When, in her journal, she alluded to Lizzie Alcott, Beth’s real-life counterpart, as “Our Angel in the House,” she did so with reverence, not sarcasm. She regarded the choice of Meg’s alter ego, Anna, to live quietly as a wife and mother, with a tinge of envy. Alluding to her stories, Alcott wrote, “I sell my children, and though they feed me, they don’t love me as [Anna’s] do.” In her nonfiction, Alcott referred to domestic obligations as “a woman’s tenderest ties.” Yet when Marmee declares in Little Women that “to be loved and chosen by a good man is the sweetest thing which can happen to a woman,” we need not presume that Alcott entirely agreed. Even for Marmee, whose judgments regarding a woman’s “place” are somewhat more conservative than Alcott’s own, happiness and usefulness matter more than the fulfillment of a preassigned role. “Better be happy old maids,” Marmee cautions, “than unhappy wives.”

Alcott’s differences with Bunyan on the significance of place have another, more ironic dimension. Although Part Two of The Pilgrims’ Progress deals with saving the supposedly lesser denizens of a household deprived of its erstwhile master, the physical home is the one place where a person seeking to save herself must not stay. The home from which Christiana and her children flee is a place of guaranteed destruction. As always, Bunyan was speaking allegorically; he meant to suggest that one must guard against being comfortable and at home with one’s sinful practices. Nevertheless, the movement in Bunyan is away from the familiar, to which the righteous person has no thought of returning. Bunyan, who had no confidence whatever in human institutions, could hardly believe in the saving power of even so basic an institution as the family. In Little Women, where the moral journeys require self-discovery as well as self-purification, the physical trajectories can be more complicated. Hearth, home, and human comforts are not the moral death traps they appear to be in The Pilgrim’s Progress. To the contrary, home and family in Little Women are the quintessentially saving institutions for all. Indeed, the ideal end toward which Alcott’s narrative moves is not merely an affirmation of family, but an enlarged vision of family. Plumfield, the educational Utopia that Jo and the Professor establish at the end of the book, is a nuclear family gone, if you will, thermonuclear. It is, as Jo describes it, “a good, happy, home-like school.” The original student body is “a family of six or seven boys” (emphasis added), and Jo’s vision for the school emphasizes nurture first and education second. “I should so like to be a mother to them,” she declares, and school and family effectively merge.

Bunyan would never have conceived that the best path through life might be circular, leading the moral adventurer back to the point where she began. In Little Women, travel is essential for both Jo and May. Without it, May would never achieve refinement, nor would Jo arrive at experience or self-reliance. But the journey is essential to each, not because it offers a permanent escape from home, but rather because it instills her with a greater fitness for duty when she returns. The aim is not to evade the atmosphere of one’s origins, but to use the experience of one’s wanderings to make that atmosphere more cosmopolitan and compassionate than it had been in one’s childhood. Given the March girls’ worship of Marmee, it is easy to miss the fact that, by the end of the novel, her children have collectively improved on her example: as a guardian of the conventional home, Meg has become more or less her mother’s equal; Jo has expanded the reach of maternally fostered virtue far beyond the reach of a single family; and Amy has acquired a cultural polish that she will pass on to the next generation. Even tragic Beth, who does not live to create a home of her own, in one sense goes farther than her mother and, indeed, all her sisters combined. She has walked through her own place of Bunyanesque trial and temptation, the Valley of the Shadow. Through the grace and resignation she exhibits in death, she teaches Jo—and the reader—a starker but more sublime moral lesson than her mother ever offered.

To a modern eye, Little Women looks and feels like a devotedly Christian book. The girls’ father is a minister; their mother brightens their Christmas by distributing copies of “that beautiful old story of the best life ever lived.” And, of course, a book patterned after The Pilgrim’s Progress can hardly be said to venture terribly far from the foot of the cross. It is thus a challenge to remember that, when it was published, Little Women drew criticism for being insufficiently religious. The Ladies’ Repository lamented, “It is not a Christian book. It is religion without spirituality, and salvation without Christ.” The reviewer for Zion’s Herald was actually scandalized by Alcott’s appropriation of The Pilgrim’s Progress, viewing it not as a sign of reverence but as a “dis-spiritualizing of Bunyon’s [sic] great allegory.” The reviewer was troubled to see the Christian’s fight with Apollyon “reduced to a conflict with an evil temper and the Palace Beautiful and Vanity Fair [used to represent] only ordinary virtues or temptations.” The reviewer did not consider that evil is seldom so obliging as to take a form as recognizable as a fire-breathing monster, nor did the reviewer pause to reflect that Alcott’s readers were most likely to confront the devil precisely as the March sisters do: in their daily, commonplace impulses and failures of character. To the contrary, Little Women was seen as a secular, unholy tale, “perilous in proportion to its assimilation to Christian forms.” Alcott evidently paid little heed to her religious detractors; she certainly knew that their criticisms were beside the point.