While these internal revolutions were going on...
While these internal revolutions were going on...
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Last week: Phillis Wheatley “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773)
This week: Louisa May Alcott, from Little Women, Chapter 34 “Friend” and Chapter 35 “Heartbreak” (1868)
Next week: Edgar Allen Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842)
Few books are so beloved by my students as this one. I teach two sequential courses in American literature: in the fall I teach “beginnings” to 1865, and then in the spring— starting now! — I teach 1865-1917. Little Women will be the first novel of the second semester, but my first semester women are forever hopeful that I could perhaps make an exception. They come up to me at the end of the class, stars in their eyes, begging to write the term paper for American Literature I on Little Women.
I’ll tell you what, there are no such solicitations for Moby Dick.
When I think about the role this book had on my own young womanhood, I can only catch a glimmer of the feelings I once had for it. It felt like a revelation — I remember that — to read a “classic” that was exclusively about young womanhood. I came to this book after a long time in Narnia, where the genders are evenly distributed but the heroes are the boys, and Susan grows up and leave magic behind. I felt sad for the Susans and Megs of the world, and fought with all my heart against their taming. (I am still fighting that battle!)
At 35-years old, with a novel, a memoir of her time as a Union nurse, and a huge stack of successful stories to her name, Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women to help her father. The story goes: her father, Bronson Alcott, was in conversation with a publisher about his next philosophical treatise. The saavy publisher, Thomas Niles, wanted to fill a gap in the market for juvenile literature for girls — what we call YA today — and he had already tried, and failed, to convince Louisa May Alcott of the project. Niles brokered a package deal: he would take Bronson Alcott’s manuscript if Louisa May Alcott would write a lively, smart novel for girls. Her response was that she didn’t know any girls. But she got to work, out of fidelity to her father, and produced Little Women in 2 months.
There are so many beautiful essays, books, and reflections on this book. Some of my favorites are the wonderfully fun “reviews” of each of the March sisters from the Avidly blog at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Greta Gerwig’s 2019 movie version was critically acclaimed — and I love the casting of Jo, Amy, and Laurie. It seems we are just as eager as our students to keep writing about Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth.
I want to focus on a chapter that seems like a transition, but actually tracks a key pivot in Jo’s inner world. “Friend” or Chapter 34 comes at the top of three key chapters: Jo’s writing and intellectual life are explored in relationship to her budding admiration for Professor Bhaer, the “friend” of Ch 34. Then in Ch. 35, Jo denies Laurie’s proposal in “Heartbreak” (easily the most famous scene in the novel, played to perfection by Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan) and in ch. 36, Beth and Jo go to the seaside for a retreat, and Beth tells Jo that she is aware that she is dying.
So, in Chapter 34, no such big revelations, no fireworks or tears are shed. But I love this chapter because it shows a writer trying to come up with a voice. She is living in the classic New York City garret, and:
“She saw that money conferred power; money and power, therefore, she resolved to have; not to be used for her self alone, but for those whom she loved more than self.”
Alcott uses the figure of Jack and beanstalk to describe her heroine’s labors. She had a tumble when her novel was not well received.
“But the “up again and take another” spirit was as strong in Jo as in Jack; so she scrambled up on the shady side, this time, and got more booty, but early left behind her what was far more precious than the money-bags.”
How does Jo go “up on the shady side” and get the booty? She writes sensational stories, “rubbish,” “thrilling tales” for a newspaper man who sits in a cloud of cigar smoke with his feet on his desk and offers her 25 dollars a story. Mr. Dashwood is a classic stereotype. He sees straight through Jo’s ruse that she is “asking for a friend,” and publishes her tales without her name.
“She thought it would do her no harm…”
At the time she wrote Little Women, Louisa May Alcott was doing the same thing — writing “thrillers” and these subversive and lurid tales of spies, opium dens, violence, and escaped convicts ran counter to the moralistic matters we know her for now. She used this money to support her family when they needed it most, in the 1860s, and published them under a pseudonym, A M. Barnard. She didn’t burn them. thankfully, so we can enjoy this “shady side.”
Jo has been sheltered from the world, so she seeks to rectify this gap in her education:
“But Mr. Dashwood rejected any but thrilling tales, and as thrills could not be produced except by harrowing up the souls of the readers, history and romance, land and sea, science and art, police records and lunatic asylums, had to be ransacked for the purpose. Jo soon found that her innocent experience had given her but few glimpses of the tragic world which underlies society, so regarding it in a business light, she set about supplying her deficiencies with characteristic energy. Eager to find material for stories, and bent on making them original in plot, if not masterly in execution, she searched newspapers for accidents, incidents, and crimes. She excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons. She studied faces in the street, and characters, good, bad, and indifferent, all about her. She delved in the dust of ancient times for facts or fictions so old that they were as good as new, and introduced herself to folly, sin, and misery, as well as her limited opportunities allowed.”
What fun!
Unfortunately I could not free myself from the meetings I have to go to today (dutiful Meg!) in order to share with you all the adventures Jo undertakes on the streets of New York, in order to get material for these dangerous stories. Go reread chapter 34. About how she attends a party and soaks up the debates of philosophy students, talk on Kant and Hegel, which rearranges her thinking, like “a young ballon out on a holiday.” And how both times, the moral narrator brings her back from this edge with the steady hand of Professor Bhaer, who puts the guardrails back on. Jo rereads her stories through his eyes, literally, wearing reading glasses like his. She burns the stories and keeps the money. Goes home with her reputation intact and takes Beth to the seaside.
But here’s the thing— the author left the passages of freedom and intellectual curiosity right there on the page for us to follow. Burn the manuscripts all you want, Jo, the newspapers are still in the archives. The path you walked into freedom and power is clearly lit.