Rereading Little Women as an Adult

Like plenty of other young girls on the verge of their first middle school dance, I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It was a warm contrast to The Clique series and other young adult literature popular in the 2000s that centered on social snobbery and pettiness. The Little Women film (starring June Allyson) was also a staple in my house growing up, as I was not allowed to watch much mainstream media, most of all animated children’s films. However, none of the film adaptations ever gave me the same feeling I got from reading the book or made me want to give the book a reread. Until, of course, the newest version: Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation. As most people read this story in childhood, I thought it would be interesting to reread Little Women as an adult and pitched the idea to my book club and it became our April read.

Rereading Little Women as an adult gave me a different perspective on the characters and the message Alcott was hoping to cultivate. Inadvertently, it was the perfect book to settle into at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown. The story and characters are heartwarming, wholesome, comforting during a pandemic where we all have to stay inside. In addition, the Marches’ story is one of survival. They are not wealthy and are living through the Civil War, already a time of financial difficulty and uncertainty. Their father, their only male family member, is away fighting for a good chunk of the story, and without him Marmee and the girls are vulnerable. The absence of March sons means that the girls have limited options for financial survival into adulthood. Meg worked as a governess before her marriage and Jo sells her short stories, but it is clear that neither is a long-term career with financial stability or independence. This societal and financial instability is parallel to the job-losses of the pandemic and

Amy has been much maligned as the worst March sister, but I heartily disagree. Amy is by far the best March. I blame the many movie adaptations for this portrayal. Amy is shown to be selfish and materialistic, which she definitely is, but no more than any other normal person is. Meg is just as selfish, but the movie adaptations do not explore it as much because she’s the oldest, and therefore a “second mother,” and cannot afford to indulge her petty luxuries. But reading the book, you can see that Meg likes to imagine herself as a martyr, and therefore keeps her selfish impulses to herself, lest she is seen as anything other than the perfect daughter (and later the perfect wife and the perfect mother). Amy’s contrast to the angelic Beth also makes her seem more selfish and nefarious than she really is. Beth clings to her image as a domestic angel on earth, even though she kills her bird by not feeding it for a week. With her painful shyness, exclusive love of the domestic, and dedication to good works, as evidenced by her many visits to the Hummel family, and her lack of ambition for literally anything, Beth slots into the Victorian ideal of the “angel in the house.” Her young death cements her status as a domestic martyr and helps to gloss over her lack of personality and that she killed her pet. Through her young marriage and motherhood, Meg can also be considered an “angel in the house,” but she will never reach Beth’s mythical perfection because she desires money and material comforts (what a bitch). Alcott sets Beth up to be The Best Sister™ but my hot take is that Beth is in fact, the worst character in the whole book. The most recent film adaptation is the only one, in my opinion, that does the character of Amy justice. We see her burn Jo’s collected fairy tales in a disproportionate childish rage, but we also see her calculate her family’s future and her important role in it, as the only one willing to “marry well.” The other films portray her strategic marriage designs as purely social climbing or gold-digging, but in Amy’s temporal context, there is not much she, or any of her sisters, can do to keep her family from going under financially, especially in the event of the death of her father. She has goals to be a great artist, but even if she did become one, it would realistically not pay the bills.

The two halves of Meg and Beth’s roles as “angels in the house” come together in Marmee, the mother of the March girls. She is more of a “mother” archetype than a real person. She always has the perfect lessons in wisdom at the right time and is simultaneously a gentle domestic goddess and an effective disciplinarian, even when her daughters are adults and no longer living at home. In the chapter “On the Shelf,” Marmee tells Meg that it is her fault that her husband spends all his evenings with his friend (and his friend’s young, childless wife) instead of with her and their children:

You have only made the mistake that most young wives make — forgotten your duty to your husband in your love for your children. A very natural and forgivable mistake, Meg, but one that had better be remedied before you take to different ways, for children should draw you nearer than ever, not separate you, as if they were all yours, and John had nothing to do but support them. I’ve seen it for some weeks, but have not spoken, feeling sure it would come right in time (322).

Marmee’s advice in this and all things always perpetuates the traditional gender norms that dictate that women should be quiet, gentle, and subservient, all while running an immaculate household. They should manage every situation and their husbands perfectly, but without ever letting their husbands feel managed, lest they should feel emasculated. The only advice that diverges from this is that Marmee tells Meg she should share childcare duties with her husband — a reasonable suggestion since they are his offspring as well. Marmee does limit these childcare duties to disciplining and teaching skills. Let’s not get crazy and ask John to change a diaper.

Someone in my book club pointed out that the messaging of Little Women seems particularly anti-feminist, even for the time it was published (1868) and I wish I had thought to say at the time that because this book was published in the United States, not Britain where I now live and attend book club meetings, the goalposts for what was “radical feminism” were very different. But of course, I did not think of this argument fast enough, and I will be bitter forever. If you look at the political debates — in the context of the pandemic or not — being held in the US vs the UK, you can see that much of American politics is deeply puritanical. It’s not surprising that these puritanical political ideals would be even more intense in 1868, especially since it was in the years directly following the American Civil War, a conflict about whether or not some people had a right not to be someone else’s property. The postwar political climate was all about the apportioning of rights to populations that previously had none or very few. It is certainly true that Little Women contains many outdated and problematic messages on gender roles and the meaning of womanhood, but it is important to remember that in the context of the experiences of white womanhood in the northern United States, Little Women was radical in its portrayal of young women and their individual approaches to domesticity. I enjoyed revisiting Little Women, but if I could expunge the memories of cringey middle school dances that came with it, I would.