Little Women

[flea]

Tonight is book club, and we read Little Women, which I had never read before. At least, I read Little Women; I rather suspect, from the emails that I received, that precious few of us finished it. In any case, we are watching the movie (Hepburn version, 1933; not the 1949 version with a BLOND Liz Taylor as Amy!) tonight.

I can't decide if I would have loved this as a girl or not. I was a cynical 12 year old, but I did love Anne of Green Gables and things of that ilk. As an adult reader, I am distanced from the text by my understanding of history and knowledge of the Alcott family (my mother volunteered at the Concord Museum for a while; I've been to Orchard House and seen 'Amy's' drawings on the walls.) I can certainly see how many girls at the time, and still today, would love it. I wasn't spoiled for who Jo and Amy marry, though I did know Beth died (is there anyone in the world who doesn't know Beth dies? If so, I'm sorry; you do know now.)

It falls strangely into the two pieces (book one ends at Meg's engagement). The first book is more truly girls' literature - full of promise, and romantic - one is sure that Jo and Laurie will marry. The second book feels a little antifeminist - the trials of Meg as a new wife and mother make her seem very weak and silly; Amy is redeemed from being a brat and snags Laurie, who is both rich and virtuous, showing us the triumph of the ladylike; Jo seems to give up her dreams of being a novelist to look after little boys and a shaggy German academic. The first book is all about the girls and the family and Marmee and the boundless possibility of their adult futures; the second book sees their lives narrow to their relationships with (future) husbands.

Another odd thing is how completely absent the father is, even when he does come back from the war. Bronson Alcott was an oddball; one of the critical essays suggests she left him out because his philosophy would be unpalatable to the mainstream readers she hoped for. My mother has a rant about how completely irresponsible he was as a parent; I guess they nearly starved and froze to death one year when he decided to live off the land (without actually knowing how to.)

Did you read it, as a child or as an adult? Do you love it?

Comments

[gchick.livejournal.com]

Always hated it. As a kid, I'm not sure which I resented more -- the fact that "my" character (that is, the one with my name) was horribly HORRIBLY dull, or the fact that Jo got so utterly tamed at the end.

For me, it's part of a whole series of girls' classics with the same basic tame-the-tomboy arc. I still catch myself feeling angry and betrayed out of all proportion when I think about them, and also associate them with a lot of unpleasant musty old-lady types cooing about how if I like to read, I must LOOOOOOVE this.

So, issues. Or early part of my feminist awakening. Depends on how you look at it.

[sophiabrooks.livejournal.com]

What is interesting is that I think Alcott was trying to (at least subversively) trying to present a feminist sensibility. She does more so, especially with minor characters, in The Old Fashioned Girl. The heroine, Polly, is not really a tom boy, but does not succumb to the fashion of growing up before her time. Also, when she moves back to the city at 22 to make her living as a piano teacher, she rooms in the same rooming house as an older woman who is sort of a Jane Addams type, and a bunch of young women artists (writers, musicians, sculptors) who are very independent. Two of them also appear to have a 'Boston Marriage', unless I am reading too much into it.

[gchick.livejournal.com]

And (just as interesting) I know all that to be true, and can see it in other Alcott work that I've read (which is admittedly random bits and pieces, since I'm not a big enough fan to really seek her out). But my reaction to LW is so tied up with (1) that feeling of being just gutted by book after book that -- in my utterly unobjective eyes -- more or less character-raped the only interesting people in the book, and (2) the very conflicty feeling I had as a wants-to-please-the-grownups nerd that I was really under some kind of pressure to think this stuff was the greatest thing ever, that I've never been able to read it later with a more rational perspective.

[sophiabrooks.livejournal.com]

I feel a little like this with other things-- but my family didn't really know children's books, I think. My mother bought just about everything and I read it all, however, she loved a) The Old Man and the Sea, b) The Snows of Kilamanjaro, c) Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn and d) all Ayn Rand-- all of which I felt some pressure to have my life changed in the same ways my mother did, when really I wanted to throw them all across the room, especially Ayn Rand!

[stephl.livejournal.com]

the fact that Jo got so utterly tamed at the end.

I guess I'm revealing myself to be extremely conventional, but -- well, even tomboys want to be loved. It's not as though Jo bowed to family/societal pressure to get married -- she loved Prof. Bhaer. I mean, I guess she needn't have married -- she could have been an unmarried author for the rest of her life -- but it doesn't seem to me that she was "tamed" just because she fell in love and got married.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

Doesn't she actually give up writing, though?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

No, she gives up writing shocking blood-and-thunder adventure stories. Even by the end of Little Women she's published a few small pieces, and by Jo's Boys (the sequel to Little Men, which is the sequel to Little Women) she is a very well-known, even famous, author.

[gchick.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're terribly conventional -- if anything, I think I'm kind of insane. As I said before, my reaction to the book is very visceral, and I've never really been able to make myself look at it in the kind of calm and analytic light that I was taught to do elsewhere.

That said, yes, I think there's a lot of taming going on there, on a fairly insidious level. The key point to Jo's story for me is that it's so taken for granted that it's an either/or thing. That tomboys want to be loved, I get completely. But the notion that that has to mean a choice between a loveless life and giving up what makes you you? Gutpunch city. If there were some kind of outside pressure on her that she was resisting, or that I could even imagine her resisting in a sort of fanficcy way, it wouldn't suck as much for me as her deciding on her own that marriage = giving up her stories = A-OK.

It's all very much like my feelings about the BtVS S6 ep As You Were. Not so much sane, as my issues having issues.