Little Women Sunday

[osprey_archer]

littlerhymes and I have been rereading Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and I thought that other people might enjoy chatting about the book too so I'm going to do a weekly post just about wherever we've gotten up to in the book, comparisons to the movies etc., just whatever comes to mind.

Today seemed like a good time to start because we just got through the MOST DRAMATIC chapter in the book, by which of course I mean the chapter where Amy BURNS JO'S BOOK and Jo in retaliation doesn't tell Amy about the weak ice in the river, and Amy falls through it and ALMOST DIES.

Critics give nineteenth century novels a lot of guff for their focus on teaching their heroines to control their tempers, but honestly I think it's much more noteworthy just how much temper these heroines get to display in the first place. How many novelists today would have the guts to have a girl burn her older sister's prized possession in a fit of temper? Or to have said older sister retaliate in a way that might have got her little sister killed? (Or an Anne of Green Gables style "breaking a slate over that obnoxious boy's head," for that matter.)

I think a lot of modern day people are theoretically in favor of "women's anger," but not actually in favor of the real fruits of losing one's temper, or prepared to think particularly deeply about the fact that women (just like men) sometimes get angry for reasons that are neither just nor righteous. (Ask anyone working retail.)

Anyway! I just recently watched the 1934 Katherine Hepburn adaptation, which cuts this scene entirely. (I still haven't seen the 1949 adaptation, but it's on the docket.) In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Amy Boyd Rioux complains that the Hepburn adaptation shortchanges Jo's writing career, which I don't agree with - we actually see quite a lot of that, including Jo's entire melodramatic Christmas play that she and her sisters put on for the neighbors. What the movie ends up cutting are scenes like Amy's burning of Jo's book, which focus on the more complicated aspects of relationships between the sisters.

Comments

[kore]

While looking something up I ran across this near the very end:

"....I am lonely, and perhaps if Teddy had tried again, I might have said ‘Yes’, not because I love him any more, but because I care more to be loved than when he went away.”

“I’m glad of that, Jo, for it shows that you are getting on. There are plenty to love you, so try to be satisfied with Father and Mother, sisters and brothers, friends and babies, till the best lover of all comes to give you your reward.”

“Mothers are the best lovers in the world, but I don’t mind whispering to Marmee that I’d like to try all kinds. It’s very curious, but the more I try to satisfy myself with all sorts of natural affections, the more I seem to want. I’d no idea hearts could take in so many. Mine is so elastic, it never seems full now, and I used to be quite contented with my family. I don’t understand it.”

[osprey_archer]

YES more 19th century usage of the word "lover" to mean "one who loves," with no particular distinction as to what kind of love! (Still gathering these up for Sleeping Beauty... if I can ever manage to write it *cries quietly*)

[kore]

Yes! The 19th century (she said, generalizing wildly) seems to root love in the family matrix, but then later in the 20th the emphasis is on romantic love, and couples breaking free of the family and settling elsewhere, usually for jobs. It fascinates me how the suitors don't have their own family ties and get sort of absorbed into the March family instead, and then in the next generation, all the romantic attachments are formed in the giant extended family Jo makes of her school. And it's a matriarchal view -- men (like Bronson Alcott, hiss boo) could just ditch their families, or at least refuse to work, if their genius was Great enough.

[osprey_archer]

Yes. I think in 19th century America there's a idealized vision of the mother-child bond as the highest, most selfless form of love (Jo nods wisely: "Mothers are the best lovers in the world"), and the point of romantic love is to start a new family. Whereas in the 20th century (growing especially out of Freudianism) parental and particular mother love are increasingly pathologized. Children can be fucked up by too much love or too little and it's apparently all but impossible to hit the Goldilocks standard of "just right."

And meanwhile romantic love becomes The Highest Form of Love... although in the 1920s/30s/40s especially, often it's idealized for its very selfishness, the caveman lover taking what he wants, etc. etc.

[kore]

and the point of romantic love is to start a new family. Whereas in the 20th century (growing especially out of Freudianism) parental and particular mother love are increasingly pathologized

Oh, yes! That's a great way of putting it -- the shift away from the family unit and toward romance, and then children are sort of still necessary for the Family but also secondary. And then Freud and Jung both demonized the mother figure, exactly. Hmm, maybe as birth control became more reliable and available, the focus of sex wasn't so much on starting a family as on fuel for individual romance? (I AM SO TOTALLY NOT A HISTORIAN)