by Kate Bolick
I was not a good sick kid. I catastrophized. I howled. I refused the bribery, and then demanded it. I kicked and hit. I sobbed and, when I learned how, swore. I told my mother I hated her. I told the medical professionals I’d rather do anything than have one more doctor touch me. I told them I’d rather die.
When I was seven—before the symptoms manifested themselves, but when I was already a weirdo and a nervous wreck—I read Little Women for the first time. The book was a gift from my godmother, Eleanor Jacobs. In her twenties, my mother had worked for Eleanor as a personal assistant and aide. When I was a kid, Eleanor was in her eighties and in an assisted living facility because she had multiple sclerosis.
Though I didn’t know it yet, Eleanor was a woman after my own heart. Her late husband had worked as a distributor for Paramount, though she’d been widowed since the sixties, and she had spent many years living in Guatemala, Trinidad, Panama. Eleanor was the epitome of elegance and worldliness, a formidable woman who, when she died, was only two days shy of her ninety-sixth birthday. She had a deep and raspy voice—a smoker’s voice, though I don’t know if she smoked; when they flew, my mother would show up to the airport in sweatpants and Eleanor in white gloves and full makeup and with all her jewelry on because you always needed to look your best to fly.
Every summer, when we visited my mother’s people in Wisconsin, we made a special trek to Madison to visit Eleanor. I loved her long-term care facility. It was like a mini-city, a single building with everything one might need. On the way to Eleanor’s room from the entrance, we would walk past endless open doors; you could see, in turn, women having their hair pressed, a group playing pinochle, a resident weaving on a loom. At the intersection between two corridors there was a massive aviary, full of bright and radiant songbirds. In Eleanor’s room, we had our ritual: she’d give me a feathery peck on my cheek, which left a bright streak of lipstick behind. Then, she’d gesture to the corner, where the nurses had artfully arranged my gifts.
While she occasionally gave me a little something else—a personalized stationery set, journals, newspaper clippings about powerful women or writers, once, a silver locket—Eleanor primarily gifted me books. She had a distinctive type: female-centered classic literature—Little Women, The Secret Garden, A Little Princess—and long and difficult works of nonfiction with a decidedly feminist bent: the collected letters of Susan B. Anthony, a book about the first ladies, The Diary of Anne Frank. She didn’t give presents like that to my siblings, and that led me to conclude that they were not gifts meant to direct me toward new and better literature, not moral instruction manuals or pointed prescriptions for good behavior. Instead, these gifts were intended to draw out something deep inside me, something special, that was already there; something my mother could not sense, but that Eleanor could.
Every time we visited, my mother received no-nonsense marriage advice from Eleanor while I curled up in the corner, reading whatever she’d given me. Every so often, Eleanor would turn to me to ask me questions. How was school? What had I read lately? What was I writing about? They were way more interesting than the questions most adults asked me, about how good I was or how carefully I listened to my parents. They were the kind I wanted to answer.
Little Women impressed the hell out of me. It was, as a physical object, beautiful and distinctly dangerous. It was also huge, the hugest book I’d ever seen. It seemed to have its own gravity, to pull other books around it on the shelf into its formidable orbit. I liked carrying it around because it impressed and confused adults, which was at that age my primary concern. One of my teachers didn’t believe I’d read it—as if it were a copy of War and Peace—and quizzed me on its plot until she was satisfied.
And it was—I realized upon beginning to read it—very old. Not the edition itself, which was new, but the book had been written even before I or my mother or even Eleanor was born. I was still learning what it meant to read “old” books; how they read differently than “new” books. I knew that people wrote books in the past but assumed that they would be impossible to grasp, and yet when I made my way through Alcott’s prose I found the story funny and recognizable. I also adored the way the novel resembled Eleanor’s home, a little city with so many delightful rooms. Picaresque—or, at the very least, episodic—with magnificent chapter titles like “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation,” it became a touchstone for me. When people asked me about my favorite books, the list was constantly in flux, but Little Women was always there.
I was in a production of Little Women in middle school, as Marmee; it was the closest I ever came to a leading role. I got to wear a wonderful red dress. My longtime crush played Mr. March, and when he returned home from war, I was instructed to rush at him and receive a kiss on the cheek. During the scene in which Marmee receives a letter that her husband is gravely ill, I was permitted to clasp my hand to my bosom and swoon into an overstuffed chair.
Revisiting Little Women’s little women as an adult was both strange and surprising. Despite my powerful abiding aversion to Amy—her burning of Jo’s manuscript created a deep, lifelong terror of losing the only copy of one’s words—I have softened toward her a smidge, if only because she changes the most over the course of the novel, while also remaining utterly herself. (Though I still firmly believe that the otherwise very morally pure and instructive plot point of Jo rescuing her when she falls through thin ice and then reflecting guiltily on her own anger would have been far more interesting—and satisfying—if Jo had simply watched her go under.) I am unnerved, as an adult, to identify with Meg the most—that is to say, a boring homebody who wants fine things (“If only I had a silk!”). Jo is of course a delight insofar as she is a writer of infinite invention and imagination who frequently loses herself in her work, but she reads as a bit more tedious—a bit more Mary-Sue, perhaps—to my present self.1
But Beth? What was there to say about Beth? Reading the book with her death in mind was singularly odd. I waited for it, like a guillotine. I remembered so little about her that I was surprised to discover that she’s alive for a full 80 percent of it. If you’d asked me before the reread, I would have sworn she died somewhere toward the middle, maybe even earlier.
Little Women was an early example of character archetypes as clearly mappable, Cosmo magazine–style personality types,2 a prototype for Harry Potter’s houses or His Dark Materials’ daemons. Are you Jo, the Gryffindor of the group—brave, who suffers no fools while also being insufferable, thinks quite highly of herself, the author-insert character everyone wants to be? Or maybe you’re Amy—power-hungry, silly, vain; Slytherin, obviously—Jo’s main antagonist within the family. Perhaps Meg, Ravenclaw—dull in personality but smart and interested in the finer things in life. Or maybe—heavens forfend!—you’re Hufflepuff Beth: pure and loyal, dowdy and dead.
It is a curious thing, the archetype—a feature of some genres (fairy tale, satire) and a taboo in others (realism). When they appear where they are not expected, they feel curiously incomplete, as if a single character has been lopped apart. But in real life, we love to be shoved into these boxes.3 We love horoscopes and Myers-Briggs and hometown clichés and other clannish taxidermies.4 This instinct to put things in easily identifiable categories starts young; it is literally part of childhood development. (Even the aggravating focus on “girl” things and “boy” things is a combination of unnecessary adult obsession with gender binaries and children’s natural instincts to make things fit into one place or another.) This preoccupation lasts into adulthood for all of the obvious reasons: the desire to be part of a group, comfort in the idea that there are others like you, the latent belief that your personality is, in a way, outside of your control. It also provides a soothing lack of wholeness: the idea that the puzzle-piece that is us is meant to link up with the puzzle-pieces of other people. (“Beth is my conscience,” Jo tells Laurie.) It is also a way of defining who we are not: I am not a Slytherin, I am the oppo
site of a Taurus, I’d rather die than be a Meg. Even though, like astrological signs and Hogwarts houses, these qualities only add together to create one, maybe one-and-a-half distinct people, we crave their guidance. We gain much by blunting ourselves against the archetype’s hard surface.
Beth is the too-pure-for-this-world archetype made manifest. She is beautiful but sexless, artistic but very embarrassed about it, and it’s good that she doesn’t demonstrate any kind of ambition5 because she’s going to die. And I don’t mean that in a “we’re all mortal” sense; she is created with her premature death already seared into the timeline, a fact of her personality. She is born a ghost.
In the first chapter of Little Women, when Louisa May Alcott is doling out archetypes to the siblings, Beth asks, “If Jo is a tomboy and Amy a goose, what am I, please?”
“You’re a dear,” Meg answers, “and nothing else.”
People who have studied anything about Little Women know that the novel is based, roughly, on Louisa’s family, a clan of thinkers, artists, and transcendentalists who rubbed elbows with some of the premier minds of their time: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller.
Beth is no exception; she is based on Alcott’s second-youngest sister, Lizzie. Lizzie, like Beth, was stricken with scarlet fever.6 (During this initial illness, her family—vegans7 and believers in alternative medicine8—did not send for a doctor.9) Like Beth, she recovered from the illness but, her heart weakened, never regained full health. Like Beth, she died tragically young, though not quite as young as her literary counterpart.
But while Beth bore her suffering gladly, with unconscionable cheer and resolution, Lizzie was enraged at the fact of her own mortality. “In Little Women,” writes Alcott biographer Susan Cheever, “Beth has a quiet, dignified death, a fictional death. Although young Lizzie Alcott was a graceful, quiet woman, she was not so lucky. A twenty-two-year-old whose disease had wasted her body so that she looked like a middle-aged woman, she lashed out at her family and her fate with an anger that she had never before expressed.” Louisa and the others caring for Lizzie plied her with morphine, ether, and opium, though eventually they lost any effect they once had on her. “[The] pain,” writes Cheever in American Bloomsbury, “seemed to drive her mad . . . even on large doses of opium, Lizzie attacked her sisters and asked to be left in peace.”
By the end, the fight had gone out of her body. The final words her family could understand were, “Well now, mother, I go, I go. How beautiful everything is tonight,” though she “kept up a little inaudible monologue” for a short while after that. When she passed, both Louisa and Abba reported seeing a “light mist rise from the body and float up and vanish in the air.”
Lizzie was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, on a patch of land she’d chosen before her death. Thoreau and Emerson served as pallbearers. “Emerson told the officiating minister, who did not know the family well, that Lizzie was a good, unselfish, patient child, who made friends even in death,” John Matteson wrote in Eden’s Outcasts. “Everyone seemed to forget that they were not burying a child but a woman of twenty-two.”
I once read a distraught, pearl-clutching editorial in a British newspaper that bemoaned the rise of sick-lit. “While the Twilight series and its imitators are clearly fantasy, these books don’t spare any detail of the harsh realities of terminal illness, depression, and death,” wrote a blusteringly scandalized woman named Tanith Carey. “Most are also liberally peppered with sex and swearing.” She claimed to trace the phenomenon back to The Lovely Bones—published in 2002—seeming to not know how old the genre of “young people in bodily peril” really was.
I spent the better part of the nineties devouring sick-lit for young people, as well as adult books—memoirs about illness and medical thrillers alike—that hit similarly dramatic and gruesome notes: Alex, the Life of a Child (a father tells the story of his daughter’s fight against cystic fibrosis); Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone (in which viral hemorrhagic fevers turn the human body into quivering puddles of blood pudding10); all of the Robin Cook novels.11
But the genre’s undeniable master is Lurlene McDaniel, who has written dozens of books about teenagers at the mercy of cancer, organ failure, and other “faultless” diseases. “In the nineties, librarians started referring to me as the crying-and-dying lady,” she once told a bookstore audience, and indeed, that was precisely what I—a highly sensitive burgeoning hypochondriac with some kind of undiagnosed ailment—wanted from a book. I wanted the emotional catharsis that those books could provide—books with titles like Six Months to Live, I Want to Live, So Much to Live For, No Time to Cry—even if I spent the whole time reading them checking my body for the telltale bruises that might indicate I had leukemia, imagining what I’d look like without hair.12
Adulthood did not alleviate any of this specific anxiety, though it did change a bit. Instead of using novels as analogue WebMD, I began to think of myself and my body in narrative terms. A few years back, my parents called to tell me my paternal grandmother and aunt had both been diagnosed with breast cancer. Immediately, my mind went to a pulpy V. C. Andrews novel, Heaven, that I’d devoured as a preteen. In it, a villainous stepmother—who chapters earlier had disemboweled the protagonist’s hamster in revenge for sleeping with her husband—is felled mid-story by an advanced case of breast cancer, which had been missed because of her preternaturally large chest. I had never before considered my own massive bust as a cause for alarm; but afterward, I began the ritual of feeling up myself in the shower in an attempt to locate that fatal lump that could blossom into death, lifting and tugging and pulling at my breast in front of the mirror. “I can feel the cancer,” I said to a friend, and I was certain I could, a kind of pinching deep in the tissue. “You can’t,” she said. “You absolutely can’t.” I hyperventilated in the cheery parlor of my grad program’s building, my head between my knees. This could be it, this could be it, I thought. This is the part of the novel where I am challenged. The complication. Or maybe . . . or maybe it’s the end of the whole damn book and I’m about to die.13
In her academic essay “Nothing Feels as Real,” on the implications of the sick-lit subgenre, Julie Passanante Elman asserts that the genre is an inherently political one, in which “compulsory” heteronormativity and able-bodiedness are paramount. The genre’s primary characteristic is to rehabilitate the “unruly crip/queer” (like So Much to Live For’s Marlee, who refuses to be pleasant or wear a headscarf to conceal her partially bald head; her rehabilitation takes the form of a nineties-teen-romcom makeover, though it does not save her in the end). The end of all this wrangling is what Elman calls the “managed heart” of the reader; a genre that purports to “give teens a dose of reality” instead gives them a “powerful cultural fantasy” of rewards and punishments tied to their presentability and agreeableness. (Consider the elegance of Beth’s pallor; the romantic, swooning Victorian softness of her illness.) Instead of acknowledging the capriciousness of illness and death—how they strike at random, metastasize without warning, and leave no space for narrative neatness—the cultural acceptability of the narrative is paramount.
This mix of signals properly confused me. In addition to being a sick kid, I—to my mind—was not sick enough. I could not imagine being well, but I also could not imagine dying virtuously. My illness was not attractive or romantic—I was not pale or ethereal or waifish or magnificently bald; my illness did not make me fashionably thin. My symptoms involved shitting and vomiting and stomach cramps. I missed enough school to make my life difficult, but not enough that people wondered where I was. I was a sort-of-sick hypochondriac; it was the worst scenario I could imagine.
Little Women is positively lousy with premonitions of Beth’s death. Beth is, in turn, forced to stare down her beloved dead canary, Pip—“who lay dead in the cage with his little claws pathetically extended, as if im
ploring the food for want of which he had died”—and bury him in a domino box,14 and to cradle a baby dead from the same scarlet fever that would, years later, kill her. Little cruelties and ironies abound throughout the entire book—everything from strawberries in winter15 to castles in the sky16 to animal metaphors17 seem like odd jokes or else Alcott’s subconscious planting her grief on every page. But the grief is, otherwise, a strange and flattening thing; beneath its weight, Beth becomes faultless, angelic, positively uncomplicated. Her ambitions are not squashed by her infirmity, because she has none. Her only imperfection—shyness—seems like a humblebrag, like a job candidate telling an interviewer that her primary flaw is “working too hard.”
There is also the extended sequence in which we learn that Beth cares for a group of invalid dolls abandoned by her more discerning siblings. She cares for them the way she will be cared for one day.
Not one whole or handsome one among them, all were outcasts till Beth took them in . . . [she] cherished them all the more tenderly for that very reason, and set up a hospital for infirm dolls. No pins were ever stuck into their cotton vitals, no harsh words or blows were ever given them, no neglect ever saddened the heart of the most repulsive, but all were fed and clothed, nursed and caressed with an affection which never failed. . . . If anyone had known the care lavished on [her dolls], I think it would have touched their hearts, even while they laughed.
Reading it, I thought about the hospital I created with my friend Margaret for our American Girl dolls. With the assistance of her mother, who was a nurse, we constructed EKG machines from paper and cardboard and IVs with Ziploc bags and food dye and diagnosed our dolls—hers a Molly and mine a Girl of Today I called Sara, after the protagonist in A Little Princess—with terrible diseases that needed immediate attention. It was as frenetic a scene as Beth’s was docile—active, whirring care. We created a large and dramatic backstory in which we were sisters, and the dolls our daughters who had matching undiagnosed ailments.18 I drew stitches on my doll’s stomach and my mother almost had a heart attack. She asked me if I knew how expensive the doll had been; I told her mysterious illnesses did not make such judgments.