Little Women

As I began reading Little Women, the young characters, their diversity, playfulness, their innocent thoughts and sisterly love towards each other delighted me. Their plays, their neighbor and the friendship was brilliantly portrayed and its natural innocence kept intact. I oscillated between thinking that it was at times unnecessarily preachy and that it provides some good lessons. It does provide good lessons, in parts, especially during their younger days. The sisters shared some envious chemistry, and their awe towards their mother was portrayed so earnestly. One can’t help but believe that some part of this must have come from personal experience because of the honesty is seen in some of the lines. It was reminiscent of my childhood days and the many moral dilemmas that young hearts face at the time, dilemmas that seem utterly trivial today.

But as it progressed, as the kids grew older, I found the book steering towards being a text book on morality. Its visions of ideal women, women’s place in the society seemed even anti-feminist. But perhaps only whiffs of feminism were existent in the 1800s when the book was written, and the book may have even been considered bold for its expression of some feminist ideas.

 The later part of the book was disappointing for its idealization and commercialization. It idealizes the qualities of a perfect woman, and seems to have been written to cater to popular thoughts with the intention of selling more copies. I didn’t quite like the turn Jo’s life assumed. Yes, assertive girls like Jo didn’t stand a great chance to secure for themselves a ‘suitable man’ owing to their vivacity, but the fact that she gets married to a professor 15 years her senior makes me wonder if the author was insinuating that girls such as Jo would only get much older and queer guys, something which even her pleasant description of ‘the old man’ and ‘their happy paradise’ in the book cannot mask. Add to that her subtle remarks about the place of women in society, saying that “a woman’s happiest kingdom is her home, her highest honor the art of ruling it not as a queen, but as a wise wife and mother”; or Jo calling her childhood castle-in-the-air of wanting to be famous and writing books a selfish one, and indefinitely push her dream of writing one to a distant-if-possible future. She seems content with her life, but that’s only owing to the charm of fiction. It also seems to me that the idea was to write a good, well-accepted, bound-to-be-popular book, thus explaining the artful inclusion of popular notions, especially the ones delineating the role of women in society, even though the author herself may have not believed in the ideas so articulated. That is the disappointment that I take from this book, this idea that the book was written in order for it to get popular. That likens it to the sleazy stories Jo wrote for the magazine for money. What justifies this idea further is that the book draws inspirations from the author’s own family, her sisters and parents, with the exception of the Father perhaps who seems to be absent much throughout the book but wasn’t so in reality. It is said that Jo’s character was modeled on the author herself, and also that the author was a feminist who remained unmarried all her life. Now any woman writer with feminist inclinations and daring enough to be unmarried in the mid-1800s and not submit to the popular notions of woman as was prevalent would hardly seem to concur with some of the ideas about woman expressed in the book. Perhaps the ideas were so articulated because they would most definitely sell as opposed to the droll bold ideas that any feminist woman then may have had.  

Now disappointment number 2. Much as the Marches in the book, the author’s own family too in reality was poor, but in reality the relationships weren’t as smooth and idealistic as in the book. The author perhaps has put forth her idea of a life in contrast to her real life and vented that out in the book. That is the disappointment number two, the excessive idealization of family lives and values in the book, which makes it abjectly fictional.