Little Women - the March family

I read Little Women in February, counting it for the Back to the Classics challenge category of Family. So let's talk about the March family.

Four sisters surround a loving mother, right?

Jo, Amy, Beth, Meg, and beloved Marmee are the heart of Little Women. But, when you think about it, the entire cast becomes part of the family.

Of course, there is the mostly absent Mr. March, off in Washington D.C. serving as Civil War chaplain and then dangerously ill in the first part and then confined to study and silent pontificating in the second, only surfacing occasionally.

Laurie is surrogate brother to the girls for the entire first half, and is so desperate to really join their fun that he proposes to two of them, and is finally accepted so that he can officially join the family.

There is both a stern matriarch (Aunt March, the feckless Mr March's aunt) and a kindly, gruff  patriarch (Mr. Lawrence) who is a benefactor akin to Cinderella's fairy godmother, supplying feasts and pianos when they are most needed.

John Brooke, Laurie's tutor, marries into the family, but before that fills the role of dependable son, escorting Marmee to Washington when word comes that Mr March is at death's door and becomes her confidant and she his.

Even Professor Bhaer, or Fritz as I like to think of him, is always more brotherly than loverly, which suits Jo's vision of romance just fine.

Now back to the sisters--it's tempting to say that Louisa May Alcott succumbed to stereotypes in her portrayal of Meg (the homebody), Jo (the tomboy), Beth (the saint), and Amy (the flirt), but her own sisters on which the fictional sisters are based provided excellent models. However, in both real life and in the book, all four girls are much more complex than this simple categorization implies.

I love the fact that all four are part of the Pickwick Club, and play their masculine counterparts in the club without reservation. They are literate and artistic and creative, each in their own way, and they are individuals, capable of growth however painful.

It's also interesting the way the sisters pair up--Jo and Beth (opposites in almost every way) and Meg and Amy (with many similar traits but contrasts in terms of spheres--Meg stays home and Amy goes to Europe!). John and Laurie, as brothers-in-law, are also bordering on the stereotype of the older, responsible brother and the younger, frivolous one.

You can view the family and the story as an evolving set of pairs:
Mr and Marmee
Aunt March and Mr Lawrence
Meg and Amy
Jo and Beth
Jo and Laurie (Teddy)
Jo and Aunt March
Aunt March and Amy
Jo and Amy
Mr Lawrence and Beth
Marmee and John
Meg and John
Laurie and John
Laurie and Amy
Jo and Fritz
Marmee and Mr March

Despite all this pairing up, I go back to central notion that Little Women is the story of how Marmee and her girls are the nucleus of a family that they grow and strengthen by grafting strong new stock as needed. The pairing up moves the plot along and provides tension and room for themes to emerge, but the core of this family is not the traditional husband and wife pair, but a mother and her daughters.

But...then...I have to remember that this book was published in 1868, when opportunities for education and careers for women were not what they are today. I talked earlier about how literate and creative and individual the girls were. While they owe much of this to Marmee, Mr March (modeled on LMA's father Bronson Alcott) was a progressive when it came to education of both girls and boys. Much as I think that Bronson Alcott's ego sentenced his family to extreme hardship and poverty, his liberalism made the nucleus that was Marmee and the March girls (i.e., Marmee and the Alcott girls) as strong and vibrant as it was.

March and Midnight Rising - fictional and non-fictional Civil War Reading

It just so happened that I read March, by Geraldine Brooks, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz back to back in September.  The coincidence is not so much that they are both books about the Civil War--I am on a CW reading binge--but Brooks and Horwitz are married, and in her Afterword Brooks mentions traveling with her husband countless times to Civil War sites. 

March is a novel in which the main character is Mr. March, the father of Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth March and husband of Marmee, literature's archetypal mother, in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.  In LW, Mr. March is a shadowy character, off stage during half the book and in his study or in the far background during the second half.  He rarely speaks, and while the girls adore him, he withers as a character in the face of the force which is Marmee.

As with A Year of Wonders, the other novel by Brooks that I've read, I had mixed feelings about this book, which is why it's taken me so long to blog about it.  It is well-written and the characters and storyline are interesting, just not believeable.  I'm not sure what it is about Brooks' stories, but she always seems to go a step too far in her plotting, rendering me a disbeliever. 

I also came to this book having recently read Eden's Outcasts, which is about Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott.  Brooks' portrait of Mr. March draws heavily on Bronson Alcott, just as LMA drew heavily on her own life for the stories and characters of Little Women.  While I am not a fan of Bronson Alcott, I'm even less of a fan of Mr. March.  Brooks took all his worst qualities and magnified them...and yet, the writing is good.

I really think I would've enjoyed March much more if Brooks hadn't leveraged Little Women.  Her main character still could've hailed from Concord, MA, still could've rubbed shoulders with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, still could've been an abolotionist, but needn't have been saddled to Marmee and the girls from Little Women.  There's just too much baggage and it weighs the story down with doubt and assumptions and inevitable dissappointment.

On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Midnight Rising, a bio of John Brown, he whose "body llies a-mouldering in the grave" while "his soul's marching on."  I have known of Harper's Ferry for years, but never really had a good grounding in what led Brown and his family and followers to attack Harper's Ferry, what they hoped to accomplish, or even really what they did accomplish.

I learned a tremendous amount from this book, and really loved how Horwitz was able to link so many of the major players in the Civil War together via Brown's story.  Absolutely first rate history and one that will bear rereading down the road.

Here's a great interview with Tony Horwitz about Midnight Rising on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Eden's Outcasts - a companion book to Little Women

Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson, was every bit as good as I hoped and expected. Coming into the book, I knew enough about A. Bronson Alcott to know that I thought he was a selfish crackpot who endangered his family's health and well-being to pursue his experiments in communal living. However, I had no idea what an innocent, well-meaning selfish crackpot he was until I read this book. Like his daughter, Louisa, I ended up forgiving him because his heart was so clearly in the right place, even if his ideas and capabilities fell fall short of the mark.

The most fascinating fact about Louisa and Bronson that I learned from the book was how coincidental their lives and achievements were. Not only were they born on the same day of the same month, November 29, but their greatest literary milestones were passed in the same year (Little Women for LMA and Tablets for her father), and they died within two days of each other. While LMA's literary success and fame far outstripped her father's, their arcs were remarkably parallel.

I found the book a delight to read--well-written, well-annotated and researched, and just the right amount of quotation from letters, journals (both father and daughter were lifelong diarists), and other primary sources. While I enjoyed reading about Bronson's quixotic youth and early struggles to find his place in Transcendental society, I most enjoyed reading about LMA's growth and development as a writer.

Having finally read Little Women last year, I can honestly say that reading this bio of LMA and her father, who was such a strong force in her life, has greatly enriched LW for me. Just today when I was listening to an audio recording of P.D. James' book, Talking About Detective Fiction, she says that "most fiction is autobiographical and some autobiography partly fiction." With the possible exception of the Little House series, I can't think of a better example of what James is saying than LMA and Little Women, which is an unabashed fictionalized account of her life.

Other notable highlights of Eden's Outcasts include a fascinating look at the years leading up to the Civil War and the abolition movement (John Brown's widow and daughters visited the Alcotts after his death) and the part the whole family played in this monumental struggle, not to mention LMA's relationships to the Concord greats, Emerson and Thoreau (who were mentors and teachers) and Hawthorne, who was a somewhat cranky and reclusive neighbor. I am now eager to get to Concord to visit Orchard House, Hillside Chapel, and Sleepy Hollow cemetary.

Having recently finished The Pilgrim's Progress, which was such a primary influence in Bronson's life, and hence his daughter's, I feel like I've completed a mini-course on LMA. Reading Pilgrim's Progess helped me see how Bronson could justify his single-minded passion of pursuing his Eden, just as Christian in Pilgrim's Progress throws off his family responsibilities in order to journey to the Celestial City, leaving his wife and children to journey on their own, just as Bronson's wife and daughters do. I can't say I ever come to admire Bronson Alcott, but I certainly admire his daughter and what she was able to acheive.

I'm not sure I'm such a fan of LMA's writing that I want to tackle her other works, but I found Eden's Outcasts to be an essential companion book to Little Women, which I read because of its popularity over the past 144 years (as in, "what's all the fuss?"), and reading both have enabled me to appreciate and understand the contribution of Little Women to American literature.

Little Women

Somehow I never read Little Women as a child and so entered my teen years determined to scorn it for its notorious goody-goody nature. And so the years went by with my scorn for this classic unchecked until recently when I felt the need to experience for myself the world that so many have loved to distraction. I started Little Women as an experiment with the Kindle app on my iphone, reading it whilst waiting at the doctor's office, the hair salon, etc. but soon found myself so caught up in the world of Jo, Amy, Meg, and Beth that I pulled the Penguin Classics version that I won last year down from the shelf and read it for real.

While the goody-goody nature of the book is often cloying, I think the reason for the novel's popularity and longevity lies in the fact that Louisa May Alcott created such a completely intact world that was realistic enough to be inhabitable but whose sharp edges were softened and made comfortable and thoroughly desirable. I have no doubt that if I had read this book as a child, I would have "played" Little Women, fantasized about living within the pages of the novel, become obsessed with it as I did my Anne and Little House books.

Last week on a business trip, I downloaded the 1994 Little Women movie with Winona Ryder as Jo and Susan Sarandon as Marmee. I thoroughly enjoyed it and felt that it captured the spirit of the book as well as all the major plot points, not an easy thing to do with a highly episodic book like this one. I also like how the script incorporated a bit of the Transcentalism that shaped the Alcott household but that is not overtly present in the book itself.

Now that I've finally read Little Women, I was able to read the Little Women chapter in Erin Blakemore's The Heroine's Bookshelf, which explores the trait of ambition and the character Jo. I found Louisa May Alcott's story so sad as compared to the magical world she created in Little Women, but then that is par for the course when it comes to fictional worlds created by beloved authors.

What did I earmark? I didn't want to fold down the corners of the pages of my beautiful copy, so I didn't mark much, but after reading this passage I found a post-it note to mark the page because I thought it so good. Regardless of her motivation as a writer and views of the finished product, Alcott was a talented author, able to balance the pressures of telling a story with speaking out with a strong narrative voice.

..in spite of her [Amy's] American birth and breeding, she possessed that reverence for titles which haunts the best of us,--that unacknowledged loyalty to the early faith in kings which set the most democratic nation under the sun in ferment at the coming of a royal yellow-haired laddie, some years ago, and which still has something to do with the love the young country bears the old,--like that of a big son for an imperious little mother, who held him while she could, and let him go with a farewell scolding when he rebelled.

Ultimately, for me, passages like this are what makes Little Women a classic. Yes, the story of the March girls growing up, shouldering their responsibilities and embracing their roles in society, is inspiring and heart-warming, but LMA's ability to articulate the American experience in all its social contradictions and ambiguity earns Little Women a place on the Classics shelf and reading lists for the future.