Growing Up Female with Little Women
MUCH OF THE discomfort with including Little Women in public discourse has to do with its depictions not only of girls, but of girls turning into women. Our culture prefers girls to stay small, young, and full of potential. The recent resurgence of book titles with the word girl—Gone Girl, Rise of the Rocket Girls, Lab Girl—speaks to our preference for the young person still looking ahead over the woman who looks wistfully behind her. We regret, in Robin Wasserman’s words, “the transition from girlhood to womanhood, from being someone to being someone’s wife, someone’s mother.”1 Even more than that, I would say, our culture is threatened by the grown woman’s possibilities: sexually, politically, and otherwise.
Girls have been told in myriad ways to stay girls as long as they can. Many have cooperated, some even starving themselves in an effort to do so; others have flat out refused to participate in girldom (like Jo). Meanwhile, others have been eager to leave girlhood’s diminished status behind and appropriate the power of womanhood (like Amy). Clearly, however, the transition is anything but simple, and few maps have been available to help guide girls through it. The fairytales we all grew up with, which depict adolescent girls falling asleep until they are awakened by a prince, were less than helpful. Little Women, however, provided a detailed map of sorts through the ups and downs of growing up female—perhaps the most important one ever created, judging by its impact on countless women’s perceptions of themselves. For generations, girls and young women have come to understand themselves through Alcott’s portraits of four very different sisters.
The personalities of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy have become a kind of shorthand that girls could use to make sense of their own identities. For 150 years, girls have wondered, which March sister am I? Which one do I want to become? My mother told me that her parents thought she was a Meg, but secretly she was a Jo, an identity that took her many years to finally reveal. Margo Jefferson recalled that after her older sister, who got to read Little Women first, claimed Jo as her alter ego, she was determined not to be “left with Meg,” the dutiful daughter. So instead she chose Beth, the sister who “makes no effort to win love: she is loved because she is loving.” But as an adult, she decided that she “should have wanted to be Amy.” Another reader remembered, “Of course, I identified with Jo, but sometimes wondered if I couldn’t also be the pretty one, Amy, or the mature one, Meg. I pondered this question deeply—who am I really?”2 Others have adopted the girls’ names, so strong was their identification. In short, reading Little Women has been more than a literary experience; it has also been a deeply personal one, helping to shape readers’ understanding of themselves.
Jo, in particular, has been a touchstone for so many girls who felt they could not or did not want to measure up to conventional (white) norms of womanhood—which must be a very large number, considering how widespread her appeal is. It is ironic, really, that the girl who didn’t want to be a girl has been one of the most popular literary heroines of all time. Her popularity speaks volumes about the deeply unsettled feelings that girls of all backgrounds have felt as they approached the restrictions of womanhood. For many young lesbians, Jo was particularly important. “It’s a complete cliché for a lesbian to claim Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as a key text in her self-understanding and relationship to the world,” writes scholar Elizabeth Freeman. “After all, who was Jo but our tomboy self, our ‘behind the mask’ self, our struggle against normative femininity?”3
It is interesting that when asked to write a book for girls, Alcott chose to focus on what Henry James called “the awkward age,” those years when a girl is not yet a woman but is also no longer a little girl. In other words, she captured her female characters in the throes of change, a highly unusual choice. Mary Wollstonecraft had noted seventy years earlier that while heroes were allowed to “become wise and virtuous as well as happy” over the course of their stories, heroines were “to act like goddesses of wisdom, just come forth highly finished Minervas from the head of Jove.” From the outset they were supposed to be fully formed icons of femininity, incapable or unneedful of growth. When Margaret Fuller wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century twenty-three years before Little Women, she despaired over how girls were discouraged from growing into their own natures when they conflicted with traditional notions of the feminine. The result? “Now there is no woman,” she wrote, “only an overgrown child.”4 By the time Alcott wrote her novel of the March sisters, not much had changed.
By examining how each girl evolves over the six or more years covered in the two parts of the novel (excluding the final flash forward), Alcott wrote one of the earliest and most influential female Bildungsromane, or novels of development. She adapted a highly male genre and thereby granted girls the opportunity to imagine themselves as works in progress, as human beings without a set destiny but one they could make for themselves. While the male Bildungsroman charted a trajectory from innocence to maturity, or dependence to autonomy, the typical story of the female child coming of age was one of containment and restraint. More about “growing down,” than growing up, it tended to show the heroine learning to conform to feminine norms rather than discovering herself as an individual. Even if it contained a rebellious middle, portraying girls who run and play like boys and yearn for achievement or fame, they generally ended rather depressingly with marriage, subservience, and renunciation of earlier dreams. Many critics have, in fact, viewed Little Women as another example of the failed female Bildungsroman, leading one to claim that it owes its enduring relevance to its central theme of “tam[ing] girls into women.” I would argue that Little Women is more complicated than that, and it still lives because we continue to wrestle with what it means to grow up female and how to write women’s lives outside of the conventional romance plot.5
BY FOCUSING HER NOVEL on the process of growing up, Alcott made a clear break with other children’s literature, writing what we would today call young adult (YA) literature. The popular boys’ books of the time celebrated the period of irresponsible youth before dutiful adulthood and didn’t bother looking beyond their heroes’ boyish pranks. (Twain would continue the trend with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, who refuse to grow up and actively resist any attempts to domesticate or tame them.) Yet Alcott perceptively understood the transition into womanhood as the most difficult time in a girl’s life. It was the moment when life was still full of possibilities—but Alcott wasn’t content simply to walk her heroines up to the altar. She made sure to show us the messy parts along the way and took us beyond the point when a girl’s life ends and a woman’s begins. In other words, she complicated readers’ understanding of what it meant to grow up female.
Adolescence did not exist conceptually when Alcott wrote Little Women. Girls and boys were supposed to simply morph into young women and men, or “little” women and men. As the terminology suggests, this stage of life was viewed as a training ground for sex-differentiated roles as adults. Largely agricultural communities created an environment in which children were trained from an early age to replicate their parents essentially, to become farmers or preachers or shoemakers, or the wives of such men. A period of transition into a new identity was therefore hardly required.
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, when psychologists first named and identified adolescence, it became known as a uniquely turbulent period, distinct from all others, when the old child-self was falling away and a new sense of oneself as an individual was being born. It could last from about the age of fourteen into the midtwenties, during which time the adolescent was likely to experience fluctuating and sometimes extreme emotions. The end result was supposed to be a more advanced, adult self. As education became more widely accessible and city life became the norm, children’s destinies could vary widely from their parents. The so-called crisis of adolescence therefore came when one’s future differed from the past or was somehow undetermined.6 This history of adolescence, however, generally presupposes a male child embarking on his future. The history of girls’ maturation is different.
During the Victorian era, girls were expected to grow up to adopt a role, or two roles, really: wife and mother, precisely in that order. There was not supposed to be an adolescent crisis; there were simply one’s duties to learn. In the meantime, they were expected to stay close to home and family until they were turned over to husbands, thus remaining dependents first in their family of origin and then in their husband’s home. Yet as the century wore on, even girls experienced new educational opportunities while marriage rates declined (largely as fallout from the Civil War). As a result, many young women felt the pull toward independence and left home on their own, as Jo does when she goes to New York. Meg, who is sixteen when the story begins, seems to be most comfortable with her new status as a “little woman,” apprenticing herself to Marmee and learning how to be a proper woman and future wife. Jo, on the other hand, seems to point toward a more modern form of adolescence, torn as she is between familial ties and a desire for independent selfhood. She also is developing a less gender-specific concept of her future role. She calls herself the “man of the family” in her father’s absence, and she expects to be the family’s breadwinner, a role she assumes in the second part of the novel, even after her father has returned.7
For girls, maturation has also always been closely tied to sexuality and the loss of purity or innocence. Girls who were sexualized early, such as slaves or workers who were preyed upon by their masters or bosses, were denied their adolescence. Yet even middle- and upper-class white girls could be sexualized early. There were famous examples of Victorian men attracted to prepubescent girls. Edgar Allen Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin. A friend of Poe’s, best-selling Scots Irish American novelist Captain Mayne Reid, married his wife when she was fifteen and he was thirty-five. Wilkie Collins is known to have carried on an extensive flirtation via correspondence with a twelve-year-old girl. The actresses Anna Cora Mowatt and Ellen Terry both married older men when they were quite young—Mowatt at fifteen and Terry at sixteen. Two famous English clergymen—future Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson and the prime minister’s son Stephen Gladstone—became engaged to young girls they later married. And the popular art historian John Ruskin fell in love with a series of young girls. His wife, Effie Gray, first drew his amorous attention when she was twelve years old, and they married when she was nineteen. After that marriage dissolved, purportedly because she was “already too old to be truly desirable,” according to Effie’s biographer, he fell in love with a ten-year-old but waited until she was eighteen to propose. (She turned him down.)8
Victorian literature is full of girls who marry much older men. In 1868 Captain Mayne Reid published an autobiographical novel titled The Child Wife in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, where many of Alcott’s works also appeared. Alcott’s sensation fiction also offers many examples. In her novel A Long Fatal Love Chase, written in 1866 but unpublished in her lifetime, the heroine, who is relentlessly pursued by an older man (“past thirty”), is described as a “girl” and a “child.” The man first falls in love with her “graceful girlish figure” and thinks she is fifteen, although she is really eighteen.9 In “A Whisper in the Dark,” first published in 1863, Sybil is seventeen when her forty-five-year-old uncle whisks her away from the only home she has known and imprisons her when she refuses to marry him. And in “Love and Self-Love,” published in 1860, the heroine is only sixteen when her guardian, twice her age, becomes her husband.
Marriage at the age of sixteen or seventeen was not uncommon, even in the Northeastern United States, where child marriage rates were much lower than elsewhere in the country. In Massachusetts, where Little Women takes place, 23.5 percent of the women who married in 1861 were under the age of twenty (compared to 1.9 percent of the men). Of those, 302 were seventeen years old and 137 were only sixteen. When the United States began collecting such data in 1880, 11.7 percent of girls between fifteen and nineteen years of age were married.10 (Parental consent was required for girls under eighteen.)
The picture of when exactly a girl was deemed capable of becoming a woman gets even murkier when we consider the legal age of consent, or the age at which a girl was deemed competent to declare her consent to a sexual act. In 1868, it was twelve in England and only ten in the United States. In 1885, the age was raised to sixteen in England, in response to a public outcry against childhood prostitution.11 (Today in the United States, U.K., Canada, Ireland, and Australia, the age is between sixteen and eighteen.)
Victorian confusion and discomfort about the girl on the cusp of becoming a sexual being is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, first published in 1865, three years before Little Women. Alice’s body morphs in monstrous ways, literally outgrowing the small house that cannot contain her. Carroll (Oxford don Charles Dodgson) was no less uncomfortable with the maturation of the real Alice Liddell, who was ten years old when Dodgson made up his story about Alice’s adventures for her. He feared the time when she and the many other girls he befriended and photographed would outgrow the frame he placed around them, once writing to a girl, “Please don’t grow any taller, if you can help it, till I’ve had time to photograph you again.” Next to his words he drew a girl’s body without a head, as it now extended beyond the edges of the photograph. When he met Alice Liddell again at age thirteen (after a two-year separation from her family, imposed by her mother), he was struck by how much she had changed. “And hardly for the better,” he wrote in his diary, indicating the she was “probably going through the usual awkward state of transition,” a euphemism for puberty.12
In the 1860s, menarche occurred at about fifteen, Jo’s age at the beginning of Little Women. (Today the average age is closer to eleven or twelve.) Although Alcott never mentions menstruation, budding breasts, or other physical changes, that is precisely what is happening to the March sisters. And all the discussions of gloves, hair, and dresses have everything to do with these changes. Decorum and convention were ways of outwardly marking what wasn’t discussed openly. Once a girl started wearing her hair up, covering her hands with gloves, wearing long skirts, and refraining from running or talking openly to boys, she was assumed to have advanced to the stage of sexual being. The March girls don’t participate in the more formal coming-out ceremonies, which signified a young woman’s readiness for marriage (and thus sex) among the upper classes, so these other signifiers took their place. As historian Deborah Gorham has written, “After puberty, a Victorian girl was expected to give up both vigorous physical activity, and play. When she put up her hair and donned long skirts, she was to begin to prepare herself with adult seriousness for adult femininity.”13
When we are first introduced to Jo, we see an awkward girl with long limbs and large hands and feet. She possesses “the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn’t like it.” Meg soon reprimands her for whistling like a boy, saying, “You are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady,” to which Jo responds, “I ain’t! and if turning up my hair makes me one, I’ll wear it in two tails until I’m twenty.” She also hates the thought of having to “wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China-aster.” When she later decides to cut her hair, she does so not only to get money for her mother’s trip to Washington where her father lies ill (her mother says it wasn’t necessary), but also as a way of resisting the new forms of adult femininity. Jo likes the idea that she will have a “curly crop” that looks “boyish.” Yet she cries that night over the loss of her “one beauty,” suggesting how confusing the transition to womanhood is for her.14
New forms of dress were central to that transition. Jo burns her dresses by standing too close to the fire, a sign not simply of her carelessness but also of her further rebellion against the idea that she has to start wearing long, full skirts. When Meg goes to the Moffats’, or Vanity Fair, she is given a “coming out” of sorts as the French maid dresses her up like a doll, covering her neck and arms with powder, reddening her lips, and lacing her plump figure into a low-necked dress so tightly that she has trouble breathing. High-heeled boots and a coquettish fan complete the effect. Alcott subtly ridicules the whole scene and makes Meg come home and repent for her night of frivolity. However, in part two of the novel, Alcott allows Amy, now sixteen, to take the production of femininity to new heights. Amy, ever the artist, paints her clothes to imitate the more expensive versions her friends wear. In the “Calls” chapter, Amy tries to make Jo in her own image, while Jo enjoys exaggerating the performance for comic effect and then divulges the secret of Amy’s “brilliant performances,” such as painting a pair of soiled white boots to look like blue satin for one of Sallie’s parties.15 Amy is mortified by the exposure of her fraud. The last laugh is on Jo, however, who loses out on the trip to Europe while Amy is rewarded for her ability to play the part of the lovely, pleasing woman. By this point in the novel, Jo is learning that rejecting that role comes at a cost.
THE OUTWARD SIGNS of approaching womanhood altered over the decades as the March sisters, with their concerns about gloves and dresses, faded into icons of Victorian young womanhood. Flappers cut their hair short (a move prefigured by Jo, although they wouldn’t admit it) and shortened their skirts, essentially claiming the freedom of girlhood. But in my mother’s generation of the 1950s and ’60s, young women wore longer skirts and gloves again and put a premium on prim, decorous behavior, not to mention sexual purity. The March girls would have felt pretty much at home, if it wasn’t for Hollywood promoting a feminine ideal that mixed girlishness and sexuality, à la Marilyn Monroe. My generation of the 1980s (post–Title IX) played school sports, almost never wore skirts, and wore gloves only to keep warm in winter. But I wouldn’t say that the outward tensions about what it meant to become a woman had disappeared. In a way, they only intensified. The ideal was an amalgam of the three Charlie’s Angels: smart, sexy, and sporty. The most admired girl in my high school was a straight-A student, star volleyball player, and perfect blonde beauty (other students called her “Barbie”).
The year I graduated from college, 1991, the development of girls became a matter of widespread public concern with the publication of the American Association of University Women’s Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America. The report concluded that girls suffered a significant loss of self-esteem during their teen years and were routinely deterred from male-dominated fields such as math and science.16 In response, conferences, programs, documentaries, and a flurry of books by psychologists, social scientists, and education experts tried to identify and remedy what was seen as a widespread problem of girls failing to thrive in a hostile culture that devalues their abilities and sexually objectifies them.
Meanwhile, girlhood was also increasingly viewed as a physically vulnerable time. Who can forget the nonstop media coverage of the (still unsolved) murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey in 1996? Her face, all dolled up for the beauty pageants in which her mother had entered her, was splashed across magazine covers across the nation. When twelve-year-old Polly Klaas went missing from a slumber party in Petaluma, California, in 1993, the search for her was national news until her body was found two months later. Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma, was deeply moved by Klaas’s story, offering a $200,000 reward for her discovery. When Ryder learned that Little Women was Klaas’s favorite book, she became even more determined to get a film of the book made. At the end of the film is a dedication to Klaas.17 Little Women, as a symbol of girlhood innocence, had become an important corrective to the hypersexualization of girls, which could lead to their destruction.
In 1994, the same year Ryder starred in Little Women, the most influential book about the girl crisis was published: Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. It was an instant success and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for an astonishing three years. As audiences and reviewers celebrated the wholesomeness of Gillian Armstrong’s portrait of the March family, with a strong mother figure and girls relatively easily navigating the path to womanhood, Pipher was signaling the alarm about contemporary adolescent girls’ loss of self-worth. As the second wave of the women’s movement was beginning to wane, it was reenergized as a movement to rescue girls from a poisonous culture, making the 1990s, as one commentator put it, “the Decade of the Girl.”18
Some have questioned whether the crisis really existed, at least on the scale Pipher and other authors alleged, while others have regretted the messages about girls’ victimhood it spawned. For instance, media scholar Kathleen Sweeney points out that “girls continue to be perceived as the gender in need of ‘correction’—better math scores, more science, better self-esteem.” It is also important not to generalize about all girls, and to recognize that girls’ experiences are affected not only by gender but also by race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and other factors. African American girls, for instance, have been found to be more resilient, more adept at resisting the limiting gender stereotypes imposed on them, while white middle-class girls seem to be most affected by those pressures.19
The basic message of Reviving Ophelia is that girls suffer psychologically from the way our culture reduces their value to their physical attributes. Girls’ reactions to what Pipher calls “lookism” vary, and some are able to effectively resist it without long-term negative effects. Yet I think we can agree that to be female in our society is to realize, usually at puberty, that our bodies are judged as much more important than any other attributes we possess, and that this is often a disturbing discovery. Pipher observed self-directed girls who in elementary school dreamed of becoming doctors or authors but then realized in middle school that the media, boys, their friends, and even their own parents were observing their bodies and wanting them to look and to act in certain ways. Pipher argues that “girls are expected to sacrifice the parts of themselves that are masculine on the altar of social acceptability and to shrink their souls down to a petite size.”20 The alarming increase in anorexia and other eating disorders, depression, self-harm, substance abuse, and overly risky behavior in girls all pointed back to the psychic crisis they experienced as they hit puberty and lost their sense of control and identity.
The damaging effects of the sexualization of girls (on themselves and on boys) have not waned since Pipher’s book became a bestseller; they have only gotten worse. The American Psychological Association’s 2007 Report of the APA’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls provides a wealth of evidence for how girls and women suffer when their worth is reduced to how sexually attractive they appear to men. The report calls for further study of, among other things, “issues of age compression (‘adultification’ of young girls and ‘youthification’ of adult women).”21 Sexy clothing and high heels are manufactured for and marketed to girls as young as preschool age while social media and the Internet, which girls often embrace in their early teens, exponentially reinforce the “lookism” Pipher described.
When Pipher outlined what girls need to counter the damaging effects of our gender-stereotyping, even misogynistic, culture—safe, nurturing homes; “identities based on talents or interests rather than appearance, popularity or sexuality”; “a sense of purpose”; and “quiet places and times”—she provided a pretty fair description of what the March sisters, Jo in particular, have. This is what girls respond to when they read Little Women. Jo has been for generations a prime example of the girl who is “defined not by how she looks or who she dances with, but by what she does,” Anna Quindlen has written. “[She] spoke of possibilities outside the circuit of feminine wiles and fashion consciousness.”22 In other words, Jo represented all of us who ever wanted to be something other than the quiet, submissive young lady or the alluring sexual object. There was another way, she taught us, a way to be in the world that was genuinely ourselves. It’s not always easy for Jo, and she gets a lot of flak for her difference, especially from Meg and Amy, but she manages to assert her right to reject ladyhood and retain her family’s love.
Girls have four ways to react to the pressure they experience to adapt to stifling standards of femininity, Pipher observed: “They can conform, withdraw, be depressed or get angry.”23 Meg and Amy to varying degrees conform, Beth withdraws, and Jo gets angry and for a while becomes depressed. What Alcott portrayed are four different responses to growing up that still reflect the ways girls navigate the path toward maturity. Meg, as the oldest, has it more or less thrust upon her and has to be the pioneer, venturing out to balls and into an engagement (at the ripe age of seventeen) with only her mother’s guidance. Amy, as the youngest, is eager to show how grown up she is; she practices her adult vocabulary and feminine wiles until, in the second part, we see that she has learned them to a tee. Jo resists, with every fiber of her being, the pressure to be ladylike—that is, grown up—while Beth doesn’t actually grow up at all, wasting away instead of becoming an adult woman.
MEG IS THE MOST conventional of the four, thanks to her temperament as well as her good looks. She is the one beauty of the four and thus appears to have her path laid out for her. When the sisters and Laurie discuss their “castles in the air,” Meg’s dream is to be rich and loved for her good deeds, Jo’s is to be a rich and famous author, Amy’s is to be a famous artist, and Laurie’s is to be a famous musician. (Beth only longs for things to stay as they are.) Each of them has the tools to make their dream a reality—Jo her pen, Amy her pencils, and Laurie his music—except for Meg, or so she believes. Laurie corrects her by explaining that her face is her key to happiness. In other words, he suggests, she will be loved for her looks, not for her talents or virtues. While the others can and will work actively to accomplish their goals, Meg has only to be pretty and wait for the right man to come along.
Meg is no fully formed Minerva, however. She still has some growing and learning to do. Her temper is modest compared to Jo’s, but she does threaten, when cross, to drown Beth’s “horrid cats.” Later, when Brooke proposes, she toys with his affection, enjoying the power she has over him (a ploy my students have not admired in her). Even after Meg’s marriage, Alcott makes a point of showing us that she still has a lot to learn. Despite her efforts to be the perfect woman, she has a catastrophe with the currant jelly that won’t gel and proceeds to have a terrible row with Brooke when he brings a friend home for dinner, expecting her to be the perfect wife. Later she spends an exorbitant amount on silk for a new dress, blurting out to him, “I’m tired of being poor.”24 It’s a crushing blow for him, but she later makes up for it by selling the silk to Sallie and giving him the money to replace his worn old coat.
Meg is only twenty when she marries and, presumably, twenty-one when she gives birth to twins. Not all runs smoothly in the “Dovecote,” their idyllic cottage. Alcott shows her girl readers that life after the presumably happy ending isn’t all roses. No longer the pretty girl who had prospects, Meg feels “old and ugly” after her twins are born, an inconsequential woman who has been “put upon a shelf.” To restore domestic harmony, she has to learn to invite John into the nursery and to leave the care of the children to others occasionally. Not that young readers are likely to notice any of this, however. As scholars Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle point out, “It’s hard to understand anything about [Meg’s] compromises when you read Little Women for the first time, in your girlhood, before you’ve wrangled with womanly compromises of your own.” But if you pick up the novel again after having had your own kids, you will be surprised to read about, among other things, sleep training a child—an experience all parents share but one that is rarely written about. Alcott shows us, through Meg, that adulthood is “a slog,” as Blackwood and Mesle write. “And motherhood, especially the sentimentalized version, is particularly brutal because it’s a slog you are only meant to enjoy.”25
While Meg is the book’s archetype of domestic femininity, Amy is its model of ornamental femininity. She is the most overtly designing in her attempts to develop her powers of attraction. Her aspirations far exceed Meg’s; she hopes to become a great belle and in part two of the novel easily accomplishes her goal. Unlike Jo, Amy embraces her budding womanhood, which she feels empowers rather than diminishes her. At sixteen, “she has the air and bearing of a full-grown woman” and has “learned to use the gift of fascination with which she was endowed.” Although not a natural beauty like Meg, the blonde, blue-eyed Amy easily succeeds at making herself into a fashionable work of art, gaining first the attention of Laurie’s college friends, then Fred Vaughn, and finally Laurie himself. It is not only with men that she succeeds, however. She wins over her fellow art school students, the mean girls at the fair, and then her aunts, one of whom takes her to Europe. Once abroad, Amy blossoms further. “Always mature for her age,” she now becomes “more of a woman of the world.” She enjoys her power over men (including Laurie) and tears around Nice in her own carriage, taking the reins herself and yelling out to Laurie in the street, her “free manners” scandalizing a French mother who hurries her young daughter in the opposite direction.26 Amy was the daring American girl abroad ten years before the publication of Henry James’s Daisy Miller.
In the end, of course, Amy wins Laurie and decides that she won’t be an artist after all (because she possesses talent but not genius, something Laurie also discovers about his music). Readers often forget that Amy wants to become a famous artist because she gives it up so easily. She will become instead, as the wealthy Laurie’s wife, “an ornament to society.” To many readers, Amy has seemed to be the clear winner among the four March sisters. In her New York Times essay “Amy Had Golden Curls; Jo Had a Rat. Who Would You Rather Be?” film and book critic Caryn James wrote that favoring Amy over the other girls was a “no-brainer.” Pretty Amy went to Europe, had adventures, and married the dashing boy next door, while Jo lived in a dumpy boardinghouse in New York and married a boring professor.27
While Meg and Amy represent two paths toward conventional womanhood, Beth and Jo are in many ways their opposites and, as a result, much more interesting. If Amy sits at one end of the spectrum, expending great effort to grow into a “lady” as quickly as possible, then Beth sits at the other end, unable to even imagine herself as a grown woman. Beth was obviously Alcott’s favorite, and she made her Jo’s as well. Jo admires her sister’s small, seemingly inconsequential life, but critics have not. They have discussed her much less than the other sisters and, when they have noticed her, they have often dismissed her with belittling phrases. She is “the least vital and the least interesting,” “the flattest and most immature of the characters,” or “doll-like Beth, the permanent little woman,” lacking “even sufficient self-reliant impulses to stay alive.”28
Yet the most remarkable thing about Beth is not simply her angelic goodness but her apparent lack of interest in growing up. If Meg and Amy are eager to grow up, and Jo is reluctant to, then Beth seems to reject the possibility altogether. At the beginning of the book, twelve-year-old Amy insists that she is not a child, but later on, Alcott describes Beth at seventeen as still a child. Beth, not Jo, is the one who most resists moving into adulthood and wants things to stay as they are. She is just less vocal about it. Beth is shy and prefers to stay at home, seemingly afraid of the outside world. She does not go to school and spends her time caring for sick and injured dolls. While her sisters and Laurie have big dreams for their futures, Beth wants only “to stay at home safe with Father and Mother, and help take care of the family.” When pressed, she admits that she had wanted a piano, which Mr. Laurence has already given her, but now she only wishes that “we may all keep well and be together, nothing else.”29 A page earlier, she admitted to longing for heaven, wishing she could go there at once rather than wait through a long life. This declaration takes place well before the crisis of her illness. It would seem that contracting scarlet fever was inevitable for one who already had little desire to mature and is already yearning for the afterlife. After nearly dying of the disease, Beth unsurprisingly never fully recovers. While the effects of scarlet fever can linger, it is not clear what is killing her. My students often ask me what is wrong with Beth.
Alcott is not explicit. Many have assumed that she dies ultimately of complications from scarlet fever, which can lead to rheumatic fever and thus heart failure. But Beth is not described as having the typical symptoms of painful, swollen joints or heart pain. In real life, Louisa’s sister Lizzie, the prototype of Beth, was also not described as having these symptoms or having rheumatic fever (then a known disease). She was suffering from low spirits and a wasting disease, the cause of which doctors could not identify. They called it simply “hysteria”—in other words, maladies in women with psychological causes that male doctors couldn’t explain. Today she might be diagnosed with depression or perhaps even anorexia nervosa. In fact, when Lizzie died, she was nothing but skin and bones. As for Beth, critics have understood her death variously as the result of “a nameless wasting disease,” a “prolonged suicide,” and even her self-effacing nature.30
With no rational explanation for Beth’s decline, we might surmise the cause was psychological. What we see in the second part of the book is a young woman who should be on the verge of adulthood but is instead receding into childhood. Although not exactly an invalid, Alcott says, Beth nonetheless stays close to home and is a constant source of concern for her family. Even when her health appears to be stable, her moods are not, and Marmee seems to be worried that she is slipping into a depression. Jo suspects Beth may be in love, perhaps with Laurie, a sign of the volatile adolescent emotions she assumes Beth must be experiencing. “I think she is growing up,” Jo tells Marmee, “and so begins to dream dreams, and have hopes and fears and fidgets, without knowing why or being able to explain them. Why, Mother, Beth’s eighteen, but we don’t realize it, and treat her like a child, forgetting she’s a woman.”31 Yet Beth is not becoming a woman. Instead, she is preparing to die.
When Beth finally tells Jo that she is dying, she explains that she was never like the rest of her sisters. “I never made any plans about what I’d do when I grew up. I never thought of being married, as you all did. I couldn’t seem to imagine myself anything but stupid little Beth, trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there. I never wanted to go away, and the hard part now is the leaving you all.”32 This remarkable speech demonstrates Beth’s incredibly low self-esteem and inability to envision her future self. Many critics have interpreted her illness as the ultimate expression of self-sacrificial womanhood and her death as its inventible culmination. Noting that Beth first contracted scarlet fever from her selfless service to the Hummels, scholar Ann B. Murphy expresses the common view that Beth’s death was a warning about the “ominous dangers of selflessness.” She then goes even further, claiming that “Beth, of course, dies from a mysterious disease arising from terminal goodness—from her inability to distinguish between nurturing others and the radical self-denial expected of femininity.”33 Yet what if Beth’s illness is something else—a response to and even rejection of the prospect of growing into a woman’s body?
Beth’s refusal to grow up bears an uncanny resemblance to the modern teenage girl who starves herself as part of an effort to stunt her growth, to maintain the prepubescent body in which she feels comfortable and in control. Beth seems unwilling to visualize a future that would entail the full realization of the capacity of her female body: sex, motherhood, nursing—and the feeling of selflessness that such experiences can create. Anorexics strive not simply for thinness but for purity and cleanliness, feeling disgust at the female functions of their bodies (menstruation, sex, and pregnancy) and starving themselves as a way of suppressing their bodies’ capacity for femaleness. Viewing Beth not simply as a too-good-to-be-true paragon of femininity but as a girl who may be rejecting her female self or tragically succumbing to the pressure to be as “little” a woman as possible makes her a much more consequential character than she has been given credit for. Although we can’t know for sure what ails Beth, if we consider the possibility of anorexia, which didn’t yet have a name but was a phenomenon that had been around for centuries, Beth’s inability (or even refusal) to grow up can be read as a serious commentary on the limits of adult female identity as it was then (and to a great degree still is) constructed.34
Anorexics are usually submissive, obedient, and self-sacrificial to the point of being unaware of their own desires and needs, traits that also correspond to the feminine ideal. At the beginning of part two of Little Women, Beth is described in her fragile state as “an angel in the house,” a label that signifies her perfect alignment with domestic femininity and, potentially, the history of religious fasting, both of which prized a supreme capacity for self-denial. Food plays a surprisingly prominent role in Little Women, perhaps due to the scarcity of food (particularly the forbidden kinds) in real life. Alcott filled her novel with feasts, but Beth is strangely nonexistent in these scenes—present but never shown as partaking of or enjoying food. In the most poignant of these scenes, Jo prepares an elaborate feast of lobster, asparagus, bread, corn, potatoes, salad, blancmange, and strawberries while Beth mourns her dead canary, who has starved to death from lack of care. When the meal is served, Jo, Meg, Amy, Laurie, and Miss Crocker each try and then reject each ill-prepared item, to great comic effect; Beth is noticeably absent, reappearing only when it is time for the bird’s funeral.35
As the most enigmatic and, for many, inconsequential character in the book, Beth’s function in the novel is not well understood. My students have reacted to her at times with surprising disdain and animosity, rejecting her extreme virtue and even viewing her lingering illness as a possibly manipulative ploy for attention. They tend to share Brigid Brophy’s view that Beth’s sunny goodness and patience “are a quite monstrous imposition on the rest of the family,” inflicting a “blight” of unworthiness on everyone around her. Alcott certainly never intended readers to see Beth as anything but the sweetest and most overlooked of the March sisters. “There are many Beths in the world,” the narrator tells us, “shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully, that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping.” If there is a stratagem behind her illness, we can best understand it as an attempt to reconnect a fragmented family. Beth is the emotional glue that binds the family together, singing, “Birds in their little nests agree” while Jo and Amy argue in the opening pages of the book.36 Her initial illness helps unite a family in danger of dissolution when Marmee has gone to care for Father and Amy and Jo are at each other’s throats. Beth’s lack of recovery coincides with the family’s further separation, first with Meg’s marriage and then with Amy’s trip to Europe and Jo’s move to New York. And her death actually becomes a catalyst for the romances between Laurie and Amy, and Professor Bhaer and Jo—romances that enlarge the family and bring it back together, as the final scene demonstrates.
Jo, of course, has always been considered the most important of the March sisters. She is the one girl most readers have always wanted to be, and for good reason. Jo shows us a different path out of the wilderness of female adolescence and into an adult womanhood that is modified to fit her own needs. Rather than conforming to ideals of femininity or succumbing to their destructiveness, as her sisters do, she figures out how to thrive in spite of them. Unlike most unconventional nineteenth-century heroines (such as Edna Pontellier, Emma Bovary, Lily Barth, Daisy Miller, or the unnamed narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper”), Jo neither dies nor gets carted off to an insane asylum. Instead, she simply, refreshingly, does what is not expected of her. Within the first five pages, Jo announces that she wishes she were a boy, refuses to behave in a ladylike manner, and designates herself “the man of the family” while their father is away. Beth alone seems to understand and accept her desires to avoid becoming a “lady” or a full-grown woman, consoling her over her disappointment in not being able to go to war and encouraging her masculine identification. “Poor Jo; it’s too bad! But it can’t be helped, so you must try to be contented with making your name boyish and playing brother to us girls,” Beth tells her.37
Later Jo throws snowballs at Laurie’s window, runs with him, spoils her dresses, and cuts her hair. At no point do we sense that her community or her creator will punish her for her missteps. And even though Meg attempts at every turn to tame her (but not Marmee, interestingly), Jo stands her ground. As she explains in a letter to Marmee, “I’m Jo, and never shall be anything else.” Nonetheless, when their father returns home and assesses how each of the girls has changed, he sees Jo in a decidedly different light. “In spite of the curly crop, I don’t see the ‘son Jo’ whom I left a year ago,” he tells her. “I see a young lady who pins her collar straight, laces her boots neatly, and neither whistles, talks slang, nor lies on the rug, as she used to do. . . . I rather miss my wild girl,” he confesses, “but if I get a strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite satisfied.” It appears that caring for Beth “in a motherly way” during her bout with scarlet fever has effected Jo’s transformation. But I suspect that Jo is also on her best behavior for her father’s return. Marmee seems more content to let Jo be Jo. In fact, time and again Marmee comes down on the side of letting Jo put off the “little womanhood” her father and Meg push on her. In the case of Jo’s friendship with Laurie, Marmee sees nothing improper in it when Meg insinuates that it is not as innocent as Jo imagines. When Meg tells Jo that Laurie has given her a compliment, Jo announces that she doesn’t want “any sentimental stuff.” Marmee agrees. “I hope Meg will remember that children should be children as long as they can,” she says in Meg’s hearing.38
In the second part, nineteen-year-old Jo continues to behave in unfeminine ways. With Meg now settled into her new home, Amy takes over as Jo’s chief disciplinarian, trying in vain to teach her to “be calm, cool, and quiet” because “that’s safe and lady-like.” Jo makes a mess of it, of course, “as her elbows were decidedly akimbo at this period of her life.” She is incapable of flirting, she tells Laurie, or pleasing without effort, as Amy does. He likes that she is “a sensible, straightforward girl,” but he would also like her to be a little sentimental about him. She steadfastly refuses. While he develops feelings for her, “indulg[ing] occasionally in Byronic fits of gloom,” she keeps him at arm’s length, continuing to prefer “imaginary heroes to real ones.”39
Partially in an effort to disrupt Laurie’s growing romantic interest in her, Jo decides to leave home. Yet she also goes to please herself. She is restless and wants to spread her wings a bit, a very novel stage in a young woman’s development in the nineteenth century, at least for the middle classes. Girls of the lower classes might leave home to work (as in fact the Alcott girls did), but they rarely strayed as far as Jo does when she moves to New York. Jo’s time there, spent working, writing, socializing, and theatergoing, is as central to her development as it would be for a young man. New York is her college, where she learns important lessons that will help her become an author. While still at home, she had begun to advance in her literary career, winning a prize and publishing a novel (to mixed reviews). Now she ventures into the male sphere of seedy newspaper offices to sell her wares and learns how to please the public with thrilling stories. Just as she worried about Laurie falling into debauchery while he was away at college, she herself begins to “liv[e] in bad society, . . . imaginary though it was.”40
When her new friend Professor Bhaer gives her Shakespeare to take as her model, he advises her “to study simple, true, and lovely characters, wherever she found them”; in other words, to write from life. Eventually he rails against the sensation papers she is writing for, and she hides her writings from him, promptly burning them and creating such a prodigious blaze the chimney almost catches fire. Although feminist critics have viewed this scene as the height of patriarchal belittlement, for Alcott it was a portrait of the developing writer. For Little Women is also a Künstlerroman, a genre as decidedly male as the Bildungsroman. The story of the artist’s coming of age was typically not about a woman, and when it was (as with Madame de Staël’s Corinne), it invariably ended in death. Jo instead is allowed to grow as a writer, advancing from writing for hire to writing out of her life, deciding, as so many young writers have before and since, that she doesn’t have the experience to make a great writer yet, so she’ll wait to write until she has something worth saying: “I don’t know anything; I’ll wait till I do before I try again, and, meantime, ‘sweep mud in the street,’ if I can’t do better—that’s honest, any way.”41
When summer comes and Jo returns home, she finds Laurie as in love with her as ever. Her response to his proposal—simply that she doesn’t love him the way he loves her—has crushed the hopes of countless readers. Yet I think Jo is right that Laurie is too rich for her (he likes “elegant society” and she doesn’t) and that they are too alike with their “quick tempers and strong wills.” Marriage to Laurie would be a gilded cage, perfectly suited to Amy but not to Jo. He needs “a fine mistress for [his] house.”42 By refusing Laurie, Jo allows herself to mature in new directions.
Beth’s final decline and death are the crucible through which Jo must pass to discover who she truly wants to be. Although Alcott had wanted to allow Jo to become a “literary spinster” like herself, she felt forced into choosing a mate for her. The “funny match” she came up with was not just a joke, however. With Bhaer, Alcott made an argument for the kind of companionate marriage advocated by Margaret Fuller and that her mother had hoped for with her father: a union of individuals who choose to work together toward a common goal. Husband and wife were to be intellectual as well as romantic partners. Even if the fortyish, rather stout Bhaer is not our romantic ideal, he was much more than simply a practical choice for Jo. But Alcott did not tempt her heroine with the cold life of the mind through a scholar like Casaubon or St. John Rivers, as George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë did for their heroines. Alcott’s professor is a warm father figure who loves children and promises Jo a family and home full of love and affection.
A union with Bhaer also promises Jo a vocation. When he proposes, she is adamant that she will “carry my share . . . and help to earn the home.”43 He goes away for a year to teach in the West and earn money to support his nephews while Jo toils away at home. When Aunt March dies and leaves Plumfield to Jo, together she and Friedrich turn it into a home and school for boys, fulfilling Abigail Alcott’s dream of working together with her husband in a school. Abigail had as many ideas about education as Bronson did, but marriage to him precluded their collaboration, and she stayed at home while he hired unmarried women to assist him in the Temple School. Their daughter had a more progressive view.
On the whole, it seems to me that Alcott is addressing a fundamental conflict for women—how to love and be loved without losing one’s self. Alcott gave generations of girls like the poet Gail Mazur “permission to try to become what we wished, . . . help[ing] us to recognize—and to live with, knowing we’re not alone, the conflict between the writer’s need for solitude and self-absorption and the yearning for the warmth of love.”44 All relationships, even those within the family, require great compromises by the individual, especially the self-directed artist. Alcott knew this well. Simply remaining single did not mean freedom. Louisa spent her adult life torn between her own desires and the needs of her family, which included parents, sisters, nephews, and the niece she adopted.
In the end, Jo grows up by learning to accommodate some aspects of the female role that she decides she wants (such as marriage and motherhood) while continuing to resist others, particularly the injunction that women should live only for and through their husbands and children. Jo finds common purpose with her husband in running a school and retains a separate identity. When her children are grown, she can return to the “castles in the air” she once dreamed of, and she becomes a famous author in Jo’s Boys. Alcott thus gave young female readers a path toward maturity that entailed compromise but not tremendous sacrifice. Jo longs for both independence and connection—quest and romance—and she manages to have both. Jo more or less “has it all.” As one scholar puts it, Jo “consolidates ‘masculine’ dreams of ambition with ‘feminine’ ones of connection.”45
A companionate marriage isn’t the only way to get there, but Alcott didn’t suggest other alternatives. Although Jo’s path does not seem predestined toward marriage and motherhood—she vociferously pronounces her right not to marry on at least two occasions—her family clearly expects her to. When Marmee describes her plans for her daughters’ futures, it is clear that their job is to wait and prepare to be worthy for good men to come along and offer them marriage and new homes. If none come, Marmee hopes they will be happy to stay at home, but there appear to be no other options.46 In the essay “Happy Women,” which Alcott wrote at the same time that she was starting to work on Little Women, she described a variety of content “old maids,” hoping to show young women that all was not lost if they did not find a husband, that in fact a single life was better than making a hasty, unfortunate match. In her next novel, An Old-Fashioned Girl, she would hold out the possibility of living and working alongside other women. Two young artists live and work together and refuse ever to be parted. Even though one of them is soon to marry, her friend will join her in their new home. As the century wore on, the cohabitation of women became more common and became known as “Boston marriages.” But Alcott never entertained that possibility for Jo. Thus she had to figure out how to have Jo marry without sacrificing herself and so give some readers, if they weren’t too mad at her for Jo’s rejection of Laurie, hope that they could one day do the same.
For Little Women’s initial readers, the question of who the March girls would marry was paramount. But as girls have come to have more options on the path to adulthood, readers have been less focused on that all-important question. I know that my eleven-year-old daughter’s attention lagged during the second part of the novel. And girls growing up in the U.K. or other countries where Little Women and Good Wives are sold separately often just read part one. As one woman told me, “Why would I have wanted to read a book called Good Wives?” It would seem that the life choices the March sisters make as they age matter less to girls now. In fact, girls are finding other heroines to help point the way forward for them. Yet Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are still very much present in the literature and entertainment girls are consuming today.