The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

Little Women (1868-1869)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

Little Women was written by Louisa May Alcott and was published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Alcott (1832-1888), an American, was a professional novelist. Little Women is her best- known novel; it has never been out of print and has been a cherished classic of girls’ literature for generations.

Little Women is a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel) about the four March sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, and their lives growing up during and after the American Civil War. As teenagers, they suffer through poverty but are never as desperately poor as their neighbors, and usually have enough to give to their poorer neighbors, the Hummels. Jo befriends the neighbor’s boy, Laurie, and he becomes one of the family; Jo later befriends Laurie’s intimidating grandfather and warden, Mr. Laurence, and he becomes a steadfast friend to the family, although his favorite is the music-playing Beth, who Mr. Laurence gives a piano to.

The girls have various adventures—Amy nearly dies while skating on thin ice, Meg attends a party and learns that appearances are not everything, and Jo begins writing stories for the local newspaper. These relatively innocent times end when the Marches receive a telegram informing them that their father, who is serving in the Army as a chaplain, has been injured, and that Mrs. March has to go to Washington to take care of him. With Mrs. March being absent, the girls neglect their chores, with the result that Beth is exposed to scarlet fever and only partially recovers from it. Laurie’s tutor falls in love with Meg, and she reciprocates his feelings, much to Jo’s dismay.

In the second volume, three years have passed, and Laurie is nearly done with college. Meg marries Mr. Brooke and moves into a house with him. Jo becomes a successful writer and Amy goes to Paris with the Marches’ Aunt Carrol. Jo moves away from home in an attempt to try to prevent Laurie from loving her, and while away from home meets Professor Bhaer, a poor German language instructor. A deep friendship grows up between them. When Jo returns home, Laurie proposes to her, but she declines him, temporarily rupturing their friendship. Beth dies from complications of her disease. Laurie, who has gone to Europe to recover from her heartbreak, meets up with Amy, and they fall in love and marry. Professor Bhaer comes to visit Jo and they fall in love, marry, and found a boarding school for boys.

Like Kidnapped, Little Women has been ill-served by its relegation—driven by librarians and booksellers—to the category of Young Adult literature. Little Women is justly beloved by the girls who read it, but the novel is considerably more complex than traditional 19th century children’s literature, and has content which should appeal to adult readers as well. Historically, Little Women is important as a transitional novel between traditional Romantic children’s literature and Sentimental literature and more modern children’s literature.

It is true that Little Women is Young Adult literature. As mentioned, it is a coming-of-age story, covering the childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of the four March sisters, and in that respect the novel is apposite reading for young adults. Compared to other Victorian Bildungsroman, such as Emma or Père Goriot, Little Women lacks sophistication and is considerably simpler in style. Little Women is not a simple text—Alcott intermixes a great deal of moral and religious instruction with the story of Jo and the other sisters, and repeatedly chooses to make unpredictable and even uncomfortable authorial choices—but it is told in a simpler manner than Austen or Balzac would have chosen. Alcott was not the equal of those two authors, of course, but she deliberately chose to tell Little Women in a direct, simple style: “never use a long word, when a short one will do as well,” in her own words. The content of the novel often becomes quite serious and even verges on tragedy—Beth’s decline and death due to scarlet fever and Jo’s turning down Laurie’s marriage proposal would be fitting material for an adult novel, and Alcott does not turn away from the more sobering aspects of poverty—but the plot proceeds without the complications of adult fiction, or the more mature narrative description of it.

That said, Little Women is surprisingly complicated for Young Adult literature. It’s not that the plot is complicated (although it is modeled on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress) but that Alcott’s world is complicated and complex—and realistic. Good people like Beth and innocents like the Hummels’ baby grow ill, waste away and die from disease. Soldiers at war, like Mr. March, get injured, leading to frightening telegrams home to their family. Young men impassioned by love find that the objects of their desire don’t love them back, despite plot momentum and the laws of narration seeming to indicate that they should. These are not matters for children, but for young adults, and Little Women treats and portrays them in a sober and unblinking fashion, albeit one colored by Alcott’s religious faith.

This complication is part of the evolution of children’s literature in the 19th century. Before the 1860s stories written specifically for children had a moralistic and didactic element to them: they were intended to reach children proper morals and behavior. Authors wrote fairy tales of various stripes as well as adventure stories for children, but through all of these ran a heavy strain of moralizing, and the notion that what the children read must be morally instructive was never far from authors’ minds, especially in domestic novels for children, whose characters were portrayed in flat, pious, one- dimensional terms. This began to change in the 1860s, first with the Reverend Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863), which brought a realism to the genre of children’s fiction in its treatment of the plight of child chimney sweeps and established that was possible to write a story for children that was both popular and at least partially rooted in the real world. Next came Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which lacked any moralizing or didactic aspect, and is a nonsense satire which lampoons adults but makes no attempt to instruct children and is nearly absent of sentimentality. Then came Little Women, which did contain a significant moralizing element but which used autobiographical elements from Alcott’s own life to create three-dimensional human beings in the children and to portray family life in realistic (though still unobjectionable) terms. These three works allowed children’s literature as a genre to begin to evolve.

Alcott also made something new in Little Women. The sentimental novel— the modified, 19th century version of novels of Sensibility—led to the creation of a type of domestic fiction (the most dominant fictional type in the middle of the 19th century, domestic fiction is about the story of a young women winning her way in the world) called the “conduct novel.” In these novels female characters endure hardship to triumph while also instructing the reader about the proper conduct of women, with emotion (Sensibility) being used as an argumentative tool to convince readers. Alcott took elements of the conduct novel and undertook, in her words, “to write a little story about Young America, for Young America.” As critic Sarah Elbert notes, Alcott created the first fictional portrayal of the specifically American adolescent female (as opposed to English or European), essentially creating the market for American Young Adult fiction that was about America rather than England.

This Americanism in the novel expressed itself in other ways. One of the major themes of the novel was the portrayal of the American self-reliance promoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson; another was the tension between individualism and community, of the desire to go one’s own way versus the necessity to be a part of a family and greater social organism—again, a very American dilemma, especially during the time in which Little Women was written.

Little Women has numerous other themes: the glorification of domesticity and the family life; marriage as the proper fate for women; the necessity to grow up and set aside childish things. All traditional, conservative themes, which have led some critics to see the novel as inherently repressive, teaching women how to become submissive and domesticated—to become “little” women. But much of Little Women is not conservative, but radical, and part of the tension in Little Women is a novel at war with itself—Alcott working out her own issues through the writing of the novel.

Alcott’s childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood were deeply unhappy—her family was often desperately poor, forcing Alcott to work to support them from an early age, one of Alcott’s sisters died and another married. Alcott funneled these unpleasantnesses into Little Women but transformed them into something more genial, turning oppressive poverty into a more romanticized, mere wanting of better things (Alcott went hungry as a child, but the March children never did), the loss of hair due to disease into Jo voluntarily cutting and selling her hair, the death of Elizabeth Alcott into the gentle departure of Beth and the destruction of the family unit by Anna Alcott’s marriage into Meg’s marriage, which only gently strains the sisterhood of the March sisters.

There is also the matter of anger—Jo’s anger, Marmee’s anger, and Alcott’s anger. This anger, what critic Ann Murphy calls “unending rage against the cultural limitations imposed on female developments,” is a recurring theme through the novel, but how Alcott has the novel deal with the anger has led to numerous critical debates. Is the novel conservative in teaching Jo and Marmee to suppress their anger, or is the novel radical in acknowledging the anger and at times letting it vent? The novel remains ambiguous and admits of multiple interpretations on this issue, and many others.

Also interesting to modern critics is the question of gender and sexuality in Little Women. Alcott’s own sexuality remains a matter of much debate; she seems to have been attracted to much older or younger men, and apart from a two-week trip in Europe with a younger Polish man—a trip that seems to have been a brief romance—Alcott never had a relationship with a man. Of herself she even said that “I am more than half persuaded that I am a man’s soul put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body … because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.” This, and the portrayal of Jo—Alcott’s fictional substitute—as someone who for most of the novel is not interested in men or romance, have led many to suppose that Alcott was a lesbian or bisexual.

The issue of the erotics of Alcott extend to Little Women as well. Rebellious, tomboyish Jo, who turns down Laurie’s marriage proposal, and who repeatedly says she has no use for romance, is ultimately married to Professor Bhaer, a much different kind of man than Laurie—a patriarch fifteen years her senior and her instructor in German and in morality. Under the influence of Bhaer, Jo gives up her sensationalist writing and writes more morally acceptable fare (in much the same way that Alcott herself gave up writing sensationalist fiction to write the “moral pap,” in her own words, of children’s literature). Does this constitute Alcott’s sacrifice of Jo, forcing her to submit to the limitations of marriage to Bhaer? Or does the fact that Jo maintains her self- sufficiency as a writer and person mean that Alcott was actually subverting Victorian ideals of domesticity and womanhood? The usual critical assessment is that Jo’s marriage to Professor Bhaer rather than Laurie was Alcott’s way of frustrating readerly desires for a conventional fate for Jo (marrying Laurie) and instead urging readers to keep an open mind in matters of love (by marrying the elderly, German Bhaer, as different from Laurie as it possible to be). But a good argument can be made that the resolution of Jo’s life is as unconvincing as the ending of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and that Alcott essentially bowed to market pressure by marrying her off rather than letting her live life independently, as Alcott herself did, and perhaps finding another woman to form an “intense friendship” with, as a number of Victorian women did.

There is certainly, in Little Women, a substantial amount of 19th century feminism: one of the themes of the book is of women seeking satisfaction on their own terms, rather than through husbands and family. And in the character of rebellious, tomboyish Jo, who supports herself and her family through writing, who turns down Laurie’s marriage proposal, and who repeatedly says she has no use for romance, women readers of Little Women found a new fictional role model to emulate. More broadly, there is a kind of gender instability in the novel, with the adolescent Jo—more of the protagonist of Little Women than any other character—being relatively mannish (at one point going so far as to describe herself as the man of the household) and adolescent Laurie having various feminine qualities and essentially becoming one of the March sisters.

Will modern readers find Little Women worth reading? Yes, both adolescents and adults. Alcott’s documentary approach to the lives of the March family gives modern readers a detailed glimpse into the lives of New England villagers during the Civil War (although in volume one of Little Women Alcott’s focus on the March family is so tight that life outside the household is only vaguely described). Alcott’s documentary style also lets readers see how children and adolescents of the 1860s really spoke—again, Alcott was trying to write “a little story about Young America, for Young America,” rather than emulating traditional English children’s literature and making the children’s diction and grammar as perfect as their characters would be.

Despite the dating of the novel Little Women still provides adolescent readers with material to laugh and to cry at. The adolescent mindset of the March sisters still rings true to adolescent readers today. Adult readers will find that the characters are realistically good and realistically flawed, so that the characters are generally good but make mistakes, some of which are critical, such as Jo’s obsessive focus on writing leading to Beth catching scarlet fever and ultimately dying from it. Despite Alcott’s portrayal of the March family being a loving and positive one, Alcott does not sentimentalize their life or flaws.

Adults will find the portrayal of the March family as an interesting homosocial female paradise, where Mr. March is absent through the first volume and essentially absent through the second, and in which the only male to enter the family—Laurie—feminizes himself and even goes so far as to take on a feminine nickname.

Too, although Alcott took the material of her own life and romanticized it to a certain degree, there remains much unsentimental material, and Alcott does not shy away from showing unpleasant events: the telegram from the front informing the Marches that their father has been injured, saintly Beth catching a disease and eventually dying, and the emotional distress, on both sides, caused by Jo not loving Laurie and turning down his marriage proposal.

Finally, although there is a definite moralistic streak in Little Women, Alcott tends to keep the homilies and moralizing short. The novel keeps to the right side of being saccharine, and does not pretend that the hardships of life are not difficult to deal with.

Although Little Women lacks the sophisticated style of similar Victorian coming- of-age stories, the content of the novel is as mature and complex as any other Young Adult novel of the era, and readers will find themselves caring about the characters.

Recommended Edition

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women: An Annotated Edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013.

For Further Research

Alberghene, Janice M, and Beverly Lyon Clark, eds. Little Women and the Feminist Imagination. London: Routledge, 1998.

Elbert, Sarah. A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott’s Place in American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

McCrum, Robert. “The 100 Best Novels: No. 20—Little Women.” http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/03/100bestnovelsLittleWomenlouisamayalcott

Murphy, Ann B. “The Borders of Ethical, Erotic, and Artistic Possibilities in Little Women.” Signs v15n3 (Spring 1990).

Stern, Madeleine. “Louisa May Alcott: Overview.” Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers. Detroit, MI: St. James’ Press, 1995.

Thompson, Stella. “Little Women.” Facts on File Companion to the American Novel. NY, NY: Facts on File, 2006.