PREDATING Tom and Huck, Jim Hawkins and David Balfour, Dorothy and the Wizard, and only three years junior to Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the March sisters of Little Women stand virtually at the inception of modern children’s literature. First appearing in the autumn of 1868, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy were destined to bring forth countless literary offspring. From the novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett to Anne of Green Gables to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, it is a rare book for young girls that owes no debt to Louisa May Alcott and especially the ur-heroine of young women’s literature, Jo March. For such a far-reaching legacy, the initial image of Alcott’s four fictional sisters, as they sit by the fire and Jo grumbles about her lack of Christmas presents, seems a modest and almost unpromising beginning.
It is far from unusual for a children’s classic to begin with scenes of deprivation. As a genre, the children’s novel teems with armies of orphans. From Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Baum’s Dorothy to Burnett’s Mary Lennox and Sara Crewe, from Rowling’s Potter to Snicket’s Baudelaires, youthful protagonists typically find parents in decidedly short supply. Those juvenile heroes fortunate enough to have both parents intact invariably battle a host of other extraordinary ills, from gangs of bloodthirsty pirates to the influence of evil, disembodied brains. In such company, the problems that initially confront Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March in Little Women—an absent but not irretrievably lost father, an assortment of inner character flaws, and a deficiency of packages on Christmas morning—may seem comparatively mundane. Also conspicuously absent from Little Women is any character who comes close to a cosmic embodiment of All Things Evil. The four sisters have no Injun Joe with whom to contend, no Wicked Witch, no IT, no Lord Voldemort. The personal villains in the book never descend to any lower depths than Amy’s occasionally jealous schoolmates or the profit-maximizing editor who counsels Jo to add more blood and thunder to her magazine fiction.
Yet, despite these evident handicaps in the misery sweepstakes, Little Women has survived and flourished since its two parts were first published in 1868 and 1869. It has done so for a multitude of reasons, and many of them have to do with the very features that its fellow classics possess but which Little Women so conspicuously lacks. Little Women retains its importance in part because it recognizes that many of our most potent enemies lie within us and that life is far more likely to call on us to vanquish our vanity, selfishness, or ill temper than to battle actual evil wizards and slay physical dragons. The book succeeds as well because it reveals the value of the family. It does so not by depicting the horrors that ensue when a family has been shattered, but rather by celebrating the blessings that occur when family members surmount their differences and learn to love and support one another. Little Women also distinguishes itself from many of the later classic fictional treatments of American adolescents in that its view of the transition to adulthood is largely optimistic. Finding that the restraints and corruptions of “sivilized” society are too much for him, Huck Finn lights out to the territory. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield ends his narrative in a mental institution. Granted, there are moments when Little Women becomes more about the dread of growing up than about the act of growing up itself, and, of course, illness and death prevent Beth March from ever achieving a fully adult existence. Yet the stories of the three surviving sisters end in fulfillment of various kinds. Each has found the position and, more importantly, the work that will lead her to a life well lived. Indeed, even the demise of Beth can be seen not as a succumbing to death, but as a transcendent triumph over it. Because of the quiet courage and grace with which she faces the end, her passing feels less like a defeat than an apotheosis.
Two aspects of the happy ending of Little Women can never be emphasized enough. The first is Alcott’s insistence that all young women’s stories need not end the same. Through the diverse destinies of Meg, Jo, and Amy, Alcott stoutly asserts that there are a variety of happy endings toward which a growing girl might aspire. In contrast to Meg, who finds contentment as a wife and mother, Jo discovers the best part of herself by founding the progressive school Plumfield. Amy, happily allied with Laurie, pursues a life enlivened by art and philanthropy. Indeed, Alcott would have scattered her happy endings across an even wider range of outcomes if she had had her wish. Having conceived for Jo a rewarding life as a literary spinster, she relented only when her publisher, Roberts Brothers, persuaded her that marrying Jo off was the only commercially viable choice.
The second point is that not one of the four March sisters finds happiness by getting what she initially wanted. Near the midpoint of Part First, in a chapter called “Castles in the Air,” each of the girls lays out the future of her dreams. Meg, the materialist, covets “a lovely house, full of all sorts of luxurious things; nice food, pretty clothes, handsome furniture, pleasant people, and heaps of money.” Bookworm Jo aspires to “a stable full of Arabian steeds, rooms piled with books,” and a magic inkstand to bless her writings with literary fame. Beth modestly asks only “to stay at home safe with father and mother” and that “we all may keep well, and be together.” Amy, the budding aesthete, wants to “go to Rome, and do fine pictures, and be the best artist in the whole world.” At the novel’s end, not one of the girls’ wishes is fulfilled. Even Beth’s poignantly humble prayer for health and togetherness is cruelly denied. If happiness means nothing more than getting what one wants, the world of Little Women seems less one of dreams come true than one of thwarted youthful desires. But Alcott had a more mature idea of happiness. The March girls do not cry because their childish fantasies have been denied. Instead, they acquire the wisdom to accept fate when necessary and the courage to build less selfish dreams when possible. They find happiness not in narrow self-gratification, but in self-improvement and service to others.
Not only do the March sisters learn to be realists, but the landscape in which they live and grow is, unlike that of a multitude of children’s classics, uncompromisingly real. Although Jo and her sisters would gladly escape from their poverty and their anxiousness over the fate of their father, Alcott conjures no Oz, no Neverland, no Narnia for them to flee to. One of the greatest strengths of Little Women is that it is not a story about running away. Many books that worthily bear the mantle of “children’s classic”—Huckleberry Finn and Peter Pan spring readily to mind—are founded on fantasies of escape and even the possibility of eternal childhood. The marvelous boys at the center of those books will take a stand if they have to, and they have lessons aplenty to teach about the nature of courage. Still, their more frequent preference is for flight—away from responsibility and unpleasantness, even away from mortality itself. We love them, at least in part, for the genius and even the miraculous quality of their evasions. But, whereas many of her successors in children’s fiction would offer to solve their heroes’ problems by having them escape into a realm of magic and fantasy, Alcott preserves a firm barrier between imagination and fact. We love the March sisters because they stand their ground. When the March sisters do attempt to escape, as they do when they stage their plays, read their books, play their music, or simply drift off into pipe dreams of the future, they remain quite clear as to what’s real and what isn’t. Still, imagined reality plays an extremely prominent role in Little Women, and a key to understanding the progress of the March sisters from childhood to adulthood lies in an appreciation of how the characters’ own engagement with literary fiction informs their mental and emotional growth. To a very large extent, the March sisters are who they are because of what they read.
One is hard-pressed to think of a work of children’s fiction that contains a greater range and quantity of literary allusions than Little Women. To fully appreciate the literary context into which Alcott inserts the March family, one would require a knowledge of at least five dozen authors to whom Alcott either alludes or openly refers, as well as a relatively powerful command of the King James Bible. Other protagonists in classic novels for and about children often exist in a world disconnected not only from literature, but even from literacy. The March sisters, and Jo in particular, stand at the far opposite end of the spectrum. The girls’ homespun stage plays strive to emulate Shakespeare, and their domestic newspaper takes its cues from Dickens. Meg reads Sir Walter Scott, Jo paraphrases Harriet Beecher Stowe, Beth quotes Isaac Watts, Amy fumbles with Greek mythology, and, of course, Alcott herself persistently analogizes the sisters’ moral struggles to the more grandiose adventures of Bunyan’s pilgrim. Apart from Little Women’s ties to Bunyan, of which more will be said later, the book’s literary allusions, taken individually, seem essentially random; there appears to be no particular reason for Meg to be reading Ivanhoe or for art-loving Amy, on her European tour, to take time away from her beloved cathedrals and galleries to visit Goethe’s house or Schiller’s statue. Taken together, however, the dense literary allusions of Little Women add up to something important. We can start with the very fact that the March girls perceive themselves in a world shaped by stories. Stories—at least those that Alcott cites in her novel—have a purpose; they possess a logic that leads toward a goal. Living in a world rich in narratives, one begins to think of one’s existence as a kind of tale, replete with themes, reversals of fortune, and ultimate objectives, patiently striven toward. The fact that the Marches are immersed in narrative adds a substance to their lives that is not only intellectual but also moral. To live meaningfully, they, too, must have stories, of which they are their own authors, daily creating their self-fulfilling, self-affirming narratives.
Alcott’s infusion of literary references into her work also says something about her own ambition. Even at the outset of writing Little Women, when she presumed that her novel would be of no great interest to anyone, Alcott sensed that a novel deserved to be taken no less seriously because it happened to be written for younger readers. By consciously alluding to a wide variety of literary traditions, Alcott was situating her novel within those traditions and making a bold claim for its relevancy as a work of literary art. Generations before T. S. Eliot set forth the proposition in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Alcott understood that writing gains and creates significance through its relation to writings of the past. Through her reading, she was acquainted with the minds of western Europe. Through her personal associations, she knew Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the other leading minds of Massachusetts, which then formed a large part of the mind of America. A great compendium of thought, then, is present in Little Women, and it ventures well beyond the works and writers Alcott could expect her youthful audience to know. Instead of consenting simply to meet her readers where they were, Alcott perceived her work as a stepping-stone toward greater heights. The child who reads Little Women may well become curious to find out what those authors whom Jo admires were up to. Little Women is a wonder of its kind. The vistas onto which it opens are more wondrous still.
Although Little Women was published in two parts, Alcott actually wrote it in three. Her motivations as an author were different as she wrote each one, and understanding her changing intentions is a vital key to divining the subtle shifts in meaning in the novel as a whole. As she wrote her first twelve chapters, Alcott had no expectation that the book would be a success. To the contrary, she held out scant hopes for her manuscript, which she was writing more to oblige her editor, Thomas Niles, than with any hope of pleasing a broader audience. Indeed, Alcott claimed later to have drafted these first dozen chapters merely to prove to Niles that she was not capable of writing a book for girls. If we take Alcott at her word, in these chapters she was least concerned with what the reading public would think of her work. Half expecting that the manuscript would never go farther than her editor’s desk, she presumably wrote without feeling greatly obliged to make herself pleasing to anyone.1
The second phase of the book, comprising the remainder of the chapters in the published Part First, were written with changed expectations. By now Niles had shown the first twelve chapters to his niece, who had found them captivating. Niles urged Alcott forward. Sparked by his enthusiasm, she responded with a torrent of chapters. With “a head full of pain from overwork,” she completed Part First in a matter of weeks. The book was now plainly a profit-making venture—of high quality, to be sure, but more calculated than before to appeal to a commercial audience. When Alcott wrote Part Second of Little Women, the portion published in 1869 and sometimes known as “Good Wives,” her motivations were at their most complex. On the one hand, the public’s eager reception of Part First had filled Alcott with unprecedented confidence. On November 1, the day she started the sequel, she wrote, “A little success is so inspiring that I now find my ‘Marches’ sober, nice people, and as I can launch into the future, my fancy has more play.” The virtual certainty that readers would line up to buy the concluding half of Little Women helped her feel she could create more boldly. At the same time, however, knowing that she had a public to please weighed irksomely upon her.
The effects of Alcott’s changing intentions for the book that became Little Women are observable in the novel itself. The first dozen chapters, which, surprisingly, Alcott initially considered “dull,” contain some of the liveliest and most memorable scenes in the entire novel. It is here that the girls take to their homemade stage in “The Witch’s Curse”; that Jo’s angry neglect causes Amy to fall through the ice; that Meg’s fancy curls, the victims of an ineptly wielded iron, go up in smoke; and that Beth conquers both her shyness and the heart of old Mr. Laurence. In these chapters, writing with no great anticipation of success, Alcott wrote with little affectation. The tale is told with a simplicity that is charmingly mimetic of the innocence of the March sisters themselves—a naïveté that will slowly evaporate as the girls gain more knowledge of the world. These chapters feel as if Alcott drafted them at least in part for her own amusement, freely weaving memories of her youth with the brightest strands of her imagination and infusing all with an ethical understanding that comes to people looking back on their early years.
The first twelve chapters of Little Women are among Alcott’s most perfect creations, but they are not yet a novel. Each can be read almost independently, as one might read a loosely connected series of short stories. If there is a unifying question in these chapters, it is only whether the girls will behave in a way that their father will find sufficiently pleasing when he returns home—an interesting query but perhaps a trifle thin to sustain an entire book. Probably sensing that her ideas lacked an inner cohesion, Alcott was able to find an appearance of overall direction only by grafting her tales onto a preexisting structure, supplied by her pervasive allusions to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. It was evidently only after Thomas Niles revised his first opinion of the work that Alcott began to think more broadly about turning Little Women into an integrated, comprehensive whole. The change is evident in “Castles in the Air,” the first chapter Alcott wrote after the initial dozen. In that chapter, Laurie and the March sisters begin to think, however fancifully, about their lives beyond the immediate future. Except for the humble ambitions of Beth, who wants only to live at home and care for her parents, the goals that they imagine for themselves are exuberantly unrealizable, and that’s part of the fun. Nobody really expects Amy to become the world’s greatest artist or Jo to acquire a magic inkstand. But even the wildest dreams tell some truth about those who dream them, and, much more clearly than before, we see Meg, Jo, and Amy as vessels of ambition. “Castles in the Air” brings a pair of key questions to the fore: To what extent, if at all, will each girl succeed in realizing her ideal vision of herself? And, having fully vested the girls with heartfelt desires, how far is Alcott prepared to go in letting them pursue those aspirations?
These matters are especially interesting to readers who have perceived a tension since the novel began: from the moment the girls are called upon to give away their Christmas breakfasts to the destitute Hummels, they have continually been forced to choose between doing their duty to others and gratifying their self-centered desires. It seems inevitable that, for poor girls like the Marches, further sacrifices will be demanded and that the sisters will be asked to lay aside not just a holiday meal, but their most cherished dreams and wishes. Henceforth, the March sisters’ task will never again be quite so simple as pleasing their parents. They will need to fashion mature lives that will be acceptable to others but will also be satisfying to themselves. Those seeking an early hint as to how the contest between self and others might go may have found an uneasy omen in the fact that the girls divulge their dreams in the unlucky Chapter XIII. It is at this moment that the story of the March girls acquires the shape and direction that is necessary for a novel. In some ways, it is also here that their story begins to matter.
It is also in the second half of Part First that the distant horror of the Civil War transforms into a critical concern. Until now the war has chiefly been a plot device for keeping Mr. March offstage. However, when news arrives in Chapter XV of Mr. March’s illness at the front, the war truly hits home, and its intrusion at this point suggests that Alcott was beginning to think about the likely audience for her work. Despite her later frequent protestations that she wrote primarily for money, Alcott also wrote to serve as a source of strength and guidance for her young readers, and she took this obligation seriously. If, as Niles had intimated, Little Women might be a grand success, it would also be a fine opportunity for Alcott to offer words of wisdom and comfort on a subject that mattered greatly to her and to her audience. When Little Women Part First was published, the war had been over for less than three and a half years. Telegrams like the one sent to Mrs. March, often bearing even darker news, had virtually blanketed the country. The Alcotts themselves had received such a telegram concerning Louisa herself; in January 1863, while serving as an army nurse in Georgetown, Louisa had very nearly died from typhoid pneumonia. The war claimed hundreds of thousands of men. The number of Megs, Jos, Beths, and Amys they left behind may never be ascertained. Surely one of the best uses to which Alcott might put her fiction was to share her readers’ grief. To those with a Mr. March who would never come home, she might say something about how one carried on with grace and courage when one’s family was no longer whole. Even at the beginning of Little Women, Jo has an active sense of public duty; in Chapter I, she is already knitting socks for Union soldiers. In the second half of Part First, that sense intensifies. Jo’s sale of her hair to help in “making father comfortable, and bringing him home” is a sacrifice of a higher order, one that parallels Alcott’s loss of her own hair, which was shaved off while she struggled to survive the disease she contracted at the hospital. For those whose sacrifices in the war had made them, too, feel sadder, uglier, or less beloved, Jo’s donation of her hair was a potent gesture of solidarity.
As Alcott readied herself to write Part Second of Little Women, her consciousness of audience changed yet again, this time in the direction of mild resentment. She found that people wanted her to write in ways that did not strengthen their moral fiber, but seemed instead to cater to their taste for conventionality and female submissiveness. Alcott’s chief annoyance came in the form of fan letters—untold numbers of them—that expressed a common theme. Her young fans raved about Part First and could not wait for Part Second, in which, as many seemed to think inevitable, Jo would marry Laurie.
Alcott bristled at the very thought. Her identification with Jo was already deep and personal; her fans’ assumption that the only possible happy ending for a heroine was marriage not only offended Alcott’s firm belief in female equality but also seemed to imply that Alcott’s own happiness as an unmarried writer was less authentic and complete than if she had found a husband. At the same time that she basked in her readers’ adulation, she fulminated at their shallowness. “Girls write to ask who the little women will marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life,” she groused. “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.” But Roberts Brothers insisted “on having people married off in a wholesale manner.” The demand that Jo must have a husband “much afflict[ed]” Alcott. Still, as she thought about the sales she might lose if she stuck to her principles, she found at last that she “didn’t dare to refuse.” As she often did when life grew too complicated to confront with a straight face, she sought a solution in humor. “Out of perversity” and much against her personal wishes, she concocted Professor Bhaer and thus contrived “a funny match” for Jo.2 Still, her compromise annoyed her. When a waggish friend suggested that the highly matrimonial Part Second of the novel should be christened “Wedding Marches,” Alcott seems to have been only half amused.
The argument over whether Jo should marry Laurie, or anyone at all, shows that the text of Little Women was an object of struggle and negotiation, involving Alcott’s individual will, her relations with her publisher, and her sense of obligation to her readership. Before she began to tackle Part Second, Alcott told a correspondent that she would very gladly write “this sort of story” and nothing else, but could not because the genre did not “pay as well as rubbish.” However, after the ensuing months and years proved to her that the genre might pay very well indeed, she came to have less regard for it, even tending to dismiss it as a species of rubbish all its own. By 1878, she had quite reversed her judgment. “I do not enjoy writing ‘moral tales’ for the young,” she confided, “I do it because it pays well.” Until the very end of her life, Alcott hoped to feel secure enough that she might write what she chose, not merely what an audience would buy. Though her wealth and fame now rivaled that of any other American author of her time, that feeling of security never came. She could not reconcile the omnipresent tension between authorial desire and public demand. As in the hearts of the characters she created, the wants of the author strove against the tastes and expectations of others.
Apart from the debate over whether and whom Jo should marry, the documentary record surrounding Little Women is too thin to reveal much about the other ways in which Alcott may have altered her vision of the book to suit the predilections of her reading public. Yet it is fair to say that Little Women tells us as much about what late-1860s America wanted to be told about itself as it does about what Louisa May Alcott hoped to achieve as an artist. The book as a whole strikes a remarkable balance between reform and reassurance. With its pleas for temperance, its championing of support for the emancipated slaves, and its advocacy of charitable works of every description, Little Women plainly sought to urge the country toward a more humane and virtuous footing. At the same time, though, it invited readers to take secure comfort in the knowledge that the foundation of society, namely the family, was solid and enduring. In the novel’s final chapter, Jo utters a pronouncement that arguably stands as the culmination of all that Alcott has shown us: “I do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world!” Yet Alcott adds in the next breath that Jo has been speaking “in an unusually uplifted frame of mind, just then.” Alcott was aware that Jo’s ebullient opinion was not always true: not for Jo and, more emphatically, not for Alcott herself. For many of us, as Alcott surely knew, the dream of making our families the most beautiful things in the world can fall painfully short of coming true. The fortunate may agree with Jo; others may be able to read her words only with a brutal sense of irony. Yet Little Women has retained its appeal precisely because of the bridges it builds between the “is” and the “ought.” By representing its miracles of love and togetherness as difficult but possible, the novel encourages us to try harder, to be more accepting of one another’s failings, all in the faint but persistent hope that we, too, can resemble the Marches.
Alcott wrote not only to inspire and to reassure. She also wanted to express herself—or, more accurately, the self she remembered being in her youth—frankly on the page. Through Jo, she wanted to present her own spirit, with neither the veneer of tact nor the gloss of propriety. Certainly, Little Women is a novel, not a memoir, and it contains a host of scenes and characters that had previously existed solely in Alcott’s imagination. At the same time, though, Alcott regarded Jo as an alternate version of herself. In letters written after Little Women, Alcott sometimes deliberately blurred the line between truth and fiction, alluding to family members by the names of their fictional counterparts. She published a series of short story collections that bore both her own name and the title of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag. The identification deepens in Jo’s Boys, the last volume of the Little Women trilogy, when Jo, now a mature woman, becomes unexpectedly rich and famous for having written a book that is really Little Women:
A book for girls being wanted by a certain publisher, she hastily scribbled a little story describing a few scenes and adventures in the lives of herself and sisters,—though boys were more in her line,—and with very slight hopes of success sent it out to seek its fortune. . . . The hastily written story . . . sailed . . . straight into public favor, and came home heavily laden with an unexpected cargo of gold and glory.
Alcott thus constructs a charming illusion of circularity: the adult Jo has been writing herself into existence since the first page of Little Women, and the entire trilogy has been a fiction composed by an author who is herself a fiction. If one accepts Alcott’s clever conceit, then Jo has two voices in Little Women: the frank, unguarded, youthful Jo March, and the narrator, who represents the perspective of the grown woman she later becomes. Little Women thus expresses a kind of dual awareness.
A savvy marketer as well as a beloved author, Alcott seldom let a holiday season pass without turning out a new book for her fans’ Christmas stockings. Volumes in her Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag series of short-story collections found their way under many a Christmas tree. (From the collection of the editor)
A gap of both manners and experience of the world divides the narrator from Jo, who proudly retains her penchant for slang, her boyish carriage, and other rough edges through most of the novel. Jo the middle-aged storyteller, with her superior knowledge and periodic asides to the reader, supplies not only a narrative structure to the book but also a moral one; we depend on both her and Marmee to explain the ethics of unfolding situations. At the same time that the narrating Jo imposes order, the younger Jo disrupts it. Though not nearly as wise as the woman she will later become, the young Jo does know her own mind, and she speaks it fluently. She also knows things that the narrator can approach only through memory: what it is to be young, awkward, and filled with misgivings about growing up. The narrating Jo shapes the story with her experienced mind; young Jo enlivens it with the energy of her body and the frankness of her spirit. In Little Men and Jo’s Boys, the gap in age and experience between Jo and the writer who creates her inevitably narrows. If the latter two books of the trilogy are less compelling than the first, they may be so in large part because the youthful voice and its older counterpart gradually merge, and the tension between the two Jos naturally evaporates.
Bronson Alcott called The Pilgrim’s Progress one of his “bosom companions,” and he frequently read aloud from it to his daughters. Louisa consciously used the book as a model for Little Women. (Houghton Library, Harvard University)
As was briefly noted earlier, Alcott used Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as a kind of trellis to structure the story of Little Women. Like Alcott’s novel, Bunyan’s allegory tells of moral transformation. Bunyan’s narrator recounts his dream of Christian, a man who, tormented by presentiments of the destruction that awaits the sinful, abandons his wife and children to pursue righteousness. Bunyan represents Christian’s striving toward purification as a physical journey. The trials and temptations the hero encounters are figured either as physical places (depression becomes the Slough of Despond; the enticements of lust and greed call out to him at Vanity Fair) or as dreadful monsters (Christian strives with wrath in the form of the giant Apollyon and must ignore the advice of false friends like Timorous and Mistrust). In the company of brave companions like Faithful and Hopeful, Christian at last makes his way to the Celestial City. As is well known, each of the March sisters is defined early in the novel by a signature flaw that it is her task to overcome. Meg wrestles with vanity; Jo tries to subdue her temper; Beth seeks to surmount her shyness; and Amy slowly learns to become less selfish. In each instance, Alcott uses a chapter title to link the inner struggle to episodes from Bunyan: “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair”; “Jo Meets Apollyon”; “Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful”; and “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation.” Though Bunyan’s presence is especially strong in the first dozen chapters that Alcott drafted at Niles’s behest, it remains a motif quite deep into the novel: “Pleasant Meadows,” the title of the chapter in which Mr. March comes home, is also borrowed from Bunyan, and the chapter that relates Beth’s passing, “The Valley of the Shadow,” is a nod both to Bunyan and the Twenty-third Psalm. Alcott’s reliance on Pilgrim’s Progress was neither random nor superficial. Bunyan’s work had been firmly entwined with her family’s history, and it had taught her early in life the power that a single book can exert over a human life.
The son of an illiterate farmer, Louisa’s father Bronson came into awareness in a home without books. He was eager for education, though, and he slowly amassed a library from the literary castoffs of neighboring farmers. From a helpful cousin, he repeatedly borrowed a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress and committed favorite passages to memory. He called it his “dear, delightful book” and said that “more than any work of genius, more than all other books, the Dreamer’s Dream brought me into living acquaintance with myself.” Bronson took to heart with uncommon zeal the spiritual message of The Pilgrim’s Progress, a message that emphasized that the way to salvation is hard and narrow and that one does not follow it either by indulging in the carnal pleasures of this life or by being ruled by the good opinions of others. Bronson absorbed a profound wariness of material temptations and a firm resistance to popular opinion. He also believed that he had been put on earth to raise to their highest perfection the minds and souls of the people around him. As a father, Bronson dispensed readings from The Pilgrim’s Progress to his children along with their gingerbread. Throughout his career as a teacher, he continually impressed upon his young charges the Bunyanesque values of holy community and self-denial. When that career abruptly ended in 1839, he redoubled the lessons of charity and personal austerity that he taught his own children. Bronson’s asceticism achieved a high-water mark in 1843, when the Alcott family became charter members of Fruitlands, a vegan agrarian commune where, according to Bronson and the community’s cofounder Charles Lane, the laws of life might be summarized in a single word: “Abstain.” At Fruitlands, the influence of The Pilgrim’s Progress was powerfully in evidence. Eleven-year-old Louisa wrote in her journal that her father read aloud from the book. She pronounced Bunyan’s writing “dear,” and she copied lines from it into her diary. Toward the end of the Fruitlands experiment, Bronson Alcott proposed that the failing community might save itself by dividing along gender lines—he going one way and his wife and children going another. It is highly probable that his suggestion was partly motivated by Christian’s renunciation of his family in The Pilgrim’s Progress.
In a bold but ill-conceived experiment in communal living, the Alcotts spent the better part of 1843 seeking transcendence at the Fruitlands commune near Harvard, Massachusetts. Instead they found privation and a severe threat to their unity. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
Fruitlands did not endure. The influence of The Pilgrim’s Progress over the Alcott family did. Bronson Alcott continued to perceive his life through its textual lens. For Louisa herself, no single literary influence was as clearly dominant. Shakespeare, Scott, Charlotte Brontë, and Dickens all made large claims upon her mind, and the fact that Little Women alludes to more than sixty authors attests to the breadth of her literary diet. Yet Little Women might not even exist if it were not for Bunyan, and we need to understand why, apart from his strong presence in Alcott’s own upbringing, his sway remained so powerful.
The answer begins with the fact that, in the late 1860s, The Pilgrim’s Progress was a part of the Anglo-American cultural lingua franca. In 1866, Cincinnatian Philip Phillips published a collection of hymns called The Singing Pilgrim, or, Pilgrim’s Progress Illustrated in Song. Mark Twain gave his 1869 book The Innocents Abroad the subtitle The New Pilgrim’s Progress. The same year, England’s Mary Godolphin published a children’s edition of Bunyan’s work called The Pilgrim’s Progress in Words of One Syllable, and Ebenezer Porter Dyer made his contribution to the literature with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in Verse. Essays and lectures poured forth in abundance, and a determined bibliographer would be required to identify all the new editions of the book itself that were coming into print. By relating the domestic drama of Little Women to the spiritual strivings of Pilgrim’s Progress, Alcott immediately established a common ground for herself and her readership.
Another reason for Alcott’s reliance on The Pilgrim’s Progress was more personal; it gave her a way to place her father’s principles in the foreground of Little Women while keeping his problematic personality in the background. Although she proved adept at creating fictionalized alter egos for her mother and sisters, Alcott struggled to present her father in the light that she desired. In her private interactions with him, she dealt with his often-baffling eccentricities with heavy doses of humor. But the treatment that, between them, felt like good-natured raillery would have seemed like ridicule in print, and Alcott had no wish to hold her father up for laughter. Moreover, Bronson Alcott was, in many circles, a well-known figure. To place a fictionalized version of him near the center of the action in Little Women was to risk drawing too much attention from the main focus of Alcott’s story. In 1868, Alcott was also planning to write a novel for adults devoted solely to incidents in her father’s life, which she intended to call The Cost of an Idea. It would not have done for her to use in Little Women the material she was saving for this other project, one that, sadly, she was never able to complete. Alcott thus decided to keep Mr. March in Little Women largely hidden from view, sending him off to war for most of Part First and then virtually barricading him in his study for the majority of Part Second. So eager was Alcott to keep the March family’s patriarch sheltered from view that the first action he performs when he returns from the front is to “become invisible” in the embrace of his family.
Yet Alcott wanted to keep her father’s values—his love of self-sacrifice, his transcendence of earthly appetites, and his belief that the goal of life is spiritual purification—very much in view. A key device for doing so was to use The Pilgrim’s Progress as a leitmotif in Little Women. Observing both the hellish trials and heavenly potentials of human existence, The Pilgrim’s Progress is a fatherly book: one that teaches, cajoles, sets high standards, and demands the best of those it would instruct. It is, in all these features, similar to Bronson Alcott himself. In the same ways, it resembles Little Women.
But the true ingeniousness of Alcott’s use of The Pilgrim’s Progress in Little Women arises from the differences she maintains with Bunyan, not the similarities, or perhaps more accurately the differences within the similarities. The Pilgrim’s Progress, like Little Women, was published in two parts. In the first, the allegorical believer Christian leaves his wife, Christiana, and four children behind at their home in the City of Destruction and embarks on a lonely quest to save his soul and find his way to the Celestial City. Published six years later, Part Two ties up a rather pendulous loose end: What has become of the pilgrim’s abandoned family, left to fend for themselves in a place that, we have been led to understand, will be destroyed by fire from heaven? Far from being annihilated as promised, Christiana and her offspring decide to follow their husband and father. Tracing the same path of woe and temptation, they, too, arrive at salvation. In their case, however, evidently doubting that a woman and her children could make their way on their own, Bunyan supplies Christiana and her brood with a male guide and protector, Great-heart, who offers moral lessons and handily slays a few dragons along the way.
Most of the material that Alcott transposes from Bunyan into Little Women comes from Part One of The Pilgrim’s Progress. However, the poem that she adapts to serve as the novel’s preface is taken from the beginning of Part Two. It is also from Part Two that Alcott derives the principal theme of the first half of her novel: the moral progress of a mother and her four children in the absence of the family’s male head. In crafting her own tale of deliverance, Alcott accepts few of Bunyan’s assumptions about how the journey must be made. To the contrary, she challenges and even reverses them, and in so doing she articulates a much more progressive concept of the human spirit.
Alcott differs profoundly from Bunyan in her representation of childhood. Christiana’s offspring are all male. Bunyan eventually gets around to naming the four boys—Matthew, Samuel, Joseph, and James—but until almost the second third of Part Two they are anonymous. Although James shows somewhat quicker spiritual perception than his elder brothers, there is nothing else about the boys’ characters to differentiate them. Bunyan, righteously intent upon saving the souls of Christiana’s sons, had no interest whatever in exploring them. Though Bunyan sets forth the boys’ birth order, he does not specify their ages, and they grow up astoundingly quickly. At the outset of Part Two, James and his brothers seem to be young children. By the end of the journey, which seems to have been accomplished in a matter of weeks or months, they are all old enough to have taken wives and to assist Great-heart in some of his giant-killing. The boys’ wives interest Bunyan even less. Only Matthew’s bride, Mercy, stands out; she has been Christiana’s traveling companion since the journey began and has offered frequent, thoughtful comments on the unfolding action. The other three wives are accorded names but not a hint of personality, and they function solely as wives. We hear of their good natures and fertility. Otherwise, we learn only that they “did much good in their place.”
Doing good in one’s place also mattered to Alcott, but it was rarely sufficient. Moreover, her notion of place was notably more flexible than Bunyan’s, in more ways than one. A few months before she began work on Little Women, Alcott published an essay called “Happy Women,” a response to what she saw as a besetting worry of women of her time: the fear that they would become old maids. Alcott assailed the anxiety as a “foolish prejudice” and told of four women she knew who had discovered satisfaction without finding or even looking especially hard for husbands. Alcott’s four subjects had found fulfillment as a doctor, a music teacher, a home missionary, and, not surprisingly, a writer. Case by case, Alcott argued that a life devoted to “philanthropy, art, literature, music, medicine, or whatever task” could be as worthy and fulfilling as one given to a husband. The world, Alcott insisted, “is full of work, needing all the heads, hearts, and hands we can bring to do it.” Her Yankee practicality and loathing of waste forbade any other conclusion. Whereas Bunyan had assumed that salvation was the destiny of a chosen few, Alcott averred that happiness was “the right of all.” Its attainment lay in using one’s talents for the good of society.
The same doctrine is implicit in Little Women. Unlike Christiana’s daughters-in-law, the March sisters have not one place but many, and Alcott tries not to discriminate among those places. Although a twenty-first century woman may find the paths pursued by Jo and Amy more exciting and appealing than those of the more domestically oriented Meg and Beth, Alcott was reluctant to make any such judgment. When, in her journal, she alluded to Lizzie Alcott, Beth’s real-life counterpart, as “Our Angel in the House,” she did so with reverence, not sarcasm. She regarded the choice of Meg’s alter ego, Anna, to live quietly as a wife and mother, with a tinge of envy. Alluding to her stories, Alcott wrote, “I sell my children, and though they feed me, they don’t love me as [Anna’s] do.” In her nonfiction, Alcott referred to domestic obligations as “a woman’s tenderest ties.” Yet when Marmee declares in Little Women that “to be loved and chosen by a good man is the sweetest thing which can happen to a woman,” we need not presume that Alcott entirely agreed. Even for Marmee, whose judgments regarding a woman’s “place” are somewhat more conservative than Alcott’s own, happiness and usefulness matter more than the fulfillment of a preassigned role. “Better be happy old maids,” Marmee cautions, “than unhappy wives.”
Alcott’s differences with Bunyan on the significance of place have another, more ironic dimension. Although Part Two of The Pilgrims’ Progress deals with saving the supposedly lesser denizens of a household deprived of its erstwhile master, the physical home is the one place where a person seeking to save herself must not stay. The home from which Christiana and her children flee is a place of guaranteed destruction. As always, Bunyan was speaking allegorically; he meant to suggest that one must guard against being comfortable and at home with one’s sinful practices. Nevertheless, the movement in Bunyan is away from the familiar, to which the righteous person has no thought of returning. Bunyan, who had no confidence whatever in human institutions, could hardly believe in the saving power of even so basic an institution as the family. In Little Women, where the moral journeys require self-discovery as well as self-purification, the physical trajectories can be more complicated. Hearth, home, and human comforts are not the moral death traps they appear to be in The Pilgrim’s Progress. To the contrary, home and family in Little Women are the quintessentially saving institutions for all. Indeed, the ideal end toward which Alcott’s narrative moves is not merely an affirmation of family, but an enlarged vision of family. Plumfield, the educational Utopia that Jo and the Professor establish at the end of the book, is a nuclear family gone, if you will, thermonuclear. It is, as Jo describes it, “a good, happy, home-like school.” The original student body is “a family of six or seven boys” (emphasis added), and Jo’s vision for the school emphasizes nurture first and education second. “I should so like to be a mother to them,” she declares, and school and family effectively merge.
Bunyan would never have conceived that the best path through life might be circular, leading the moral adventurer back to the point where she began. In Little Women, travel is essential for both Jo and May. Without it, May would never achieve refinement, nor would Jo arrive at experience or self-reliance. But the journey is essential to each, not because it offers a permanent escape from home, but rather because it instills her with a greater fitness for duty when she returns. The aim is not to evade the atmosphere of one’s origins, but to use the experience of one’s wanderings to make that atmosphere more cosmopolitan and compassionate than it had been in one’s childhood. Given the March girls’ worship of Marmee, it is easy to miss the fact that, by the end of the novel, her children have collectively improved on her example: as a guardian of the conventional home, Meg has become more or less her mother’s equal; Jo has expanded the reach of maternally fostered virtue far beyond the reach of a single family; and Amy has acquired a cultural polish that she will pass on to the next generation. Even tragic Beth, who does not live to create a home of her own, in one sense goes farther than her mother and, indeed, all her sisters combined. She has walked through her own place of Bunyanesque trial and temptation, the Valley of the Shadow. Through the grace and resignation she exhibits in death, she teaches Jo—and the reader—a starker but more sublime moral lesson than her mother ever offered.
To a modern eye, Little Women looks and feels like a devotedly Christian book. The girls’ father is a minister; their mother brightens their Christmas by distributing copies of “that beautiful old story of the best life ever lived.” And, of course, a book patterned after The Pilgrim’s Progress can hardly be said to venture terribly far from the foot of the cross. It is thus a challenge to remember that, when it was published, Little Women drew criticism for being insufficiently religious. The Ladies’ Repository lamented, “It is not a Christian book. It is religion without spirituality, and salvation without Christ.” The reviewer for Zion’s Herald was actually scandalized by Alcott’s appropriation of The Pilgrim’s Progress, viewing it not as a sign of reverence but as a “dis-spiritualizing of Bunyon’s [sic] great allegory.” The reviewer was troubled to see the Christian’s fight with Apollyon “reduced to a conflict with an evil temper and the Palace Beautiful and Vanity Fair [used to represent] only ordinary virtues or temptations.” The reviewer did not consider that evil is seldom so obliging as to take a form as recognizable as a fire-breathing monster, nor did the reviewer pause to reflect that Alcott’s readers were most likely to confront the devil precisely as the March sisters do: in their daily, commonplace impulses and failures of character. To the contrary, Little Women was seen as a secular, unholy tale, “perilous in proportion to its assimilation to Christian forms.” Alcott evidently paid little heed to her religious detractors; she certainly knew that their criticisms were beside the point. Although she placed Christian charity at the foundation of the March family’s sense of social mission, she intentionally painted the book’s religiosity in muted tones. Critics noted the conspicuous absence of a Bible from Beth’s sickroom, and others have noticed that, despite their father’s vocation as a minister, Meg is married at home instead of in a church, and the sisters collectively spend even less time attending services than the notoriously heathen Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Content to let actual ministers guide their flocks toward the Celestial City, Alcott focused on the saving propensities of love and family; she was intent upon articulating a vision of home as heaven, and of heaven as home.
If, as Little Women intimates, the path through life of even the most adventurous woman leads back to the family, what is to be said about Alcott’s concept of woman’s rights? On this subject, modern critics have found cause to feel dissatisfied. Does Amy travel the continent and cultivate her artistic powers only so that she can marry Laurie, a man who, for all his admirable efforts at reform, seems to remain her inferior in both will and apprehension? Is it really necessary that Meg’s son Demi should “tyrannize” his twin sister Daisy, while Daisy repays his oppressions by making “a galley-slave of herself . . . ador[ing] her brother as the one perfect being in the world”? It is in Jo, however, that current readers tend to feel the keenest sense of betrayal. Bravely flouting convention and broadcasting her independence at every opportunity, Jo has taken the male roles in her sisters’ plays and, in her father’s absence, has proudly become “the man of the family.” Throughout her growing up, she has seemed to fear almost nothing—except, interestingly, the fact of growing up itself. Promising so much as a model of equality and new womanhood, Jo seems to deliver very little. Having rejected Laurie in part because she fears he would “hate my scribbling, and I couldn’t get on without it,” Jo marries Professor Bhaer, the very man who persuades her to abandon her writing career. Even the act that is the culmination of her journey through the novel, the founding of the school at Plumfield, which Laurie pronounces “a truly Joian plan,” does not contain nearly as much of the old Jo as many of us might have hoped. The school, at its founding, is for boys only, and Jo proposes only “to take care of” the young students, while the Professor does the teaching. The influential feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun put the problem aptly: “Jo reinvented girlhood, but the task of reinventing womanhood was beyond her.” Had Meg or Amy chosen the matronly tasks and comforts of Plumfield, one would likely accept the decision with a smile. For the former firebrand Jo, however, such a denouement feels like an almost cowardly retreat.
Except that it isn’t, though it took Alcott two more books to show it. What is already evident in Little Women is that, if we take as given that Jo must marry—and Roberts Brothers was adamant on that point—she chooses very well in Professor Bhaer, an embodiment of intelligence, moral rectitude, and unquestionable loyalty. Though Alcott did not so intend when she began it, Little Women is only the first volume of a trilogy, and the state of that trilogy’s characters at the end of Book One is by no means final. If Jo seems uncharacteristically passive and subordinate at the end of Little Women, she does not remain so in the sequels. In Little Men and Jo’s Boys, her word on how Plumfield is to be run seems more authoritative than Professor Bhaer’s. Moreover, despite his misgivings in Little Women, the Professor not only tolerates Jo’s writing but creates conditions under which it can flourish. One also observes that “the school for little lads” does not remain all male for very long. By the time of Jo’s Boy’s, the academy has metamorphosed into the fully coeducational Laurence College, where young women train for the professions (one of them, Nan, becomes a successful doctor), hotly dispute the sexist assumptions of their male contemporaries, and anticipate Billie Jean King by besting the boys at tennis. And, of course, perhaps most reassuringly, Jo herself has reclaimed her literary career, becoming famous enough that she must climb out the back window to hide from importunate members of the press. Granted, Jo is no longer the spunky, wayward colt she was at fifteen—thank goodness none of us are—but in the place of her stormy impulsiveness she now has good-humored serenity, and as much respect and worldly fortune as she could want. Perhaps those who would demand a more revolutionary destiny for Jo—that she somehow preserve her tartness, impetuosity, and rebellious spirit to the very end—are asking of her the one thing that Jo herself knew to be impossible: that she never grow up.
Blissfully ensconced at Plumfield in Jo’s Boys, blessed with “money, fame, and plenty of the work I love,” Jo, not Professor Bhaer, has become the true sage of Plumfield; it is to her that admirers write in search of wisdom. To one such, who wonders how she should best educate her seven daughters, Jo replies that she should “let them run and play and build up good, stout bodies before she talks about careers. They will soon show what they want, if they are let alone, and not all run in the same mould.” Jo’s counsel seems hardly earth-shattering, but it conveys succinctly much of what Alcott herself hoped that all girls might be given: the chance to grow without fretting or fetters, to discover and cultivate their own strengths, and to use them as they choose. These three simple gifts are much of what girls—and boys and women and men—require even in our own time.
Alcott sat for this photograph, her most appealing likeness, in 1856, while the Alcotts were living in Walpole, New Hampshire. It closely resembles her description of Sylvia Yule, the heroine of her first published novel, Moods: a face “full of contradictions,—youthful, maidenly, and intelligent, yet touched with the unconscious melancholy that is born of disappointment and desire.” (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
1 There is, unfortunately, no way of knowing whether or to what extent Niles revised Alcott’s first twelve chapters once he realized that he might have a hit on his hands.
2 Louisa May Alcott to Elizabeth Powell, March 20, 1869, The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, p. 125.