March Sisters

by Kate Bolick

  1. Far more interesting, and what went over my head as a kid, was Jo’s delightful genderfuckery, her queerness. “I’m the man of the family now papa is away,” she says in an early chapter, and continues asserting her own masculinity throughout the novel. As a child, I thought that Laurie—prone to “Byronic fits of gloom,” a “glorious human boy” who “frolicked and flirted, grew dandified, aquatic, sentimental, [and] gymnastic,” “hinted darkly at one all-­absorbing passion”— was Jo’s one true love, and was of course heartbroken when she rejected him. As an adult—and recognizing Jo for who she was—I realized that my heartbreak was an unsettling precognition that they would have made a mercurial but otherwise fine gay couple.

  2. As a kid, I played a reissued version of the 1960s Barbie Queen of the Prom board game in which you vied against other players for four distinct dresses, dates, etc. with a clearly designed order of desirability. (Ken, for example, sat on one end, and indicated that in some way or another you’d won; getting Poindexter was a sign that you’d made some terrible choices.)

  3. For the record, I think I’m a Ravenclaw-­Meg-­Cancer with Slytherin-­Jo-­Poindexter rising and my daemon is an otter and my otter’s dae­mon is a naked mole rat.

  4. More than once, I’ve been advertised a personalized sweatshirt that reads: “It’s a Machado thing, you wouldn’t get it.”

  5. “‘We’re an ambitious set, aren’t we? Every one of us, but Beth, wants to be rich and famous, and gorgeous in every respect. I do wonder if any of us will ever get our wishes,’ said Laurie, chewing grass like a meditative calf.”

  6. Unlike the novel, in which Beth gets the illness while helping an impoverished family, the real-­life Lizzie likely picked up the illness from mother Abba. Louisa wrote in her journal that Lizzie caught it from “poor children Mother nursed when they fell sick, living over a cellar where pigs have been kept.”

  7. In 1843, the Alcotts participated in a short-­lived experiment they called Fruitlands: a vegan, agrarian, transcendentalist utopia in Harvard, Massachusetts. Like so many American utopian experiments—the Shakers, the Oneida Community—the members were progressive for their era but ultimately so ahead of their time they could not sustain themselves. On the ninety-­acre farm, Barry Hankins wrote in The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists, the group struggled to survive without the assistance of animal labor or products, and also eschewed coffee, tea, and rice, as well as “carrots, beets, and potatoes . . . because they showed a lower nature by growing downwards.”

  “Wearing [clothes] incapable of warding off the cold,” Hankins wrote, “and undernourished by the extremely ascetic diet, members abandoned the idea as winter ensued.” But before the experiment failed, the group celebrated Lizzie’s eighth birthday. The group decided to give her an imaginary bouquet of flowers. Charles Lane, cofounder of Fruitlands, offered her a fictional piece of moss—humility. Anna offered a rose—grace. May, a tiger­lily—passion. Louisa, a lily of the valley—sweetness. And Abba, a forget-­me-­not.

  8. Bronson Alcott in particular was a follower of Samuel Christian Hahnemann, founder of homeopathic medicine.

  9. “Anticipating that Lizzie would soon throw off her illness,” writes John Matteson in Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, “Bronson put much faith in the fact that she had never tasted animal food.”

  10. I read The Hot Zone in one night, under the blankets with a flashlight. It would have been horrifying enough on its own, but when I finished, I turned the book back over to its cover and noticed the copy beneath the title—“A TERRIFYING TRUE STORY”—and those words scrolled through my brain like ticker tape until the sun crept into the sky.

  11. During the pre-­op appointment for a diagnostic procedure I had when I was a young teenager, I made a nurse promise that they would not deliberately screw up my anesthesia in order to harvest my organs from my still-­living body. My concerns stemmed from Cook’s 1987 best-­selling medical thriller Coma, which I’d secreted from a church bazaar without my mother’s knowledge.

  12. It should be pointed out that this was more or less the explicit purpose of the novels’ symptom scenes; “teen sick-­lit’s unrelenting diagnostic indexing of characters’ symptoms also compels readers to imagine their own bodies as subject to an endless ‘body project,’ encouraging them to self-­examine not only for signs of illness (as many fans of the books report doing) but also for other markers of undesirability or abnormality that might be improved.” (Julie Passanante Elman, “Nothing Feels as Real.”) It is probably not a coincidence that I more than once imagined that the pesky extra pounds I’d gained during the onset of puberty would be conveniently dealt with via chemotherapy if I was (un)lucky enough to have cancer.

  13. The fundamental problem with this psychological mindset is that where you are in the narrative of your life entirely depends upon what sort of author is writing your story. Lurlene McDaniel? Terry Pratchett? Jonathan Franzen?

  14. In a surviving diary, ten-­year-­old Lizzie writes of a classmate bringing in “a little dead squirrel in a paper coffin.” Her response is comically neutral: “[It] gave us something to talk about.”

  15. Shortly before Beth’s death, Jo imagines giving her beloved sister “strawberries in winter”; “strawberry tongue” is a classic symptom of scarlet fever.

  16. “‘If we are all alive ten years hence, let’s meet, and see how many of us have got our wishes, or how much nearer we are then than now,’ said Jo, always ready with a plan.”

  17. Called “Mouse” by her family, Beth loves to play with cats.

  18. As an adult, Margaret is a doctor who works in the NICU, and I am still writing large and dramatic backstories for people who don’t have them.

  19. Bronson gave the manuscript to friend Ralph Waldo Emerson for his feedback; Emerson reluctantly informed him that the majority of the project was unpublishable, and Bronson eventually abandoned it.

  20. From “Charite’s Rape, Psyche on the Rock and the Parallel Function of Marriage in Apuleius’ ‘Metamorphoses’” by Sophia Papaioannou.

  21. Vrettos also points out that while “the strong, masculine Jo is the family ‘scribbler,’ making her way in the world through the art of storytelling, Beth is associated with the passive virtues of domesticity and silence. Beth is incapable of refiguring the world in fiction. . . . During a storytelling game at Laurie’s picnic, Beth ‘disappear[s] behind Jo,’ leaving control of language to her more verbally dexterous sister. Whereas the other participants shape the interlocking stories to their own temperaments (Mr. Brooke fashions a tale of chivalrous knighthood; Meg a ghostly romance; Amy a fairy tale, and Jo a playful confusion of genres), Beth’s life remains untransformed by linguistic play.” Not only is she unable to locate herself as a character in a story, she is unable to tell a story, too.

  22. Upon Lizzie’s death Abba wrote, “Elizabeth passed quietly into Shadow Land.”

  23. And, in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), she expertly plays an utterly guileless young woman who is born with her fate firmly and tragically intact.

  24. Muttonchopped nineteenth-­century neurologist George Beard, who coined the term “neurasthenia,” believed that the condition could in part be blamed on “an increase of mental activity among women,” a symptom of the modern age.

  25. In one journal—kept in 1846, when she was ten—she mostly wrote of poetry memorized and words learned, of her sewing and walks and the weather. On September 29 of that year, a Tuesday, Lizzie wrote, “After dinner, I washed the dishes and [Abba] and I played in [her] chamber. I was a sick lady and Abba was a doctor.”

  WHEN I WAS growing up (I think I first read Little Women when I was ten) I identified with Jo—she was tall, she was literary,
and she represented Alcott herself. Her journey is the most prominent of the four. But now, when I look at the girls, the one I enjoy the most is Amy.

  When we meet the March sisters on page one, it is Christmas and there are no presents because of the Civil War—lack of funds, frightening absence of Father. Each girl responds to the news characteristically—Jo (aged 15) grumbles, Meg (16) sighs, Amy (12) offers “an injured sniff,” and Beth (13 to 14) speaks last, “contentedly.” The four girls then recollect that each of them has saved a bit of money, about a dollar (maybe $19.00 now). Meg says that she would like to buy herself some “pretty things.” Jo wants a copy of a book of two fantastical stories translated from German, one about a water sprite, the other about a knight. Beth would like some music (she is the pianist), and Amy says, “decidedly,” that she wants drawing pencils. None of the four seems more selfish than the others at this point, but the next passage is revealing. Each sister now issues a complaint—Meg about the children she takes care of, Jo about her “fussy” aunt, whom she also tends to, Beth about her household tasks (though she doesn’t like to complain). Amy, who is the only one who goes to school, makes the most modern complaint—at twelve, she is surrounded by other twelve-­year-­olds. She says, “I don’t believe any of you suffer as I do, for you don’t have to go to school with impertinent girls, who plague you if you don’t know your lessons, and laugh at your dresses, and label your father if he isn’t rich, and insult you when your nose isn’t nice” (by “label” Amy means “libel”). Because she negotiates the social world of what would now be junior high school, Amy is (and must be) always aware not only of her own feelings but of her social status and how she appears.

  In fact, Jo and Amy constitute two types of feminists we will see in the future who will agree on some matters and disagree on others—Jo is the one who values her independence and wishes to retain it even if it leads to disagreement or unhappiness; Amy is the one who thinks that the best option for doing what she wants is to learn to navigate and make use of the world she is stuck with. We might think of Jo as the “agitator,” Amy as the “political operative.”

  It is no surprise that of the four, Jo and Amy are the two who are most often at odds with one another. One reason is that, as every novelist knows, and as Alcott herself knew, all four of the sisters cannot be good—readers with their own daughters and sisters wouldn’t buy it and if there was no conflict, no character development, the plot would have nothing to build upon. Meg has a few faults, but she must end up as the wife and mother. Beth has no faults—she is the sacrificial victim (and realistically so, since many nineteenth-century children died before they reached adulthood). Jo is the central character who needs a foil, and Amy is it. If she is going to be a worthy foil, she needs to be as complex as Jo—as ready to learn, though in different ways, and as ready to do battle so that their conflict will force them to learn from their experiences. She can’t be a flat character, and she isn’t—though as the youngest, most petted sister she is often seen by her sisters (and by readers) as vain, calculating, and spoiled—she actually has the self-­awareness and reflectiveness that will help her navigate the adult world.

  Alcott was inspired by John Bunyan’s sixteenth-­century allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress—her epigraph makes this explicit in directing the reader’s attention to the less-­often-­read book two of The Pilgrim’s Progress, the story of Christiana, her young neighbor Mercy, and Christiana’s children as they journey to the Celestial City—but instead of medieval women on pilgrimage, her subjects were modern girls living in the modern world. Their job is to negotiate real events—war, poverty, family life, career aspirations, and, of course, growing into womanhood. But what is their goal? Marmee would say that it is to be kind, self-­sacrificing, womanly, generous, to marry, have children, and serve others, and indeed they do, when they get to the Hummels’ shack: Hannah builds the fire, Marmee tends to the mother and baby, and Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy (who has offered to “‘. . . take the cream and the muffins,’ . . . heroically giving up the articles she most liked”) lay out the provisions and feed the hungry children. Their Christmas is merry and their lesson is a religious one, as Meg understands: the lesson of loving thy neighbor.

  Alcott’s theory of child development is specifically Christian, as were most American theories of child development until the early twentieth century. Marmee’s goal is to get Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy to adhere to a set of general principles. She chooses to do it through kind persuasion rather than force, and the two parts of Little Women constitute a demonstration of how that system works. Marmee’s job is not the one most modern American mothers take on: to investigate the individuality of her children, to contemplate their differences and decide if their qualities are a product of nature or nurture. It never occurs to Marmee to wonder if the chaos of having four daughters in four years, and in moderate circumstances, has caused those daughters to develop in idiosyncratic ways. As a mother, I would have told her that Amy was certainly shaped by, and has in some ways benefited from, the inevitable neglect she would have experienced as a baby and a toddler when her sisters were five, four, and two—she would have had plenty of time on her own to explore her world and think her own thoughts. Those of us with several children know that she would also have had to avoid being bullied, to protect her toys and her other possessions from the older girls, and to assert herself from time to time.

  Alcott herself was from an interesting family that had strong convictions—her uncle, Samuel J. May, was a prominent Unitarian minister and abolitionist leader, and her mother, Abigail May, together with Alcott’s father, Bronson, dedicated their lives to social reform, the abolition of slavery, and the promotion of temperance, women’s rights, and aid to the poor. Bronson was famous (or infamous) for classroom innovations that would now seem progressive—Socratic (rather than prescriptive) discussions of hot-­button issues, like the meaning of biblical stories, or having students explore their own experiences through writing about them. His experimental schools and the books he wrote describing his unconventional teaching methods garnered significant criticism and no money. Around the time that May Alcott (the model for Amy) was born, the family was living in Concord, Massachusetts, and being supported by Ralph Waldo Emerson. When Louisa was ten, Bronson bought some property and attempted to establish an ideal agrarian community—no meat, no animal labor, no leather or fabrics that were grown by means of slave labor (cotton, silk, wool). The new experiment lasted seven months. This idealism and family background had a strong influence on Louisa. She herself later said that she had a powerful religious experience (though she never officially joined a church):

  “Running in the Concord woods early one fall morning, she stopped to see the sunshine over the meadows. ‘A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I felt God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that happy sense of nearness all my life.’”*

  When a publisher suggested to her in 1867 that she write a book for girls, she realized that as an unmarried woman with no children, she didn’t particularly like girls, so she turned to her own experiences for material. When she sat down to write Little Women, she recalled the precepts that her mother had employed to raise her and her sisters while contending with the chaos produced by her principled and eccentric father, and she also pulled from the actual lives of herself and her three sisters. By the time Louisa was writing Little Women, May was in her mid-­twenties, and had spent much of her life learning to teach children or teaching them. She was an active artist, studied when she was in her late teens at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, and she also supplied the illustrations for Little Women as well as publishing her own art book, called Concord Sketches. Like Louisa, she was single, and she remained single until she was in her late thirties.

 
Perhaps the first in-­depth exploration of Amy’s experiences, and also the first hurdle Amy must confront in her path to self-­knowledge, comes in chapter seven. In order to claim some status at her school, Amy thinks she must share with the other girls a treat that is the latest craze, pickled limes (which are limes preserved in salt). Meg gives her a quarter, worth maybe five dollars today; Amy buys some, and carries them to school in a brown paper bag. Then comes a classic episode of bullying that every modern girl can recognize—she gets some praise from her teacher for maps she has drawn, and the girl who envies the praise tattles to the teacher about the pickled limes. Amy is called to the front of the room, forced to throw the limes out the window, then subjected to having her hand smacked with a ruler. The pain is not as great as the humiliation, and, perhaps thinking of Bronson Alcott’s educational principles, Alcott writes, “during the twelve years of her life she had been governed by love alone, and a blow of that sort had never touched her.” Since physical punishment, sometimes brutal, was routine in the nineteenth century (and stories from my own relatives born in the 1880s and ’90s attest to this), this line is perhaps the most radical in the book so far—I don’t think most of us in the twenty-­first century understand how fundamental whipping and humiliation were to nineteenth-­century educational theories and practices. Marmee “comforts” Amy by criticizing her: “You are getting to be altogether too conceited and important, my dear, and it is quite time you set about correcting it. You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius.” It is true that Amy took the pickled limes to school in order to elevate her status. But it was showing off by giving gifts, not preening or bragging. I, perhaps, am more forgiving than Marmee is. Amy then voices the lesson she has learned from the events in her chapter: “I see, it’s nice to have accomplishments, and be elegant, but not to show off, or get perked up.”