
Robinson Crusoe
The Only Man on the Island or What did Crusoe do with Friday on Saturday Night?
...
May
12
May
14
[Hard as it is for me to conceive
that there might be people who are not acquainted with the story of Meg, Jo,
Beth and Amy, I should warn readers that this piece contains plot spoilers.]
Little Women is the first proper book I read on my own as a child. The archaeological evidence bears out this memory: I was given a copy of Piccole Donne the year I started school, as shown by my Nonno’s dedication, inscribed “with infinite tenderness” and elegant penmanship. It is one of the best presents I have ever had in my life. I must have read that book at least once a year until I graduated to the pleasures of unabridged novels, and I know I am not alone in these compulsive returns to the world of the March sisters. I also have dim recollections of play-acting their story with a neighbour of mine. There were only two of us. She was an only child, and my brother didn’t get roped into being Laurie, the honorary fifth sibling. It’s not as if gender-blind casting was out of the question. To us girls, eight and nine years old, Laurie and the rest were simply not an integral part of the narrative.
I don’t know how but I managed to convince my friend to be Meg and Amy, my least favourite sisters. (Amy, I truly disliked with a passion.) I kept for me the other pairing set up in the novel: Beth and, most importantly, Jo. I was strong-willed and crotchety like her. I admired her free spirit. I dreamed of becoming a writer. Meanwhile, I could think of no greater bliss than to retreat to a sunny garret to read books and munch crisp apples. If being Jo meant that my other role in our game ended in premature tragedy, that seemed a fair deal to me. Beth’s musicianship, no matter how short-lived, was further compensation for her demise anyway – though, I realise now, the same did not apply to Amy’s own artistic talent, which did nothing to absolve her of her silly pretensions in my eyes. My tunnel vision only registered her frivolity, and I wanted no truck with that. I think I have mellowed out, a bit, with age. So, how does Little Women stand up to the test of time? I’m thinking here about my own modest life-span to date, rather than the hundred and fifty years since its original publication (Part 1 was issued in early October 1868, Part 2 – initially printed out in a separate volume, as Good Wives – in April 1869). Let’s see.
Nearly a decade on and, tempted by the recent BBC Radio 4 adaptation, I have gone back to Little Women once more. This time the relish I have felt in renewing my acquaintance with Jo and her sisters has surprised me. Yes, the novel is sentimental and didactic, and it suffers from occasional longueurs. And yes, while it’s cold and bleak outside, and political debate often sinks to the level of shouting and bullying, Little Women has offered me the incomparable comfort of hanging out with good, kind, considerate people. They respond to nastiness with generosity of spirit, and – would you believe it? – the strategy tends to pay off. I should try that sometimes. (Christopher Columbus, I have mellowed out!)
What of the fact, though, that Jo must give up writing her sensation novels before she can deserve the love of a good man? Isn’t that a sure sign that her creativity – and earning power – must be curbed as a condition for the traditional happy ending? We are getting closer to the mark with this observation – and it might be for this reason that the well-paced Radio 4 dramatization has glossed over Professor Bhaer’s censorious attitude towards Jo’s thrillers. Still, Alcott is careful not to suggest that Jo can’t be a writer and a wife and mother. If anything, at the close of the novel Jo declares with characteristic optimism that the book she hopes to write one day “will be all the better for such experiences and illustrations such as these”. The words are said as she gestures to her extended family and the boys’ school she has set up at Plumfield.
Contrary to Professor Bhaer’s negative judgment, sensation fiction is now widely recognized as the valuable mode of expression for social anxieties that it was, especially for women writers, in the mid-to-late 19th century. Even so, Jo’s stint in the field of lurid melodrama is dictated by economic necessity, rather than by her own artistic proclivities. Jo writes in order to make money. The irony is that that’s exactly what Alcott did with Little Women. She wrote it almost under duress, against her better instincts: “the publisher thought it flat, so did I […] We found out our mistake, & since then, though I do not enjoy writing ‘moral tales’ for the young, I do it because it pays well.”[2] Better, we might add, than the sensation fiction she had previously published.
On one point though, I still agree unreservedly with Estes and Lant’s analysis: the Jo remembered best by those of us who read Little Women as children is the rebellious tomboy, and not the little woman she may or may not have become by the end of the novel. For me, she’s the aspiring writer caught up in her creative “vortex”, the gregarious prankster, the hermit reading books and munching apples in a room of her own. She’s the spirited, mischievous, voluble work-in-progress, busy figuring out how to be herself and testing boundaries along the way. I never really cared about the destination. Knowing that I was not alone in my dreams of independence, and my confusion about how to get there, was enough.
P.S. Nonno’s literary gift was followed up by another American classic, when my father handed me a children’s edition of Moby Dick. I don’t remember how seamlessly I travelled from the genteel, pastel-coloured world of the March sisters to Ishmael’s much darker adventure. I know I was awed by the illustration of Queequeg’s tattooed face, because it’s still imprinted vividly in my mind. And I did colour in the whale…
[1] Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant,
‘Dismembering the Text: The Horror of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women’, Children’s
Literature 17 (1989): 98-123.
[2] Letter from Louisa May Alcott to Miss Churchill (1878?). In her 1868
journal, Alcott had recorded of the
composition of the novel: “I
plod away, through I don't enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls, or knew
many, except my sisters”.
[3] Letter from Louisa May Alcott to Elizabeth Powell, 20
March 1869.
[4] On this issue, see Anne Dalke, “‘The House-Band’: The
Education of Men in Little Women”, College English 47 (1985): 571-78.