, the girls’ bickering in the opening pages of the book:
“Jo does use such slang words,” observed Amy with a reproving look. . . . [Jo] began to whistle.
“Don’t Jo; it’s so boyish.”
“That’s why I do it.”
“I detest rude, unlady-like girls.”
“I hate affected, niminy piminy chits.”2
As readers we can almost see and hear Jo and Amy, as if they are real girls before us.
The book’s initial reviewers repeatedly pointed to the book’s resemblance to real life. They were surprised that a novel in which so little happens could sustain readers’ interest but attributed the book’s charm to its realism. “Everything about the story is ‘as natural as life,’ ” stated one reviewer. Another compared the novel’s incidents to photographs, a technology then in its infancy but already changing audiences’ expectations about art’s relationship to reality.3 Little Women is very much concerned with the happenings of everyday life, so much so that at times little seems to be happening. But audiences found this quiet sort of book refreshing. They were used to gothic literature with mysteries to decipher and the supernatural to contend with, romantic literature’s alternate reality of dreams and extreme psychological states, sensational literature’s plot twists occasioned by kidnappings or mistaken identity, or sentimental literature, which stirred up the feelings against social injustice, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Little Women represented a rather new style of literature.
In the United States, the so-called rise of realism is associated with the Civil War and developments in technology and science, as well as with male writers such as Mark Twain and Henry James. However, women were writing realistically long before the war. In the 1840s and ’50s, writers like Caroline Kirkland and Rose Terry Cooke had begun to write fiction based on their experiences, which meant staying close to home. So when Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women out of her own life, she wasn’t exactly a pioneer, but she was making a significant contribution to a new way of writing that would never entirely go out of style. Her innovation was that she portrayed such fully realized characters that readers then and now have instantly felt as if they were real people, wholly unlike the idealized characters most common at the time. Each of the March sisters has a flaw she cannot easily overcome. Marmee admits her failings. Laurie struggles to do the right thing. Even Professor Bhaer is afraid to propose to Jo and proves himself to be, like all the other characters, only human. The plot moves along much like real life, with small trials and triumphs. The great crises in the novel are death and loss—again, as in real life.
Some critics over the years acknowledged Alcott’s contribution to the literary movement of realism. As early as 1907, G. K. Chesterton declared that Little Women “anticipated realism by twenty or thirty years; just as Jane Austen anticipated it by at least a hundred years.” He pointed in particular to the scene in which Professor Bhaer proposes to Jo. Alcott makes a point of presenting what should be an idealized scene as full of imperfections. Jo is anything but a typical romantic heroine. “She looked far from lovely,” the narrator tells us, “with her skirts in a deplorable state, her rubber boots splashed to the ankle, and her bonnet a ruin.” Bhaer, for his part, is also rather battered by the rain: “his hat-brim was quite limp with the little rills trickling then upon his shoulders . . . , and every finger of his gloves needed mending.”4 The unkempt, middle-aged professor was hardly the romantic hero readers were used to.
Yet, while the novel’s realism continues to strike readers profoundly, many over the years have insisted that its portrait of family life and romance is idealized and sentimentalized. The word sentimental has evolved over the past two centuries to signify exaggerated emotionalism or nostalgia. There is no denying that Little Women tugs at the heartstrings. The question is whether it does so excessively.
Early reviewers almost unanimously viewed the emotions evoked by the novel as ordinary and natural. There was nothing “overwrought” about it, claimed one reviewer. Another declared, “There is just enough sadness in it to make it true to life.” Yet skepticism toward literature that evoked emotions was starting to creep into critical commentary. The Galaxy reviewer admitted that “it isn’t à la mode now to be moved over stories,” but he thought the “few tears [and] many hearty laughs” the novel elicited would do readers good.5 Literature was expected to have a beneficial effect on readers, and proponents of realism believed that romantic and sentimental fiction could overwork readers’ emotions, deluding particularly young female readers about what they could expect in life. (The most famous literary depiction of this theme, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, was published in France in 1856, twelve years before Little Women.) Realism, by contrast, was supposed to be the more ethical literary mode. Alcott, it could be said, agreed. Although she enjoyed writing sensation stories, in which the emotions are decidedly overwrought, she staked her literary reputation on her realistic writing.
As realism and then modernism became the dominant literary aesthetics in the twentieth century and literary texts capable of drawing out readers’ emotions were deemed sub- or even nonliterary, Little Women came under attack for being too sentimental. When the Broadway play was produced in 1912, the shift away from sentiment was in full swing, yet most reviewers did not fault the play or the novel it was based on for mawkishness. Probably the term most often used to describe the play was wholesome, crediting Little Women with doing good and countering the more deleterious effects of most popular entertainment. Even one critic who thought “the sentimentality was occasionally laid on with a trowel,” concluded that the play “never cloys because it is so genuine in its sweetness.” A much later stage adaptation, in 2004 on London’s West End, was again noted for its ability to wring a few tears out of “sardonic, anti-sentimentalist” theatergoers. The play made for an evening “as warm and wholesome as hot milk,” the reviewer concluded.6
Little Women has always walked the fine line between genuine realism and sweet sentimentality. Consider again the scene in which Professor Bhaer proposes to Jo. While Jo and Bhaer are anything but a romantic hero and heroine, their humble love is elevated above commonplace emotion. In what must be the novel’s most sentimental line, Bhaer’s “rapture” is described as “glorify[ing] his face to such a degree that there actually seemed to be little rainbows in the drops that sparkled on his beard.” Most readers could not help groaning at that. Yet the narrator also undercuts the idealization by noting how passersby must mistake them for “a pair of harmless lunatics.”7 Throughout the novel, in fact, Alcott makes sure her readers keep their feet on the ground by reminding them that Beth is no angel but a very human girl, that Marmee is not perfect, and that Jo has to learn to manage her destructive temper. The tug-of-war between realism and sentiment works for most readers, but for some sentiment wins out, to the novel’s detriment.
After World War I, literary critics uniformly employed the term sentiment pejoratively and were fond of using the synonyms sweet or treacly. In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway, that archenemy of emotion in literature, had not actually read the novel but still associated it with an innocence that was incompatible with modern life. He mocked the budding writer Lavinia Russ by telling her she should be carrying Little Women instead of a play by Ibsen because she was “so full of young sweetness and light.”8 For the rest of the century, Little Women would be associated with cheap, easy, outmoded emotions.
At the heart of the literary war against sentimentalism was, to be frank, a distaste of the feminine. The expression of emotion was associated with the world of women, namely the home. This association becomes explicit in a story like Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” (1925), which I regularly teach in my American literature survey. Coming a few weeks after Little Women on the syllabus, it throws into relief how much literature had changed after World War I. For a soldier returning home, like Hemingway’s Harold Krebs, women and the homes they inhabit are full of complicated emotions he wants nothing to do with. He can only stare at the bacon fat hardening on his plate as his mother cries and tells him she loves him.
Even in 1868, Alcott understood the association of emotion with the feminine. Jo prefers the more masculine version of her name because Josephine is “so sentimental.” She refuses to cry when Amy burns her manuscript because “tears were an unmanly weakness.” In the end, however, when she challenges Professor Bhaer for being so sentimental as to want her to call him “thou,” the form of address common in romantic poetry, he tells her that he is proud to “believe in sentiment” with the rest of his German brethren.9 Thus Alcott turns the tables by privileging sentiment through a male character. But that wouldn’t matter in the coming decades. She had written a book for girls that covered the full spectrum of their emotions, from anger to grief, and worse than that, she made readers cry. Critics would find it hard to forgive her for that.
When the RKO film came out in 1933, some reviewers took the opportunity to take a pot shot at Alcott’s original novel. The Nation’s critic alluded to the custom of referring to the novel “as the classic expression of a certain kind of American sentimentalism,” and another critic admitted he never could stand Alcott’s “sugared sentimentality,” although he loved the film. Katharine Hepburn, it seems, had redeemed the sentimental story with her exaggeratedly masculine performance as Jo. But in the period after World War II, Little Women became inseparable from sentimentality and nostalgia. The MGM film in 1949 was attacked for being “sweet and cloying,” “a sentimental Technicolored Valentine.”10
That same year, Little Women was indicted in James Baldwin’s famous attack on sentimentality. His excoriation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” used Little Women as a point of reference, apparently assuming that readers would know it better than Stowe’s novel. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel,” he wrote, “having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women.” He went on to explain, “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”11 He goes on, but that is enough, I think, to suggest how virulently anti-sentiment mid-twentieth-century American writers and critics were. I find it hard to believe, however, that Baldwin actually read Little Women. He seems to be using it as a shorthand, as Hemingway did, relying on the cultural associations it carried to help bring down his more immediate prey, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In 1965, the British critic Brigid Brophy would address the issue of Little Women’s sentimentalism head on, writing a long article that ran both in the London Times and on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Her essay about sentimentality in art, titled “A Masterpiece, and Dreadful,” was occasioned by the recent airing of the 1933 film of Little Women on BBC television and her subsequent rereading of the novel. Alcott was, she supposed, “of all writers the one whose name means sentimentality.” Brophy set out to rescue the novel from such condemnation. Its ability to evoke tears was not a sign of its excessive emotionalism; in fact, crying over literature was a legitimate response to a book so skilled in the “gentler and less immoral sort” of sentiment. “Having . . . dried my eyes and blown my nose,” she writes, “I resolved that the only honorable course was to come out into the open and admit that the dreadful books [Little Women and Good Wives] are masterpieces,” although she is careful to qualify her praise. Sentiment should be applied conservatively, and it is in Alcott’s “artistic honesty” and restraint that she finds the novel’s merit.12
When the novel turned one hundred years old in 1968, the many reassessments that appeared again highlighted how impossible it was to pin down Little Women. The New York Times Book Review ran another lengthy essay, this one by American novelist and critic Elizabeth Janeway, who called the book “dated and sentimental” yet “as compulsively readable as it was a century ago.” It commits the “literary sin of sentimentality which falsifies emotion and manipulates the process of life,” but it succeeds still because “it is about life, and life that is recognizable in human terms today.” Children’s author Lavinia Russ, writing for the children’s Horn Book Magazine, found it strange to be going back to Little Women in a year that had witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. “To think, let alone write, about a book remembered as the story of a loving New England family in the nineteenth century seems about as timely as a history of antimacassars” (the cloths used to protect the backs of chairs). But Russ ultimately realized how timely the novel was with its belief in striving to be good and make the world a better place. If young people would follow Alcott’s lead, then there was still hope for the nation to emerge from the darkness of that terrible year.13
In another centennial reassessment, the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain wrote “This Is Your Life . . . Louisa May Alcott” for Holiday, a travel magazine in which many famous authors appeared. O’Faolain’s delightful essay, which deserves to be read in its entirety, again touched on the sentimentalism debate: “I will not quarrel with any reader’s right to lay [Alcott’s] book aside because there is too much sweetness and light in it,” he writes, “but I do feel that the balance she strikes between the dark and bright sides of life is more true to common experience than the opposite imbalance of our so-called realists.”14 In other words, Little Women is neither a realist nor a sentimental text, as they have become defined by their extremes of “dark and bright.” Rather, it is a novel that has lasted precisely because it manages to place itself in the middle, where most of us live.
Disagreement continues about whether Little Women tips toward realism or sentimentalism. For some, the novel’s emphasis on goodness makes it patently unreal. The writer Mary Gaitskill resented the book’s “impossibly sweet view of life” when she was growing up and was not convinced by the March sisters’ avowals of contentment as they happily shouldered their burdens. This was nothing like the “real life” she knew. London journalist Miranda Kiek is afraid to tell people how much she loves the novel because she invariably gets the response, “Isn’t it just a load of schmaltz, only fit for Christmas?” For critic Laura Miller, Little Women is the epitome of the type of children’s book that is “populated by snivelers and goody-two-shoes, the most saintly of whom were sure to die in some tediously drawn-out scene.”15
For others, however, the story and characters remain genuine. Sutton Foster, who played Jo in the 2004 Broadway musical, regrets that people think it is “precious and Hallmarky and tender.” For her, the story has “passion and heart and determination and heartbreak and desire and absolute devastation.” Anna Quindlen always felt as if the March sisters must have “roots in real life simply because they were so alive, so patently real.” The director of a recent stage production, Danielle Howard, likewise insists, “The characters, they’re not just storybook. They’re real people, confronting real day-to-day problems, their own flaws.”16
As for the novel’s virtuousness, it is important to recognize that the March sisters aren’t good already but are trying to be good. The girls never attain some pinnacle of perfect virtue (except for Beth, who admittedly doesn’t have to work much at it). Even after Beth’s death, Jo struggles to be the dutiful daughter. Alcott shows us Meg’s failures as much as her successes as a new wife and mother. Amy is rewarded with Laurie and with wealth in the end not because she is good, Alcott seems to suggest, but because she is charmed. Those who see the novel as sickeningly sweet don’t seem to remember how the girls grumble and resist as they shoulder their burdens. One of my favorite chapters is “Experiments,” in which Marmee, tired of listening to her daughters complain about their burdens, allows them to take a week off from their responsibilities in order to show them that “all play, and no work, is as bad as all work, and no play.”17 At the end of the week, she takes the day off herself so they will see what it is like to take care of everything themselves, an experiment that results in domestic chaos and unhappy girls. While most novels and sermons of the era preached self-sacrifice as the height of virtue, Alcott’s characters slowly learn that being “good” benefits themselves as much as others.
Perhaps it’s Little Women’s association with Christmas that has made it inescapably sentimental for some. The story opens with the girls at home preparing for Christmas, and many of the subsequent films, plays, radio dramas, and television specials opened or aired at Christmastime, capitalizing on the holiday’s associations with a nostalgic idealization of home. The nineteenth-century cult of the home still has strong appeal, even outside of the holiday season. We bemoan the fact that families don’t sit down to dinner together and are all on their devices instead of interacting with each other. Alcott’s portrait of home as a haven from the outside world pulls at our deepest longings. She has an uncanny ability to make it seem not only ideal but also possible. In Perri Klass’s novel Other Women’s Children, a female pediatrician reads Little Women at night to help her fall asleep, reminding her of “all the cozy domesticity of my fantasies, the Little Women mix of loving family, hard work, and moral uplift.” For Gloria Steinem, the novel was so attractive precisely because her family never stayed put. It represented the kind of house “with a picket fence and a school I could walk to” that seemed like home to her.18 Little Women plays on such urges despite—or perhaps because of—the modern family’s fragmentation. Seen from another view, the March home might be so appealing precisely because it is not entirely traditional. It has no patriarch, and everyone has her role to play. No one is on top, unless it is Marmee, who is a gentle guide rather than a boss. So while the novel’s image of home may seem essentially conservative, there is something rather subversive about it as well. It is this tug-of-war between traditionalism and modernity that continues to make Little Women such a vital, living text.
BEGINNING ABOUT THE TIME of the novel’s centennial, questions about Little Women’s progressiveness or lack of it came to the fore in discussions of Alcott’s book. By the 1970s, it was impossible not to read Little Women through the tense debates over women’s rights. There had been almost no notice of the novel’s defiance of cultural norms before that time. One exception is a 1913 review of the Marion de Forest play that identifies Jo as “something of a Pankhurst sort of person,” referring to the English militant suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst. Jo’s “forceful, untamed nature” was deemed relatively harmless, however, considering that it was only her own family she “sets afire . . . instead of ducal palaces.”19 The critic was right in saying that Jo would like to upend social conventions, but neither she nor her creator would have advocated militant methods.
Alcott herself was a staunch defender of women’s right to vote, a cause that had stalled in the years leading up to and during the Civil War. She was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, in 1879, and she held three meetings at her home to rouse up the women of the town to join her. She signed a letter to the Woman’s Journal about her suffrage activities, “Yours for reforms of all kinds.” Although suffrage and women’s rights are not mentioned directly in Little Women, they would become a prominent theme in the sequel Jo’s Boys, published in 1886. By that time it seemed very much as if the tide was beginning to turn (although it would be another thirty-four years before the Nineteenth Amendment finally gave women the franchise). In one scene, Nan, the tomboyish girl in whom Mrs. Jo sees much of her former self, declares, “The women of England can vote, and we can’t. I’m ashamed of America that she isn’t ahead in all good things.” Nan, we are informed, “held advanced views on all reforms,” like her creator.20
As a young woman, Jo was even more ahead of her time and even more alone in her views. In Little Women there is no community of women who are discussing the larger social issues and women’s place in them, as there is in Jo’s Boys. Instead, Jo goes through life “with [her] elbows out,” Alcott’s way of describing her resistance to convention. Jo’s difference from her sisters is most noticeable in her relationship with Amy, which comes to a head in the chapter “Calls” in part two. Jo refuses to behave appropriately on their visits to their so-called social betters, while Amy wants to adhere to social norms. Jo calls Amy’s insistence on women’s agreeableness even in the face of bad behavior “a nice sort of morality.” “I only know that it’s the way of the world,” Amy responds, “and people who set themselves against it, only get laughed at for their pains. I don’t like reformers, and I hope you will never try to be one.” To which Jo retorts, “I do like them, and I shall be one if I can; for in spite of the laughing, the world would never get on without them. We can’t agree about that, for you belong to the old set, and I to the new.”
Neither this conversation nor the scene in which it occurs is included in any of the novel’s adaptations on film or stage. All of them tend to reduce Jo’s “love of liberty and hate of conventionalities,” as Alcott puts it, to her boyish ways, love of writing, and burning of her dresses by standing too near the fire.21 While telling, these traits are hardly threatening to the social order. Perhaps this is why commentators didn’t pay much attention to Jo or recognize how iconoclastic she was before the second wave of feminism.
Even the rebellious 1920s overlooked Jo. In an article titled “Subversive Miss Alcott,” which ran in The New Republic in 1925, the author, Elizabeth Vincent, couldn’t understand why “every little girl in America” still read such an old-fashioned book. It wasn’t the novel that was subversive, ultimately, but girls’ insistence on reading it despite “our insurgent age.” In Vincent’s examination, Jo is nothing more than a tomboy, and Meg’s belief that a woman’s highest duty is in the home is “a fine popular doctrine for the age of equality and economic independence.” The flapper Marjorie Harvey in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920) similarly thought there was nothing progressive about Little Women. “What modern girl could live like those inane females?” she quips.22
By 1968, however, Little Women no longer seemed so innocent. Janeway took the lead in her New York Times Book Review essay. Although she thought the novel overall “dated and sentimental,” she declared that Jo was the original feminist, fulfilling “the dream of growing up into full humanity with all its potentialities instead of into limited femininity: of looking after oneself and paying one’s way and doing effective work in the real world instead of learning how to please a man who will look after you, as Meg and Amy both do.” Although Jo marries in the end, she is “not a sweet little wife but a matriarch,” Janeway argued, making the woman who created her a “secret rebel against the order of the world and woman’s place in it.”23
In the letters responding to Janeway’s piece, Little Women became, not for the last time, a lightning rod for debate about the virtues of feminism. Janeway sounded like Betty Friedan or “some other militant feminist,” complained one woman, who took exception to Janeway’s privileging of work outside the home and felt personally attacked as a stay-at-home mom. If some women “want the ‘child-raising off their backs,’ ” she protested, “then let them hire their children out to nannies, and get on downtown to the office, for God’s sake. Get them off our backs. We have work to do.”24 Janeway had clearly touched a nerve, one that would be at the heart of discussions of Little Women from then on. Reading Little Women was no longer a nostalgic activity or something only girls did. Alcott seemed to be commenting on the turbulent transition women’s lives were undergoing in the late twentieth century.
Some journalists, including Gerald Nachman, saw the linkage of the novel to feminism as a comic opportunity. Writing for the New York Times, he imagined a film adaptation called “Little Women ’70” that would star Betty Friedan as Jo and have Beth die in a botched abortion. His fictional director described the concept as Little Women “seen now in ironic perspective against the background of the Women’s Liberation Front, an inevitable outgrowth of the activities of the girls in the novel.”25 But feminists were beginning to directly challenge the notion, on which Nachman’s satire rests, that Alcott could be associated only with the education of prim little girls.
At the same time that Nachman was poking fun, the first national publication of second-wave feminism, Women: A Journal of Liberation, published an essay titled “Louisa May Alcott: The Author of Little Women as Feminist.” Although she was typically “a prime example of everything hip culture scorns, literati ignore, and feminists detest,” journalist Karen Lindsay wrote, Alcott should instead be viewed as a humanist and a feminist, although admittedly not a radical one. Alcott never directly criticized the institution of marriage, for example, although she challenged its romanticization by having Jo choose Professor Bhaer instead of Laurie. Given the current state of children’s literature and television, Lindsay argued, girls of 1970 could do much worse than to read Little Women and Alcott’s other books.26
Stephanie Harrington struck a similar note in a 1973 New York Times article titled “Does Little Women Belittle Women?” It was a review of the BBC’s nine-part miniseries adaptation, which had just aired in the United States. Compared to most television fare, such as “the weekly humiliation” of Edith Bunker on All in the Family, the BBC production “takes on the force of a feminist tract.” But that wasn’t saying much, Harrington claimed. The novel Little Women was still “a perfectly disgusting, banal, and craven service to male supremacy,” given its celebration of marriage and motherhood as the pinnacle of a woman’s life. Even Jo eventually succumbs to the feminine mystique of selflessness. Yet, amid the sea of female caricatures on large and small screens, the March sisters stood out because they were still allowed to be themselves. “They at least think. They at least, in their own terms, grow,” Harrington argued. Most impressively, they were given the respect of being called women, a considerable step ahead of Marlo Thomas’s “That Girl.” Playing on the Virginia Slims slogan that used feminism to sell cigarettes, Harrington concluded, “No, we have not come a long way, baby. Nobody ever called Jo March baby.”27
When feminist scholars emerged within academia in the 1970s, they were particularly drawn to Little Women, but they weren’t much interested in favorably comparing the novel to current fare and celebrating its incipient feminism. In various ways, they set out to demonstrate what Nachman’s fictional director had identified as his theme: “Just why these women were so little [and] how male chauvinism made them feel so small.”28 For many early feminist critics, Little Women was a prime example of the internalized patriarchal viewpoint that had compromised and thwarted women writers, who simply couldn’t help but portray their female characters as limited, submissive, and powerless.
One of the first feminist critical texts to focus on literature by women was The Female Imagination (1975), by Wellesley English professor Patricia Meyer Spacks. She analyzed how Little Women focused on the “glorification of altruism” for women. Saintly Beth is “rewarded by dying young,” Spacks argued, while rebellious Jo, who yearns for the freedom granted men, is punished by marrying “a man who can control her.” Three years later, in Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, Nina Auerbach, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, provided the first extended feminist analysis of Little Women and found that while it celebrated female community in the first part, Alcott had betrayed her “deepest fantasies” by denying the possibility of “permanent sisterhood” in the last part of the book.29
But it was Judith Fetterley’s 1979 analysis of Little Women as “Alcott’s Civil War” that has been most influential on subsequent readings of the novel. Inspired by the reprinting of some of Alcott’s sensationalist stories, which often portrayed marriage as a prison for women, Fetterley saw darker undercurrents in Alcott’s most famous children’s novel, a text that now seemed to be at war with itself. The novel’s overt messages favor female submission and self-sacrifice, including Amy and Jo’s seemingly carefree renunciation of their artistic and literary ambitions. Yet the novel also contains subtler messages, Fetterley argued, about the limitations imposed on women and the lack of alternatives to marriage. The great paradox of the book is that “the figure who most resists the pressure to become a little woman is the most attractive and the figure who most succumbs to it dies.” Although Fetterley ultimately regretted Alcott’s capitulation to traditional notions of womanhood, her analysis opened up new ways of talking about the tensions in Little Women.30 In other words, while Alcott herself came to be seen as a more complex figure—someone who could write about drugs, madness, and suicide as well as benevolent virtues for children—her masterpiece, Little Women, also began to appear more multidimensional.
Ever since, readings of Little Women have addressed the question of whether it is a subversive or submissive text, whether it is a product of its time or pushes against nineteenth-century cultural mores, particularly as they concern women. There have been many important analyses of the novel’s historical and biographical contexts, but the main points of contention focus on whether we can read Little Women as a feminist text, and what it means to read it through the lens of our contemporary expectations concerning gender.
As feminist criticism entered the scholarly mainstream, the number of academic articles on the novel exploded from only five in the 1970s to over twenty in the 1980s and more than thirty-five in the 1990s. Three currents in literary criticism made it possible for scholars to take Little Women more seriously. First, the idea of a novel’s “cultural work,” or its effect on readers and even the social order, became as significant a measure of its worth as traditional measures of aesthetic value. Second, the practice of literary analysis began to move away from unifying interpretations and toward indeterminacy and the recognition of competing themes, which Little Women had in spades. Third, the rise of gender studies initiated a turn away from thinking of men and women as simply distinct biological entities and toward considering gender as something learned and performed, not fixed but mutable. Little Women, more than perhaps any other novel written before the second wave of feminism, is fundamentally about how girls learn to become women or perform gender as it was constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century (and as it more or less continued to be through the 1960s). As scholar Gregory Eiselein has written, “Before Simone de Beauvoir (a devoted reader of Little Women), Alcott understood that one is not born, but rather becomes, a little woman.”31 The novel also shows how men are educated into their gender, as Laurie must give up his music and prepare to take over his grandfather’s business.
All of this has led to intense debates about how much Little Women participated in or pushed against the dominant ideologies of its day. In the 1980s, critics were largely unwilling to forgive Alcott for marrying Jo to Professor Bhaer instead of making her a writer. Carolyn Heilbrun, while acknowledging that “Jo was a miracle,” also concluded that Alcott “betrayed Jo” by robbing her of her autonomy. Scholars Angela Estes and Kathleen Lant, picking up the theme of hidden violence from James Baldwin, stressed the “horror” of Alcott’s “dismemberment of the text,” particularly in the way she destroys “fiery, angry, assertive” Jo and the female utopia to which she belongs. They describe the ways Jo gradually loses power until she finally takes on the self-effacing personality of her dead sister, Beth, becoming a “zombielike Jo.” For children’s literature specialist Beverly Lyon Clark, Alcott stifled Jo in Little Women, and was above all “ambivalent—about writing, about self-expression, about gender roles.”32 All of these critics focus on the transformation of Jo from part one to part two, which has been the most troubling aspect of Little Women for feminist critics.
Such debates spilled over into the popular press when Gillian Armstrong’s film came out in December 1994. Feminist writers and critics outside of academia wondered whether Little Women was still a book worth reading and talking about, and, predictably, they did not agree. One view, represented by Gaitskill in her article for Vogue—titled, like Harrington’s, “Does Little Women Belittle Women?”—was that Little Women should still be read. Although she had rejected the book as a child, Gaitskill realized now that it could help women move toward “a new, more fully dimensional feminism that includes both gentleness and strength” and away from the image of powerful, gun-wielding babes that often passed for feminism in popular culture. Little Women could also provide a useful model for today’s writers, she decided, because it was emotionally honest, not sentimental, as she remembered it. Critic Caryn James disagreed. In an article for the New York Times, she set out to counter the “cult of Jo [that] has conspired to make her a proto-feminist saint.” The novel was much more ambiguous than that, she felt. Her own reading as a girl had been that Amy was the sister to envy: she had golden curls, went to Europe, and got the cute rich boy next door. But upon rereading the book, she decides that it hasn’t held up all that well thanks to the prevalence of “preachy, do-good lessons from Marmee.”33 For her, Little Women was simply not the feminist tract the film suggested it was.
When the film made its way across the Atlantic, British writers and professional women who were asked for their opinions were largely critical, and some were downright caustic. The journalist and biographer Brenda Maddox, an American expat, was the first to chime in for the Times. She didn’t need to reread the book, she said, because its lessons on womanhood had already been etched on her psyche, and she wasn’t happy about it. “J’accuse Miss Alcott of making little women of us all,” she wrote. “For all its ostensible preaching about women’s self-sufficiency, Little Women is as politically incorrect as Penthouse. Its message is that woman’s role is to stand and wait, place her husband above her children, and never let her learning or quick tongue get ahead of her duty to be gentle, subdued and nurturing.” The Observer interviewed a number of women about the book and film, including author Michele Roberts, who felt that the novel promoted an unattainable and damaging model of self-sacrificial womanhood. “Come the end of the novel, [Jo’s] been tamed into submission by horrid Marmee,” she complained. There was simply nothing feminist about Alcott’s story. Novelist and journalist Linda Grant agreed, calling Little Women “a sickening book.” Having read it again as an adult, she thought that “it reveals its grisly agenda,” namely the preaching of feminine, wifely virtues. Liz Forgan, managing director of BBC Radio, went so far as to call Little Women “profoundly unfeminist, truly dangerous stuff for little girls.” The Independent also wanted to know what British women thought of Little Women and drew this opinion from novelist and self-proclaimed “militant feminist” Julie Burchill: she liked the first part but thought Good Wives “pretty disgusting. If Louisa May Alcott had been really sound,” she contended, she would have written a third volume and called it “Divorced Lesbian Sluts.”34
Some staunch feminists, however, were less willing to throw their childhood favorite to the wolves. Germaine Greer said that the book still moved her deeply. On rereading it forty-five years after first having it imprinted on her imagination, she wrote, “The tears run down my face like rain; tears of mirth, tears of sympathy, and tears of I-don’t-know-what.” Steinem admitted that her view of the novel had changed, but not for the worse: “I’m now old enough to identify with Marmee, and to appreciate this rare literary model of a hard-working single mother.” Although she wished Alcott had been able “to tell more of the truth,” she wondered, “where else in popular culture can young readers find an all-female group discussing work, art, and all the Great Questions? . . . Most of all, where can they find girls who want to be women—instead of vice versa?”35 In Steinem’s mind, cultural images of young womanhood had still not caught up to the iconic portrait of a feisty Jo March as first envisioned in 1868.
In 2005, when the Library of America published the Little Women trilogy (including Little Men and Jo’s Boys), the debates geared up once again. Rereading the novels brought some surprises for critics. Whereas the three film versions ended with Jo getting married and getting published, the novel does not end so patly. As Deborah Friedell read it, Jo gave up her writing and burned her sensation stories (forgetting that Jo writes again after Beth’s death and is rewarded with success). “She learns to cook and to keep house. She marries the professor, starts a school, has children. . . . This is not exactly the woman’s fate that has edified generations of Jo’s readers.” Stacy Schiff agreed in her op-ed “Our Little Women Problem” for the New York Times. To her great disappointment, especially since she had named her daughter after Jo, she said the novel turned out to be more Rapunzel than the proto-feminist tale of her recollection. In response, Elaine Showalter, who had edited the new edition, wrote to the New York Times to encourage Schiff to read the books again and see that Jo is “the great feminist heroine” who does not renounce her career in favor of family life. “Jo does not stop working or pick up the feather duster when she marries,” Showalter explained. She not only codirects a boarding school with her husband but makes sure the boys are taught to respect women’s rights and even puts them to work as babysitters.36
The widely varying readings seem to depend on which parts of Little Women—and its sequels—one focuses on. I’m inclined, with Steinem and Showalter, to see Little Women’s glass as half full rather than half empty. I don’t entirely disagree with those readings that see the novel as not particularly feminist, but to me they tell only part of the story. Does the Jo of part two cancel out the Jo of part one? Scholar Barbara Sicherman found that early female readers did not view Jo as having failed to realize her potential, as contemporary critics have done. Having so few models of unconventional womanhood in their own lives, readers from the 1860s to the 1960s gravitated toward Jo “as an intellectual and a writer, the liberated woman they wanted to become. No matter that Jo marries and raises a family; such readers remember the young Jo . . . and her dreams of glory.” One critic has argued that readers are drawn to Little Women precisely because they can pick and choose which parts matter to them, and for most readers it is “the far naughtier beginning and middle.”37 Even if we can’t agree on how to read the book, we can find in its various parts those elements that most speak to us.
Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that Little Women is such an ambiguous novel. In its competing narratives of quest and romance, rebellion and resignation, rejection and adjustment, Little Women offers its readers multiple options, none of which is the one message of the text. Jo is both writer and family member, revolutionary role model and little woman, male-identified tomboy and feminine nurturer. Little Women therefore provides a wonderful opportunity to tease out the relationships between these identities and consider how women have inhabited multiple selves. In Jo we can see how these competing identities create internal conflicts, making not only for a fractured text but a fractured heroine. Her great desires, as Alcott identifies them—“to be independent, and earn the praise of those she loved”—are rather contradictory. How can Jo hope to achieve independence, which implies separating from her family, and earn their praise, which implies a submission to their wishes or at minimum a compromise? As one critic has pointed out, Jo’s dreams of a career are coded masculine while her dreams of connection are coded feminine. She wants to be an independent writer and a member of a loving family, a pairing not traditionally available to women. Ultimately she makes a compromise between the two that is “the result of a genuine maturation” rather than a capitulation to conventionality.38
My students tend to understand this and roundly reject the equation of Jo’s marriage with her subjugation. A woman can marry and still be independent, they tell me, and they like to review the passage where Jo explains that she hasn’t given up her career altogether. At the end of Little Women, when Jo is in her thirties and married with two boys of her own as well as many others at the Plumfield School that she and Bhaer manage together, she is reminded of her earlier dreams to be a famous author. She begins, “Yes, I remember; but the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now.” This line is often cited by critical feminist scholars and writers, who rarely continue to the next sentence, where Jo says, “I haven’t given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait, and I’m sure it will be all the better for such experiences and illustrations as these,” meaning her family and her work at the school.39 What has seemed like a defeat to feminist critics seems to my students a reasonable response to life. They reject the dichotomy between writing/career and family/love. I felt the same way when I first read the novel in my early twenties. That line jumped out at me and gave me hope that Jo would write her great book yet, a book enriched by her family life rather than crushed by it.
Another passage almost entirely neglected by critics explains why Jo’s dreams of fame seem cold to her now. Beth’s death initiates a great change in Jo that could seem as if feelings of guilt have led her to try to replace Beth. But there is more to Jo’s transformation. Beth may say to Jo on her deathbed, “You must take my place, Jo, and be everything to father and mother when I am gone,” but she also tells her, “you’ll be happier in doing that, than writing splendid books, or seeing all the world; for love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.” Then and there, “Jo renounced her old ambition” and felt “the blessed solace of a belief in the immortality of love.”40 This is not mere sophistry or conventional romantic thinking to which Jo succumbs. Love isn’t the thing to which she must sacrifice her ambitions to become a true woman or to be accepted by her society. Instead, Alcott says that it is the one thing in life that really matters, in the end. Anyone who has sat at the bedside of a dying loved one knows the truth of Beth’s words. It is the people they love who are on their minds.
If Little Women has one major theme, it is learning to live with and for others. Meg, Jo, and Amy all start out rather myopically, wanting things for themselves. As they each learn to let others’ needs take precedence at times, they discover that doing things for others makes them happy as well. It’s not always easy, however. After her sister’s death, Jo, in particular, struggles to be as self-sacrificial as Beth. In fact, Jo isn’t capable of it. At the prospect of living the rest of her life at home, in service to her aging parents, she thinks, “I can’t do it. I wasn’t meant for a life like this.” And Alcott doesn’t make her. In her view, women didn’t fulfill their true natures by living solely for others. The kind of life she promoted was one of cooperation, in which each does his or her share to make life more comfortable for each other. Marmee teaches this lesson early on, in the “Experiments” chapter, where she tells them that “the comfort of all depends on each doing her share faithfully.”41 In the end, Jo and Professor Bhaer share the running of Plumfield School, which, as we see in Little Men, is itself a kind of cooperative community. Each pupil has a role to play in the school’s success. While not always recognized as a key tenet of feminism (although it should be), the idea of sharing life’s burdens, regardless of gender, remains a radical prospect for many.
I sometimes get impatient with readings of Little Women that take a hard line on Alcott’s betrayal of Jo. I agree with my students who want Jo (and themselves) to have a family and a career. We can talk about how difficult that is, trying to keep the writer or artist or intellectual part of yourself alive when the baby wakes up early from her nap or starts refusing to nap altogether, and how unfair it is that men have not had to choose between family and career. But let’s not say that Alcott robbed Jo of her individuality by giving her a husband and children. In the chapter “All Alone,” where Jo realizes after Beth’s death that she can’t live at home forever, we see how lonely she is and how much she wishes she could love someone. Alcott wanted Jo to be a literary spinster like herself, largely because the idea of women combining love and art seemed wholly impossible in the 1860s. Jo’s belief that she may one day write even better works from the experiences she is having was pretty revolutionary. Not only that, but in 1886, Alcott had Jo pick up her career again in Jo’s Boys, writing a book like Little Women that touches the hearts of her readers and makes her a celebrity. Alcott also gave careers to three young women in that book: two who marry (Amy’s daughter, Bess, an artist, and Meg’s daughter Josie, an actress) and one who does not (Nan, a doctor with no interest in marrying).
In recent years, as the idea of feminism has broadened and deepened, readers have been able to more fully recognize the novel’s key tensions as inherent to women’s lives and even the human condition. Complementing Alcott’s realistic portrait of the way women have had to accommodate their dreams in order to have families, she also shows that men like Laurie and Professor Bhaer have to make compromises. Bhaer gives up his true vocation—teaching at a college out West—to instruct little boys at Plumfield so that he can have a home with Jo. And Laurie gives up his dream of a being a musician so he can work in his grandfather’s business and have a stable home with Amy.
In many other ways, as well, the novel extends the boundaries of conventional womanhood in the nineteenth century. Each of the girls is given a different personality and a unique talent that she is encouraged to cultivate. Jo and Amy leave home as part of their development into adult women. Alcott allows Jo to reject a perfectly lovable and wealthy suitor and to contemplate life without marriage (virtually unprecedented in nineteenth-century literature). And the novel allows female characters a wide range of emotions, including unfeminine anger, frustration, moodiness, willfulness, and self-centeredness, not to mention masculine ambition.
Alcott’s portrait of marriage is especially progressive. For starters, marriage is not presented as the end point of a woman’s development; we see in Meg’s storyline that it requires new adjustments. Alcott also promotes a non-patriarchal, companionate view of marriage: Marmee encourages Meg to invite John into the nursery, and to talk with him about politics, and Jo and Bhaer share the same sphere, working together at Plumfield instead of each toiling away at home or at work. In this way, Alcott introduced to a wide audience the notion that to be partners in life, men and women must be allowed to come together as fully formed individuals. Her parents’ friend the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller had written about this concept in her feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), and it was a principle Abigail Alcott promoted to her daughters. Too many women, they thought, entered marriage as incomplete selves and simply became their husband’s appendages or dependents. Not so the March sisters.
Whether Little Women is propaganda for the patriarchy, cautionary tale, or radical argument for women’s equality wrapped up in a book for children—or all of these things at once—it seems our readings of it will continue to multiply as we decide which parts of it matter to us most. Nonetheless, the question of who should read Little Women and why remains. Is it a book that should be read in schools? Is it worthy of continued attention? Should boys be encouraged to read it? And does it still matter to girls today? Again, there are no easy answers.