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.