Be Kind to Spinsters

I know that I just wrote that my new theme would be In Search of Lost Time, but in preparation for a job interview this week, I just finished Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and as I've resolved to write something about every book I read, here's my take on the children's classic.

Most of Alcott's first-time readership is between 10 and 13 years old; I'm an obvious late-comer at age 23, so my experience with the book is probably very different than other readers my age, who will look back upon it with fond childhood memories. I'm also reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott and her family as I read Little Women, which has enriched my understanding of the characters and Alcott's authorial remarks.

Like much 19th century domestic literature, gender is a prominent feature of Little Women. Alcott's protagonist Jo March is based on the author herself- a tempestuous, vibrant, independent tomboy with a strong sense of the dramatic, who also cannot seem to find a place within the feminine world to which she is confined. Jo angrily says that she wishes she were a boy so she could do whatever she wanted, and the young Louisa felt the same way; she was constantly reprimanded for her improprieties, her un-ladylike interests in athleticism and drama. In her diary as a teenager, Alcott wrote that if she couldn't be a writer, she wanted to be an actress; at that time, a career in the theater was still considered highly inappropriate for a middle class young lady, not only because of the ostentatious position in the public sphere, but also because of the theater's past association with prostitution. Actresses were still very much regarded with suspicion for stretching the narrow confines of gender roles (especially in the wildly popular but risque burlesques, in which women dressed in drag and mocked public figures). Although she never gave her heroine Jo this ambition and kept all of the March sisters' dramatic performances strictly within the domestic sphere of their parlor and barn, Alcott was a daring woman who took pleasure in shocking her family and polite society.

The March girls are a rather watered-down version of Louisa herself; Jo was defiant, but became docile and gentle, two qualities that Alcott claims, at the age of 50, she never acquired in her entire life. She, unlike the March sisters, would not be content with submissive meekness.

Marriage also becomes a prominent feature of the narrative in the latter two-thirds, as the March girls grow into women and meet suitable mates. Even wild Jo March settles into domestic life; Alcott gives her a husband and children, and reworks Jo's literary aspirations into running a school for boys out of her home (and Jo's husband, not Jo, is the schoolmaster and teacher, while she plays mother to the lonely little boys). This is an intriguing departure from autobiography for Alcott's heroine, for she never married. At the end of the novel, Jo claims that she couldn't be happier as a wife and mother, although she hasn't given up her literary dreams. But, she reasons, those can wait while she raises her children and the boys at the school. Alcott, however, seemed to be faced with two irreconcilable options: marry and become a mother, or remain a spinster and become an author. The first choice requires giving up her freedom and a large part of her identity. The latter means resigning herself to a loneliness, which she seemed to feel painfully as she wrote Little Women. After describing the happy marriage of the youngest March sister, Alcott inserts an authorial aside, imploring young people to be kind to the spinsters, because their lives are difficult and lonely, and they are already isolated from society by virute of having no husbands. She alludes to the fact that she has enough internal strength to fight off despair and is fulfilled by her writing career, but there is a tinge of regret that she never was loved. In the biography, that is a sadly frequent refrain of Alcott's diaries; as a child, she felt that her unruly behavior and feisty independence made her bad and unworthy of love (her father often scolded and threatened her that God only loves good children). As a teenager, she had fervent crushes on Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, impossible unrequited love for these two much older and married men. She experienced a young romance with a former schoolmate, who died shortly after he extended an invitation to go riding together. This seems to have been a dilemma and disappointment for Alcott her entire life, that she could love, but never felt it was fully reciprocated by anyone but the characters she created herself. As she wrote in Little Women, she had her pen for a spouse and her stories for her children, and this was not altogether satisfying.

Alcott also gives Jo March a quick temper, which she herself had, but she spares her heroine from the debilitating bouts of depression and despair that she suffered herself. I think that a significant factor in Alcott's wildly variable moods was the fact that she could not fulfill the very restrictive feminine ideal of her age. She was told, from age two onward, that she was a bad child, that she couldn't do the things that she longed to do, and she was forced to choose between giving up her writing and independence, or living a solitary life as a noevlist, pursuing a career that still wasn't very highly respected or well paid. She could never fully be herself, and I read that in Little Women; she couldn't find the intellectual man who would bolster her own literary pursuits for herself, and she felt terribly isolated for much of her life.

New Direction

I started writing this as a way to organize my thoughts better on what I'm reading, but I haven't really done that very well; I've done absolutely no research, read no secondary sources, and have let my entries become rambling and at best semi-coherent. So I'm going to re-group here and start anew.

This Christmas, I started reading the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, an intimidating mass of work that has long been on my "to-read" list. I haven't taken it all that seriously, though, and let my attention wander, stopped reading it in the middle, read it while my parents were watching TV and on Skype with my sister. In short, I've been really unfocused. I'm quite determined, though, to read this work and to give it the thought and attention that I should put into everything that I read, so for the time being, I think the theme of this blog will be on Proust's literary project and my process of reading through it.

Most of my previous entries haven't been all that useful, so I've deleted a lot of them and I'm going to re-name the blog. I'm ready to start this thing fresh. I like the idea of blogging, but the entries so far have mostly been testing the waters and trying to put together themes, without much direction or even keen interest on my part. Well, after a brief hiatus, I'm going to return and have better things to say, more trenchant observations, and I invite anyone else interested in eitehr Proust or what I have to say about him to join me!

New Year

Happy 2010, everyone! It doesn't really feel like a new year; the same snow is covering the frozen earth and we're all back to business as usual for the most part after weeks of festive holiday cheer. April 1st probably was a better choice for the start of the new year; spring evokes that feeling of rebirth and renewal that we usually seek when the new year begins.

Anyway.

I've been reading "The Kreutzer Sonata" by Leo Tolstoy in the last week or so. It's a novella about two men conversing on a train, mainly about marriage and family life. The twist is, one of these men, Posdnicheff, recently murdered his wife.

Although "The Kreutzer Sonata" is horribly misogynistic (Posdnicheff is of the opinion that a woman's greatest virtue is remaining a virgin and that, because of women's education, the only control on their coquettish behavior is pregnancy and nursing children), it does raise some interesting questions about male-female relationships. None of the characters have happy, successful relationships; an old man at the beginning of the story claims that married people are doomed to misery because wives have lost their sense of fear of their husbands and husbands no longer fear God, so they commit all sorts of debaucheries. Posdnicheff, meanwhile, struggles with what really attracted him to his wife in the first place, and he concludes that he only decided to marry her because he admired her physically and wanted sexual contact. He convinced himself that this feeling was love, he heaped all of these impossible ideals upon her and then found himself disgusted by her once they consummated their marriage and she gave up her only virtue, her virginity.

Obviously, this guy has a major Madonna-Whore complex, but I think the story is still relevant in that question of human relationships. How do they develop? How much of love is actually idealization divorced from the reality of human flaws, and how do you cope when the other person departs from your idealizations?

Tolstoy wrote this story at a time when marriage was undergoing a significant transformation in Russia; arranged marriages were beginning to fall out of social acceptability, in favor of love marriages. But the interactions between the sexes were still constrained to superficial venues like ballrooms and the theater, and guided by very scripted conversations that included the same behavioral tropes: calculated charm, excessive enthusiasm for certain subjects that one does not really care about but feigns interest to become more intriguing to the prospective mate.

Is it all that different today? Male-female interactions are much less constrained in contemporary America, but there's a disturbing parallel to Posdnicheff's description of dances; he says that the women all put themselves on display, and the men peruse the options and choose to dance with whichever woman strikes him as most attractive and desireable. This reminded me of internet dating; you search through profiles and although there is personality information, it's all a calculated image designed specifically to attract. It's not necessarily the entire truth, but a particular version of a person that s/he uses to attract as many people as possible. Even in the "real world," there's still that element of superficiality, of calculations to figure out what will best attract a desireable mate.

But it doesn't have to be that way. One problem that I've noticed with a lot of young women my age, is that they are constantly trying to figure out "guys." They complain on Facebook that "guys are so dumb" or that they "just don't get guys," and they search as though there is some formula, some mathematical calculation that will solve all of their relationship problems.

The problem lies in that generalization, in the assumption that there is something universal about "guys" that will suddenly clarify and guide all interactions once that something is discovered. It's a version of Posdnicheff's problem, obscuring the individual with these abstract ideals and notions of behavior. When we relate to individuals as individuals, rather than a representative of a gender or as a manifestation of ideals that we privately hold, only then is love possible.