In honor of the novel’s 150th anniversary, I would like to offer a new and different reading. These are the critics who cite Alcott’s own characterization of her novel as a “dull” book that she wrote only for the money her family desperately needed, and lament that Little Women was not really imbued with the rebelliousness and ingenuity of its author.ĭoes the novel empower women, or does it oppress them?Įven readings of Little Women that reject the above binary tend to enforce this core belief of many educated people in our time: When it comes to women’s place in our culture, what is traditionally religious is regressive and of low quality and what is progressive and of high quality must, by extension, be in conflict with traditional religiosity. ![]() When critics read the novel as oppressive, they focus on Alcott as a (usually reluctant) captive of a perniciously moral domesticity to which the fictional March sisters also succumb. These are the critics who view Little Women as a female utopia, free from any male intrusion. They see her as attempting to reform that world from within with a novel that rejected all the pre-emptive categorizations and premises that would have put it on a shelf alongside tracts like those referred to above. When critics read the novel as empowering, they focus on Alcott as a proud rebel against the 19th-century cult of domesticity and the sentimental Christianity upon which it rested. The various arguments around Little Women have long boiled down to this: Does the novel empower women, or does it oppress them? But a great deal of the novel’s complexity has been lost to the kind of oversimplified debates so prevalent in our time. Some of what is different about Little Women, compared with its more sentimental contemporaries, has been duly noted by the many filmmakers and literary critics who maintain an ongoing interest in Alcott’s most famous novel. Nearly a century and a half later, as I made plans for my own life, I found in it a thoughtful guidebook for young adulthood and beyond. This seemingly simple tale is based loosely on Alcott’s life. Published in 1868, it tells the story of the four March sisters coming of age in their impoverished New England home during the Civil War. Then I reread a childhood favorite of mine, one of the most popular, and certainly the most enduring, girls’ novels of the period: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Yet I found almost all of these books frustrating because they seemed to share a simple, enervating and reductive formula: the more a heroine cries, the greater her piety. Most were written by women for a female audience, and nearly all disparaged the popular culture of their time as frivolous and materialistic while trying to orient their readers toward more pious pleasures. Whilst it may seem sad that the sisters do have to conform to some extent, if you read between the lines there is so much inspiration for young female readers.As an undergraduate preparing to write a thesis on 19th-century American girls’ literature, I read many so-called sentimental novels. These ‘little women’ are not children but young adults finding their way via love, religion and confidence. With their father away at war, the four sisters pull together to support each other but still have time to search for their own identity. The book speaks to every woman that has had to fight against convention. “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” Writing is Jo’s passion and in a world where women are expected to put personal growth aside in order to withhold traditional family values, she is met with many challenges. ![]() Just like Alcott, Jo is a strong, independent woman who is fighting through her domestic duties to do what she truly loves. The book is semi-autobiographical, with Jo Marsh mirroring the life of an ambitious Alcott. The pace of the novel can be slow at times and the language almost too perfect but the overall sympathetic tone of Alcott wins over the reader. Intended as a book for young girls, the book is too sentimental for some but plenty of adults and young men have Little Women firmly featured in their best books of all time. The novel is a classic rites of passage story, that has often split literature critics but has been adored by many over the years. Set in nineteenth century New England, Little Women follows the lives of the four March sisters-Jo, Beth, Amy and Meg.
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