Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys
by Louisa May Alcott
Library of America, 1,045 pp., $40
LOUISA MAY WAS THE PRETTIEST of Bronson Alcott's four daughters--or so you must believe if you admire Louisa's tomboy alter-ego, Jo March. The heroine of Little Women had "a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful. Her long, thick hair was her one beauty; but was usually bundled into a net to be out of the way. Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a fly-away look to her clothes."
Maybe it's the Massachusetts connection, but reading that description, I picture John Kerry scampering around Concord in a hoopskirt. Louisa made her heroine Jo awkward and impetuous, with an air, a humor, even a vocabulary ("Christopher Columbus!") more suited to a lively Yankee boy in the 1860s than to a girl from a good family, brought up to be a picture of frailty and grace. And Jo was, in most ways, a true portrait of Louisa in her youth. Tall and long-limbed, the young Louisa had a "rather masculine air," according to her childhood friend Edward Emerson, son of the famous transcendentalist (whom she playfully called "Rolf Walden Emerboy"). Another friend remembered Louisa "romping and racing down the street, usually with a hoople higher than her head."
For all her boyishness, though, Louisa was "a big, lovable, tender-hearted, generous girl, with black hair, thick and long, and flashing, humorous black eyes," wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne's son Julian, who lived next door. Edward Emerson called her "fine-looking," and early daguerreotypes agree. All the Alcott sisters had strong jaws and noses, but Louisa's features composed themselves into a pleasing regularity. The face on the new Library of America edition of her three March family novels-- Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys--is both sensitive and serene, with dark eyes and soft cheekbones that balance the conviction of the mouth. This is a forceful woman, yes, but not the one who declared herself to be, in the words of Jo March to the amorous Teddy Laurence, "homely, awkward, and old."
It's not so surprising that Louisa disguised her prettiness on paper, shifting the role of "beauty" to the oldest sister in Little Women, Meg March (Meg's inspiration, Anna Alcott, was as gentle as her fictional counterpart but not so pretty). Louisa may even have believed in her own plainness. Who, after all, treated her like a beauty? The men she admired (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne) were old and famous and kept their distance. Teddy Laurence never bounded over the hill to propose (Julian Hawthorne was far too young). No Professor Bhaer waited for her under an umbrella, saying "I will haf her if I die for it!"
And, besides, the novel worked better with Jo plain. Until Jo's arrival, heroines of novels--at least, of novels written for the edification of girl readers--could be victims, or vixens, or a little of both; but they were always feminine, always ladylike. And here was Jo March: whistling, soiling her dress, chopping off her hair so that she looked even more like a gangly boy. Jo was a comic heroine, a foil for herself. Tomboys everywhere rejoiced; girls all over America wanted to be her friend.
To Louisa, Jo offered certain theatrical advantages. The author was a born ham, a would-be actress. She didn't need to invent the plays the March girls put on in the parlor. Those were genuine melodramas from her own childhood, when she really did play swashbuckling heroes opposite her sister Anna's shrinking-violet leading ladies. Julian Hawthorne writes of walking over one day to visit Louisa's little sister Abby, on whom he had a secret crush. At the gate, he met her flirting with a visiting English gentleman. This odd-looking fellow stared stonily at Julian through his monocle and addressed the boy "with insufferable condescension": "I couldn't deny his grace, charm, and high-society bearing. He was slender and dark and wore a black broad-cloth suit and soft black felt hat. . . . He twirled an absurd switch cane and occasionally caressed the points of a tiny black moustache."
Just as Julian was getting his dander up, though, the hat fell off the gentleman's head, "letting a thick mass of black hair fall down to his waist." Julian gasped as Louisa laughed uproariously and dashed back to her house yelling, "April Fool!"
LOUISA BRIMMED WITH SUCH dramatic and comic sense, and she poured all of it into her best works. It's no wonder that stage versions of Little Women are a staple of high school theater, or that the book has so often found its way to the movie screen. Louisa wrote it almost as a play: That's why characters talk without much interruption, why monologues drift on for sentences without any mention of who's speaking. As for Jo, Louisa inhabits her the way an actress inhabits a great role. Jo is the perfect part for Louisa to play.
It wasn't enough for Louisa Alcott to play a part, though. In the Alcott family, creativity existed side by side with a fervor for religion and good works. The two streams didn't always blend well. Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, was a difficult figure, both idealistic and theatrical, a cross between a hermit and a transcendental chatterbox. Most of his great ideas (a utopian community, experimental schools) came to nothing. After the failure of "Fruitlands," his ironically named utopia, he fell into a suicidal depression. What saved him, Louisa wrote later, was his fear that his family might perish without him.
But the truth was that the family might have perished with him. Real salvation for the Alcotts came in the friendship of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the loyalty of kin, and, above all, the mind-boggling perseverance of Louisa's mother, Abigail. Nicknamed Abba, she miraculously made a good home from nearly nothing. She loved her husband without cynicism and her children without reserve. More than that, she dragged all of them out of themselves and into the world of good causes. Were the Alcotts poor? Abba knew that others were poorer. She and her daughters fed the hungry and cared for the homeless and sick. Sister Lizzie really did die (like her namesake, Beth March) after catching scarlet fever from children her mother tended.
Louisa changed her father's character somewhat for Little Women (she represented him more accurately, if humorously and affectionately, in an essay called "Transcendental Wild Oats"). Her mother, though, she allowed to shine full-strength in her Little Women portrait of Marmee March, the all-loving, all-patient woman who dispenses wisdom to her daughters at the climaxes of several early chapters.
"Oh, mother! help me, do help me!" cries Jo, after a terrible episode of temper. Marmee tells Jo that she's been struggling for forty years to tame her own sharp tongue. She owes her progress to the help of her gentle husband and the love of God: "I'm angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so."
THIS IS A REVELATION to Jo, one that sets her on her own "pilgrim's progress" toward self-control. "If I'm ever half as good as you," she declares to Marmee, "I shall be satisfied!" The rest of Little Women--really the whole March family chronicle through Little Men and Jo's Boys--charts Jo's transformation into a virtuous matriarch. It's a little disappointing to those of us who prefer the young Jo March, but by the time her Little Men are growing up, "Mrs. Jo" has indeed become another Marmee, a motherly soul ready to care for all the waifs who drift her way.
IN REAL LIFE, too, Louisa was becoming her mother. During the Civil War, she announced her intention to work as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington. Her decision may have shocked a few Concord neighbors, but not Louisa's abolitionist parents (John Brown's daughters had boarded at their house the year before). She kissed her mother goodbye and set out on the very journey that Marmee would take in Little Women.
Six weeks later her father fetched her back, desperately ill with typhoid, head shaved and face ghostly pale. She spent three more weeks in a delirium, dreaming she was married to a handsome Spaniard, visiting heaven, being burned as a witch. She recovered, but lived the rest of her life with the ill effects of the "mercury cure"--the treatment for the disease at that time.
The whole nursing scheme sounds dangerous and doomed to fail, more like one of her father's grand plans than something her practical mother would have undertaken. Fortunately, the experience fed Louisa's creativity even while it wrecked her body. She'd always had a taste for the morbid and melancholy, yet she was generally better when writing close to life (autobiography tamed her literary excesses). In the Union Hospital she saw violence, passion, racism, and redemption firsthand. Here, misery mingled with hope and artistry with heroism. Louisa had no need for artifice. Two of her best works, "Hospital Sketches" and "My Contraband," were the result.
Besides the cost to her health, Louisa paid a social cost for refusing to live an ordinary life, for seeking out "something to do," as she called it. By not staying home, by looking for causes to fight for (from abolition to suffrage), she hurt her chances of simply getting married and having a family. Maybe it wasn't such a huge sacrifice; she said later that liberty made a better husband. But she was, in Julian Hawthorne's words, a "lovable, tender-hearted" woman, and her works show that she often had love on her mind. Perhaps she wondered now and then what it would be like to live as her mother did, creating children as well as novels. When sister Abby died after childbirth, Louisa was quick to adopt her little niece. She also stayed close to her nephews, who appear (as brother and sister) in Little Men and Jo's Boys.
In fiction, too, Louisa paid a price for being unconventional. It's always been a puzzle why Jo March turns down Teddy Laurence. From the moment the boy bursts into the story in chapter three of Little Women, we all know that Jo's going to marry him--young love must grow into mature love: That's what literary convention teaches. But Teddy is Jo's own puckish spirit, the child half of herself. To marry him would be to stay a girl forever, never to grow into an independent woman like Marmee. So Jo defies convention and chooses kindly, wise Professor Bhaer, an older man somewhat like Louisa's father. As fictional consolations go, he's not all that great (the audience at my husband's high-school production of Little Women booed when Jo accepted him). As a catalyst to Jo's transformation, though, he's perfect.
SO MANY OF US who read Louisa May Alcott's books as children long for the domestic coziness of the March family. We wonder if there are still mothers like Marmee, who balance love and tolerance with the pursuit of moral perfection. We wish children still read great books, played outdoors, put on theatricals, obeyed their parents. In short, we long for the past, or at least an idealized past, when closeness and warmth seemed more possible.
So it's a wonderful gift from Louisa that her March family will always be there for us to visit, year after year, without change. Returning to Concord, we'll seek out Marmee for moral guidance, we'll weep over the loss of Beth, we'll delight to watch how Amy redeems poor, spurned Teddy. Most of all, we'll find Jo March, that awkward, funny girl on her way to becoming a great woman. "I do think," she'll say with gusto, "that families are the most beautiful things in all the world!"
Betty Smartt Carter is a novelist and author, most recently, of the memoir Home is Always the Place You Just Left.