by Kate Bolick
Jo also possessed something I didn’t: an older sister.
I had never longed for an older sister, I suppose because I was busy being an older sister myself. I took great pride in tending to my younger brother, a tow-headed miscreant four years my junior. Meg didn’t particularly captivate me either. Did she anyone? Kind, gentle, responsible—the closest thing the book has to a conventional literary heroine—she is yawningly familiar, the quintessential good girl of morality tales and parental remonstrances the world over.
Everything we need to know about her is right there on the first page. Jo grumbles about Christmas not being Christmas without any presents, and Meg, “looking down at her old dress,” sighs, “It’s so dreadful to be poor!” Just a few pages later, when Meg announces that she’s going to give up acting in their “dressing up” frolics, Jo calls her bluff: “You won’t stop, I know, as long as you can trail round in a white gown with your hair down, and wear gold-paper jewelry.” A bride-to-be already. Soon after, when they’re invited to a New Year’s Eve party, Meg’s first thought is, “now what shall we wear?” Vanity, of course, is Meg’s one real flaw.
Initially, I deigned to appreciate her in a bland, idle way, for being a good big sister, which I knew full well wasn’t always easy. Then the fact of her prettiness sunk in—this I found interesting. When I read that Meg was “very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain,” I pictured my friends the fraternal twins. What was it like to be pretty? To draw admiration by doing absolutely nothing, as opposed to cajoling others to pay attention to my endless theatrics?
There was also the fact that Meg, a glamorous sixteen, was well past the bodily changes of early adolescence, and untroubled by them. Someone into the breach before me.
What an elixir! A universe so familiar I could smell it (wood smoke, gingerbread, wet wool), yet not without its curious anachronisms (bows on caps, hairnets, toasting forks), which both resonated with my present-day and provided a template for a future self, one I was only then in the process of becoming aware of. And so nine-year-old me continued reading, hovering somewhere between the two elder March sisters, still defined by the qualities of Jo, and wondering if I’d ever be so lucky as to attain those of Meg.
What is it that happens between a woman and her clothes? Virginia Woolf coined the term “frock consciousness” to describe this relationship or frequency or vibration—whatever it is—in a 1925 diary entry. Mrs. Dalloway had just been published, and she’d been sitting for a photograph in Vogue. “My present reflection,” she wrote, “is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness &c. These states are very difficult . . . I’m always coming back to it . . . Still I cannot get at what I mean.”
She wanted to unpack the simultaneous outward-inward nature of clothing—the fact that what we wear is a visible, tactile membrane between our private and public selves that expresses who we think we are or who we wish to be, while also affecting how others feel about us, a curious feedback loop of self-perception. In a wonderful essay about Woolf’s inquiry, the scholar Rosemary Hill points out that Clarissa Dalloway’s favorite dress “is both distinctive and yet suitable,” which is “what many women want from their clothes, to stand out and to fit in to the same degree at the same time.” When I read that line I silently applauded its accuracy. Is that not exactly what I’m trying to accomplish nearly every time I dress to leave the house?
Woolf was in her early forties when she began thinking about this subject, which is the age I began looking closely at it myself. I don’t think this is a coincidence. By middle age, as our bodies submit to change yet again—the anti-puberty—we’ve achieved enough distance from our corporality to be able to regard it with more dispassion than was possible back when our hormones overrode all else. As Alcott put it in her “Happy Women” essay, “After a somewhat tempestuous voyage, she is glad to find herself in a quiet haven whence she can look back upon her vanished youth and feel that though the blossom time of life is past, a little fruit remains to ripen in the early autumn coming on.” (Note that she was only thirty-six when she wrote this.)
In that essay, Alcott evaluates the looks of the three other spinsters she writes about. One is “pretty,” one “attractive,” one “plain.” Notably, she doesn’t ascribe judgment to herself. How could she know, really? This question—“Am I plain, or am I pretty?”—seems to me central to frock consciousness. We have all seen love and hate transfigure a face, when we are doing the looking; recall Mr. Darcy saying in Pride and Prejudice that knowing Elizabeth Bennett better made her seem the most handsome woman of his acquaintance. Likewise, the sensation of wearing the “right” clothes—right in the sense that Rosemary Hill pinpoints, right in the manner of my fourth-grade Halloween costume—imparts a self-possession that transcends being looked at, or at least renders the judgment of others meaningless.
“Am I plain, or am I pretty?” I think this question was a little easier to answer in Alcott’s time. When women had so few resources at their disposal to alter their appearance, and had to rely exclusively on their so-called god-given features, the demarcation was strict, but clear. All those severe buns and strict center parts. No such thing as lipstick or mascara—not among the respectable women of New England, that is.
And so there it was: Meg was pretty. Jo wasn’t. Harsh, sure, and we all know it’s not as neat as all that, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that sometimes physical beauty doesn’t even matter. After all, it was Jo who not only won Laurie’s heart, and had the presence of mind and self-assurance to reject him, but also went down in history as the most influential of the March sisters, inspiring the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Patti Smith to become writers—the ultimate ugly duckling-turned-swan. Before I learned that Alcott was a spinster, not a mother, and returned to Little Women, I didn’t even think of Meg.
As it turned out, imagining myself into Meg’s prettiness as a child had taken me only so far; biology is brutal like that. Braces came in sixth grade, pimples in seventh, and both remained all through high school. My mother instilled in me second-wave feminism’s antipathy toward makeup and rolled her eyes when I expressed Meg-like longings for fashionable clothes (though she did buy me more than a few). She, too, had grown up plain, but in the conformist 1950s, when beauty was still a woman’s greatest asset, plainness verboten, and girdles and hair rollers nonnegotiable. She wanted to raise me free of the painful strictures of dressing to fit in. I trusted her. She was smarter than the other mothers. I felt lucky to follow in her footsteps.
In the chapter “Castles in the Air,” when Laurie and the March sisters fantasize about their futures, and Meg realizes that, unlike Jo and Amy, she doesn’t have a vocation to help her achieve “a lovely house, full of all sorts of luxurious things,” Laurie points out that she does have something else—her face. “Wait and see if it doesn’t bring you something worth having,” he says. My mother wanted me to know I was so much more than whatever I looked like.
Everyone assured me that college would be different, but it wasn’t, not really. Pretty continued to evade me. I both did and didn’t mind. Simply living inside of a female body taught me the discomfort of being looked at, and for the most part, being plain seemed a welcome reprieve from all that. Like Jo, it gave me control. It forced me to center my appeal inside of myself. I recognized prettiness in others, I admired it, I occasionally envied it, but mostly I accepted that they were one way and I was another. Boys liked me well enough as I was, which helped.
It probably took me longer than it should have to understand that biology is only one part of the story. “Say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the everchanging and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs,” Woolf writes in “A Room of One�
��s Own.” Once upon a time, I took stock of my plainness, and I accepted it. Or so I thought. Not until my early thirties did I reckon with the “world of gloves and shoes and stuffs.”
It wasn’t my first dress fiasco, but it was my first of any significance. At thirty-three I’d taken an editorial position at a glossy lifestyle magazine in Times Square, where I learned that whatever attractiveness I possessed could be improved upon: my blotchy skin and acne scars could be concealed with foundation, my lank locks enlivened with a good (and expensive) haircut, my short legs lengthened with high heels. The discovery that it was within my power to enhance my appearance was when things got confusing.
Until then, I’d bought my clothes on sale or secondhand, proud of my thrift, proud even to cultivate desires for garments based mainly on their affordability; my wardrobe was a collection of misfits and underdogs that had, thanks to my munificence, found a home, or so went my pretense. Now that I was making real money, I could walk into a shop, fall in love with a dress or a sweater on its merits alone, and suddenly own it, just like that. I’d assumed such freedom would bring me pleasure; I hadn’t anticipated the complications. For one, I couldn’t let go of the internal agitation it caused me to spend money—a small tightening in the chest, almost a shortness of breath, followed by a massive distrust in my purchase, and an overwhelming urge to return it. A Massachusetts puritan to the bone. Worse, wearing something that fit the way it was intended to, or was a color that flattered my complexion, or any number of details that make a garment suit a woman and enhance her attractiveness, made me deeply uncomfortable, as if I were trying to be something I wasn’t.
At the magazine, someone came up with the phrase “frock shock” to describe those mornings one or the other of us was late to work because we’d been standing paralyzed in front of our closets incapable of choosing what to wear. It was a ridiculous problem to have, but the fact that I wasn’t alone in it was a true comfort.
My boss, Claire (not her real name), was a wealthy, extroverted woman with an aggressive sense of humor who didn’t like me very much. In meetings she’d cry out, “Bolick! Say something! You creep me out being so quiet!” and I’d explain, again, that I just don’t think very well when I’m around other people, that once I was back alone at my desk I would be able to come up with ideas. I wanted to be better, I just didn’t know how. My earnest ineptitude intensified her frustration, creating a dismaying static we couldn’t get past.
It wasn’t only my personality she disliked. There was also my relationship with her college friend Noah (not his real name, either), an art historian I’d met long before I’d started the job. He was the sort of person who cultivated a cult of scarcity, keeping himself consistently slightly unavailable to the people in his life, so that everyone always wanted more and envied everyone else their share. My indeterminable status made me even more threatening to my boss than I would have been otherwise. I wasn’t Noah’s girlfriend—he made that clear—but neither was I his friend, because we’d been sleeping together off and on for years, nor was I his mistress, because we were both unpartnered. In the beginning, I found the unclarity of it all intoxicating, but over time I grew to resent it. I wanted to be one thing or the other: friend or girlfriend. He refused. I was in a trap—but a trap of my own making. If I could only not want him, I could be free. Try as I might, I couldn’t not want him. I suspected that if I were prettier, things would be different.
As Noah’s not-girlfriend/not-friend, I rarely spent time with his actual friends, so when he invited me to the summer party that my boss was hosting for the magazine he was breaking code. Unlike the occasional staff event we were all encouraged to attend, this one was exclusively for top executives, advertisers, industry insiders, and Claire’s successful friends. She had asked Noah to be a guest at her table, and he had asked me to be his plus one. My breath caught when he asked. Did he know what he was doing? It was the modern-day equivalent of bringing the scullery maid to her employer’s society ball. I saw instantly that he did know, very much. My presence at the party would be a thorn in my boss’s side, and that was the point.
Obviously, I accepted. I had no idea why he wanted to get under her skin, and I didn’t care, because finally I was getting the social validation I’d craved. That it came at the cost of Claire disliking me more than she already did seemed a small price. There were even flashes, during those two weeks until the party, when I felt a sort of diabolical delight in the discomfort it must be causing her. Mostly, though, I worried over what to wear. My work wardrobe was a vast improvement over what it had once been, but “cocktail attire”—as suggested on the official printed invitation—remained beyond me. That weekend I unearthed the blue cotton dress I’d worn to my brother’s rehearsal dinner and ironed out the wrinkles. I doubted it was right for this occasion, but I hoped it would do.
When I returned to Little Women as an adult, knowing what I do now about Alcott’s opinion of marriage, I was eager to see how she’d treated Meg’s betrothal to John Brooke, which was clearly the most—indeed, the only—important event in Meg’s life (along with becoming a mother).
Ah, clever Alcott. Even here she subverts expectations. Rather than give readers the satisfaction of ending part one with a white wedding, she saves it for part two’s second chapter—and she breezes right through it. That chapter is among the shortest in the entire book. Moreover, aside from moving the plot forward, it’s largely a callback to Meg’s most significant chapter, in part one, about the time she goes off to spend “a fortnight of novelty and pleasure” with her rich friend Annie Moffat.
“Meg goes to Vanity Fair” is Meg’s only departure from the bosom of family. Unlike Amy and Jo, who both were given the chance to demonstrate Alcott’s belief that young women should live for a significant period of time on their own to discover themselves, Meg is granted only these two weeks. Fittingly, the chapter title refers to the fair held in the frivolous town of Vanity in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a favorite text of both the March and Alcott families. (It’s possible that Alcott had also read Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair.) Packing her humble frocks for the trip, Meg says, impatiently, “I wonder if I shall ever be happy enough to have real lace on my clothes, and bows on my caps?”
The problem of vanity isn’t entirely beyond the comprehension of a nine-year-old girl. I knew it well from Snow White’s plight; were her stepmother less vain, she wouldn’t have tried to get her killed. Class disparity was equally legible. I understood that Cinderella was poor, Prince Charming rich, and that the right dress would blind him to this discrepancy (the economic aspect of frock consciousness exemplified); that if all went well she’d marry him, thus becoming rich herself; and that being rich was perforce a good thing, possibly the best thing, better than being good, because clearly kindness alone wasn’t doing Cinderella any favors.
The subtler implications of Meg’s mini-adventure, however, were lost on me. I glossed over the pointed description of the Moffats as “kindly people, in spite of the frivolous life they led.” Like Meg, I imagined it would be “agreeable to fare sumptuously, drive in a fine carriage, wear her best frock every day, and do nothing but enjoy herself.” (Well, had I known then what a frock was, I wouldn’t have liked that part.) When I read that Meg and her three friends “shopped, walked, rode, and called all day; went to the theatres and operas,” I pictured the preteen girls I saw in my own hometown, free to go wherever they wanted unchaperoned, which I would also be at liberty to do in three years, when I turned twelve.
Nor did I understand the shame Meg felt over having only two dresses, so new was I at comparing myself with others. And so I thrilled at the chapter’s apogee, when the kindly Belle Moffat, Annie’s sister, offers to loan Meg her “sweet blue silk” to wear to their final fancy fête. The evening of, Belle and her maid crimp and curl Meg’s hair, shower her with “some fragrant powder,” redden her lips with “coralline salve”—after th
at Meg draws the line: no rouge—and lace her into the tight-fitting, low-cut, sky-blue gown. A full set of jewelry, a cluster of rosebuds, and high-heeled blue silk boots from France complete the effect. Everyone deems her “a little beauty.”
Meg had always known herself to be pretty. But now when she looks in the mirror she sees something else—a “fashion plate,” as she later confesses to her mother. For a long several minutes, heart beating, feeling “as if her ‘fun’ had really begun at last,” she stands alone, admiring her transformation. This is where Alcott twists the knife. She compares Meg to the jackdaw in Aesop’s famous fable, who, after envying the peacocks’ splendid feathers, sticks a bunch of their “borrowed plumes” into his own plain black tail—then struts among his fellow jackdaws, fooling nobody but himself. As if heeding Alcott’s warning, here Meg pauses for a moment, afraid to go down to the party “so queer and stiff, and half-dressed.” But quickly enough she summons her courage and sails into the drawing-rooms, where she successfully passes as a fine lady and enjoys herself.
Until, that is, she looks across the room and sees Laurie, “staring at her with undisguised surprise, and disapproval also.” Suddenly self-conscious again, wishing she’d worn her old dress after all, she nonetheless crosses the room to greet him. He refuses to meet her eyes. He admits that he’s “quite afraid” of her, looking “so grown-up, and unlike yourself,” then adds that he doesn’t like “fuss and feathers.” Hurt, she tells him off, but when she huffs away she overhears a conversation in which she’s referred to as “nothing but a doll, to-night.” Cooling her cheeks by the window, she muses, “I wish I’d been sensible, and worn my own things; then I should not have disgusted other people, or felt so uncomfortable and ashamed myself.” Laurie apologizes and they dance, but later, when he catches her drinking champagne, he tries to shame her again. This time, “with an affected little laugh,” she shuts him down: “I’m not Meg, to-night; I’m ‘a doll,’ who does all sorts of crazy things. To-morrow I shall put away my ‘fuss and feathers,’ and be desperately good again.”