Before women were asking “am I a Carrie or a Samantha?”, they were asking “Am
I a Jo or an Amy?” Before there was Edward vs Jacob, there was Laurie vs Professor Bhaer.
And over the more than 150 years since Little Women was originally published, there have
been dozens of adaptations, feature films, television adaptations, plays,
ballets, operas and at least two animes based on it.
So despite being written off as proto-chick lit or kiddie lit or as Alcott herself said,
"moral pap for the young,” Little Women has worked its way into the consciousness
of readers for the last 150 years, and has stayed there.
But what is it about the tale of the March sisters that keeps us coming back?
For those of you haven’t read the book or seen one of these many adaptations, Little
Women, written by Louisa May Alcott and published in two parts between 1868 and 1869, is the
story of the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. The novel follows their trials
and tribulations growing up in Concord, Massachusetts during the Civil War, while their father is
off serving as a chaplain in the Union Army. They are brought up by their austere and wise
mother, or Marmee, and are taught all sorts of empowering lessons about being kind, charitable,
intelligent, and loving in the face of hardship. The token boy of their world is their rich,
half-Italian orphan friend Laurie, who is our romantic McGuffin for the novel.
Now in terms of plot, the book is less story driven and more of a series of character vignettes
exploring the lives of the titular “Little Women” as they leave behind childhood and
enter adulthood. Giving away their Christmas breakfast, Jo cutting of her hair for money,
Amy burning Jo’s manuscript (which has scarred generations of young female writers forever),
Laurie’s proposal to Jo and her rejection of it, and Laurie eventually settling for
Amy. And what else? Oh, yeah. Beth dying tragically young.
Spoiler alert, I guess.
Now you might think that all this mundane, sentimental, and moral lesson rearing was
the kind of work that Alcott was used to writing, but if you take a look at how the novel came
to be, you find that Little Women was actually somewhat outside of her wheelhouse.
In September of 1867, publisher Thomas Niles wrote to Alcott to ask if she would write
a book specifically targeted to young girls, but she wasn’t initially wild about the
idea. Said Alcott: “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer
plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it." Ouch. However, in spite
of her initial animosity towards the idea, Alcott took the experiences of her life and
family and, with some creative flair, turned them into what would become Little Women.
According to Anne Boyd Rioux, Alcott used the book as an “opportunity to immortalize
some aspects of her life while concealing others.”
Alcott was herself the second of four sisters, the others being Abigail May, Elizabeth, and
Anna. Roughly, Anna became Meg, Abigail May became Amy, and Elizabeth was … well Beth.
And Jo was basically a self-insert of Alcott.
The Alcott patriarch, Amos Bronson Alcott was both a man very ahead of his time in terms
of abolition, women’s rights, and education, while also being a fanatic who put his principles
ahead of his family’s well being. Because he was vegan, before anyone thought veganism
was cool, his family wasn’t allowed to eat meat or wear anything other than linen. In
the winter. In Concord, Massachusetts. And he only approved of vegetables that grew upward.
So potatoes were out, too. Oh, and he left his wife while she was pregnant with their
third child to go stay in a room by the Pennsylvania library so he could read.
Maybe this constant absence in his family’s life is why Mr. March isn’t around in the
novel, although Alcott gives the fictional father a more noble reason to be gone.
Thanks, Daddy-A.
As the scholar Judith Fetterley writes, “Much of the popularity of Little Women, then and
now, derives from its embodiment of the cultural fantasy of the happy family,” which the
Alcotts both were and were not.
The Alcott sisters like the March sisters, had real artistic ambitions. The sister who
Meg is based on had dreamed of being an actress, “just as Louisa had dreamed of becoming
a famous author and May a famous artist.” And with Jo, Alcott’s stand-in, the shared
dream to be a famous writer blurs the lines between reality and fiction.
Alcott wrote primarily as a means to provide for her family -- according to Rioux, “writing
could never be a purely artistic affair. There was room in the Alcott family for only one
self-absorbed genius.” Thanks, Daddy-A.
Alcott would get between $50 and $75 for each of her stories, which was pretty bank for
the day--she actually preferred to write her revenge and saucy stuff under the pen name
A. M. Barnard, to keep the Alcott #brand consistent.
While Jo at first writes saucy, violent short stories out of general love of the game, she
ends up doing it because it makes money, and because she has yet to write her real masterpiece,
her in-universe novel also titled Little Women.
Alcott successfully negotiated with her publishers so that she kept the copyright for Little
Women, which they caved on with little pressure because they didn’t think it would end up
being the gangbuster that it was. Part One’s initial printing sold out so quickly that
the company who published it, Roberts Brothers, had trouble keeping up with demand! And it’s
never been out of print since.
And little women wasn’t just a hit with, well, little women. As a contemporary of Alcott’s
wrote, “Grave merchants and lawyers meeting on their way down town in the morning said
to each other, Have you read little women and laughed as they said it.”
But more noteworthy than its commercial success was what Little Women brought to the table
on the literary side of things. According to Rioux, “What Alcott brought to children’s—and
American—literature was the fresh language of American colloquialism, [...] and a precursor
to the even more “vulgar” speech of the lower-class Huck Finn, who would appear sixteen
years later, in 1884.” In terms of writing, what made Alcott’s work so noticeable was
the way it so realistically captured the slang and “vulgarity” of everyday life without
wordy purple prose.
But if the book allowed Alcott to comfortably provide for her family, it also meant that
she had to deal with... fans.
According to Rioux: “Their letters poured in with demands to know what would happen
to the four March girls, or, most importantly, whom they would marry, ‘as if that was the
only end and aim of a woman’s life,’ the author grumbled.”
Once the second volume was published, a lot of fans and critics, both back then and today,
took real issue with Jo giving up her career to be married, but that wasn’t where Alcott
had originally intended to take the character -- it was a narrative choice made at the encouragement
of Alcott’s publishers. Alcott wanted Jo to be an unmarried successful writer, but
that idea was a little too revolutionary for the 1860’s.
As the scholar Ann Douglas has noted, Alcott “could not disregard, however, the unpleasant
facts confronting her female contemporaries and characters; unlike her male peers, a Victorian
woman rarely had a spouse, a family, and a full-time career.”
SO Jo, under pressure from the publisher, had to have a husband and not a career. But
if Jo was gonna have a happy ending, it was going to be in terms that felt real. Alcott,
much like Rian Johnson, didn’t believe in giving in to fanservice. Despite the reader’s
wishes, Louisa refused to pair Jo up with Laurie, her dreamboat neighbor with enough
money to solve all of her family’s problems. Denying 19th century readers their ultimate
OTP.
So she gave Jo her very own creepy old guy--I mean, older German professor--and the film
adaptations have been trying to figure out how to make THAT work for over a hundred years.
(Newer versions deal with it by making him either a) hot and/or b) younger)
So even though the publisher wanted the picture of mid 19th century womanhood filtered through
a certain lens, Alcott’s personal life is heavily infused into the final product - and
that sense of realness is a part of what has made it so enduring. Douglas has called these
sisters, “the only mythic American characters from the Victorian era unashamedly believably
actively capable of love friendship, loyalty and sheer fun.”
Rioux adds that “Little Women was a cultural phenomenon that knew no boundaries of age,
gender, or class.”
Yeah, so let’s unpack that.
It is interesting to think that a book about four cis-hetero white women has managed to
last so long and be so universally loved. From the queer readings of Jo and the racebent
adaptations or books inspired by Little Women, it is clear that there is something that connects
women across the board with this novel. It’s more than just a book about a group of sisters
coming of age and getting married - And perhaps it’s that the March sisters have the relative
freedom to be themselves and feel cherished, despite society’s constraints.
They feel human and tangible with their virtues and vices, while also having the full ability
to experience girlhood. For a lot of marginalized people, the girlhood of Meg, Jo, Beth, and
Amy might not be relatable, but it is as idyllic, fantastic, and magical as the idea of getting
a letter from Hogwarts. For Alcott, the cozy world of the Marches was somewhat distant
from her own life of poverty, abolition, and frustration.
But there’s always a need to return to a place of innocence and freedom, regardless
if it is something you’ve experienced or not. as times change, we find new ways to
express the universal elements in Little Women.
...and i’ll let you finish
Louisa May Alcott was raised to believe she could be anything she wanted to be, that there
were no limits in what women could do, in spite of real world limitations. Despite her
initial concerns, that comes through on the page. Little Women isn’t important because
it is “realistic” or a perfect mirror of our world. It is important because it inspired
generations of women to be whole human beings.
That is worth revisiting.
Although, you know … maybe throw in some adaptations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison,
Amy Tan, and Isabel Allende in there for seasoning.