“My castle was the most nearly realized of all. I asked for splendid things, to be sure, but in my heart I knew I should be satisfied, if I had a little home, and John, and some dear children like these. I’ve got them all, thank God, and am the happiest woman in the world.” And Meg laid her hand on her tall boy’s head, with a face full of tender and devout content.
“My castle is very different from what I planned, but I would not alter it, though, like Jo, I don’t relinquish all my artistic hopes, or confine myself to helping others fulfil their dreams of beauty. I’ve begun to model a figure of baby, and Laurie says it is the best thing I’ve ever done. I think so myself, and mean to do it in marble, so that, whatever happens, I may at least keep the image of my little angel.”
As Amy spoke, a great tear dropped on the golden hair of the sleeping child in her arms, for her one well-beloved daughter was a frail little creature and the dread of losing her was the shadow over Amy’s sunshine. This cross was doing much for both father and mother, for one love and sorrow bound them closely together. Amy’s nature was growing sweeter, deeper, and more tender; Laurie was growing more serious, strong, and firm; and both were learning that beauty, youth, good fortune, even love itself, cannot keep care and pain, loss and sorrow, from the most blessed for –
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and sad and dreary.[340]
“She is growing better, I am sure of it, my dear. Don’t despond, but hope and keep happy,” said Mrs. March, as tenderhearted Daisy stooped from her knee to lay her rosy cheek against her little cousin’s pale one.
“I never ought to, while I have you to cheer me up, Marmee, and Laurie to take more than half of every burden,” replied Amy warmly. “He never lets me see his anxiety, but is so sweet and patient with me, so devoted to Beth, and such a stay and comfort to me always that I can’t love him enough. So, in spite of my one cross, I can say with Meg, ‘Thank God, I’m a happy woman.”’
“There’s no need for me to say it, for everyone can see that I’m far happier than I deserve,” added Jo, glancing from her good husband to her chubby children, tumbling on the grass beside her. “Fritz is getting gray and stout; I’m growing as thin as a shadow, and am thirty; we never shall be rich, and Plumfield may burn up any night, for that incorrigible Tommy Bangs will smoke sweet-fern cigars under the bedclothes, though he’s set himself afire three times already. But in spite of these unromantic facts, I have nothing to complain of, and never was so jolly in my life. Excuse the remark, but living among boys, I can’t help using their expressions now and then.”
“Yes, Jo, I think your harvest will be a good one,” began Mrs. March, frightening away a big black cricket that was staring Teddy out of countenance.
“Not half so good as yours, Mother. Here it is, and we never can thank you enough for the patient sowing and reaping you have done,” cried Jo with the loving impetuosity which she never could outgrow.
“I hope there will be more wheat and fewer tares every year,” said Amy softly.
“A large sheaf, but I know there’s room in your heart for it, Marmee dear,” added Meg’s tender voice.
Touched to the heart, Mrs. March could only stretch out her arms, as if to gather children and grandchildren to herself, and say, with face and voice full of motherly love, gratitude, and humility-
“Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!”
INSPIRED BY LITTLE WOMEN
Began the second part of “Little Women.”… Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.
– Louisa May Alcott, from her Journal
Sequels
Louisa May Alcott wrote for money, to “take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.” With the overwhelming success of Little Women, she became solvent enough to repay her family’s accumulated debt, while combining her twin passions: her love of words and her talent for teaching children. Alcott cared deeply about the rearing of children, about high standards and role models, about morals and a robust work ethic. She deplored the rough, ill-grammared boys of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them.”
In the wake of Little Women’s popularity, Alcott furthered her agenda of writing high-minded children’s literature by publishing several more episodes of Jo March’s clan. Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys (1871) was the first sequel. The book opens with a raggedy boy named Nat arriving at Plumfield to discover Alcott’s characteristic atmosphere of education and recreation:
The house seemed swarming with boys, who were beguiling the rainy twilight with all sorts of amusements. There were boys everywhere, “up-stairs and down-stairs and in the lady’s chamber,” apparently, for various open doors showed pleasant groups of big boys, little boys, and middle-sized boys in all stages of evening relaxation, not to say effervescence. Two large rooms on the right were evidently schoolrooms, for desks, maps, blackboards, and books were scattered about.
Little Men was followed by Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag, published in six volumes between 1872 and 1882. The saga of Jo’s progeny continued with Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out (1886). Jo’s Boys chronicles the boys’ lives as they become men and offers a glimpse into the sagac ity of Mrs. Jo and Mrs. Meg as they age gracefully: “Now we are expected to be as wise as men who have had generations of all the help there is, and we scarcely anything.” Alcott’s posthumously published Comic Tragedies Written by “Jo” and “Meg” and Acted by the Little Women (1893), a lively collection of plays, furthered her mythology.
Film
Of the various attempts to bring Alcott’s Little Women to the silver screen, two stand out as exemplary: George Cukor’s 1933 version and Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation. Cukor, the legendary film-maker who later made David Copperfield (1935) and My Fair Lady (1964), blends high production values and the nascent technology of sound to re-create Alcott’s Civil War – era Massachusetts. Twenty-six-year-old Katharine Hepburn stars as the fiercely determined Jo; the film is the second of ten collaborations between Cukor and Hepburn, including the masterpiece The Philadelphia Story (1940). Little Women features a crisp script by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman.
Cukor’s film is unabashedly sentimental, indulging in scenes of the turbulently emotional March sisters consoling each other in the parlor, that sanctuary from the war that threatens to keep their father away for good. The lively sorority of Jo, Meg (Frances Dee), Amy (Joan Bennett), and Beth (Jean Parker) reveals itself in homegrown plays, in which Hepburn, playing multiple roles as well as her sisters’ acting coach, dons a mustachio and a blonde wig by turns. Jo’s girlish enthusiasm is sorely tested in her return to take care of Beth in the film’s most moving sequence. Hepburn’s chirpy, headstrong, and innocent performance captures the essence of Jo so completely that many critics have branded Cukor’s the definitive version of Little Women. In addition to Mason and Heerman’s Oscar-winning adaptation, Little Women was nominated for Outstanding Production (Best Picture) and Best Direction. Cukor later refused to take over the direction of the 1949 film of Little Women, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Janet Leigh.
Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film was lauded as a successful effort to subtly renovate a classic into a germane story for modern audiences. While nothing can keep the characters from occasional ventures into sainthood, Armstrong valiantly downplays the story’s more saccharine elements; in bringing Alcott’s feminist sensibility to the fore, Armstrong nicely balances the compulsory old-fashioned conduct of the characters. The film features autumnal New England scenery and the formidable talent of a large ensemble cast: Winona Ryder as Jo; Susan Sarandon as Marmee, the flawless mother; Kirsten Dunst, who almost steals the show as the young Amy; Claire Danes as Beth; Eric Stoltz as John Brooke; Gabriel Byrne a
s Professor Bhaer; and a cavalcade of others. Winona Ryder’s performance, Thomas Newman’s score, and Colleen Atwood’s costumes were all nominated for Academy Awards.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Little Women through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Mr. N. wants a girls’ story, and I begin ‘Little Women.’ Marmee (mother), Anna and May approve my plan, so I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, excepting sisters; our queer ways and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.
– from her diary, in Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (1889)
THE NATION
Miss Alcott’s new juvenile is an agreeable little story, which is not only very well adapted to the readers for whom it is especially intended, but may also be read with pleasure by older people. The girls depicted all belong to healthy types, and are drawn with a certain cleverness, although there is in the book a lack of what painters call atmosphere – things and people being painted too much in “local colors,” and remaining, under all circumstances, somewhat too persistently themselves.
– from a review of Little Women (October 22, 1868)
HENRY JAMES
It is sometimes affirmed by the observant foreigner, on visiting these shores, and indeed by the venturesome native, when experience has given him the power of invidious comparison, that American children are without a certain charm usually possessed by the youngsters of the Old World. The little girls are apt to be pert and shrill, the little boys to be aggressive and knowing; both the girls and boys are accused of lacking, or of having lost, the sweet, shy bloom of ideal infancy. If this is so, the philosophic mind desires to know the reason of it, and when in the course of its enquiry the philosophic mind encounters the tales of Miss Alcott, we think it will feel a momentary impulse to cry Eureka! Miss Alcott is the novelist of children – the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room. She deals with the social questions of the child-world, and, like Thackeray and Trollope, she is a satirist. She is extremely clever, and, we believe, vastly popular with infant readers.
– from an unsigned article in the Nation (October 14, 1875)
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
The career of Miss Alcott has not only given pleasure to many readers, and real benefit to not a few, but it has afforded an example of what may be accomplished by talent and industry in the way of worldly success, and this of rather a high kind. She fulfilled that which is to-day the dearest dream of so many young women. Earning her living first by domestic service, she soon passed beyond that; by her own unaided pen she lifted an exceedingly impecunious household into lifelong independence and comfort; and she nursed, in what was for him luxury, the extreme old age of a father whose ideal and unworldly nature had made it very hard for him to afford ordinary comforts and advantages to her youth. This she did without tricks or meanness or self-puffing; without feeling jealousy, or inspiring antagonism. She had the delight of sending sunshine into a myriad of scattered homes, and of teaching many young girls, doubtless, the way to a more generous and noble life.
– from Short Studies of American
Authors (1888)
LUCY C. LILLIE
The story of Louisa Alcott’s life has been, to a certain extent, told by herself in “Little Women.” At least, the character of Jo was drawn from her own experiences and full of her own individuality, but hers throughout was a more notable history than the world knew. A girl, whose earliest teacher was Margaret Fuller; who, at ten years of age, learned to know the seasons in their varied dress and nature in its deepest meanings under Thoreau’s guidance; to whom, men like Emerson, Channing, Ripley, and Hawthorne were every-day company, yet who was brought up almost in poverty, and with the necessity of work at home if not abroad; who had a fund of downright common sense and keen humor underlying all transcendental influence, – is one who, as a woman, might be expected to have made her mark, and she did it by the simplest, kindliest, cheeriest of writing, and the sweetest of companionship and kindness toward others.
– Cosmopolitan (May 1888)
Questions
1. Is it possible to formulate just what it is that has made Little Women so popular for so long – or does the answer lie in intangibles?
2. Do you feel Alcott pressuring the reader, no matter how obliquely, to take Jo as a role model?
3. Which of the sisters do you find most congenial? Why? Which of the sisters do you find most admirable? Why? Is this difference significant?
4. What might a man find to interest or move him in Little Women?
FOR FURTHER READING
Biographies and Primary Sources
Alcott, Louisa May. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, and Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.
–. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, and Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987.
Bedell, Madelon. The Alcotts: Biography of a Family. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1980.
Cheney, Ednah Dow, ed. Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals. Boston: Little, Brown, 1928.
Elbert, Sarah. A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984.
Saxton, Martha. Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Stern, Madeleine B. Louisa May Alcott: A Biography. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. A new edition of the standard Alcott biography.
–. Louisa May Alcott: From Blood & Thunder to Hearth & Home. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.
Reference Texts
Eiselein, Gregory, and Anne K. Phillips, eds. The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Payne, Alma J. Louisa May Alcott: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.
Lesser-known Works by Alcott
Alternative Alcott. Edited and with an introduction by Elaine Showalter. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Includes selections from Hospital Sketches, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Work, and many others.
The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman’s Power. Edited and with an introduction by Madeleine B. Stem. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. Includes “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” “V.V.: or, Plots and Counterplots,” “Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power,” and “Taming a Tartar.”
The Inheritance. Edited by Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy. New York: Penguin, 1998. Alcott’s first novel, written when she was seventeen years old.
A Long Fatal Love Chase. Edited by Kent Bicknell. New York: Dell, 1995. Unpublished as too sensational during Alcott’s lifetime.
A Marble Woman: Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Madeleine B. Stern. New York: Avon, 1976. Includes letters between Alcott and her publisher, “V.V.: or, Plots and Counterplots,” “A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model,” “The Skeleton in the Closet,” “A Whisper in the Dark,” and “Perilous Play.”
Critical Studies
Alberghene, Janice M. and Beverly Lyon Clark, eds. Little Women and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. Collected essays and commentary by scholars.
Delamar, Gloria T. Louisa May Alcott and “Little Women”: Biography, Critique, Publications, Poems, Songs and Contemporary Relevance. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990. Includes excerpts from reviews, polls, and commentary.
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Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. Little Women: A Family Romance. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. Part of the Twayne’s Masterwork Studies series. A psychological reading.
–. Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Examines Alcott’s sensational stories, children’s literature, and adult novels to reveal her subversion of conventional women’s values.
MacDonald, Ruth K. Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. Part of Twayne’s United States Authors series. Establishes Alcott’s pragmatism in contrast to her father’s idealism; discusses the March family stories at length.
Stern, Madeleine B., ed. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.
Strickland, Charles. Victorian Domesticity: Families in the Life and Art of Louisa May Alcott. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985.
Books with Critical Studies of Alcott
Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Includes studies of Little Women, as well as of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Henry James’s The Bostonians, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss lean Brodie.
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