Making Amy a psychopath is the ridiculously easy choice that they have to **avoid**. I can just hear Louisa May Alcott shouting, "No, stupid; that's exactly NOT the point!"
The point of making a somewhat (or very) unpleasant girl who's **not** a psychopath is because most ordinary people who are unpleasant aren't psychopaths. A lot of books spend times puzzling over and examining this, and some of those get it wrong in different ways (like trying to make their actions virtuous for some reason--that, too, is not the point: if you make what a character does excusable, then you've drained it of a lot of its unpleasantness).
But ordinary people can be mean! They can have character traits that are dislikable--without necessarily being entirely disliked by everyone! How does that work? **That's** the interesting, harder thing to examine.
Destroying something that took years of work is a terrible, terrible thing. People--especially kids--sometimes are so overcome by emotion (even petty emotion) that they act with no sense of proportion or consequence. The fact that Amy felt terrible remorse is what shows she's not a psychopath... she's just garden-variety unpleasant, and not always even that. That's MORE of a trial to learn to deal with. Are you obligated to insta-forgive, like Marmee wanted? (No) How can you nudge them into better behavior--if you're even supposed to? (Are you maybe not supposed to? What are your responsibilities in that? Probably depends on your relationship to the person and how old they are)
It's also interesting, or can be, to see how that type of person views the world and struggles to reform (like Eustace Scrubb, for instance), whereas psychopaths.... well, I was going to say there's not much interest in getting inside their heads, but I realize some people love that stuff.
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The point of making a somewhat (or very) unpleasant girl who's **not** a psychopath is because most ordinary people who are unpleasant aren't psychopaths. A lot of books spend times puzzling over and examining this, and some of those get it wrong in different ways (like trying to make their actions virtuous for some reason--that, too, is not the point: if you make what a character does excusable, then you've drained it of a lot of its unpleasantness).
But ordinary people can be mean! They can have character traits that are dislikable--without necessarily being entirely disliked by everyone! How does that work? **That's** the interesting, harder thing to examine.
Destroying something that took years of work is a terrible, terrible thing. People--especially kids--sometimes are so overcome by emotion (even petty emotion) that they act with no sense of proportion or consequence. The fact that Amy felt terrible remorse is what shows she's not a psychopath... she's just garden-variety unpleasant, and not always even that. That's MORE of a trial to learn to deal with. Are you obligated to insta-forgive, like Marmee wanted? (No) How can you nudge them into better behavior--if you're even supposed to? (Are you maybe not supposed to? What are your responsibilities in that? Probably depends on your relationship to the person and how old they are)
It's also interesting, or can be, to see how that type of person views the world and struggles to reform (like Eustace Scrubb, for instance), whereas psychopaths.... well, I was going to say there's not much interest in getting inside their heads, but I realize some people love that stuff.