The first volume of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott was published in 1868 and the second came out 150 years ago in 1869. The New Republic looks at “Why Little Women Endures.”
From the article:
When Louisa May Alcott was a child, her father Bronson asked her to define what a philosopher was. She replied, tongue in cheek: “a man up in a balloon with his family at the strings tugging to pull him down.” Later, as a grown woman, Alcott would write a short story loosely based on day-to-day life at Fruitlands, the short-lived utopian community her father founded in the 1840s. Titled “Transcendental Wild Oats,” the story satirized men like her father and his circle (Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and others), noting how “some call of the Oversoul wafted all the men away” when it came time to harvest the crops. Throughout her life, Alcott knew how to puncture the buoyant intellectual men floating above the people stuck down in the muck of cooking and sweeping and dying in childbirth.
This sharp perspective is easy to miss in the work for which Alcott is best known, her beloved 1868 novel Little Women. The earliest reviewers described the story of the four March sisters and their mother Marmee as “fresh,” “healthy,” “natural,” and “sincere.” In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway characterized Little Women as full of “sweetness and light.” Critics since then have largely followed suit, continuing to describe the novel as amiable and charming, though often disagreeing as to whether that was a good or bad thing. In the 1960s the British critic Brigid Brophy asserted that the novel’s sentimentality was a form of “technical skill” on Alcott’s part, whereas Mary Gaitskill, writing in 1995, criticized the story as treacly: an “impossibly sweet view of life.”
From the conclusion of the article:
Rioux concludes that Little Women has endured because of the power of its “lessons” about balancing family and career, individualism and selflessness, and the value of (truly) companionate marriage. I’m not sure I share her faith in the usefulness of lessons drawn from fiction. I love, and have always loved, Little Women because of its perversity, because of the way its characters often work against their own best interests (Meg marries the worst man of all time basically to stick it to old Aunt March), and because of its anger and eroticism (consider the sausage pillow!). These aren’t lessons, but they are life.
Likewise, the affections Little Women inspires aren’t necessarily “good” lessons, even as they accurately reflect our culture’s distorted views of womanhood. “Am I a Jo or an Amy?” is as pleasurable a question to consider, as it is revealing of the tight strictures that govern our understanding of womanly selfhood. Some of the best television shows about women have been founded on Little Women’s presentation of women as types (Golden Girls, The Facts of Life, Sex and the City, Girls); so are many of our literary stories about womanly life (“Am I a Lila or a Lenu?”). Our most popular and lucrative stories about women are still based on this premise, which can begin to feel narrow and limiting: Am I the type of woman who marries or the type who writes? The type who’s a prude or the type who’s experienced? The heroine or the *****?
Still, Little Women is, ultimately, a generous book. Alcott wrote it, first and foremost, to be generous to herself: It allowed her to rewrite and re-envision painful aspects of her life, both current and past, and to make bank while doing so. But it’s also generous to the reader. The first time I reread it after having children, I was gobsmacked to find a chapter on sleep-training a baby! Horrible handbooks that simplistically teach sleep-training abound, but a literary representation of this complicated, terrible aspect of new motherhood? I hadn’t even realized I’d been starving for it, and there was Alcott waiting for me at the table.
Readers’ relationships with Little Women, Rioux shows, are always also about rewriting ourselves, our histories, and our frustrations with the misogyny of our world. It’s easy enough to love heroines who don’t want to be girls, or to fantasize about floating off and away from patriarchy’s harrowing entanglements. But it’s less easy to know what to do with the fact that so many of us end up back down on the ground—married, dead, making jam. Little Women still matters because in it, Alcott insists that the ground is where the work, the harvest, and the nourishment is.
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