Little Women Sunday
Feb. 13th, 2022 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerLittle 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.
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.
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Date: 2022-02-16 02:37 am (UTC)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.