Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  When Mr. March returns from the front, it is as if his daughters, having studied their moral lessons, must submit to examinations. All four pass with honors; March commends each girl in turn for the substantial conquest of her particular fault. Interestingly, when he praises Jo, he takes special notice of his daughter’s face, which he says is “thin and pale.”19 It is the face of Louisa after her return from Union Hotel Hospital. As the author who created her had done, Jo wins her father’s acceptance after an experience of war has aged her and demanded that she sacrifice. Mr. March admits that he will miss the wild girl that Jo once was, though he is pleased to see the “strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman” who stands in her place.20

  The reunion is a moment not only of judgment but also of unveiling. After twenty-one chapters of anticipation, the reader finally prepares to meet the father of the little women. In introducing the reader to Mr. March, however, Alcott is less than obliging. Like a resurrected messiah, Mr. March returns to judge and to bless. Curiously, however, these are almost his only functions. When he first appears, Alcott declines to describe him other than to say that he is “tall.” No sooner does she bring him into the scene than she obscures him again. Only two sentences after entering his home, he becomes “invisible in the embrace of four pairs of loving arms.”21 Louisa uses the love of the March family to hide Jo’s father and shelter him from scrutiny.

  For the rest of the novel, Mr. March is present in the household, but he never receives more than sparse attention. Unlike Bronson, he is a man of few words, remaining virtually barricaded in his study for the duration of the novel. There are a host of practical reasons why Little Women belongs to Marmee and the March sisters, instead of yielding much of the spotlight to a Bronson-like patriarch. When Louisa wrote Little Women, she was still planning to write a book with Bronson as its focus. “The Cost of an Idea,” her projected tale of her father’s upbringing and quixotic struggles, had been on her list of projects for more than a decade, and her journal reflects her intention to write it as late as 1872.22 It would have been unwise if, in Little Women, she had drawn heavily on the material she expected to use in this other work.

  Moreover, Louisa had expressly promised Thomas Niles a girls book, and since she had recently finished her essay “Happy Women,” the theme of feminine autonomy was very much on her mind. To have injected a father too forcefully into Little Women would have interfered with the story she wanted to tell about the virtues and difficulties of womanhood. Paradoxically, if Bronson was too masculine to fit Louisa’s vision of a female household, he may not have been manly enough to find a place in an ideal fictional family. His gentle nature, his fascination with child rearing, and his rejection of the masculine world of commerce made him more of a second mother to his children than a traditional father. For this reason, Alcott biographer Madeleine Stern has stated that a fuller representation of Bronson in Little Women might have been “redundant” of Louisa’s characterization of Marmee.23

  Furthermore, Alcott knew something about the public for which she was writing. Just three years earlier, the nation had concluded a war that had torn approximately three million men away from their hearthsides and killed more than six hundred thousand of them.24 The number of Megs, Jos, Beths, and Amys they left behind can never be precisely ascertained. It seems clear that Alcott wanted to write a book in sympathy with these children’s losses and to offer her young readers an example of how one might carry on when one’s family was no longer whole. For all of these reasons, Louisa acted judiciously when she chose to keep Mr. March primarily in the shadows.

  And yet Bronson Alcott is firmly present in Little Women through the Bunyanesque subtext of the novel. The elder Alcott identified his moral outlook so deeply with Bunyan’s that, whenever Louisa alludes to The Pilgrim’s Progress in Little Women, she suffuses the scene with her father’s ethical ideas. Like Christian, Mr. March in Little Women is not physically present during the pivotal portions of his family’s journey toward redemption. However, he does not need to be. In imitation of Bunyan’s hero, he has already blazed a spiritual trail, making it easier for his family to complete the same journey. If Bronson, in the form of Mr. March, is barely present in the overt action of Little Women, he is spiritually omnipresent.

  The public response to part 1 of Little Women was astounding. Julian Hawthorne, with what degree of exaggeration and invention is anyone’s guess, related in his memoirs the story Louisa told of the day she learned she had written a best-seller. Having had no news of her manuscript for months, she resolved to visit the publisher and demand an explanation. When she arrived, she saw a small brigade of truckmen loading packing crates onto drays and a busy detachment of clerks hurrying in and out of the building. Suspecting that the establishment had been seized for debts, she mounted the stairs to the office of the publisher, who was signing a check. Without looking up, he waved his hand dismissively. “Go away,” he grumbled, “I’ve given orders—most important. How did you get in here?”

  Louisa’s resolve stiffened. “I want my manuscript!” she exclaimed.

  “I told you to get out—” the man began. Looking up for the first time, though, he froze as if petrified by a gorgon. An instant later, the story goes, he vaulted over his desk toward her and grasped her by the elbows with the aspect of a madman. As she feared for her safety, Louisa suddenly understood what he was trying to tell her: “My dear—dearest Miss Alcott! At such a juncture! You got my letter? No? No matter! Nothing parallel to it has occurred in my experience! All else put aside—street blocked—country aroused—overwhelmed—paralyzed! Uncle Tom’s Cabin backed off the stage! Two thousand more copies ordered this very day from Chicago alone! But that’s a fleabite—tens of thousands—why, dearest girl, it’s the triumph of the century!” The check on the publisher’s desk had her name on it, and the packing crates were filled with copies of Little Women.25

  Very little, if any, of this anecdote truly happened as Hawthorne describes it. The quoted sales figures are vastly overstated, and Hawthorne himself admits “the amusing exaggeration” of Louisa’s “spirited account.” Yet the underlying import of the story is true enough. The first printing of two thousand copies sold out within days of the book’s release, and another forty-five hundred were in print by the end of the year.26 Before she could even begin the second half of her story, part 1 of Little Women had made Louisa May Alcott famous and very nearly rich.27

  Fan mail poured in. Niles told her that an edition was being prepared for publication in England. There was no question now that a second part would be wanted. “A little success is so inspiring,” Louisa told her journal, and she plunged back into a creative vortex on November 1, vowing to write a chapter a day.28 She worked “like a steam engine,” taking a daily run as her only recreation and barely stopping to eat or sleep.29 Falling behind the ambitious schedule she had set for herself, she spent her birthday alone, “writing hard.”30

  Only three months separated the publication of part 1 at the end of September 1868 and Louisa’s delivery of part 2 to Roberts Brothers on New Year’s Day 1869, but in the interval, much more than Louisa’s level of enthusiasm had changed. Whereas she had based her work thus far on events from her family’s past and had felt some obligation to stay reasonably close to fact, she would now be able to “launch into the future” thus her “fancy” would have “more play.”31 Had she been able to indulge this fancy without restraint, Louisa would have used part 2 to craft Jo into a grown woman very much resembling the veiled self-portrait she had drawn in “Happy Women.” Having created her main character in her own image, Louisa knew precisely the life that, from Jo’s point of view, would constitute a happy ending: the professionally satisfying career of “a literary spinster.”32 More broadly, she wanted part 2 to be a searching inquiry into the moral ambiguities of adulthood from which her main characters’ youth had thus far kept them exempt. As long as the highest goods in the March sisters’ world are their mutual support and the approving
judgments of their parents, there is little or no conflict between moral action and the kind of gratification they have been taught to prize most highly. However, Alcott causes tension to erupt forcefully in part 2 when other objectives—wealth, professional achievement, or an independent sense of one’s value—become more important than pleasing Marmee. Part 1 is about the formation of character. Part 2 is about young women who, having achieved a sense of self, must struggle against worldly forces—for example, mortality and male-dominated social conventions—that threaten to diminish or destroy those selves. This theme makes the second half of Little Women a deeper, more thoughtful work than the first.

  Yet Louisa’s freedom to write part 2 as she chose was circumscribed in another, unexpected fashion. As her fans clamored for a sequel, they expressed a virtually unanimous opinion: they demanded that Jo should marry Laurie, the boy based on Alf Whitman and Ladislas Wisniewski and given the character name of Theodore Laurence, or “Laurie.” Louisa, who had wanted her book to show what girls could accomplish for themselves, read with deepening disappointment the letters sent by “girls [who] ask who the little women [will] marry. As if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life.”33 To her annoyance, Thomas Niles sided with public opinion, and she complained acidly about “publishers [who] wont [sic] let authors finish up as they like but insist…on having people married off in a wholesale manner.”34 She felt that Roberts Brothers had compelled her to finish her novel “in a very stupid style.”35 The profusion of romantic pairings-off that Niles demanded led one of her friends to quip that the sequel might as well be called “Wedding Marches.”36 As happened more than once in her career, Louisa found herself torn between popular taste and artistic integrity.

  Not quite daring to defy both public and publisher, she offered a compromise. While remaining firm in her determination not to “marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone,” she contrived a “funny match” for her with the kindly, philosophical Professor Bhaer.37 Laurie, too, finds wedded bliss in the sequel, but in the seemingly unlikely arms of the youngest March daughter, Amy. Even as Louisa adopted this middle course, she feared that it would please no one.

  As it happened, however, Louisa’s decision neither to write a safe, predictable denouement nor to give Jo the ending she thought her heroine deserved is largely responsible for the artistic triumph of Little Women, part 2. Part 1 had concluded with resolute cheerfulness, with Beth evidently recovering from her bout with scarlet fever, Mr. March safely home, and Meg engaged to her true love. What gives part 2 its enduring power is that not one of the March sisters gets what she had once believed would make her happy and that none of the visions of the future expressed in the “Castles in the Air” chapter are realized. Materialistic Meg, though happily married to the virtuous John Brooke, has fallen far short of her dreams of luxury. Jo and Amy have deferred their artistic ambitions and settled down with their respective husbands. Even Beth, who modestly wished only “to stay safe at home with mother and father,” has been denied her wish by death.38 Marriage is the quintessential happy ending to a children’s tale. Yet subversively, Alcott disposes of Jo’s and Amy’s weddings in the most anticlimactic fashion possible. Amy and Laurie cheat the reader by marrying offstage. Whereas Alcott has earlier devoted an elaborate description to Meg’s wedding, she treats Jo’s marriage in a solitary, perplexing sentence. As a single woman, Jo has been forthright and energetic. Her wedding, to the contrary, finds her dazed and passive: “Almost before she knew where she was, Jo found herself married and settled at Plumfield.”39 By spurning Laurie and marrying the professor, Jo has avoided being stifled by conventional romanticism. Her marriage to Bhaer will eventually lead, in some sense, to fulfillment and freedom. Nevertheless, those who feel shortchanged when Jo’s bold opposition to matrimony crumbles have a right to their reaction. The defeat of opportunities for women seems complete when it is revealed that Plumfield, the school that Jo and her husband establish, admits only boys. Both Jo and Amy still hope to find a place in their lives for artistic achievement, and Jo reflects, rather unconvincingly, that the life of literary glory she once imagined for herself seems “selfish, lonely and cold to me now.”40 Nevertheless, Little Women appears to end as a story, not of dreams come true, but of dreams at best compromised and at worst thwarted.

  The wisdom of part 2 asserts that happiness can be both serendipitous and self-denying. Meg, Jo, and Amy do not find selfish gratification; rather, they find contentment by renouncing their immediate individual ambitions and returning to the interdependence of family. It is an ending that Bronson Alcott must certainly have appreciated. Indeed, one can see in Professor Bhaer some of Bronson’s outlines: they are both threadbare, philosophical men with an altruistic love of children and a contempt for the kind of cleverness whose chief virtue is its profitability. Alcott describes Bhaer and Mr. March as sharing a “kindred spirit.”41 In marrying Jo to Bhaer, Louisa endorsed her father’s ideals. She also repeated a pattern in her love plots that began with Moods and was to resurface in her other full-length adult novel, Work. In all three novels, the heroine faces a choice between a man who stirs her passion and one who speaks eloquently to her sense of moral duty. The latter figure invariably prevails.

  Modern readers, conditioned to equate happiness with personal achievement and, perhaps, less inclined than Alcott’s original audience to regard duty and domestic bliss as sufficient objectives in life, are likely to view the last chapters of Little Women as a defeat for the March sisters, whose brave, happy beginnings seem to have led only to conventionality and subservience. For many of us, Jo’s and Amy’s settling into matrimony seems a betrayal of their earlier promise and courage. Jo, however, seems not to think so. She believes that her dreams have not been lost, but rather transmuted into a more charitable form. If, as Alcott evidently intended, we regard Jo’s matronly life at Plumfield as a triumph, we can understand a key tenet of Alcott’s feminist ideal. Women’s rights, for Alcott, was never an end in itself. Rather, expanding opportunities for women was the great and necessary means by which previously neglected talents and energies might be made available to benefit a societal family, such as Alcott embodies in Plumfield. Jo learns that abilities used to benefit only oneself are thrown away. Used to advance only one’s biological family, they remain largely wasted. Only when one gives freely to all do talent and effort attain their highest value.

  Although this altruism lies at the root of Alcott’s feminism, it is also the reason modern readers sometimes misconceive her as antifeminist. It can be argued that women historically accepted a subservient position precisely because of their willingness to sacrifice for the perceived greater good of the family. If Alcott was proposing a social order in which women were educated to feel a sense of family obligation to the entire community, might not her vision deepen, rather than diminish, the problem of sexual inequality? Perhaps the best answer is that Alcott expected the self-sacrifice of good men as well as good women. Her ideal of equality touched principally on opportunities to serve rather than any presumed right to seek one’s individual happiness.

  Apart from its confrontation of gender issues, another ethical ambiguity haunts the pages of Little Women. Earnestly intent on inculcating spiritual and moral lessons, the novel nevertheless steers away from conventional theism and toward the more material concerns that began to obsess America after the Civil War. It has been aptly observed that, even though their father is a clergyman, the March sisters never set foot in a church. Moreover, Jo’s famous opening grumble, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” is the lament of a child who needs no persuading that the true spirit of her culture is commercial, not ecclesiastic.42 Of course, Alcott’s father and his transcendental brethren had striven to retain a reverential view of the world while discarding outward forms and unbending dogmas, and Louisa was bound to inherit the philosophical problem that their heresies had raised: how, in the absence of a sturdily organized faith, does one preserve both the feel of a relig
ious life and the ideal of an ethical existence? Lacking a system of either rituals or sacraments through which to practice their piety, the March sisters are pressed repeatedly in the direction of good works. Indeed, few books narrate more acts of unselfish generosity than Little Women. However, it is this impulse toward charity that exposes Beth to scarlet fever, and the power of the Marches to do good is generally restricted by their limited means. Although one feels deep admiration when the girls give up their Christmas breakfasts to a more abject family, the greatest acts of philanthropy in the novel, for instance the founding of Plumfield, are made possible only by the accumulated capital of wealthy people like Grandfather Laurence and Aunt March. To cynical eyes, Little Women may be a novel of the Gilded Age after all.43

  Part 2 of Little Women was every bit as successful as its predecessor. It is a matter of some irony that Little Women, Alcott’s hymn to genteel poverty, put a permanent end to the real Alcott family’s days of chronic want. Flush with royalty checks, Louisa paid all the family’s debts and, to her astonished delight, had money left over to invest. As Roberts Brothers readied part 2 of Little Women for release, she had dared to tell her journal, “My dream is beginning to come true.”44 As a turning point in the fortunes of the Alcott family, the publication of Little Women cannot be overestimated. Yet at virtually the same moment that Little Women was making Louisa the most renowned female author in America, Bronson was enjoying a success that was, in its way, also extraordinary. More than thirty years had passed since the publication of Conversations with Children on the Gospels. In those years, the public careers of his great literary contemporaries—Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville—had risen to their highest glory and subsided. Few would have expected the elder Alcott, now aged sixty-eight, finally to present the world with a completed book. Yet in the marvelous year of 1868, there were suddenly two bestselling authors residing under the roof of Orchard House. Both Little Women and Tablets were published in September 1868. Born thirty-three years apart, father and daughter achieved their most significant literary breakthroughs in the same month.