‘Is Beth the rosy one, who stays home a good deal, and sometimes goes out with a little basket?’ asked Laurie, with interest.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (Puffin Books, 2017), p. 76
‘Yes, that’s Beth; she’s my girl, and a regular good one she is, too.’
‘The pretty one is Meg, and the curly-haired one Amy, I believe?’
‘How did you find that out?
Laurie coloured up, but answered frankly, ‘Why you see, I often hear you calling to one another, and when I’m alone up here, I can’t help looking over at your house, you always seem to be having such good times. I beg your pardon for being so rude, but sometimes you forget to put down the curtain at the window where the flowers are; and when the lamps are lighted, it’s like looking at a picture to see the fire, and you all around the table with your mother; her face is right opposite, and it looks so sweet behind the flowers, I can’t help watching it. I haven’t got any mother, you know,’ and Laurie poked the fire to hide a little twitching of the lips that he could not control.
After being gifted it by my sister for Christmas, I read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women for the first time and absolutely adored it. I had seen the Greta Gerwig adaptation before reading the book and I found the film enjoyable enough. (Honestly speaking, I have yet to meet a period drama I didn’t like because where old-timey fashion is, I will also be, and I was not the least bit disappointed by Jacqueline Durran’s costume choices, which I later learnt was actually a controversial take due to comments about their anachronism.) Having seen the film first, I was really excited to experience the story in its original format and being an adult reader, I really enjoyed it in a romantic, wistful way because it felt exactly like stepping back into girlhood for a handful of weeks.
Being a younger (and youngest) sister myself, I found my heart breaking for Amy throughout the novel because all younger siblings know the pain of being not quite old enough to partake in something your older sibling is allowed to do with their friends, and it’s a feeling Alcott showed so poignantly in the chapter where Amy burns Jo’s book in retaliation for not being allowed to the theatre with her, Meg and Laurie. For me, it was my sister’s sixteenth birthday. While I had been allowed to take part in the usual birthday festivities, I was barred from the evening activities which took place in the attic (handily located in my sister’s bedroom), which my mum had gone to great lengths to decorate and populate with all the comforts and recreational things a sixteen year old girl could desire. To make matters worse, I was a very girly eleven year old who saw in the girlish decorations, fluffy throws, and makeup a burgeoning womanhood that my parents were deliberately gatekeeping from me. I later found out that the secret festivities were just watching movies and talking about boys, but that there were kinds of movies and kinds of conversations that I was deemed not mature enough to participate in didn’t sit well with me at all. I never burnt anything of my sister’s but as I read chapter eight and remembered the feeling of going to sleep in my bedroom while my sister and her friends were potentially discovering womanhood itself in the room next to me, I more than resonated with Amy’s threat of ‘You’ll be sorry for this Jo March, see if you ain’t.’
Anyone who has read Little Women cannot walk away from the novel without an overwhelming sense of Meg’s beauty – it’s almost all she is. While the other three sisters each have their distinctive ‘things’ (Jo is a writer, Beth is impossibly pious and a skilled pianist, Amy is a talented artist), Meg is apparently just exceptionally beautiful. Yes, she can sew very well, and yes, she can make a great blancmange, but Margaret March is nothing if not oppressively pretty and I found Alcott’s focus on how Meg is read by everyone in light of this beauty a very effective commentary of Jo’s anxieties about womanhood.
As I read, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the repeated mentions of Meg’s prettiness because she began to feel ornamental and like an object rather than a subject in her own life. In the chapter ‘Meg Goes To Vanity Fair’, where she is quite literally positioned and referred to as an inanimate object after the Moffatt sisters dress and make her up for the ball, I thought Alcott brilliantly conveyed the loss of personhood that comes with a beauty like Meg’s in her society. There, Meg, who idolises high society life and wants desperately to be a part of it, learns the full implications of hypervisibility as a woman when those who had once admired her, previously referring to her as a ‘fresh little thing’ voice their disapproval at her manufactured beauty, contemptuously calling her ‘nothing but a little doll tonight’. As Meg cries to her mother about the humiliation of being spoken about as she was, she refers to herself as a mere ‘fashion plate’. While in the 1800s, when the novel is set, fashion plates were illustrations of the latest fashions, in the 21st century, the phrase is not without the connotations of being an object of consumption, a connotation very fitting given the ogles Meg receives from both male and female characters throughout the novel, and the gawping at her that Alcott herself invites the reader to also participate in.
Meg’s words to her mother on her return home from the Moffatt ball, tragic for their self-objectifying nature, only highlighted the sense I had as I read the chapter that I was experiencing in real time a girl on the cusp of womanhood realising the full implications of the kind of womanhood she had idealised. I liked that, despite Alcott’s clear idealisation of the domestic life comprised of the husband who labours sacrificially to provide for his ever-growing family, the wife from whom boy and girl-children primarily receive their religious instruction and the white picket fence that Meg so craves – one which is undoubtedly unremoved from Alcott’s own sense of Christian morality – she equally didn’t shy away from showing the connection between Meg’s desire for marriage and motherhood in high society and always being ‘consumed’ by men who may express their approval or disapproval of your face as openly as they please, as well as being potential gossip fodder for jealous girls and women.
I was surprised to see how stereotypically feminine book Jo actually was considering the pop culture representations of her as an extremely subversive, boyish figure. It seemed to me that in fashioning herself as a boy, Jo was not rebelling against femaleness itself, but had astutely noticed, seemingly before Meg, that the kind of womanhood represented by ‘neat boots, gloves, and handkerchiefs’ was only as sweet as a man’s opinion of you, and was rebelling against this instead, rather than actually desiring to share in boyhood with Laurie. (This is something I thought Gerwig’s film articulated particularly well in the famous monologue where Jo expresses her desire for companionship alongside frustration at the idea that love is “all a woman is good for”.) In actuality, book Jo is as much of a ‘little woman’ in the traditional sense as her sisters are and I thought Alcott very interestingly depicted this performative nature of Jo’s masculinity.
For example, in the chapter where she nurses Laurie back to health (in itself a very stereotypically feminine role to take on), before she leaves for his house she mocks Meg for dozing off by the fireplace and states that she is off to find herself an adventure because unlike Meg, she is not ‘a pussycat’. Yet the chapter preceding it begins with her reading in a nook, eating six apples (?!), accompanied by a household rat with unofficial pet status. This is a picture of domesticity not dissimilar to the picture Alcott gives us of Meg at the beginning of the next chapter and Jo’s inability to recognise it as such highlighted the innocence of her performance of masculinity to me. The fact that her ‘adventure’ was also to go straight into a caregiver role, playing mother, sister, and nurse all at once for a sick and female-company starved Laurie, was also an enjoyable irony showing the same childlike innocence of thinking yourself to be doing one thing when you are actually doing another.
With the first sermon from Marmee following a moment of ingratitude from the sisters, I quickly realised that Little Women fits very comfortably into the conduct literature genre (it begins with a preface from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, wherein Bunyan urges ‘young damsels’ to ‘prize the world which is to come’ in response to God’s mercy, rather than fixate on the desires an troubles of their current world). The novel’s Christian ethic is notably absent from the film but it was one of my favourite aspects of the book. I found Marmee’s ‘sermons’ both comforting and grounding and the way they came very neatly at the end of a chapter underscored the book’s theme of childhood innocence.
Alcott’s depictions of the girls’ antics and their intense individuality are sure to resonate with anyone who had a somewhat typical childhood with siblings. Her portrayals of their strength of character in keeping it together at home while fearing everyday for their father’s safety in his post as a chaplain during the American Civil War are equally sure to resonate with anyone who has ever had to carry on living in safety while a loved one lives in precarity elsewhere. To anyone with a love for domestic fiction with great social commentary and who has ever been a younger sister vowing to make their older sister sorry for something, I would recommend reading Little Women and joining the centuries-old fan club.
(Important side note – if this review inspires you to read Little Women, you MUST read it around in the winter months because it’s absolutely a wrapped-up-warm-by-the-bedside-lamp-and sipping-on-a-hot-chocolate-while-the-snow-falls-gently-outside kind of story. To read it at any other time of year would be like watching the 1995 Sense and Sensibility or any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in summer and if you don’t agree that some stories are better suited to certain seasons then you obviously just don’t read books but there’s a time to start for everyone and it starts with reading Little Women in the prescribed season!)
