Although she placed Christian charity at the foundation of the March family’s sense of social mission, she intentionally painted the book’s religiosity in muted tones. Critics noted the conspicuous absence of a Bible from Beth’s sickroom, and others have noticed that, despite their father’s vocation as a minister, Meg is married at home instead of in a church, and the sisters collectively spend even less time attending services than the notoriously heathen Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Content to let actual ministers guide their flocks toward the Celestial City, Alcott focused on the saving propensities of love and family; she was intent upon articulating a vision of home as heaven, and of heaven as home.
If, as Little Women intimates, the path through life of even the most adventurous woman leads back to the family, what is to be said about Alcott’s concept of woman’s rights? On this subject, modern critics have found cause to feel dissatisfied. Does Amy travel the continent and cultivate her artistic powers only so that she can marry Laurie, a man who, for all his admirable efforts at reform, seems to remain her inferior in both will and apprehension? Is it really necessary that Meg’s son Demi should “tyrannize” his twin sister Daisy, while Daisy repays his oppressions by making “a galley-slave of herself . . . ador[ing] her brother as the one perfect being in the world”? It is in Jo, however, that current readers tend to feel the keenest sense of betrayal. Bravely flouting convention and broadcasting her independence at every opportunity, Jo has taken the male roles in her sisters’ plays and, in her father’s absence, has proudly become “the man of the family.” Throughout her growing up, she has seemed to fear almost nothing—except, interestingly, the fact of growing up itself. Promising so much as a model of equality and new womanhood, Jo seems to deliver very little. Having rejected Laurie in part because she fears he would “hate my scribbling, and I couldn’t get on without it,” Jo marries Professor Bhaer, the very man who persuades her to abandon her writing career. Even the act that is the culmination of her journey through the novel, the founding of the school at Plumfield, which Laurie pronounces “a truly Joian plan,” does not contain nearly as much of the old Jo as many of us might have hoped. The school, at its founding, is for boys only, and Jo proposes only “to take care of” the young students, while the Professor does the teaching. The influential feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun put the problem aptly: “Jo reinvented girlhood, but the task of reinventing womanhood was beyond her.” Had Meg or Amy chosen the matronly tasks and comforts of Plumfield, one would likely accept the decision with a smile. For the former firebrand Jo, however, such a denouement feels like an almost cowardly retreat.
Except that it isn’t, though it took Alcott two more books to show it. What is already evident in Little Women is that, if we take as given that Jo must marry—and Roberts Brothers was adamant on that point—she chooses very well in Professor Bhaer, an embodiment of intelligence, moral rectitude, and unquestionable loyalty. Though Alcott did not so intend when she began it, Little Women is only the first volume of a trilogy, and the state of that trilogy’s characters at the end of Book One is by no means final. If Jo seems uncharacteristically passive and subordinate at the end of Little Women, she does not remain so in the sequels. In Little Men and Jo’s Boys, her word on how Plumfield is to be run seems more authoritative than Professor Bhaer’s. Moreover, despite his misgivings in Little Women, the Professor not only tolerates Jo’s writing but creates conditions under which it can flourish. One also observes that “the school for little lads” does not remain all male for very long. By the time of Jo’s Boy’s, the academy has metamorphosed into the fully coeducational Laurence College, where young women train for the professions (one of them, Nan, becomes a successful doctor), hotly dispute the sexist assumptions of their male contemporaries, and anticipate Billie Jean King by besting the boys at tennis. And, of course, perhaps most reassuringly, Jo herself has reclaimed her literary career, becoming famous enough that she must climb out the back window to hide from importunate members of the press. Granted, Jo is no longer the spunky, wayward colt she was at fifteen—thank goodness none of us are—but in the place of her stormy impulsiveness she now has good-humored serenity, and as much respect and worldly fortune as she could want. Perhaps those who would demand a more revolutionary destiny for Jo—that she somehow preserve her tartness, impetuosity, and rebellious spirit to the very end—are asking of her the one thing that Jo herself knew to be impossible: that she never grow up.
Blissfully ensconced at Plumfield in Jo’s Boys, blessed with “money, fame, and plenty of the work I love,” Jo, not Professor Bhaer, has become the true sage of Plumfield; it is to her that admirers write in search of wisdom. To one such, who wonders how she should best educate her seven daughters, Jo replies that she should “let them run and play and build up good, stout bodies before she talks about careers. They will soon show what they want, if they are let alone, and not all run in the same mould.” Jo’s counsel seems hardly earth-shattering, but it conveys succinctly much of what Alcott herself hoped that all girls might be given: the chance to grow without fretting or fetters, to discover and cultivate their own strengths, and to use them as they choose. These three simple gifts are much of what girls—and boys and women and men—require even in our own time.
Alcott sat for this photograph, her most appealing likeness, in 1856, while the Alcotts were living in Walpole, New Hampshire. It closely resembles her description of Sylvia Yule, the heroine of her first published novel, Moods: a face “full of contradictions,—youthful, maidenly, and intelligent, yet touched with the unconscious melancholy that is born of disappointment and desire.” (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
1 There is, unfortunately, no way of knowing whether or to what extent Niles revised Alcott’s first twelve chapters once he realized that he might have a hit on his hands.
2 Louisa May Alcott to Elizabeth Powell, March 20, 1869, The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, p. 125.
“We Really Lived Most of It”: A Biographical Note
IN a letter that she sent to her editor Thomas Niles soon before the first volume of Little Women was published, Louisa May Alcott wrote, “I don’t care for a Preface.”1 Thus, the present edition of the novel begins by violating its author’s intentions. We should not be overly troubled by this fact, however, since the writing of Little Women itself did not fit in easily with Alcott’s personal desires or expectations.
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