Little Women Sunday: The End
Mar. 13th, 2022 08:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThis week we reach the end of Little Women, and I am happy to report that Louisa May Alcott has not lost the gift for bringing all her characters together for a final tableau. This time the March sisters, their husbands, their children, and also all of the students at Jo’s school gather to celebrate Marmee’s sixtieth birthday by feasting, frolicking, and singing “the little song that Jo had written [and] Laurie set to music.”
Yes: all of our young artists, all of whom have given up their various arts with great fanfare at least once, are back at it again. Jo stopped writing after Professor Bhaer’s denunciation of sensation stories and then again after Beth died (she may have taken Beth more literally than Beth meant when Beth says that living for others will make her happier than “writing splendid books or seeing all the world”: after all, Beth never let living for others stop her piano playing), but she’s scribbling again, and indeed has already found a modest success in writingLittle Women a poem about her sisters. (In the sequels, Jo is a bit too successful for her own good, and her school is besieged by literary admirers.)
Laurie, similarly, is still composing, at least as a hobby; and Amy, for all her earlier decided comment that “I won’t be a common-place dauber, so I don’t intend to try any more,” has returned to her first love, sculpture. “I don’t relinquish all my artistic hopes, or confine myself to helping others fulfill their dreams of beauty,” she says; and she is making a bust of her beloved yet sickly daughter (named Beth, of course), to remember her by if the worst should happen.
I am, as always seems to happen by the end of this book, reconciled to the pairings, although if I were Amy I would be a little alarmed when Laurie insisted that he must go ahead to meet Jo ALONE, and then greets her with a kiss, although it must be said that 19th century novelists are far freer with kisses in a far wider variety of relationships than we are today. (Ditto lap-sitting. Amy, twenty years old and a married lady, celebrates her return from Europe by “sitting in her mother’s lap, as if being made ‘the baby’ again.”)
Also, returning to the theme that the 19th century had a very different definition of lover than we do today, here’s this exchange between Marmee and Jo, when Jo confesses that she’s beginning to feel lonely in her spinster life:
“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.”
Now that’s a thesis statement for Little Women if there ever was one: the primacy of mother love. Although all the living sisters are married by the end, and have children of their own, we end as we began, with the March sisters gathered around Marmee. It is, the chapter title tells us, “Harvest Time”; and all the fruits of Marmee’s labors have come to celebrate her birthday in the orchard. “Mrs. March could only stretch out her arms, as if to gather children and grandchildren to herself, and say, with face and voice full of motherly love, gratitude, and humility… “Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!”
Yes: all of our young artists, all of whom have given up their various arts with great fanfare at least once, are back at it again. Jo stopped writing after Professor Bhaer’s denunciation of sensation stories and then again after Beth died (she may have taken Beth more literally than Beth meant when Beth says that living for others will make her happier than “writing splendid books or seeing all the world”: after all, Beth never let living for others stop her piano playing), but she’s scribbling again, and indeed has already found a modest success in writing
Laurie, similarly, is still composing, at least as a hobby; and Amy, for all her earlier decided comment that “I won’t be a common-place dauber, so I don’t intend to try any more,” has returned to her first love, sculpture. “I don’t relinquish all my artistic hopes, or confine myself to helping others fulfill their dreams of beauty,” she says; and she is making a bust of her beloved yet sickly daughter (named Beth, of course), to remember her by if the worst should happen.
I am, as always seems to happen by the end of this book, reconciled to the pairings, although if I were Amy I would be a little alarmed when Laurie insisted that he must go ahead to meet Jo ALONE, and then greets her with a kiss, although it must be said that 19th century novelists are far freer with kisses in a far wider variety of relationships than we are today. (Ditto lap-sitting. Amy, twenty years old and a married lady, celebrates her return from Europe by “sitting in her mother’s lap, as if being made ‘the baby’ again.”)
Also, returning to the theme that the 19th century had a very different definition of lover than we do today, here’s this exchange between Marmee and Jo, when Jo confesses that she’s beginning to feel lonely in her spinster life:
“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.”
Now that’s a thesis statement for Little Women if there ever was one: the primacy of mother love. Although all the living sisters are married by the end, and have children of their own, we end as we began, with the March sisters gathered around Marmee. It is, the chapter title tells us, “Harvest Time”; and all the fruits of Marmee’s labors have come to celebrate her birthday in the orchard. “Mrs. March could only stretch out her arms, as if to gather children and grandchildren to herself, and say, with face and voice full of motherly love, gratitude, and humility… “Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!”
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Date: 2022-03-13 01:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-14 12:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-13 11:30 pm (UTC)I know I totally harp on this, but really, that last image of Mrs March as the matriarch who has sown and reaped and harvested her family, as some kind of apple harvest Pomona (fertility!) goddess, is really striking. Mr March and even Prof Bhaer have kind of faded away at that point. Louisa may have been a total daddy's girl, but it's so true that motherly love -- and mothering as an act -- is at the heart of the book. (I have that "Marmee and Louisa" book but haven't read it, yet. HOWEVER, I do actually know where it is!!)
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Date: 2022-03-14 12:40 am (UTC)I'll be curious to hear what you think of Marmee and Louisa when you read it! I see more biographical reading about LMA in my future...
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Date: 2022-03-21 11:31 pm (UTC)