March Sisters

by Kate Bolick

  It’s a captivating moment of double consciousness. For the first time, Meg has looked in the mirror and seen how gorgeous she can be, how very like the illustrated fashion plates she’s heretofore admired in magazines. The sumptuous clothes are both costume and passpor; passing as someone she’s not, she’s free to assume behaviors she never would otherwise. And yet, having at last achieved her long-­held desire for lace and bows on her clothes—albeit borrowed—she spends her night of glory not in unmitigated triumph, like Cinderella, but demeaned like the jackdaw, careening between compliments and insults, excitement and embarrassment, wholly at the mercy of how others experience her manifest beauty, and ultimately deprived of her own pleasure.

  Did Alcott intend Meg’s vanity as punishment for not having pursuits of her own, other than to someday marry, and have a nice house and clothes? Or was she lobbing a warning about the pernicious underside of upward mobility? Of the four sisters, only Meg is old enough to be off navigating fraught social spaces. In Alcott’s time, if a young woman from a poor family appreciated nice things, the only way to get them was through marriage or prostitution. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it was the barely middle-­class Alcott, not the upper-­class Woolf, who recognized this economic aspect of frock consciousness. Maybe Alcott wasn’t punishing Meg so much as admitting that, lacking the freedoms granted to men, many women rely on other means to express their more limited range of powers. It was her hope that Meg—and all the rest of us—would find a better way.

  Some memories progress in stages, instead of appearing all at once. We can’t always know what is happening as it happens; if we’re lucky, we remember later, at which point our recollection is informed by the knowledge we’ve since accrued. It’s not that we misremember, necessarily, or not always. It’s that in the act of remembering we can’t help seeing the event in a way that we couldn’t when it first took place. It’s a useful process. A retrospective wisdom.

  Is it possible to say that during my dress fiasco I had a cellular memory of Meg’s shame over the blue silk dress? I don’t know. It feels too romantic. And yet I do believe that books seep into us and change us in ways we can’t keep track of. At nine, I breezed through Meg’s fortnight with the Moffats, only taking in the elements that made quick sense to me. Then, many years later, I experienced the same event in my own life, without remembering hers. After that, more years passed, until I finally read Little Women again and revisited Meg’s frock shock on the page, but this time through the scrim of my own memory, as if overlaying Alcott’s words was a sheet of tracing paper on which I’d sketched my own episode. This time around it was a dual experience: Meg’s and my own.

  The morning of my boss’s party I arrived at work to find a garment bag laid across my desk. It was customary for Claire to “call in” clothes from designers to wear to big events, and at first I assumed this had something to do with that—that they were hers, somehow misplaced—but when I looked inside I saw two dresses in my size. I ran to her office to thank her, but she wasn’t there, so I ran instead to the bathroom to try them on.

  The first was very “me,” something I would have picked out myself. Prim, retro, it was made of a slightly stiff fabric, almost a brocade, woven with big gold and silver triangles. The bodice had a high crew neck and short sleeves, and the skirt was an A-­line that hit at the knee. Or, it was supposed to. To look right it would need to be taken up several inches. The other was made of a black silk jersey that slunk in my hands like a cat. Once on, it clung to every curve I had. The neckline plunged to my sternum.

  I stared at myself in the mirror. I had never seen myself like this—so unapologetically sexy, in the contemporary sense, like an actress on the red carpet. I looked and looked. I couldn’t take my eyes off myself.

  At that moment the fashion editor walked into the bathroom, unsurprised; she’d been the one to guess my size, and what styles might suit me.

  “Looks good,” she said, glancing at me, before disappearing into a stall, “but you’ll definitely need some bronzer on your chest.”

  I took in my very white, freckled décolletage and knew it didn’t matter, that I’d never wear this dress anyhow.

  At 5:00 P.M. I raced back to Brooklyn and straight to the tailor to beg her to hem the gold-­and-­silver dress in an hour. She kindly agreed. At home, I showered and blew my hair dry, twisted it into a loose chignon, applied makeup, then got down on my hands and knees and went hunting through my closet for the black heels I’d worn to my brother’s wedding. After exactly sixty minutes had passed I dashed out to the tailor’s, retrieved the gold-­and-­silver dress, ran back home, put it on, touched up my lipstick one more time, grabbed the doorknob—and paused. Without letting myself think I turned around, pulled off the gold-­and-­silver dress, stepped into the black one, zipped it up, grabbed the doorknob again, and left my apartment.

  By the time I reached the corner to find a cab, I could barely contain my anxiety. What a fool I’d been! How could I possibly go out in public looking like this—so attention-­grabbing, so conspicuous, so one-­note “sexy”? I looked ridiculous! I had to go back and change! Just then, a taxi pulled up. Heart pounding, I dove inside, gave the driver the address, on the far west side of Manhattan, and telephoned my brother. When he picked up I was nearly hyperventilating. “What is it? What is it?” he kept asking, and I had no idea how to explain.

  “I’m on my way to a party,” I said, to allay his alarm, though saying the words out loud only made my situation more inexplicable. I was on my way to a party, wearing a designer dress, in a cab no less, and I couldn’t breathe. My brother, bless him, stayed on the line until I’d arrived. I paid the fare, stepped out of the cab. The venue overlooked the Hudson River, orange with the lowering sun.

  The walls resembled glass waves. I could see inside to the party, already in full swing. I wished for a coat, an excuse to visit the cloakroom, a buffer between apprehending the party and becoming subsumed. Instead, I pulled open the glass door and walked straight in, got a drink, found Noah in the crowd.

  He wore dark jeans, a charcoal suit jacket, a white dress shirt, black shoes.

  He looked me up and down. He didn’t look at me so much as look through me. His expression was one of mild disdain. At last, he spoke.

  “Well, well,” he said, archly, cocking an eyebrow. “If someone didn’t take ‘cocktail attire’ to the next level.”

  I froze, smothered in shame. I had tried to be something I wasn’t, and I hadn’t succeeded. I would never be pretty. I would never fit in. I would always be the scrawny girl with buckteeth and lank hair, the misfit with odd thoughts and the wrong clothes. He would never love me the way that I wanted.

  While rereading Little Women I was struck by the section in the chapter “Tender Troubles” that goes on and on about Jo’s “repulsive” pillow, known as “the sausage.” Alcott describes the March family sofa as “a regular patriarch of a sofa—long, broad, well-­cushioned and low. A trifle shabby.” Jo claimed one corner as her own, and monitored her territory with a hard, round pillow “covered with prickly horse-­hair, and furnished with a knobby button at each end.” When “the sausage” is standing up, Laurie is free to lounge as much as he’d like, “but if it laid flat across the sofa, woe to the man, woman or child who dared disturb it.” It’s a strange, amusing passage, one of the rare portions of the book that breaks the otherwise steady narrative pacing, and the details themselves feel far too specific and exhaustively drawn to be made up. When I finished the book, I traveled to the house in Concord where Alcott wrote it, and learned that I’d been onto something, that the pillow was real.

  The pillow on display, apparently the original, is a standard cylindrical bolster, maybe two feet long, covered in a russety-­brown velvet. The guide explained that it was known in the family as Alcott’s “mood pillow,” and used to signal her emotional state while she was busy writing. When the pillow was up, all was well, and visit
ors to her room upstairs were welcome. When the pillow was down, it meant she was having a difficult time with her work and wanted to be left alone.

  I stood for as long as the tour allowed, just looking at the pillow. It was such a homely thing, and yet totally exceptional, a golden key, a personification of Alcott’s consciousness. Alcott was rare enough among women of her time for being a professional writer; here was evidence that her family supported her so completely that even her moods were given the run of the house. No wonder she didn’t want to marry. As if the social role of “wife” weren’t oppressive enough, was there a man alive who could have stepped back and let her continue on as she had? For her, the struggle wasn’t merely to reconcile work and love, autonomy and intimacy, but to protect her own individuality, which was free to flourish in her family of origin, and would surely be inhibited if she ever left to start a family of her own. This, I now saw, was why she had Jo marry Friedrich Bhaer—Alcott couldn’t find such a progressive Prince Charming in real life, but she could invent him.

  My head was so full of these thoughts when the tour concluded, in the gift shop, that when I saw a book titled Moods I almost didn’t believe my eyes. Was the gift shop reading my mind?

  It was Alcott’s first novel for adults, which she began at age twenty-­seven, long before Little Women and even “Happy Women.” Sarah Elbert writes in her introduction that the book is important for raising “a personal and a social question: how could a woman marry and still develop her own unique gifts?” Alcott’s answer, of course, is that she can’t. The book’s heroine, Faith Dane, like her creator, chooses to remain a spinster.

  The stifling confines of gender and social roles, frock consciousness and party consciousness, feminism—so many of Alcott’s themes presage Virginia Woolf’s preoccupations. Had Woolf read Little Women? Once I finished rereading, I burned to know. After all, their lives overlapped. Woolf was six years old when Alcott died in 1888, a full two decades after the book became a sensation in America. Plausibly, some grown-up in young Woolf’s deeply literary orbit could have given it to her as a present.

  I reached out to three scholars of English literature—Elaine Showalter, Emma Claire Sweeney, and Ellen Tremper. They in turn checked the indexes of all of Woolf’s published works, including diaries and letters, and didn’t find a single reference to Alcott. I was careful about this, covering my bases, because I wanted to be sure. I wanted to be able to say, without a shadow of a doubt, that English literature would be different if Woolf had known that in her own time lived a woman so like herself. Had Woolf read Alcott’s exploration of frock consciousness, she might have simply picked up the baton and kept running with it, rather than grope toward the subject herself, and the rest of us would be even further along than we are now in understanding our own relationships to our clothes.

  Meg had fashion plates to look at in magazines, but she definitely didn’t have a camera, or of course the internet, and as such she would have never stumbled onto a photograph immortalizing her night of frock shock a decade after the fact, the way I did. I can’t remember how I came to find it. But there I am, wearing the slinky black dress for all the world to see. And here’s the thing: I don’t look remotely as I’d remembered. Sure, the neckline is deeper than I’d wear even now, but with my low black heels, chignon, and eyeglasses perched on top of my head, I hardly look like the overdressed hussy Noah made me feel myself to be.

  I’ve written in the past about how I’d been wrong to spend my young womanhood thinking there were only two ways to be—single or married—when in fact here in the twenty-­first century most of us live in the vast space in between. Ours is an era of delayed marriage, sexual promiscuity, asserted celibacy, sanctioned polyamory, serial monogamy—anything goes, from our romantic arrangements to our hemlines. Now the trick is to update the internal scripts in our heads to match these new realities.

  And so it is with plain vs. pretty. The message I took from Alcott and my mother was that pretty is a prison. If, like Meg, you are pretty, you can’t also be a writer, or an artist. If, like Amy, you are almost pretty but not quite, you are eternally vexed by the one feature that doomed you. If you are plain, like Jo and my mother and me, and maybe even Alcott, you are free.

  But I was mistaken. Meg and Jo and Amy and Beth were neither morality tales nor real people. They were fictional characters drawn from life to embody different aspects of the female experience. Little Women has endured across the centuries because it invites the reader to imagine herself into a variety of personalities, both in real time while reading, and afterward, in reflection. As a girl I was a Jo who never became a Meg and in the process became something else. Ultimately, I am all of the sisters. I am Marmee and the aunts. I am even the writer herself. Books enlarge us. We read, and we move forward.

  We live, and we’re held back. I allied myself with my mother’s plainness because it was the path she bequeathed me, and taking it gave us closeness. But doing so foreclosed my ability to discover my own fluidity. As with everything else in life, I had to learn my own relationship to myself, and choose how to interact with the vagaries of my era. Is makeup enfeebling or empowering? I honestly can’t decide. But continuing to live inside of that question, instead of fixing myself within yet another either/or binary—whether plain vs. pretty, friend vs. girlfriend, single vs. married—is part of what it means to be a woman in our time. Indecision and irresolution are our modernity.

  All these years later I can see that Claire was doing me a favor when she loaned me that slinky black dress. Just as Belle Moffat encouraged Meg to try on a dress that belonged to a different type of life, to a different version of Meg, Claire gave me the chance to see myself as I might never otherwise, allowing me to expand my individuality in a way that Noah (and in Meg’s case, Laurie) couldn’t abide. I believe that the most we can ask from the people in our lives is that, no matter what, when they see us grow or change in an unexpected direction, they stand aside and let it happen.

  “Genius; don’t you wish you could give it to me, Laurie?”

  FROM THE MOMENT I learned English—my second language—I decided I was destined for genius and it would be discovered through my writing—my brilliant, brilliant writing. Until then, I had to undergo training, the way a world-­class athlete might prepare for the Olympics; so I did what any budding literary marvel desperate to get to the glory and praise stage of her career would do—I read and read and read and then imitated my idols in hope that my talents would one day catch up to my tastes. At age ten, I gave up picture books and took the leap into chapter books, but continued to seek out the girly subjects that alone interested me. Any story involving an abandoned young girl, left to survive this harsh, bitter world on her own, was catnip to my writerly ambitions. Like the literary characters I loved, the protagonists in my own early efforts at writing were plucky, determined, unconventional girls, which was how I saw myself. They often acted impetuously, were prone to bouts of sulking and extreme mood swings, sweet one minute and sour the next. I always gave my heroines happy endings—they were all wunderkinds who were wildly successful in their artistic pursuits and, on top of it, found true, lasting love with a perfect man. I was a girl on the cusp of adolescence, but I had already fully bought into the fantasy that women should and could have it all.

  On one of my family’s weekly trips to Costco, I found a gorgeous illustrated copy of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, a book I had seen and written off every time I went to the library, repelled by the word women. Unlike the girl heroines I loved, a woman was something I dreaded becoming, a figure bound up in expectations of sacrifice and responsibility. A woman had to face reality and give up her foolish childish dreams. And what was reality for a woman but the life my mother—the best woman I knew—had? And what did she have but a mountain of responsibilities—to me, to my father, to my younger brother, to her parents, to my father’s parents, to her friends, to my father’s friends, to their friend
s’ parents, to her bosses, to her coworkers, and so on? Her accomplishments were bound up in other people, and her work was literally emotional, as she was expected to be completely attuned to everyone else’s feelings. She worked service jobs where she was required to absorb the anger of complaining customers and never betray any frustration of her own. Her livelihood depended on being giving and kind all of the time, suppressing her less sunny emotions into a perpetually soaked rag that she sometimes wrung out on my father and me.

  My mother had apparently wanted to be a writer when she was a young girl too. She loved reading novels and writing stories, but she continually repeated to me the same proselytizing refrain: everyone has to grow up and be responsible for others. And one day you will too, she forecasted; or, maybe she was trying to hex me. She wanted me to stop thinking of myself as some great exception. She believed the numbers didn’t lie—if something was popular, then that thing must be really good. That was her credo in life; if it applied to restaurants, it certainly applied to marriage and family. One had to do the expected thing, or else one was fucked. The odds were much higher that a young girl might one day find a husband and start a family of her own than become a famous writer. My mother believed no matter how miserable marriage and kids might be, it was guaranteed to be better than the misery of being childless and unpartnered. Better to be normal than to try to be extraordinary, she told me again and again.