March Sisters

by Kate Bolick

  My mother’s anger was far more visible than Marmee’s, but like Marmee, she did not want me to show anger—it was not feminine and I had not yet secured a husband, which made it even more imperative that I keep my passions in check. She kept hers contained at home. No friend, acquaintance, coworker, or family member outside of our nuclear unit could ever have guessed that my mother had a temper. Like Marmee, she was an angel to everyone who encountered her—generous and beneficent, always the first to extend a helping hand, always ready to open up our home to anyone who needed a hot meal and a place to stay. Other people confided their sorrows to her and she always knew exactly what kind of consolation to offer in return, keeping her own miseries hidden. My father and I were the only ones who ever saw her complain.

  And so my mother, despite her own voluptuous rage, had little patience for mine. Like my mother, I could turn on a dime, go from pure giddiness to utter sorrow to rage blackout to numbed-­out depression in an instant. The key difference between us was that I was covetous in addition to rageful. Some people get everything while I get nothing was my constant refrain, all my journal entries circled around it, it was the thrum in my brain that never turned off, the why meeeee pity party no one could argue me out of. The more I sulked in my despair, the more vividly I imagined other people’s good fortune. Like Jo, I would grumble that other people have all the fun while “I have all the work. It isn’t fair, oh, it isn’t fair!” When Jo’s bad behavior costs her a trip to Paris that her sister Amy is granted instead, Jo predicts Amy is destined to have a charmed, easy life even if becoming an artist doesn’t pan out for her. “‘You’ll marry some rich man, and come home to sit in the lap of luxury all your days,’ said Jo.” When Amy protests that, if she can’t be an artist, she would devote herself to the goodliness of philanthropic work, Jo doesn’t believe it. “‘Hum!’ said Jo, with a sigh; ‘if you wish it you’ll have it, for your wishes are always granted—mine never.’”

  “An old maid—that’s what I’m to be.”

  As it turns out, Amy definitively does not possess the gift of genius in her art; unlike Jo, she is merely talented. As it also turns out, in the world of Little Women genius does not guarantee happiness; if anything, it creates a fortress of solitude around the genius herself. Jo’s prediction for Amy comes true—she is given the most storybook ending of all the March sisters. She gets to travel through England and France, hobnobbing in fine society, and then spends approximately two paragraphs mourning Beth’s death before she is swept into a dazzling love affair with Laurie, who is still massively loaded and no longer pining for Jo. The two marry while abroad and return home radiantly in love.

  Amy’s face was full of the soft brightness which betokens a peaceful heart, her voice had a new tenderness in it, and the cool, prim carriage was changed to a gentle dignity, both womanly and winning. No little affectations marred it, and the cordial sweetness of her manner was more charming than the new beauty or the old grace, for it stamped her at once with the unmistakable sign of the true gentlewoman she had hoped to become.

  Essentially: Amy’s got a man and everything about her is improved! Marmee remarks of Amy, “Love has done much for our little girl,” which begs the question: What has the lack of romantic love done for our heroine Jo, now approaching her twenty-­fifth birthday?

  After rejecting Laurie’s declaration of love and running off to New York to serve as a governess and get away from it all, only to come back to find out her beloved Beth is dying, Jo finally submits to the cult of true womanhood. This late attempt at mastering feminine devotion and domestic goddessness, however, is of no use. Beth dies a beatific death anyway, and suddenly the book shifts—it is no longer about the four March sisters, but two married women and a soon-­to-­be spinster with no prospects. In a chapter pointedly titled “All Alone,” Alcott fills us in on Jo’s state of mind in the months after Beth’s death:

  She tried in a blind, hopeless way to do her duty, secretly rebelling against it all the while, for it seemed unjust that her few joys should be lessened, her burdens made heavier, and life get harder and harder as she toiled along. Some people seemed to get all the sunshine, and some all shadow; it was not fair, for she tried more than Amy to be good, but never got any reward,—only disappointment, trouble, and hard work.

  Poor Jo! these were the dark days to her, for something like despair came over her when she thought of spending all her life in that quiet house, devoted to humdrum cares, a few poor little pleasures, and the duty that never seemed to grow any easier. “I can’t do it. I wasn’t meant for a life like this, and I know I shall break away and do something desperate if somebody don’t come and help me,” she said to herself, when her first efforts failed, and she fell into the moody, miserable state of mind which often comes when strong wills have to yield to the inevitable.

  What was the inevitable, exactly? That no woman can surpass the limits of her gender or her class? That even the most radical amongst us must eventually cave to the hellish prison that is the capitalist cis-­hetero patriarchy, or else be punished for trying to resist? We never find out because by the end of the book Jo is married to the slovenly-­dressed, uninspiring, much older Professor Bhaer and gives up writing in order to start a school for boys. Though we start the book with Jo wanting to be a boy, the gender binary is in full force by the end of the book—girls must grow up into selfless, sacrificing women, while boys may do as they wish, under the care, wisdom, and worship of the women who feed, clothe, motivate, and care for them.

  Perhaps what I objected to most about Jo is how she starts off so ahead of her three sisters—showing gender­queer bravado and resisting conventionality—but by the end of the book, she seems the furthest behind, even more childish and stunted than Beth, who dies a selfless saint and is immortalized as a girl who never got to be a woman. Jo clings to her identity as a “daughter” and “sister” long after her own sisters have downgraded those to mere tertiary categories behind “wife” and “mother.” Jo’s self–pep talk is more than a touch strained as she tries to talk herself into being at peace with her fate:

  “An old maid—that’s what I’m to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps; when, like poor Johnson, I’m old, and can’t enjoy it—solitary, and can’t share it, independent, and don’t need it. Well, I needn’t be a sour saint nor a selfish sinner; and, I dare say, old maids are very comfortable when they get used to it; but—” and there Jo sighed, as if the prospect was not inviting.

  In rare direct address, the narrator of Little Women interjects to let us know the state of the union for young women of a certain class in post–Civil War America:

  Thirty seems the end of all things to five-­and-­twenty; but it’s not so bad as it looks, and one can get on quite happily if one has something in one’s self to fall back upon. At twenty-­five, girls begin to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never will; at thirty, they say nothing about it, but quietly accept the fact; and, if sensible, console themselves by remembering that they have twenty more useful, happy years, in which they may be learning to grow old gracefully. Don’t laugh at the spinsters, dear girls, for often very tender, tragical romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns, and many silent sacrifices of youth, health, ambition, love itself, make the faded faces beautiful in God’s sight. Even the sad, sour sisters should be kindly dealt with, because they have missed the sweetest part of life if for no other reason; and, looking at them with compassion, not contempt, girls in their bloom should remember that they too may miss the blossom time—that rosy cheeks don’t last forever, that silver threads will come into the bonnie brown hair, and that by and by, kindness and respect will be as sweet as love and admiration now.

  It’s a much softer version of a speech I had been hearing long before I even hit puberty. Ever since I could remember, my
parents warned me against spinsterhood. To be born a girl and never grow up to be someone’s mother, well that, my mother used to tell me in Chinese, is the most tragic existence possible. Worse than tragic, she’d often add. It means her time on earth was for nothing.

  She may as well not have been born? I suggested once, thinking if I could show my mother how dramatic she sounded, she might back off, but it only galvanized her.

  Yes, she said gravely. A girl who never marries and never has children is no one at all. She may as well have never existed.

  Once when I was still in grade school, my father took me with him to visit two women, sisters he knew from Shanghai, who now lived together in a big three-­story house in the suburbs of Long Island. One of them was unmarried and the other had a husband, but only on paper, as he was always away on some business trip. The visit was meant to be a teachable moment, because these sisters had it all—money, nice clothing, gourmet food, fancy cars—but they didn’t have a man around to open up a bottle of orange juice.

  Can you believe it? my parents said to me. To live in a house like that and not even be able to drink the juice you bought from the supermarket! Your father has to go once every two weeks, my mother said, to open all the jars for them.

  That was my first warning. Not long after, during a trip back to China, my parents introduced me to a distant aunt who was not only a spinster but apparently completely out of her mind. I had been told when she was young she was stunning, and knew it. Vanity, excessive belief in one’s own self-­worth, was a cardinal sin for any woman. My aunt had basked too much in her own looks, enjoyed too much the attention from men, and flaunted her beauty, jumping from man to man, always looking for someone better, richer, more handsome, more romantic, more devoted, until one day she was too old for any man, and there was suddenly no one left to jump into a relationship with. So she had a mental breakdown. She had run out the clock with her greed, with her belief that she was too good for anyone, and ended up with nothing.

  I didn’t quite believe all this, perhaps because I hadn’t even fully hit puberty yet and it was hard to imagine myself as a shrill old hag with nothing ahead of me but a possible stint in a mental institution. What was so dangerous about desire? Why was there a time limit for women? Why was it so wrong to believe in oneself? Why did we have to follow the rules of settling down (which to me might as well have been a synonym for “settling for”) by a certain age or be sentenced to eternal damnation? Men, like Bronson Alcott, seemed to have carte blanche to undertake one grand failed experiment after another, all their adventures and freedom to believe in themselves underwritten by a patriarchal structure that rewarded the delusional, outsized egos of men and punished any woman who dared to think herself capable of greatness. Women had to live for others while men got to live for themselves. Why was it that there was nothing worse than dying alone for a woman, whereas for a man, there was nothing worse than to die forgotten? Being egotistical about having genius and daring might be lauded in a man, but for a woman, it’s considered indulgent and immature.

  The confusing part about these early lessons in avoiding spinsterhood was how they coincided and clashed so thoroughly with equally urgent lessons against ever acting on any kind of sexual desire. A young girl had to remain innocent. Even to have desires of the flesh was unthinkable, it was certain death, a clear path to utter self-­destruction, the end of any kind of future worth living. The constant clamor of different alarm bells ringing in locked opposition with each other made rebellion confusing. Rejecting one thing sometimes meant inadvertently agreeing with another. I was supposed to be an aggressive prude who would rather kill a man with my bare hands than let one touch me, but if I wasn’t engaged to a man within twenty-­four hours after graduating college, a man who wanted to put a baby in me within the first six months of marriage, then I was in danger of becoming a useless washed-­up rag. Everything, apparently, had to be timed perfectly, or else, death!

  For my atheist Chinese mother who immigrated to the U.S. in her early thirties, staying a virgin until marriage wasn’t about not sinning or remaining virtuous, and to whatever extent her warnings could be considered slut-­shaming, they were a variety that seemed cartoonishly childish, like rejecting a kiss from a boy on the playground because he has cooties, or because boys are gross. My mother was always open about how much she loved being a daughter and tried to stay one as long as possible. At times it sounded like she got married only to please my grandmother. For my mother, it was utterly unfathomable that a girl might want to be touched by anyone outside of her own family in any way that was beyond the physical affection that a shared bloodline permitted—how could such a thought even exist? She loved to tell me how even into her twenties, she knew and cared so little about sex that she thought a woman could get pregnant just by sitting too close to a man. I was terrified to let your father even hold my hand, she would tell me.

  My parents had emigrated from China a couple years before me, and once they finally got everything in order for me to join them in New York, there was the question of who would take me. I knew nothing of the world except the ten-block radius in Shanghai that included my two sets of grandparents’ homes, my preschool, and the meat and vegetable market where we bought our daily groceries. Eventually it was decided that a family friend I had no recollection of ever meeting would take me, as he was planning to go to New York around the same time. This grown man and complete stranger held my hand and walked me through the boarding gate, down the aisle of the plane to our seats, and covered me with a blanket when I tired myself so much from sobbing that I abruptly fell asleep. He held my hand as we switched planes in Anchorage. He led me, by hand, to my parents when we finally landed in New York. I had been delivered to them by a man essentially hired to look after me. Like a debutante, I was ushered out into a new echelon of society. I was four and a half years old and I felt like my innocent days of being a carefree child were already behind me.

  I didn’t know anything about men or sex, my mother told me over and over again; on her wedding night, she said, all she wanted to do was go home to her parents’ house. And because my father was a softie who didn’t want to see my mother cry on their wedding night, he agreed that they should spend the first night of their married life, not in their new home as husband and wife, but in my mother’s childhood home where she was still her mother’s daughter.

  “I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it’s good for me.”

  Part two of Little Women is punctuated with a deeper flavor of misery than part one. Jo is utterly betrayed when she finds out Meg loves Laurie’s tutor, the humble and devoted John Brooke, who is as exciting as a saltine cracker and is therefore perfect for Meg, who always did aspire to very achievable goals in life. The breakup of the March family is more devastating and real to Jo than the possibility of a future where she might start her own. Louisa herself never married, and she remained steadfastly a daughter from the day she was born until the day she died. When the editor Thomas Niles asked Louisa to write a book for girls, she scoffed at the idea but eventually agreed to do it on the condition that he publish her father as well, who had written a book no one wanted. And so Little Women was written not purely out of self-­interest; it was, at least partially, motivated by daughterly devotion and a desire to help her father.

  After her father suffered a series of debilitating strokes in 1888, Louisa went to visit him and he reportedly told her, “I am going up. Come with me.” A day later, Louisa herself fell into a coma, perhaps finally succumbing to the slow burn of mercury poisoning from calomel she took for the typhoid fever she had contracted some twenty years earlier while nursing Union soldiers during the Civil War, and died two days after her father. She was reportedly buried at the foot of her parents’ and her sister Lizzie’s graves—devoted daughter and sister until the end.

  In the book, when the business of Meg and John Brooke sitting in a tree is made known to Jo, she laments, “I
just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family.” The deep attachment to family turns incestuous when one cannot age appropriately out of it. As a child, I was ashamed of Jo for not wanting to grow up, for wanting everything to stay as it had always been. My mother would often express to me her desire for time to stop, so I could be her baby forever. I was on the fence. I wanted to grow up even as I feared it. I had slept in the same bed as my parents the first two and a half years of my life. My father recalled waking up every hour in the first year to make sure neither he nor my mother rolled over and accidentally crushed me in their sleep. When I immigrated to America, I continued to sleep in the same bed as my parents. The closeness we shared was in part cultural—it’s much more accepted and encouraged in Chinese society for children to share a bed with their parents late into childhood. Based on anecdotal evidence, at least half of the Chinese mothers I knew shared a bed with their daughters until they went off to college, while the fathers slept in separate beds. For immigrants, this closeness can also be chalked up to lack of resources. I grew up sharing a house with several families, and the idea of having a separate bed, never mind separate bedrooms, was a luxury we could not afford in our first years in America. So when our economic situation improved, when we moved out of the first few neighborhoods where we lived, when we got a three-­bedroom house in the suburbs with a garage and driveway, a living room and a den, an eat-­in kitchen and a dining room, a front yard and a backyard, I began to see my mother’s physical affection for me as inappropriate. Now that we had all of this space, why on earth would I still crawl into her bed and let her spoon me? I was growing up and I wanted to be everything my parents feared.