Oh boy, lemme tell you about Little Women.
I innocently picked it up at Chainon based solely on my limited knowledge that it’s an enduring and beloved American classic. I’ve watched both Gillian Armstrong + Greta Gerwig’s respective film adaptations and was completely ignorant of the fact that they had been totally secularized, as befitting liberal-minded Hollywood. Both films had stripped away any Christian moralizing that was prevalent in Alcott’s novel.
I was also very much expecting Little Women to be a warm, fuzzy, feel-good read, but was wholly unprepared for how earnestly wholesome it would be. Gee whiz, I now get why Americans regard Little Women as a beloved classic – it’s a novel that reflected how great America once was!
Despite the wholesomeness, I was enjoying Little Women for the most part, at least until Chapter 11 when I caught on that the storylines of the March sisters were merely delivery mechanisms for preachy morality tales. At this point, my interest began to wane and my progress slowed way down.
It was during this time that I came across I’ll Be Gone in the Dark at Chainon. I would’ve dropped whatever I was reading to embark on this lucky discovery anyway, but immersing myself in Michelle McNamara’s dogged search for the Golden State Killer was a welcome break from the gushy, goody-goody-godliness I was being subjected to with Alcott’s writing. I didn’t realize how much I longed for “the darker side of life” until I cracked open McNamara’s book, may she RIP.
Once I finished I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, I made a concerted effort to plow through the rest of LW. It wasn’t all bad. I realized the film adaptations did a great job including all the important plot points, ie. how Laurie became part of the March family, the trials and tribulations of each March sibling. Like Austen, Alcott was a keen observer of societal class differences in 19th c. Massachusetts, especially through the eyes of the sheltered and naive March sisters. Take Meg, for example. She was so excited to be invited to a fancy party hosted by an upper-class family, but was ill-prepared for handling all the gossip directed at her:
Those foolish, yet well-meant words, had opened a new world to Meg, and much disturbed the peace of the old one in which till now she had lived as happily as a child. Her innocent friendship with Laurie was spoiled by the silly speeches she had overheard. Her faith in her mother was a little shaken by the worldly plans attributed to her by Mrs. Moffat, who judged others by herself, and the sensible resolution to be contented with the simple wardrobe which suited a poor man’s daughter was weakened by the unnecessary pity of girls who thought a shabby dress one of the greatest calamities under heaven.
Alcott loved using Meg as an example for various “little lessons” throughout the novel. As the eldest, she was the first to leave the March household when she married Laurie’s tutor, John.
Like most other young matrons, Meg began her married life with the determination to be a model housekeeper. John should find home a paradise, he should always see a smiling face, should fare sumptuously every day, and never know the loss of a button. She brought so much love, energy, and cheerfulness to the work that she could not but succeed, in spite of some obstacles. Her paradise was not a tranquil one, for the little woman fussed, was over-anxious to please, and bustled about like a true Martha, cumbered with many cares….
They were very happy, even after they discovered that they couldn’t live on love alone. John did not find Meg’s beauty diminished, though she beamed at him from behind the familiar coffee pot.
Having married a tutor, Meg was doomed to a penny-pinching life, yet she had a weakness for finery. When practically cajoled by her wealthy friend, Meg caved and bought herself an expensive bolt of fabric. Alcott couldn’t help but use Old Testament metaphors to drive home her point.
Till now she had done well, been
prudent and exact, kept her little account books neatly, and showed them to him
monthly without fear. But that autumn the serpent got into Meg’s paradise, and
tempted her like many a modern Eve, not with apples, but with dress. Meg didn’t like to be pitied and made
to feel poor. It irritated her, but she was ashamed to confess it, and now and then
she tried to console herself by buying something pretty, so that Sallie needn’t
think she had to economize.
Because of Meg's greediness, her husband John had to give up on getting a new coat. Meg felt so guilty and realized the error of her ways, etc. Even before Meg was married, Alcott used Mama March as the primary lesson doler:
So I thought, as a little lesson, I would show you what happens when everyone thinks only of herself. Don’t you feel that it is pleasanter to help one another, to have daily duties which make leisure sweet when it comes, and to bear and forbear, that home may be comfortable and lovely to us all?’
‘We do, Mother we do!’ cried the girls.
Good Lord, even Austen didn’t write with such earnestness!
I think most everyone’s favourite character was Jo. As the tomboy of the family, Jo was the one with a promising future as a spinster (Beth being doomed to a life of illness and death). She didn’t even have any romantic feelings for Laurie, which was refreshing. When Laurie’s obsession with Jo was getting too intense, she moved to the city to work as a governess. She lived in a rooming house ran by a respectable family friend, and it was there that she befriended the older Mr Bhaer, who used to be a professor in Germany and was now making a living as a tutor. What was cool about Jo was that unlike her sisters, she had a talent and passion - she loved writing and became a “sensational writer” to supplement her income.
Unfortunately, Alcott had plans for Jo and her adventures as a genre writer would soon come to an end.
Following Mr. Dashwood’s directions… Jo rashly took a plunge into the frothy sea of sensational literature… Like most young scribblers, she went abroad for her characters and scenery, and banditti, counts, gypsies, nuns, and duchesses appeared upon her stage, and played their parts with as much accuracy and spirit as could be expected. Her readers were not particular about such trifles as grammar, punctuation, and probability, and Mr. Dashwood graciously permitted her to fill his columns at the lowest prices, not thinking it necessary to tell her that the real cause of his hospitality was the fact that one of his hacks, on being offered higher wages, had basely left him in the lurch.
She soon became interested in her work, for her emaciated purse grew stout, and the little hoard she was making to take Beth to the mountains next summer grew slowly but surely as the weeks passed. One thing disturbed her satisfaction, and that was that she did not tell them at home. She had a feeling that Father and Mother would not approve, and preferred to have her own way first, and beg pardon afterward. It was easy to keep her secret, for no name appeared with her stories…
She thought it would do her no harm, for she sincerely meant to write nothing of which she would be ashamed, and quieted all pricks of conscience by anticipations of the happy minute when she should show her earnings and laugh over her well-kept secret.
But Mr. Dashwood rejected any but thrilling tales, and as thrills could not be produced except by harrowing up the souls of the readers, history and romance, land and sea, science and art, police records and lunatic asylums, had to be ransacked for the purpose.
Jo soon found that her innocent experience had given her but few glimpses of the tragic world which underlies society, so regarding it in a business light, she set about supplying her deficiencies with characteristic energy. Eager to find material for stories, and bent on making them original in plot, if not masterly in execution, she searched newspapers for accidents, incidents, and crimes. She excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons. She studied faces in the street, and characters, good, bad, and indifferent, all about her. She delved in the dust of ancient times for facts or fictions so old that they were as good as new, and introduced herself to folly, sin, and misery, as well as her limited opportunities allowed. She thought she was prospering finely, but unconsciously she was beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a woman’s character. She was living in bad society, and imaginary though it was, its influence affected her, for she was feeding heart and fancy on dangerous and unsubstantial food, and was fast brushing the innocent bloom from her nature by a premature acquaintance with the darker side of life, which comes soon enough to all of us.
She was beginning to feel rather than see this, for much describing of other people’s passions and feelings set her to studying and speculating about her own, --a morbid amusement in which healthy young minds do not voluntarily indulge. Wrongdoing always brings its own punishment, and when Jo most needed hers, she got it.
I don’t know whether the study of Shakespeare helped her to read character, or the natural instinct of a woman for what was honest, brave, and strong, but while endowing her imaginary heroes with every perfection under the sun, Jo was discovering a live hero, who interested her in spite of many human imperfections. Mr. Bhaer, in one of their conversations, had advised her to study simple, true, and lovely characters, wherever she found them, as good training for a writer. Jo took him at his word, for she coolly turned round and studied him—a proceeding which would have much surprised him, had he know it, for the worthy Professor was very humble in his own conceit.
YAWN. So much for Jo's brilliant career. According to this article,
Alcott originally intended for her story to end with Jo as a “literary spinster,” much like Alcott herself. But Alcott’s publishers insisted that Jo had to marry someone, that the book would be unsaleable otherwise. And so, although “much afflicted” by their demands, Alcott wrote to her friend, she had concocted a solution “out of perversity.” She invented dour and dictatorial Friedrich Bhaer as a “funny match” for Jo. Laurie she disposed of by marrying him off to Amy.
“Girls write to ask who the little women will marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life,” she wrote in a letter to a friend in 1869. But: “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.”
Alcott was intentionally being perverse in her invention of Bhaer, but it’s unlikely that any ending she wrote that involved marrying off Jo would ever be truly satisfying.
Ok, that's very interesting. So Jo was meant to be a spinster. Even so, if Alcott was pressured by her publishers to marry off Jo, Alcott still had some very conservative ideology she was perpetuating via Jo. Jo willingly gave up a lucrative writing career and whatever intellectual potential she had was quashed by her Christian values.
Once when I was a naïve youth, I went to church and studied the bible. I eventually became an atheist after reading Carl Sagan and allowing my mind to open up to new ideas, even uncomfortable ones that can result in existential angst. It wasn’t something that happened overnight, but over time, I came to realize how much I was using Christianity as a crutch. Reading Little Women really cemented these feelings for me. The following section was PRECISELY the reason why I became an atheist. Religion is a barrier to true knowledge, and prevents us from learning about our true selves and the world around us.
Before the evening was half over, Jo felt so completely disillusioned, that she sat down in a corner to recover herself. Mr. Bhaer soon joined her, looking rather out of his element, and presently several of the philosophers, each mounted on his hobby, came ambling up to hold an intellectual tournament in the recess. The conversations were miles beyond Jo’s comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing ‘evolved from her inner consciousness’ was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.
She looked round to see how the Professor liked it, and found him looking at her with the grimmest expression she had ever seen him wear. He shook his head and beckoned her to come away, but she was fascinated just then by the freedom of Speculative Philosophy, and kept her seat, trying to find out what the wise gentlemen intended to rely upon after they had annihilated all the old beliefs.
Now, Mr. Bhaer was a diffident man and slow to offer his own opinions, not because they were unsettled, but too sincere and earnest to be lightly spoken. As he glanced from Jo to several other young people, attracted by the brilliancy of the philosophic pyrotechnics, he knit his brows and longed to speak, fearing that some inflammable young soul would be led astray by the rockets, to find when the display was over that they had only an empty stick or a scorched hand.
He bore it as long as he could, but when he was appealed to for an opinion, he blazed up with honest indignation and defended religion with all the eloquence of truth—an eloquence which made his broken English musical and his plain face beautiful. He had a hard fight, for the wise men argued well, but he didn’t know when he was beaten and stood to his colors like a man.
Somehow, as he talked, the world got right again to Jo. The old beliefs, that had lasted so long, seemed better than the new. God was not a blind force, and immortality was not a pretty fable, but a blessed fact. She felt as if she had solid ground under her feet again, and when Mr. Bhaer paused, outtalked but not one whit convinced, Jo wanted to clap her hands and thank him.
She did neither, but she remembered the scene, and gave the Professor her heartiest respect, for she knew it cost him an effort to speak out then and there, because his conscience would not let him be silent. She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty, and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, ‘truth, reverence, and good will’, then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great.
Excuse me while I barf in my mouth.
So Alcott was basically saying that whenever a good
Christian’s comfort zone gets shaken by new ideas, or if they’re forced to
think so much that it hurts their head, then one must cling to our comforting
beliefs even more! Any flicker of
intellectual curiosity Jo had (and was admired for) was quickly
extinguished by Bhaer’s heroic speech to adhere to the old ways. Friedrich Bhaer may be a solid and kindly old
coot, but he was certainly no thinker.
For Jo to revere such a conservative traditionalist was really quite stomach
churning (and I love horror fiction). Even if Alcott was being
perverse in pairing Jo with Friedrich, it was such an odd way to go about
it. Anyone who was already God-fearing
certainly wouldn’t read it that way and would take their relationship at face
value. Alcott may have been perverse, but she was by no means subversive.
At this point, I still had another 150 pages to go in this almost 500-page tome. I wanted so much to get Little Women out of the way, but not before being subjected to one final lesson involving Meg, this time in her role as a young mother. Turned out Meg had been spoiling her toddler by giving him a sweet as a kind of bribe so that he’d fall asleep in bed instead of coming down and demanding treats. So her husband had to step in and intervene with some tough, fatherly love.
It was not all Paradise by any means, but everyone was better for the division of labor system. The children throve under the paternal rule, for accurate, steadfast John brought order and obedience into Babydom, while Meg recovered her spirits and composed her nerves by plenty of wholesome exercise, a little pleasure, and much confidential conversation with her sensible husband…
This household happiness did not come all at once, but John and Meg had found the key to it, and each year of Married life taught them how to use it, unlocking the treasuries of real home love and mutual helpfulness, which the poorest may possess, and the richest cannot buy.
Once again, silly Meg. Sensible John. Good God. There were indeed some great lessons there – if one was struggling to live as a white woman in patriarchal Christian society.
When I finally finished LW, I was curious what conservative fans of Alcott’s classic thought about Gerwig’s adaptation. To my surprise, I found fairly measured reviews from a couple of conservative rags:
Ms. Gerwig’s retelling of Little Women maintains the major aspects of Alcott’s beloved novel, but rearranges them to serve as a commentary on the very real lack of economic opportunities available to middle- and upper-class women (really, the genteel poor) in nineteenth-century America.
Gerwig’s rendition of Little Women intimates that women were, by and large, unhappy in their roles as wives and mothers, and that women were domestic because people at that time thought that homemaking was simply “all a woman (was) fit for.”
Alcott’s own words, however, suggest that women took on the work of rearing a family by consent, and that they chose to do so out of conviction, not oppression. Though she herself never married, Alcott called being a wife and mother a woman’s “highest honor” and the home a woman’s “happiest kingdom.”
Alcott’s characters exemplify this positive view of marriage and sacrifice again and again, not because they are oppressed, but as an expression of love. In the novel, Amy’s love for Laurie motivates her to give up vain habits and pursuits. In Alcott’s words, “she didn’t care to be a queen of society now half as much as she did to be a lovable woman.”
Even though I didn’t exactly enjoy Little Women as much as I thought I would due to my prior misconceptions, I did learn some things. However, had I known what I was really getting myself into, I would’ve avoided Little Women altogether. For the time it took me to read it, I could’ve read two thought-provoking books instead. This is why I’m noting all my thoughts down, to make the most of all that time spent reading such offensive material! Right now, I just want to watch the most graphically depraved horror movie I can find to cleanse myself of all this wretched wholesomeness!!
