SOURCE: "Alcott's Portraits of the Artist as Little Woman," International Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 5, No. 5, November-December, 1982, pp. 445-59.

[In the following essay, Keyser discusses the functions of stories and play in Little Women—as escape, as training, and as allegory for the novel as a whole.]

I

Recently an Indian friend of mine told how, as a girl growing up in Kerala, she had won a contest for a speech in English and, as a prize, received a copy of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. She especially remembered the words of the man who presented it to her: "Read this, and be a great woman!" Initially I was struck by the irony of this injunction, for, according to my own and other feminist readings of the novel, to become a little woman is to relinquish one's dream of becoming a great one.¹ But there is a sense in which Little Women, if read aright, can help us avoid the stumbling blocks of self-denial which, no less than those of self, obstruct a woman's path to creativity.

The book opens as the four March sisters receive a letter from their absent father, a Union Army chaplain, exhorting them to "fight their bosom enemies bravely and conquer themselves so beautifully that when I come back to them I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women."² The girls' mother, Marmee, aids them further by suggesting that they play in earnest their childhood game of Pilgrim's Progress. Marmee's doctrine that life is a spiritual journey seems trite but unexceptionable until one reflects on the way Pilgrim's Progress is played in the March household. Marmee reminds the girls of how they used to "travel through the house from the cellar, which was the City of Destruction, up, up, to the housetop, where you had all the lovely things you could collect to make a Celestial City." When twelve-year-old Amy claims to be too old for such games Marmee reproves her: "We never are too old for this, my dear, because it is a game we are playing all the time in one way or another…. see how far on you can get before Father comes home." Thus, the doctrine implies first that women's pilgrimage is merely a game, an imitation of men's, and second that it takes place within the confines of the home for the purpose of winning male approval. To reinforce the constricted nature of women's sphere, Alcott has the girls divide the sheets they are sewing into continents "and in that way [they] got on capitally, especially when they talked about the different countries as they stitched their way through them."

Part I of Little Women is filled with accounts of the girls' games, amusements, and entertainments, most of which have a symbolic function. The amateur theatricals in Chapter 2, which are juxtaposed with the playing of Pilgrim's Progress in Chapter 1, are as significant as the threatricals in Mansfield Park or the charades in Jane Eyre. In "The Witch's Curse," written by Jo, there are eight parts, thus requiring that each of the four girls play two of them. Jo plays both the hero and the villain, which suggests not only her longing for male freedom and her major role in the larger drama of Little Women but, more importantly, the way she is divided against herself. Meg, the most conventional of the girls and the quickest to reprove Jo, plays both the witch, whose curse destroys the villain, and Don Pedro, "the cruel sire" whose patriarchal authority would thwart the hero. Amy is cast as both the airy sprite and Zara, the heroine, but her hopeless stiffness in the latter role and the way she brings the romantic-looking tower tumbling down suggest that she, no less than Jo, is too solid and substantial to permit herself to be etherealized. Finally, Beth plays a rosy retainer, the role she habitually plays in the March household, but before that she plays an ugly black imp, which implies a darker side to her nature.

Playing, pretending, acting—these activities loom large in the lives of the March girls and would seem to offer compensation for and temporary liberation from poverty, irksome tasks and, above all, the constricting roles of little women. Jo in Chapter 1 complains that "I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy" and consoles herself with playing "the man of the family now Papa is away." Her dramas allow her to play "male parts to her heart's content" and the girls' Pickwick Club, which publishes its own newspaper, also enables her to simulate the masculine world from which she is excluded. But the futility of their efforts to escape their destined roles becomes clear at the one meeting we witness of the Pickwick Club. When Jo recommends admitting Laurie, the boy next door, Meg and Amy object: "We don't wish any boys, they only joke and bounce about. This is a ladies club, and we wish to be private and proper." In fact, by learning to make-believe and play various parts, the girls are rehearsing for the games and roles they will, as Marmee says, be playing all their lives. Significantly, Meg, not swashbuckling Jo or stiff Amy, is described as the most accomplished actress. Although she professes to be too grown up to continue acting in Jo's productions, she is simply ready to play the part in life assigned her, a part for which, more than the other girls, she has a talent.

The Gardiners' party in Chapter 3 points up both the opposition between Meg and Jo, suggested by their roles in "The Witch's Curse," and the nature of the part that Meg is anxious to play. Meg is concerned that Jo's party dress is torn and burned in back because of Jo's habit of standing too close to the fire. Thus she warns Jo to "sit still all you can and keep your back out of sight; the front is all right." Because, according to Meg, "a real lady is always known by neat boots, gloves, and handkerchief," Jo must wear one of Meg's clean gloves, even though her hand is larger and will stretch it, and carry a strained one crumpled in her other hand. As they enter the party Meg admonishes Jo not to shake hands if introduced to anyone because "it is not the thing." At first Jo is miserable, standing against the wall to conceal the back of her dress, but she is hardly more so than Meg whose "tight slippers tripped about so briskly that none would have guessed the pain their wearer suffered smilingly" and who pays for her dubious pleasure with a sprained ankle. The simple details of this chapter skillfully suggest that girls like Jo, who burn their frocks and soil their gloves, who, in other words, are too full of passion and life or who lack the refinement of a "true lady," must acquire the art of concealment and that even girls like Meg, to whom the art comes almost naturally, must hide their pain and suffer injury in consequence. Before Meg's accident, however, Jo meets Laurie, forgets her dress, and dances a spirited polka with him in the freedom and privacy of a long hall. Thus, Alcott would seem to suggest that there are a few, like Laurie, to whom a woman may freely show both sides of her nature, even if one side is slightly soiled or singed. But Jo's few relaxed moments simply sharpen the images of pain, concealment and constriction. Jo's comment on the evening, "I don't believe fine young ladies enjoy themselves a bit more than we do," can thus be read ironically. The irony, if anything, is reinforced by the narrator's ambiguous comment, "And I think Jo was quite right."

Such ambiguity is typical of the narrator even when she seems to be affirming the life of selfless service and patient, silent suffering. To Beth, the sister who comes closest to embodying the ideals of little womanhood, such service is second nature. Just as she was the rosy retainer in Jo's play, so Beth, "a housewifely little creature," ministers to the wants of her mother and sisters. Not content with that, she amuses herself by setting up a hospital for infirm dolls. Later, she insists on visiting a family with typhoid while Jo is too engrossed in her writing to do so, and as a result she nearly dies of the disease. Even after she recovers at least enough to resume her household chores, Beth is unable to conceive of a future beyond the confines of her parents' home, and with the approach of adulthood she wanes and finally dies. In one of the many passages which cloy if not read ironically, Alcott, doubtless for the sake of her Victorian audience, has the narrator glorify Beth's passive, retainer role: "There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind." The modern reader, however, is struck by the vision of thankless martyrdom and the connection between self-sacrifice and death.³

Marmee, as well as the narrator, seems to express the author's doctrine of compensation for self-discipline and self-denial. But even when Marmee's moralistic judgments seem unequivocal, the incidents that prompt them admit of more than one interpretation. For example, in Chapter 4 ("Burdens") what at first reading appears to be a sermon on the need for cheerful resignation becomes, on a closer reading, a protest against women's ignorance, passivity, vulnerability and dependence. In this chapter each girl gives an account of her day after which Marmee extracts a single moral from them all: "When you feel discontented, think over your blessings and be grateful." Jo, who resents her dependent position as paid companion to crotchety Aunt March, discovers she is lucky because, unlike her aunt, she can appreciate the magnificent library "left to dust and spiders" since her uncle's death. Jo does not speculate as to why the old woman is so severely limited, why the library her husband prized is no resource to her. But we wonder, especially later when we see the good use to which Mr. Laurence, as old and lonely as Aunt March, puts his library. Meg, like Jo, resents her dependent position, but she concludes she is luckier than the wealthy family she serves as governess because she hasn't "any wild brothers to do wicked things and disgrace the family." Meg does not reflect, as we do, that at least boys can be wild and wicked while their sisters remain passively at home to be disgraced by them. Amy stops envying a friend when that friend is punished in a most humiliating way for having made a caricature of the schoolmaster; what we see, however, is the danger of ridiculing the male power structure. Finally, Beth tells how, in the fish market, Mr. Laurence presented a big fish to a poor woman who had nothing with which to feed her family. Although Beth's point is the goodness of Mr. Laurence and her own comparative good fortune, what we see is the working class woman's dependence on the patriarchal establishment. Alcott, by having Meg laughingly accuse Marmee of turning their stories against them in order to extract a moral, indicates her recognition that each story, far from pointing up the girls' good fortune, exposes something about the unfortunate condition of women, a condition in which they all share.

II

As Jo was both hero and villain of her own play, so she is the complex character of the novel, the one who undergoes inner conflict. The nature of that conflict is defined by her relationships with her sisters, her mother and her friend Laurie. That the other girls represent alternate possibilites for Jo is, in fact, suggested by Laurie's role. He is, as has been pointed out, a suitor for each girl in turn:⁴ he is regarded in the "Vanity Fair" chapter and later by Jo as a potential suitor for Meg, is an actual, if unsuccessful, suitor for Jo, is regarded by Jo as a suitor for Beth, and is finally a successful suitor for Amy. But Laurie not only points up how Meg, Beth and Amy all represent aspects of Jo; he too represents an important aspect. As mentioned earlier, he is the one with whom Jo can be completely natural. Confined, almost imprisoned in the big house next door, he is freed by Jo in a reversal of the Sleeping Beauty tale. In boldly entering the house which she regards as "a kind of enchanted palace, full of splendors and delights," and by confronting gruff old Mr. Laurence, Jo seems to be appropriating male power and freeing part of her own nature. In fact, the shabby old brown house containing the five women, and the stately but lifeless stone mansion which contains Laurie, his grandfather and the tutor, John Brooke, could represent the feminine and masculine spheres. Jo and Laurie, whose friendship brings the spheres into contact and thus enlarges both of them, seem together to make up a whole, androgynous person; Jo's nickname suggests her longing for masculine freedom and independence whereas Laurie's nickname, "Dora," and even "Laurie" itself suggest the feminine in his nature, the kinship with his artist mother. Although Jo draws him into the March girls' charmed feminine circle, she seems to bring out the manliness in "Teddy," as she alone calls him. With Laurie, "her boy," Jo is able to enjoy the male camaraderie for which she has always longed.

Although each offers and accepts so much from the other, a barrier, represented by Jo's horsehair pillow, remains between them. When Laurie threatens to run away to Washington and take Jo with him, "Jo looked as if she would agree, for wild as the plan was, it just suited her. She was tired of care and confinement, longed for change." But then she puts the temptation from her. "If I was a boy, we'd run away together and have a capital time; but as I'm a miserable girl, I must be proper and stop at home." Later, when Jo, for reasons she finds difficult to explain, rejects Laurie's much more serious offer of marriage, she feels "as if she had stabbed her dearest friend, and when he left her without a look behind him, she knew the boy Laurie would never come again." Alcott's description of this parting makes it clear that Jo has not only betrayed a friend but a crucial part of herself which she cannot hope to recover.

The boy in Jo, as represented by Laurie, is successfully opposed by Meg, Beth and Marmee. Meg and Jo, as the two oldest sisters, have a special relationship rather like that of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet. Jo writes her mother that Meg "gets prettier every day, and I'm in love with her sometimes." Whereas Elizabeth encouraged Jane's romantic interest in Bingley, Jo is frightened and angry when John Brooke seems to be courting Meg: "I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family." The threat to Meg seems a threat to Jo herself, and in her desire to protect her sister, she exposes her fear and suspicion of masculine domination. In Jo's play, we remember, Meg had been the witch and Don Pedro, the symbol of patriarchal authority. In her unquestioning acceptance of that authority, and in her affinity for the traditional female role, she does, much as Jo loves her, represent a threat and a curse. Despite their closeness, she and Jo are always at odds. Jo's "good strong words that mean something" are "dreadful expressions" to Meg. Jo enters the "enchanted palace" for the first time partly because she loves "scandalizing Meg by her queer performances." Like the benign witch in the play, Meg opposes what to her seems villainous or shocking in Jo, but, like Don Pedro, she also opposes what is heroic or creative. She does not realize that to subdue the one is to stifle the other. As the model lady, wife and finally, mother, Meg represents the patriarchal pattern imposed on women that Jo would escape. This explains Jo's outrage when, breaking in on the proposal scene, she finds "the strong-minded sister enthroned upon [John Brooke's] knee and wearing an expression of the most abject submission."

Although Amy is stronger-minded and less sweet-tempered than Meg, they are both outwardly feminine and concerned with appearance and propriety. Thus they, too, have a special bond, leaving Jo to form one with her younger sister Beth. In one of the many significant juxtapositions in Little Women, Alcott, as though to point up the striking contrast between Jo and Beth, has Beth enter the "Palace Beautiful" shortly after Jo's first visit to the "enchanted palace." But whereas Jo enters boldly, without a formal invitation, Beth creeps in only after being assured that she will see no one. She is as drawn to the grand piano as is Jo to the library, but Mr. Laurence, recognizing that her timidity almost cancels out her pleasure, provides her with a "cabinet piano" so that she can remain at home. Yet, despite her meekness, "over her big, harum-scarum sister Beth unconsciously exercised more influence than anyone in the family." Jo refers to Beth as her conscience, and when she looks at Beth's hood "the submissive spirit of its gentle owner seemed to enter into Jo." As Jo's conscience, Beth, as in the play, is both Jo's retainer and her black imp. Her influence is more subtle and insidious than Meg's because Jo is not conscious of a need to struggle against it.

Marmee, who like Jo possesses a quick temper, teaches the self-repression which Beth alone has completely achieved, as well as the feminine and domestic virtues so readily acquired by Meg. Although Marmee admits to Jo that she is still "angry nearly every day of my life," she has "learned not to show it" and hopes "to learn not to feel it." When Jo asks her how she has learned to "keep still," Marmee explains that Jo's father made "it easy to be good." But the lesson is not so much that men make it easy to be "still" and "good"; rather, they demand it, and women, being economically dependent, learn to comply.⁵ Although Marmee gives Meg tips for dealing with her husband's temper as though it were Meg's duty to govern both his and her own, she still insists that "To be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman." But to so insist is not, as has been argued, to allow "her girls a great freedom … the freedom to remain children and, for a woman, the more precious freedom not to fall in love."⁶ Although Marmee does not make worldly matches for her girls as she is accused of doing in a conversation Meg overhears, she makes it clear that marriage is the desired event for which to wait, if not to strive. There is, then, a sense in which Mrs. March does allow the girls to remain children: by denying them other options and by repressing the parts of themselves that would make other options available, she keeps them dependent, undeveloped, diminutive—like Beth, who literally fails to attain adulthood.

In another sense, though, Marmee is for denying the pleasure-loving child, and the consequences of such denial are implied when Jo endangers Amy's life. Just as Jo is closest to Beth, the sister she least resembles, so she resents Amy, the sister whose self-assertiveness mirrors her own.⁷ In Chapter 8, Amy wheedles Meg and Jo to let her accompany them to the theatre with Laurie. Meg is willing but Jo refuses, calling her a little girl and a baby. Amy warns Jo she will be sorry, and retaliates by destroying Jo's "loving work of several years." Jo is unable to forgive her, and later, when Amy tags after her and Laurie, Jo spitefully neglects to warn her of some thin ice. The resulting accident points up the consequences not only of strong emotion but of trying to repress it. In punishing and nearly killing Amy, Jo is trying to punish and exorcise the needy, greedy, demanding and childish part of herself that Amy represents, but Amy's near-tragedy suggests the futility and danger of attempting to do so.⁸ Further, Amy's destruction of Jo's book after having been spurned by Jo implies that such repression interferes with creativity. As has been argued, Jo is in a double bind: "as a girl, [she is] constantly being told that she is not supposed to express what's in her—yet her vocation is to be a writer."⁹ Just as Amy was the heroine in Jo's play, the issue at stake between the hero and the villain, so she seems to represent something crucial in Jo's nature, something towards which Jo is deeply ambivalent. Unfortunately, Jo and Marmee see this episode as calling for more repression and self-control rather than for a recognition of the feelings that prompted it.

After Laurie is rejected by Jo, he marries Amy who, like him, seeks happiness and self-fulfillment, and who is not afraid to assert herself, take risks and appear foolish or selfish. Jo, too, desires self-fulfillment, what she calls independence, but she has so internalized her mother's values that she cannot seek it without guilt. Jo views the publication of her first story as the first step in realizing "the dearest wishes of her heart"—"to be independent and earn the praise of those she loved." But the two wishes are incompatible: to achieve independence she will have to assert herself in such a way as to incur blame; and to win the praise of those she loves best, she will have to curtail her striving for independence.¹⁰ When Meg is staying with the worldly Moffats, she slips Marmee's note "into her pocket as a sort of talisman against envy, vanity, and false pride." Similarly, Jo pins Marmee's note inside her frock "as a shield and reminder, lest she be taken unaware." Jo must guard against her emotions at all times; otherwise she will disappoint her mother and, through her, her father. When, upon his return, Mr. March praises Jo, causing her to blush with pleasure, it is for having become a "young lady who pins her collar straight, laces her boots neatly, and neither whistles, talks slang, nor lies on the rug as she used to do"—in short, a lady as defined earlier by Meg.

Part I ends with Laurie wishing he could look three years ahead into their futures. But Jo, significantly, does not wish to, "for I might see something sad, and everyone looks so happy now, I don't believe they could be much improved." Comparing the end of Part I with the end of Part II, we can appreciate Jo's wisdom. Each part ends with a family tableau: in Part I Mr. and Mrs. March sit together, the engaged couple, Meg and John, sit together, and Laurie leans on the back of Jo's chair so that the two are reflected in a long glass; in Part II, John and Laurie play cricket with the boys, Mr. March strolls deep in conversation with Professor Bhaer, Jo's husband, and Jo sits with her mother and the two surviving sisters. Masculine and feminine spheres, momentarily united by the friendship of Jo and Laurie, are once again separate.

III

Meg's marriage, with which Part II begins, is an extreme but not unusual case of separate spheres. Meg is described as "growing womanly in character, wise in housewifely arts." What strikes the reader, though, is the constriction—physical, mental and emotional—to which Meg must adapt. The lawn of Meg's home, which she refers to as "my baby home," is' "about as big as a pocket handkerchief and her dining room is described as a "tight fit." Just as Meg at the Gardiners' party had to smile although her slippers pinched her feet, so now she must gracefully, even gratefully, accept her cramped and narrow lot in life. While John takes "the cares of the head of a family on his shoulders," Meg's greatest challenge is the making of currant jelly. Her failure touches off the one quarrel we witness between Meg and John, during which Meg declares "I'm sick, dead—anything." Rash as these words are, the imagery surrounding Meg's marriage does indeed suggest a living death.¹¹ After the birth of her twins, Daisy and Demi, Meg complains to Marmee that she is "on the shelf." Marmee, to do her justice, exhorts Meg not to "shut yourself up in a bandbox because you are a woman, but understand what is going on and educate yourself to take your part in the world's work." In other words, Marmee urges Meg to enter, at least through reading and conversation, her husband's sphere and, by teaching him how to help in the nursery, to draw John into hers. Although John succeeds in teaching her how to cope with their son, Demi,¹² years of little womanhood have ill-prepared Meg to enter John's world of ideas. Having asked John to read her something about the election, Meg soon "decided that politics were as bad as mathematics" and regarded her bonnet "with the genuine interest his harangue had failed to waken."

After a few such domestic experiments, Meg learns "that a woman's happiest kingdom is home" and achieves "the sort of shelf on which young wives and mothers may consent to be laid, safe from the restless fret and fever of the world, finding loyal lovers in the little sons and daughters who cling to them."¹³ These loyal lovers, Meg's Daisy and Demi, perpetuate the sexual stereotypes Jo tries in vain to escape.¹⁴ At three, Daisy begins to sew "and managed a microscopic cooking stove with a skill that brought tears of pride to Hannah's [the March's servant's] eyes, while Demi learned his letters with grandfather" and "developed a mechanical genius which delighted his father." Whereas Daisy demands a "needier," Demi actually tries to construct a sewing machine. Furthermore, in their relationship to each other they also reflect age-old stereotypes:. "Demi tyrannized over Daisy, and gallantly defended her from every other aggressor, while Daisy made a galley slave of herself and adored her brother as the one perfect being in the world." Daisy is so angelic, such a perfect little woman, that she reminds her family of Beth. "Her grandfather often called her 'Beth,' and her grandmother watched over her with untiring devotion, as if trying to atone for some past mistake, which no eye but her own could see." But it is unlikely that even her keen eye detects what the reader's can: that in rewarding Beth, and now Daisy, for angelic or slavish, self-abnegating behavior they fail to prepare them for full participation in the adult world.

Ironically, it is Jo, not Daisy, who, as we shall see, eventually succeeds Beth as "angel in the house." At the beginning of Part II, however, Jo is still defiant of sex role stereotypes and determined to expand her sphere. When Laurie returns from college, Jo can hardly refrain from "imitating the gentlemanly attitudes, phrases, and feats, which seemed more natural to her than the decorums prescribed for young ladies." In an attempt to reconcile the selfless home-body role with masculine assertiveness, Jo boasts that "if anything is amiss at home, I'm your man." Recognizing marriage as a threat to her independence, Jo prefers "imaginary heroes to real ones, because when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin kitchen [where she keeps her manuscripts] till called for, and the latter were less manageable."¹⁵ She uses her pillow, "hard, round, covered with prickly horsehair," as a "weapon of defense, a barricade," against Laurie, who she senses is becoming romantic about her. But in evading Laurie, Jo walks into the very domestic trap she has sought to avoid. Encouraged by Marmee, who believes Jo and Laurie "are too much alike and too fond of freedom," Jo goes to New York where, just as she is getting a taste of independence, she finds in Professor Bhaer the "something sweeter" than freedom that Marmee had wished for her.

Whereas Laurie had always encouraged Jo's writing without attempting to direct it, Jo's parents and later, Professor Bhaer, are as ruthless as her opportunistic publishers. While still at home, Jo had tried seriously to write and described her fits of inspiration as falling into a "vortex." After earning several checks for her stories, "she began to feel herself a power in the house." But although she enjoys both the process and the proceeds of her writing, it does not, as she had hoped, bring her the praise of those she loves. The process disturbs Marmee, who always "looked a little anxious when 'genius took to burning'" and when her sensation story wins a prize, her father says "You can do better than this, Jo. Aim at the highest, and never mind the money." Unlike her father, however, she cannot ignore the money her fiction earns, for "she saw that money conferred power." But she does try to reconcile her desire for power with her duty, as a woman, to be self-less: "Money and power, therefore, she resolved to have, not to be used for herself alone, but for those she loved more than self." When, after attempting a serious novel, her family offers suggestions for improvement, "the young authoress laid her firstborn on the table, and chopped it up as ruthlessly as any ogre." Later, the newspaper to which she takes her sensation stories asks her to edit out all moral reflections, and she feels "as a tender parent might on being asked to cut off her baby's legs in order that it might fit into a new cradle." Jo's work, no less than Meg's life, must accommodate itself to a "tight fit," and the strikingly similar passages equate her parents' moral with her publishers' amoral influence.

Professor Bhaer, who saves Jo from "the frothy sea of sensational literature," is, like John Brooke, a tutor, and his romance with Jo, like John's with Meg, begins in German lessons. For Christmas, Bhaer gives Jo what he calls a "library" between two "lids," an edition of Shakespeare, which he takes from its "place of honor with his German Bible, Plato, Homer, and Milton"—patriarchal works and authors all. Bhaer, in giving her Shakespeare, hopes "the study of character in this book will help you read it in the world and paint it with your pen." However, as Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, women cannot write like Shakespeare until, freed from the fetish of chastity, they are allowed to experience life as Shakespeare and other male authors have done.¹⁶ Jo, under the stimulus of her sensation writing, has begun to free herself and to experience life, at least vicariously: "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." As a result, Jo begins to catch "glimpses of the tragic world which underlies society," but the narrator, like Professor Bhaer, reproves her for "beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a woman's character," and as Woolf continues, "Chastity … has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instinct that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest."¹⁷ Sadly, Jo, for all her spirit, lacks this courage.

Professor Bhaer is described as "a genial fire"; "people seemed to gather about him as naturally as about a warm hearth." But in a sense, Bhaer's fire is less than genial in that it throws a damper on Jo's creative powers. After Bhaer, in disgust, burns a sheet of the despised Weekly Volcano for which Jo writes, she re reads her work, feeling as though she is wearing the Professor's glasses (significantly, he is short-sighted). Jo "had tried them once, smiling to see how they magnified the fine print of her book; now she seemed to have got on the Professor's mental or moral spectacles also, for the faults of these poor stories glared at her dreadully and filled her with dismay." She ends by stuffing the whole bundle into her stove and, after a few vain attempts to write didactic fiction, corking up her inkstand. Professor Bhaer is satisfied to see she has "stood the test" and "given up writing." Having sacrificed the Weekly Volcano and the vortex of creativity to Bhaer's "genial fire," Jo goes on to sacrifice "my boy," as she calls Laurie, to "my Professor." Ironically, in rejecting Laurie, Jo tells him, to his indignation and disbelief, "You'd hate my scribbling, and I couldn't live without it." This seems disingenuous as Laurie, unlike Professor Bhaer, has always championed her writing; when Jo first went to sell a story to a newspaper, Laurie waited outside the office with a "Hurrah for Miss March, the celebrated authoress!" Alcott further associates Laurie with Jo's writing by having her feel, after she has rejected him, as though she "had murdered some innocent young thing and buried it under the leaves," a feeling, we recall, which Jo had when editing her work against her better judgment.

IV

With the departure of Laurie from Jo's life, the dying Beth gains ascendancy. Jo takes Beth to the shore where "they were all in all to each other." When they return home, Jo devotes herself "body and soul to Beth," whose room becomes a shrine, "a little chapel, where a paternal priest taught his flock the hard lesson all must learn." For Jo, "My Beth" replaces "my boy," and in a poem Jo asks Beth to "Give me that unselfish nature." Gradually, Jo begins to feel "that I won't lose you, that you'll be more to me than ever, and death can't part us." Beth promises "I shall be your Beth, still" and urges Jo to take her place, assuring her, "you'll be happier in doing that than writing splendid books or seeing the world." "And then and there Jo renounced her old ambition, pledged herself to a new and better one." After Beth's death, Jo assumes her role: she takes shelter in her mother's arms, sits in Beth's little chair close beside her father, and assumes Beth's housekeeping duties with Beth's implements. Although it has been argued that Beth "dies so that the others can marry,"¹⁸ her death seems to perpetuate childish dependency. Specifically, in Jo's case, her death signifies the internalization of the values that Beth represents, the values of little womanhood. In turning from Laurie as she earlier turned from Amy, and in turning towards Beth and Professor Bhaer, Jo relinquishes her dreams of success and independence in order to secure the approval of those she loves. In exacting such a sacrifice, Beth is not only Jo's conscience or retainer; she is also the "black imp" of "The Witch's Curse."¹⁹

At this time Jo also turns to Meg and begins to contemplate the advantages of marriage and domesticity. Meg recommends them as a means of bringing out "the tender womanly half of your nature." Marmee, realizing it is safe now to do so, encourages Jo to write "something for us, and never mind the rest of the world." After she has done so, her father mails the piece to a popular magazine where it is accepted and much acclaimed. Jo wonders, "What can there be in a simple little story like that to make people praise it so?" Her father tells her, "you have found your style at last"; but Jo demurs: "If there is anything good or true in what I write, it isn't mine; I owe it all to you and mother and Beth." Jo's works are described now as "little stories," "humble wanderers," received by a "charitable world" and sending back "comfortable tokens to their mother, like dutiful children." The image of the female artist as mother, her works as dutiful children, suggests how Jo has withdrawn into the feminine sphere from which she had sought to escape. Even the word "charitable" reminds us of women's economic dependence and implies Jo's acceptance of it. The tension between Jo's desire for success and her desire for love has dissolved at last, and she cares more for being loved and approved than for anything else in the world.²⁰

Jo, then, for all her engaging qualities, cannot provide us with a model of the female artist. Amy, on the other hand, appears to reconcile her love of art with her desire for love, perhaps because, unlike Jo, she never attempts to appropriate the male role. Significantly, she plays the heroine in Jo's play, whereas Jo attempts to play both hero and villain. Always ladylike, Amy shrewdly defines Jo's version of independence as a desire to "go though the world with your elbows out and your nose in the air." Jo's unconventionality, while genuine, is, as Amy implies, a matter of appearance and manners; she is only independent of those for whom she cares nothing. Amy, on the other hand, moderates her behaviour so as to please those who can help her, but she is truly independent of those upon whom it is most tempting to rely. In the chapter "Artistic Attempts," Amy, despite the derision of Jo, who accuses her of truckling to people, plans a luncheon party for the wealthy girls in her drawing class, and she retains her composure when, as Jo predicted, only one of them shows up. In the chapter "Calls," Amy's decorous and graceful behavior contrasts with Jo's too stiff or too relaxed style. As Amy says, "Women should learn to be agreeable, particularly poor ones, for they have no other way of repaying the kindnesses they receive." While Jo would flaunt her unconventionality, Amy would conceal hers in order to preserve and foster her genuine independence and what would appear to be the rudiments of a feminist consciousness. During their last call, on Aunt March and Aunt Carrol, Jo asserts "I don't like favors, they oppress and make me feel like a slave. I'd rather do everything myself, and be perfectly independent." But Amy's willingness to accept patronage "when it is well meant" earns her the coveted trip to Europe and the chance to develop her art abroad.

In the chapter describing Amy's luncheon party, the narrator pokes fun at her "artistic attempts," and Alcott, by juxtaposing them with her social ambitions, seems to imply that both are equally vain.²¹ Yet in one of these attempts, Amy casts her own foot and has to have it dug out of the plaster by Jo, who "was so overcome with laughter while she excavated that her knife went too far" and "cut the poor foot." The image would suggest that Amy, perhaps more than Jo, puts herself into her work, and that Jo, in an attempt to extricate life from art, does injury to both. Further, at the end of the long passage which seems to disparage Amy's art, the narrator adds that Amy "persevered in spite of all obstacles, failures, and discouragements, firmly believing that in time she should do something worthy to be called 'high art'." As some have pointed out, Amy is not only socially but also artistically more ambitious than Jo; Jo wants to be successful and to make money, whereas Amy wants to achieve greatness.²² Nor does Amy give up her art for a man as Jo does. By the time she meets Laurie in Europe she has already discovered that "talent isn't genius." As she tells Laurie, "Rome took all the vanity out of me." While Jo subjects her work to Professor Bhaer's "moral spectacles," Amy submits hers to a far sterner test—comparison with the greatest masterpieces. Even when her work fails that test, she continues drawing, which suggests that she values the process itself.

In Europe, Amy begins to take Jo's place with Laurie just as she becomes the more self-directed artist. During their courtship she is assertive: when driving with Laurie it is she who holds the reins, and, unlike the other girls, who marry their tutors, she plays Mentor to Laurie's Telemachus. While Laurie is still languishing for Jo, looking like "the effigy of a young knight asleep on his tomb," Amy wakes him up as he had thought only Jo could do. As Laurie later tells Jo, Amy's lecture was "a deal worse than any of your scoldings." It is Amy, then, who makes a man of Laurie, whereas Jo would keep him "her boy." As Amy says, "I know you'll wake up and be a man in spite of that hardhearted girl." Laurie, in turn, encourages Amy with her art after her sketch of him excites his admiration. Having had artistic aspirations himself, and having suffered the pain of having them discouraged, he is sympathetic and nonjudgmental. As a consequence, her letters to Laurie are filled with "captivating sketches." After Amy has finally taught Laurie to forget Jo, he gathered up "all Jo's letters, smoothed, folded, and put them neatly into a small drawer of the desk," laid Jo's ring with the letters, and locked the drawer, "feeling as if there had been a funeral." The funeral marks not only the death of his old relationship with Jo but the death of her imagination and striving for independence. Amy and Laurie, significantly far removed from the dying Beth, have the only joyous union in the book. The European chapters close with the image of them rowing side by side, and the letter they send home is described as a "duet."

Amy, then, by combining an appropriate and satisfying relationship with artistic integrity and self-direction, seems to succeed where Jo fails. Why, if this is true, does she remain, like Jo, instructive more as a negative than as a positive example? For one thing, although she says she has learned the difference between talent and greatness, we never see her in the process of making that agonizing discovery. Nor do we see her, as we see Jo, acquiring "glimpses of the tragic world which underlies society." Most important, however, Amy triumphs not because she has questioned the values of little womanhood and consciously rejected them, but because she has never felt them to be incompatible with her artistic goals. For example, during Beth's first illness, Amy is sent to stay with Aunt March (significantly, Amy, unlike the other girls, is always removed from scenes of pain and suffering). Here Amy, with the help of a Catholic maid, fits up a closet as a little shrine in which she thinks "good thoughts" and prays for Beth's recovery. This little womanly activity, however, is also an aesthetic one. Amy takes great pleasure and a pardonable pride in the careful disposition of her few treasures, and her "beauty-loving eyes were never tired of looking up at the sweet face of the divine mother." Similarly, after Beth dies, Amy's gentle melancholy seems graceful, almost aesthetic compared to Jo's raw grief and subsequent despair. When Laurie finds Amy grieving in the chateau garden, "everything about her suggested love and sorrow—the blotted letters in her lap, the black ribbon that tied up her hair, the womanly pain and patience in her face; even the little ebony cross at her throat seemed pathetic to Laurie, for he had given it to her, and she wore it as her only ornament." Amy's greatest art, we begin to suspect, is not her painting or her sculpture but rather the graceful way in which she exploits her little womanhood to further her own interests. Whereas Jo finally refuses to be drawn into the vortex of creativity, Amy, just as she once tried to cast her own foot, appears to give herself unreservedly to her art. But the incident of the foot is instructive: Amy gives herself to art by becoming an art object. As object she preserves, in her studied gracefulness, something not unlike the stiffness that prevented her from being a convincing heroine in Jo's play. So, too, in the novel Amy is no real heroine and offers no real solution to the problem of woman as artist, for, unlike Jo, she evades rather than confronts the problem, and in so doing perpetuates the myth of woman as artifact rather than artificer.

In the last analysis, as throughout, out deepest sympathies lie with the real heroine, Jo, for although she lacks Amy's self-assertiveness and single-mindedness, she is right in her recognition of the need for sacrifice and self-denial. She is simply wrong about what to sacrifice and what to deny herself. After learning of Amy's happiness with Laurie, Jo's craving for affection is intensified to the point where it triumphs finally over her drive to create.²³ Although she had promised to take Beth's place with her parents and with old Mr. Laurence, that place is compatible with her place at the side of Professor Bhaer. Further, on inheriting Plumfield from Aunt March, Jo decides to open a school for boys and become a retainer on a large scale. "Fritz [Bhaer] can train and teach in his own way, and Father will help him. I can feed and nurse and pet and scold them, and Mother will be my stand-by." We are told that "Jo made queer mistakes; but the wise Professor steered her safely into calmer waters" just as he had earlier rescued her from "the frothy sea of sensation fiction." But Jo now finds "the applause of the boys more satisfying than any praise of the world, for now she told no stories except to her flock of enthusiastic believers and admirers." While Jo wistfully expresses the hope that "I may write a good book yet," Amy in the final scene is sketching still and has just modelled a figure much praised by her husband. Yet Amy is not entirely happy, for the child whose figure she has successfully modelled is dying, a further sign that Amy's graceful blend of art and domesticity is too easy and thus doomed to failure.²⁴ For Amy to become a true artist, she must both give up something and do so consciously and painfully. The sickly child, significantly named Beth, thus represents the need for women to relinquish, however tenderly and regretfully, those self-denying values which Beth, or little womanhood, has come to mean in the course of the novel. In other words, to break the pattern of self-denial we must deny ourselves its comforting familiarity. Little Women ends with Marmee stretching out her arms as though to embrace the final sex-divided tableau at Plumfield: "Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this." But although Marmee has the last words, we are prepared by the time we read them to detect their devastating irony. Although the mother can wish nothing better for her "girls," the artist who conceived Little Women has wished something better for us.

Notes

¹ For a persuasive feminist reading of the novel which in many ways anticipates my own, see Judith Fetterly's "Little Women: Alcott's Civil War," Feminist Studies, 5 (1979), 369-83. Martha Saxton, in Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott (1977; New York: Avon Books, 1978), sees the process of becoming "little women" as the process of "achieving complete diminution" (p. 41).

²Little Women (1868 and 1869; New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 19. All further references will be to this edition.

³ Patricia Meyer Spacks, in The Female Imagination (1972; New York: Avon Books, 1976), has also equated Beth's pure selflessness with death (p. 125).

⁴ See Nina Auerbach's Communities of Women (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), p. 61.

⁵ As Fetterly points out, female anger in the novel produces, or threatens to produce dire consequences whereas male anger is permissible.

⁶ Auerbach, p. 62.

⁷ Anne Hollander, in "Reflections on Little Women, " Children's Literature 9 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), views the younger Amy as unlike the other March girls in that she is unpleasant, selfish, and genuinely bad (p. 32).

⁸ According to Fetterly, Amy's accident is part of a "pattern of maximum possible consequences for a minimal degree of self-absorption and selfishness" (381). In other words, a woman's anger is criminal, tanta mount to murder.

⁹ Spacks, p. 125.

¹⁰ In Diana and Persis, a manuscript novella recently edited by Sarah Elbert (New York: Arno Press, 1978), Alcott explores the possibility that such wishes are compatible. Both of her heroines strive for "success and happiness; but with Diana success came first, with Percy [Persis] happiness; both being conscious at times of that secret warfare of thwarted instincts and imperious ambitions, the demands of temperament as well as talent" (p. 65). When Percy becomes a wife and mother, her husband insists that she will "be the greater artist for being a happy woman" (p. 128), but Diana, the character more closely resembling Alcott herself, remains skeptical.

¹¹ Auerbach also argues that in Part II of Little Women, Alcott connects "the departures of marriage and death" (p. 63).

¹² Fetterly, 376.

¹³ Jane Van Buren, in "Louisa May Alcott: A Study in Persona and Idealization," Psychohistory Review, 9 (1981), sees Alcott as recommending "an idealized version" of marriage in this passage (297-298). However, an initiated reader can detect the author's irony beneath what Van Buren calls the narrator's "suffusion of florid prose."

¹⁴ As Carolyn Heilbrun as written in Reinventing Womanhood (New York: Norton, 1979), "Perhaps only in America, with its worship of 'manliness,' could boy-girl twins, elsewhere universally a literary phenomenon characterized by their resemblance to one another, be so sharply defined and differentiated by sex roles" (p. 191).

¹⁵ This passage explains Jo's contribution to the game of rigamarole played at Camp Laurence in Part I. John Brooke begins a story of a knight and captive princess—a thin disguise for himself and Meg; Jo reduces the romantic tale to absurdity by beheading the knight and packing him in a tin box with eleven other headless knights (p. 148).

¹⁶ (1929; New York: Harcourt, 1957), pp. 48-52.

¹⁷ Woolf, p. 51.

¹⁸ Auerbach, p. 62.

¹⁹ Sarah Elbert Diamant, in her 1974 Cornell University dissertation, Louisa May Alcott and the Woman Problem, finds it significant that "Jo is the least conventional of the March girls but is also the one to whom sisterhood means the most" (p. 167). Thus she suggests that Alcott, through Jo, equates unconventionality, freedom from oppressive sex role stereotypes, with the strength to be found in sisterhood-sisterhood, that is, in our modern sense of solidarity among women. Jo's sisterhood, however, the expression of which is her attachment to Beth, means loyalty to the patriarchal family, and far from strengthening her in her unconventionality, it compels her to conform. The fact that Jo turns Plumfield into a school for boys and thus surrounds herself with males confirms that, far from valuing sisterhood in our modern sense, Jo accepts the concept of male superiority.

²⁰ As Fetterly comments, "Good writing for women is not the product of ambition or even enthusiasm, nor does it seek worldly recognition. Rather it is the product of a mind seeking solace for private pain, that scarcely knows what it is doing and that seeks only to please others and, more specifically, those few others who constitute the immediate family. Jo has gone from burning genius to a state where what she writes isn't even hers" (374).

²¹ Critics too have disparaged Amy's art. Spacks contends that Jo "is interested in the occupation itself, unlike Amy, for example, whose narcissistic desire to paint disappears promptly when she is married" (p. 126). Some have speculated that Alcott sympathizes with Jo, who resembles herself, and withholds sympathy from Amy, who, like Alcott's sister May, goes after what she wants and always seems to get it. (See, for example, Saxton, Ch. 1.) In Diana and Persis, Percy, the May-Amy figure, is portrayed more sympathetically. In this story it is Percy who cares for happiness or love at least as much as she cares for art, and it is Diana, the Louisa-Jo figure, who is willing to live without love in order to achieve artistic greatness. The sisterhood that Elbert and Auerbach find in Little Women is a much stronger theme in this later work.

²² Hollander, p. 33.

²³ Obviously I disagree with John Seelye who believes that "in marrying a much older man, while refusing the beautiful Childe Byron, Laurie, Jo most certainly continues her subversive operation." See "Notes on the Waist-High Culture," Children's Literature 9, p. 180.

²⁴ Fetterly interprets Amy's sickly child as another indication that art, for most women, "is the product of a mind seeking solace for private pain" (374).