pictures.” Amy is blond, blue-eyed, “and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners.” Her love of the conventions ties her to Meg, whose favorite she is, and like Meg, Amy must learn modesty. Jo instead adores Beth—her “conscience”—but tangles with Amy, also quick-tempered.

Many scenes, especially early in the novel, depict the girls learning and playing together with domestic morals in mind, but almost from the outset next-door-neighbor Laurie is involved. Laurie, or Theodore Laurence, is the grandson of kindly, wealthy old Mr. Laurence, benefactor to the March girls. When first seen, Laurie has come back from a Swiss boarding school. He is jolly, gallant, and a bit of a prankster. Laurie hopes “never to be bothered about money or business.” He is a friend and equal to all the girls, but his special pal is Jo, whose age he is.

What draws Laurie to the Marches is the harmonious domesticity he sees. Laurie is lonely, an orphan. When the curtain is undrawn next door, and the lamps are lit, “it’s like looking at a picture to see the fire,” Laurie tells Jo, “and you all round the table with your mother.” According to one line of Alcott criticism, the scene shows the self-contained relations that exist among the March women. The agent in this harmony is Marmee, who has “a ‘can-I-help-you’ look” and a “cheery voice.” Marmee is the ideal mother, but there is ambiguity in her nature. It is revealed in one of the harshest clashes among the girls.

The clash occurs when Jo refuses to let Amy come along to the theater after Laurie has bought tickets for the older sisters only. Amy retaliates by destroying Jo’s cherished manuscript and later nearly drowns due to a fall through the ice because Jo is too angry to watch her little sister skate. “It’s my dreadful temper!” Jo privately tells Marmee, in remorse. “I try to cure it; I think I have, and then it breaks out worse than ever.” The incident shows Marmee at her best, performing her role as her daughters’ confidante, moral teacher, and guide, but she is perhaps not as happy as she seems. “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I have learned not to show it,” Marmee says. “I am not patient by nature.”

When pressed, Marmee says that Father helped her curb a temper just like Jo’s. The confession has helped many Alcott critics to conclude that Marmee is an example of patriarchal oppression, rather than matriarchal strength. There is additional dialogue to support this view. “How lonely and helpless we should be,” Marmee says, “if anything happened to Father.” On the other hand, as a character Mr. March is a shadowy presence, absent until halfway through the novel. Too old and weak to serve as a soldier, he volunteered to serve as a chaplain for the Union side during the Civil War.

At home, Mr. March is the minister of a small parish, a man “young at heart, gently sympathetic, wise in counsel, pure-hearted.” There is a hint that he is also impractical: “even worldlings confessed that his beliefs were beautiful and true, although ‘they wouldn’t pay.’ ” A description of his role in family relations can be read either to indicate that Mr. March is subtly dominating or that he is simply fatherly and kind. “To outsiders, the five energetic women seemed to rule the house,” but “the quiet scholar, sitting among his books, was still the head of the family, the household conscience, anchor, and comforter.” In any case, the older Marches are depicted overtly as good parents.

Marmee continues in her guiding role as the girls grow into young women. Meg, the first to marry and become a mother, exemplifies the benefits of Marmee’s teaching. Meg’s moral progress is seen in her marriage for love, not money. Her husband, John Brooke, Laurie’s former tutor, is an honest, hardworking bookkeeper. Marmee’s advice to Meg about how to treat John has bolstered the claim of many critics that the novel overtly honors women’s self-denial. Marmee advises “not to wake his anger against yourself, for peace and happiness depend on keeping his respect.”

Another occasion for advice, Meg’s absorption in maternal duties that shut John out, finds Marmee speaking in terms which persuade other Alcott critics that she advocates an enlightened, democratic view of marriage. Marmee urges Meg to go out more, to take an interest in politics, to share the responsibilities of home with her husband, the way her parents did before her. “Don’t shut yourself up in a bandbox because you are a woman,” Marmee says, “but understand what is going on, and educate yourself to take your part in the world’s work.” Feminist critics generally discount Meg as a character worthy of serious attention because of her ongoing domestic inclinations.

Critics also devote little attention to Beth. She is ill for an extended time in the novel, the result of a visit she makes to the home of the impoverished Hummels, objects of Marmee’s charity. She contracts scarlet fever, recovers, then sinks into a long decline during which she bears up as a household “saint,” then dies. Feminist critics generally cite the death as inevitable, since the sort of selfless domesticity Beth displays must render her invisible. Some of Beth’s words to Jo, who is grief-stricken over the coming death, are seen as indicative of the low self-esteem a life of private domesticity must foster. “I couldn't seem to imagine myself anything but stupid little Beth, trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there.”

The March most affected by Beth’s death is Jo, who ponders the self-forgetful virtues she finds so hard to imitate. She begins to try to fulfill a deathbed request to take Beth’s place with their parents. Some feminist critics see in the effort one of the stages in the disappointing tempering of Jo’s strong, independent spirit. That spirit is what has caused readers through the years to identify with Jo, making her their favorite of the four sisters. Feminist critics also see Jo as the sister of greatest interest. Jo, and to a lesser extent Amy, are seen by some critics as embodiments of the feminist theme that domesticity necessarily thwarts creative expression.

Jo, for much of the novel, is a developing writer. She wins a prize for a “sensation story” and brings in more “delightful checks” for tales “in which the passions have a holiday.” She finds that she can “supply her own wants, and need ask no one for a penny.” She begins to “feel herself a power in the house, for by the magic of a pen, her ‘rubbish’ turned into comforts for them all.” An agent on her path is Mr. Dashwood, the “smokiest gentleman” among a cigar-puffing trio at a publishing office. He wants his stories “short and spicy,” he says. “Morals don’t sell nowadays.”

Some feminist critics believe that the total taming of Jo’s spirit comes with her marriage. Jo rejects a proposal from Laurie, who when grown is passionate, college-educated, and Jo’s friend and equal of long standing. A love later develops between Laurie and Amy, who has worked to become fashionable and agreeable. Grown-up Amy is “a true gentlewoman in mind and manners.” Part of Amy’s maturation is seen in her decision not to marry for money, as she planned. In Laurie, Amy gets both money and love, and through her influence he matures out of his indolence. Amy’s abandonment of hope for an artist’s career serves the theme that marriage suppresses women’s creativity, according to some feminist critics.

These critics argue the same point concerning Jo. An abrupt end to her writing comes with Jo’s post away from home at a boarding school, where she meets her future husband, Professor Friedrich Bhaer. Friedrich is forty years old, a German immigrant, very learned, good and hardworking, but “poor as a church mouse.” He is also benevolent, “happy-hearted as a boy,” and as attractive to people “as a genial fire.” Moreover, Friedrich is domestic and longs for “wife and child and home.”

Jo is greatly drawn to Friedrich, but he is a defender of moral virtues against sensational stories, the kind Jo writes. “They are not for children to see,” he says. Earning a living by writing them is dishonest; it “puts poison in the sugarplum.” Jo decides herself to burn her manuscripts, but in exchange, she gets “a friend worth having” all her life. Friedrich is a controversial figure for critics, some of whom argue that Jo should have remained a writer and not married at all. Other critics prefer the sensual, charming Laurie to the fusty or protective fatherly figure they claim Friedrich is. Still others approve the match between Laurie and Amy.

Yet another line of criticism points to the positive view of domesticity and marriage Friedrich serves to represent, and there is considerable evidence for this. The narrative indicates that Jo took a dim view of spinsterhood, “a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children.” The narrative also makes it clear that Jo definitely makes a love match, and with Friedrich, she finds a cooperative, democratic marriage. Jo has the opportunity to work, as she and her husband implement her dream of managing “a good, happy, homelike school” for boys.