Little Women Sunday

[osprey_archer]

Little Women is flying by! I remembered it being a longer book than this, but when you're doing a chapter a night it zips past. Today we reached the part where the Marches get a telegram informing them that Mr. March is very ill in the hospital, and Mrs. March must come at once, and in order to fund the trip (or rather get some extra funds for the trip) Jo sells her hair - her "one beauty"! - to a barber.

In at least one of the movie versions - I can't remember which - Aunt March refuses to lend the money for the trip, and only Jo's sacrifice of her hair makes it possible for Mrs. March to rush to her husband's side. But in the book, Aunt March gives the money, so Jo's haircut is a gallant but unnecessary sacrifice. There is probably a lesson here about the Inherently Virtuous Nature of Sacrifice in Alcott's fiction: even if giving something up is unnecessary, even if it's actually useless and doesn't help anyone, it's still inherently virtuous.

Maybe it's good training for the days when you have to give up your fresh hot Christmas breakfast to the poor starving Hummel children down the street. (Which is a useful sacrifice that actually does help someone!)

The girls have also just had a conversation about their dreams for their lives. Poor Meg really gets a raw deal, doesn't she? Jo gets her writing fame (and finds it rather a poisoned chalice; but nonetheless she gets it!), Beth gets to stay home with her sisters, and although Amy does not become the best artist in the world she DOES get to travel and study art and marry a rich man... whereas Meg gets none of the things she asks for. No gorgeous mansion, no beautiful dresses, no legions of servants! Just a husband. And John Brooke is fine I guess, but how many girls dream of falling in love with fine I guess?

littlerhymes and I were talking about March sister identification - you have lots of Jos and a fair smattering of Amys and even some Beths (you'd think that as a writer I would be a Jo, but in fact I have always considered Beth my Alcott alter ego), but I don't think I've ever met someone who identifies with Meg, and I think it is, in part, because none of her dreams come true.

Comments

[kore]

Whereas Amy's artist talent is always referred to as talent, and when she gives up her art, she comments, "talent isn’t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so." And then Laurie straight-up quotes her when he decides to give up his composition.

Although clearly they both do keep up their artistic endeavors as a hobby! So in the end their quitting didn't really stick. In the 2019 adaptation, Amy gives this speech with a certain crabby "I should've become an accountant!" energy, as any artist may when the art isn't going well; she's venting, not seriously giving up her art.

Whereas Jo does give up her writing at least a couple of times, IIRC (after not!Moods is published I think, and after Bhaer's scolding, and so on) and has the success when she just basically writes something for herself. Jo not being a writer is sort of impossible. Which is totally different from what happens to Laurie and Amy! I wonder what May felt about the book, since it helped send her to Europe but also basically says she doesn't have the real genius to make it.

It strikes me that looking at Alcott's musing about Art and Artists solely through a feminist lens can have a flattening effect: given the parallel journeys of Laurie and Amy, she's clearly talking about Artists in General rather than just Women in Art, and yet modern critics tend to read her argument as gendered.

Yeah, I personally think that partly happens because as the feminist interpretations rose, the historical background of a work ethic you couldn't dent with a missile -- and even the Puritan background of NE, altho Alcott's circle was so boho -- faded out. And honestly Laurie seems like a lesser character? He's vivid -- emotional, musical, sensitive, temperamental, teasing, very generous and good-hearted, &c &c -- but he is def a part of the sisters' story, not the other way around. So nobody really cares much about him giving up his grand dream of being a famous composer, altho in any other novel he'd probaly angst for many chapters about it!

And Beth tends to get entirely left out of these conversations, even though she's part of the talent/genius circle, too; Laurie himself, the other musician, tells her that she has a really remarkable talent, and everyone listens to her playing as eagerly as Jo's stories. But she has no professional ambitions for her music.

OMFG I can't believe I forgot about Beth's piano playing, when it's so much a part of her. And she doesn't bring it up at all! And neither does anybody else! I guess she's just seen as such an invalid there's no question of her having a career, or even just practicing to get good. And that was also a period where a lot of people sang and played instruments at home for entertainment, at an amateur level, from what I remember, so perhaps she doesn't stand out that much.

Beth is just so eerily posthumous. Everyone's basically waiting for her to die young, and then she gets horribly sick, and then it still takes a while for her to die young, and she's such a perfect angel after she dies. Did you ever read this? https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/29/the-real-tragedy-of-beth-march/

[osprey_archer]

I'm SO curious how May felt about this book! It paid for her art studies, so she can't really complain... but also it basically tells the whole world that May is doomed to fail as an artist! HOW did she feel about. WHAT did she say to her art friends in Europe. DID they have lengthy discussions about the toxic Alcott family dynamics.

Beth loves her piano and is clearly quite talented but has no professional ambitions at all, zero, zilch. Going out of the house and playing in front of strangers? NO THANK YOU. As you say, this is still the era of home music production, Pa playing his fiddle in Little House etc., and also an era before people were pushed so hard to turn their hobbies into a side hustle... Why shouldn't Beth just enjoy her music on her own terms?

If she did have professional ambitions, presumably the family would support them, as they support Jo's writing and Amy's art - but no one pushes her in that direction when she doesn't go that way on her own.

I think that article is a bit hard on Louisa, honestly - not to mention hard on literary Beth: "It's weirdly hard to dislike Beth," Machado says, like she's been earnestly trying and is annoyed she can't manage it. We all have characters we dislike from time to time, but I don't think trying to dislike a character is a firm foundation for literary criticism.

Also, let's be real, if it was possible to kill a child sheerly through piling words and emotional projections onto her head, none of Bronson Alcott's daughters would have reached adulthood. It was complications of scarlet fever that killed Lizzie/Beth, not the fact that her family thought she was a darling.