In the same ways, it resembles Little Women.

But the true ingeniousness of Alcott’s use of The Pilgrim’s Progress in Little Women arises from the differences she maintains with Bunyan, not the similarities, or perhaps more accurately the differences within the similarities. The Pilgrim’s Progress, like Little Women, was published in two parts. In the first, the allegorical believer Christian leaves his wife, Christiana, and four children behind at their home in the City of Destruction and embarks on a lonely quest to save his soul and find his way to the Celestial City. Published six years later, Part Two ties up a rather pendulous loose end: What has become of the pilgrim’s abandoned family, left to fend for themselves in a place that, we have been led to understand, will be destroyed by fire from heaven? Far from being annihilated as promised, Christiana and her offspring decide to follow their husband and father. Tracing the same path of woe and temptation, they, too, arrive at salvation. In their case, however, evidently doubting that a woman and her children could make their way on their own, Bunyan supplies Christiana and her brood with a male guide and protector, Great-heart, who offers moral lessons and handily slays a few dragons along the way.

Most of the material that Alcott transposes from Bunyan into Little Women comes from Part One of The Pilgrim’s Progress. However, the poem that she adapts to serve as the novel’s preface is taken from the beginning of Part Two. It is also from Part Two that Alcott derives the principal theme of the first half of her novel: the moral progress of a mother and her four children in the absence of the family’s male head. In crafting her own tale of deliverance, Alcott accepts few of Bunyan’s assumptions about how the journey must be made. To the contrary, she challenges and even reverses them, and in so doing she articulates a much more progressive concept of the human spirit.

Alcott differs profoundly from Bunyan in her representation of childhood. Christiana’s offspring are all male. Bunyan eventually gets around to naming the four boys—Matthew, Samuel, Joseph, and James—but until almost the second third of Part Two they are anonymous. Although James shows somewhat quicker spiritual perception than his elder brothers, there is nothing else about the boys’ characters to differentiate them. Bunyan, righteously intent upon saving the souls of Christiana’s sons, had no interest whatever in exploring them. Though Bunyan sets forth the boys’ birth order, he does not specify their ages, and they grow up astoundingly quickly. At the outset of Part Two, James and his brothers seem to be young children. By the end of the journey, which seems to have been accomplished in a matter of weeks or months, they are all old enough to have taken wives and to assist Great-heart in some of his giant-killing. The boys’ wives interest Bunyan even less. Only Matthew’s bride, Mercy, stands out; she has been Christiana’s traveling companion since the journey began and has offered frequent, thoughtful comments on the unfolding action. The other three wives are accorded names but not a hint of personality, and they function solely as wives. We hear of their good natures and fertility. Otherwise, we learn only that they “did much good in their place.”

Doing good in one’s place also mattered to Alcott, but it was rarely sufficient. Moreover, her notion of place was notably more flexible than Bunyan’s, in more ways than one. A few months before she began work on Little Women, Alcott published an essay called “Happy Women,” a response to what she saw as a besetting worry of women of her time: the fear that they would become old maids. Alcott assailed the anxiety as a “foolish prejudice” and told of four women she knew who had discovered satisfaction without finding or even looking especially hard for husbands. Alcott’s four subjects had found fulfillment as a doctor, a music teacher, a home missionary, and, not surprisingly, a writer. Case by case, Alcott argued that a life devoted to “philanthropy, art, literature, music, medicine, or whatever task” could be as worthy and fulfilling as one given to a husband. The world, Alcott insisted, “is full of work, needing all the heads, hearts, and hands we can bring to do it.” Her Yankee practicality and loathing of waste forbade any other conclusion. Whereas Bunyan had assumed that salvation was the destiny of a chosen few, Alcott averred that happiness was “the right of all.” Its attainment lay in using one’s talents for the good of society.

The same doctrine is implicit in Little Women. Unlike Christiana’s daughters-in-law, the March sisters have not one place but many, and Alcott tries not to discriminate among those places. Although a twenty-first century woman may find the paths pursued by Jo and Amy more exciting and appealing than those of the more domestically oriented Meg and Beth, Alcott was reluctant to make any such judgment.