Children's Literature

Little Women at 150 is a delightful exploration of the enduring legacy of Louisa May Alcott's best-known work, offering more of the biographically grounded, textually attentive scholarship that has brought Alcott's work into university classrooms, scholarly editions, and interdisciplinary journals. This collection of eight essays and a meticulously researched introduction commemorates Little Women's sesquicentennial in 2018: "Little Women at 150, while championing Alcott's success, helps to reveal the layered complexity and significance of one of the United States' most well-known novels" (Shealy 16). The collection features eight new essays by ground-breaking Alcott scholars who, in addition to analyzing Alcott's life and works in critical articles and books, have produced critical editions, written biographies, edited the author's letters and journals, collected her anonymous and pseudonymous "thrillers," and republished contemporary reviews and reminiscences: "Utilizing various critical approaches, the essays are not focused on a particular topic or theme. Instead, they are richly eclectic, revealing the complexity and sophistication of Alcott's most famous work" (11).

The essay collection begins and ends with reflections on Alcott's literary achievements: editor Daniel Shealy's carefully constructed case for Little Women's enduring significance and Gregory Eiselein's well-reasoned closing essay asserting Alcott's merits as a major author worthy of an ongoing place in literary canons, single-author courses at universities, and continuing recognition and study as a writer whose entire body of work offers much to admire. Shealy's introduction charts in compelling detail the immediate and long-term success of the novel Alcott so reluctantly started. Shealy draws on his own and other contributors' decades of work with primary sources to chronicle the book's publication history, early reviews, and eventual status as "classic" by the early twentieth century (8). Shealy identifies what Beverly Lyon Clark has called "[t]he afterlife of Little Women" "as its story became a part of the culture of the United States and new generations discovered their own version of the March sisters" through Broadway, musical, film, and TV adaptations of the book (9). Shealy frames the story of the novel's remarkable fan base—including cultural icons "Carson McCullers, Gloria Steinem, Theodore Roosevelt, Patti Smith, and J.K. Rowling" [End Page 205] (8)—with the author's own astonishment at its success. "Not only," he observes, "did she seem to view 'juvenile' fiction as inferior, but she also initially resisted writing the novel that continues to endure after 150 years since its initial publication" (5). He also traces the growth in scholarly approaches to the novel as serious literature, beginning with feminist approaches in the mid-twentieth century, to demonstrate that Alcott scholarship now represents a strong, multidisciplinary body of academic inquiry, textual editing, critical evaluations, biographical investigation, and pedagogical approaches, with a range of theoretical underpinnings.

In the book's closing essay, Eiselein adds further detail to Shealy's already impressive introductory survey of Alcott studies, highlighting the groundbreaking work that feminist scholars did in the 1980s and 1990s to justify admission of Little Women into "paracanons" of beloved texts (182). Subsequent decades of feminist and other theoretically informed work—much of it by contributors to this volume—gave Alcott's reputation the heft it now enjoys. Eiselein measures Alcott's reputation, scholarly treatment, enduring reputation and influence on literature history, canonicity, and "sizable and varied body of writing," as well as literary judgments regarding her works' artistic excellence and aesthetic importance (184). Eiselein concludes,

Alcott's work matters. And it is a testimony to her ambitious imagination, her creative energy, and her talent that her work continues to resonate with and shed light on our contemporary situation. Teaching Little Women as a significant literary masterpiece and teaching Alcott herself as a major author in the classroom but also treating her as a major author in our critical work, both academically and broadly public, make that point clearly and powerfully.

(200)

While the essays' critical approaches, topics, and themes vary, they reveal intriguing intersections in their focus and their attention to the texts, Alcott family biography, and primary sources. I'll briefly identify the essays by title and emphasis, to highlight some of these intersections, before showcasing high points in individual essays' arguments.

Fresh responses to enduring debates over Jo's marriage (and others in the March family circle) appear in the opening essay by John Matteson, "Class, Charity, and Coming of Age in Little Women," Anne K. Phillips's "'This was something altogether new': On Jo March's Adulthood," and Christine Doyle's "Marriage in the Nineteenth Century: The Influence of Margaret Fuller's 'The Great Lawsuit' on Little Women." [End Page 206]

Socioeconomic class and gender figure largely in Matteson's essay as well as Sandra Harbert Petrulionis's reassessment of Hannah Mullet, "'Faithfulness Itself': The Imperative for Hannah Mullet in Little Women," which also considers gender and ethnic origin. Beverly Lyon Clark's "Mobilizing the Little Women: Images of Transport and the Domestic" finds class and gender hierarchies within illustrations of the novel, giving extended attention to Frank Merrill's illustration. Phillips's essay also considers Merrill's illustrations, among others.

Transcendentalism forms the backdrop for both Roberta Seelinger Trites's essay, "Louisa May Alcott's Emersonian Use of The Pilgrim's Progress: Little Women as Palimpsest," and Doyle's essay, which analyzes Little Women's practical application of Margaret Fuller's views on three types of successful marriage.

Matteson's pairing of Friedrich Engels's The Origin of the Family and Puritan John Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" to examine Marmee's class-based ethos of charity works beautifully with Trites's pairing of Puritan John Bunyan with Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson to consider Alcott's subversive uses of Pilgrim's Progress to convey the Emersonian ideals that drew critical ire to Alcott's first novel, Moods.

Joel Myerson's "Louisa May Alcott, Ethel Turner, and Some Little Women Down Under" largely deals with the novel's broader influence and its specifically American context, in contrast to the colonial conditions that gave rise to Seven Little Australians. Shealy's introduction and Eiselein's "Louisa May Alcott, Major Author: Little Women and Beyond" also seek to establish the influence and stature of Little Women and Alcott as a major author.

Among the jewels of this fine collection is Matteson's simultaneous application of Friedrich Engels's socialist critiques of the bourgeois housewife to both Marmee and Abba May Alcott and his articulation of Governor John Winthrop's landmark sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" as a founding principle for Marmee's approach to mutually beneficial relationships across the classes. Matteson discovers in Abba Alcott a woman "acutely aware of the condition of imprisonment that awaited an unwary wife," because she carried the load of the manual labor that supported the failed utopian community at Fruitlands, and he sees her independently expressing socialist principles realized in her job in a Boston "intelligence office," where "she found jobs for people less fortunate than herself" (22). While the philanthropic nature of her job enabled her to preserve some "aristocratic grace," Abba also became aware, through her job, that "[i]ncompetent wages for labor [End Page 207] performed, is the cruel tyranny of power over the laborers' necessities. The capitalist speculates on their bones and sinews. Will not this cause Poverty—Crime—Despair?" (Abba Alcott, qtd. in Matteson 22).

Matteson traces the class-based element of Abba's and the March women's charity, which both united the classes in a mutually beneficial relationship like the one the Puritan Winthrop outlined and marked the higher social position of the "shabby genteel" Marches and Alcotts in contrast to the truly indigent. In Little Women, the Marches' precarious social standing requires meeting the upper classes' standards for education and appearance as well as meeting their moral and social obligations "to share what little they have with the more desperately poor" (24). Alcott's refusal "to show Marmee working for wages" ought to make Marmee the bourgeouis housewife dismissed by Engels, but "Marmee uses charity to reassert her individual and social worth" and so "tacitly points to a flaw in Engels's theory of domestic enslavement," because "Engels fails to recognize the value of work that is not performed for financial gain" (28), a value that Little Women underscores through its "system of sacrifice for the needy, emanating from the home … in counterbalancing and strengthening the transactional economy" (28).

The surviving March girls who most successfully mature into functional adults engage in charity outside the home: "As Meg's trajectory suggests, the failure to engage charitably with the larger world imposes a cost upon one's inner growth" (30). Matteson finds that "The two sisters who achieve the fullest measure of adulthood in Little Women, Jo and Amy, arrive at their maturity through a combination of good works and productivity" (31).

Also writing about class and gender, Petrulionis offers compelling evidence of Alcott's slighting treatment of the type of working woman Alcott championed in her other novels and her social ethos. Making Alcott's third-person narrator the culprit in this study of narrative oversight, Petrulionis argues that the novel renders Hannah Mullet, the March family's girl-of-all-work, scarcely memorable, giving her no backstory, no family, no discernible racial or ethnic identity, no emotional ties or joys apart from the Marches, and no days off except during the "Experiments" chapter, when Marmee wants to drive home the lesson that her girls don't appreciate the work that underlies their home's smooth operation. The critic indicts Alcott of creating a narrator who "presents a regrettably flat and even debasing portrait of the woman whose unflagging, dutiful toil enables this story's central coming-of-age themes" (66). [End Page 208]

Petrulionis points out that Marmee, however, does little work in the reader's eye, apart from sewing: "If Marmee functions as Little Women's most vital character in cultivating her daughters' development, then an observant reader would anticipate that the household worker who frees Marmee to sit by the hearth and dispense material wisdom deserves more than passing attention" (66). Rather, it's Hannah's heavy lifting, early rising, and broad experience in all aspects of household management and nursing that free Marmee to fulfill the role of maternal wisewoman: "Without her bifurcated role as both family intimate and maid of all work, Little Women's beloved mother-of-all wisdom could not exist" (67). Petrulionis explores, through Hannah's ethnically ambiguous character, American employers' and Alcott's own prejudices against the Irish, particularly, in Alcott's case, the "Irish incompetents" she occasionally employed (74). Notably, trustworthy Hannah is not identified as Irish (and her occasional dialect speech has no consistent identity) (74–75), nor is she made like the German Hummels, so she is most likely "poor, uneducated, white Anglo-European, and native born. Unfortunately, the narrator prohibits these and other authentic personal dimensions from developing Hannah into a fully actualized character" (75). This admirably balanced essay impresses, especially with its survey of sources that mention Hannah even fleetingly, while Petrulionis appears to be the first to devote an essay entirely to the character.

Phillips's multi-pronged defense of Alcott's choices for Jo in the closing chapters of the second volume of Little Women offers much to appreciate and ponder. Giving nuanced attention to the novel and to critics' and general readers' responses, Phillips finds a satisfying conclusion to the question of Jo's future in a life she can enjoy. Phillips maps mature artistic vision onto Alcott's marital choices for Jo and in the frequently debated closing chapters of the novel. Responding to critics and leisure readers who have decried Jo's rejection of Laurie, Jo's marriage to Professor Bhaer, or Jo's marrying at all, Phillips spells out ways in which Jo's adult relationships satisfy her needs for independence, interdependence, and fruitful partnership with the two men she loves. By the novel's end, Phillips argues, Jo has recovered the zest for life, active presence, and creative flair that had diminished with her depression following Beth's death.

Seeking to subvert the conventional narrative script of "sentimental, domestic fiction," Alcott "employs purposeful word selection, contradiction, triangulation, and omission to provoke amusement while also [End Page 209] subverting conventional expectations" (116). Simultaneously, Phillips maintains, "she offers meaningful observations about the relationship of an individual to herself, her family, and her community" (116). Phillips highlights Alcott's relegation of two weddings—Jo's and Amy's—to announcements after the fact, rather than ceremonies depicted in the action of the novel, and foregrounds her attempts to deromanticize both sisters' proposal scenes. Because Alcott attempts so much, those important last chapters reveal "unusual juxtapositions": Jo as heroine of romance who yet "retains significant independence"; the author's promised "funny match" that readers "are expected to take … seriously"; romantic commitment between Jo and Friedrich and Jo's renewed "intense, intimate bond with Laurie" (116). In fact, Phillips tells us, "Jo's interactions with Laurie and Friedrich reveal that she needs and thrives in proximity to both men" (116).

Jo also has opportunity to pursue a productive career as a single woman and creates a type of interdependent "family" that extends beyond blood relatives (120). "While recognizing fans' desires and perhaps encountering some editorial direction," Phillips posits, "Alcott negotiates her own path while establishing the consistency of Jo's character, her realization of a mature femininity that remains distinctly her own, her attainment of work that she finds satisfying, and her realization of the kinds of relationships and social configurations that satisfy her" (134).

Doyle likewise looks primarily at the novel's closing chapters to match the marriages in Little Women to three types of successively egalitarian marriages described in Margaret Fuller's influential essay, "The Great Lawsuit," which Fuller expanded from its 1843 appearance in The Dial into the 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Alcott recorded Fuller's words about the three types of women in the copy of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship given to her by Emerson (142). Calling this notation Alcott's "most direct acknowledgment of Margaret Fuller," Doyle presents Little Women as Alcott's "tribute to the legacy of Margaret Fuller, and especially to her 'The Great Lawsuit'" (142). Doyle argues that the novel puts into practice Fuller's theoretical ideas about "the development of American girls into women" (142).

Doyle views Fuller's essay as a reappropriation of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" applied to the social realities that constrained nineteenth-century American women from retreating to the woods to live alone. In it, Fuller suggests ways for single women to live self-dependent lives and develop their faculties so they might eventually form egalitarian [End Page 210] marriages (144–45). Doyle see Fuller's increasingly ideal models of egalitarian marriage in four marriages in Little Women. The March parents' marriage represents a "household partnership," in which each partner has a separate but equally important role in making the relationship function, and it runs with mutual dependence" (146). Marmee, Doyle asserts, helps Meg to establish this kind of marriage with John Brooke, after the couple's early conflicts over housekeeping, finances, and child-rearing (146–47). Amy and Laurie's inwardly focused relationship fits Fuller's description of "mutual idolatry," in which "the couple only has eyes for one another" (148). The physical attraction that quickly moves Laurie and Amy's association in Europe from friendship to "deeply passionate and inner-focused romance" reveals this couple's all-encompassing relationship that is reflected in their nearly identical life purpose, to sponsor needy young men or young women pursuing artistic dreams (150, 151).

Doyle reserves Fuller's most egalitarian model of marriage for Jo and Friedrich Bhaer (151). Not only does Jo's companionate marriage with Professor Bhaer belong to what Fuller calls "the higher grade of marriage"—"a pilgrimage towards a common shrine" or shared values—but Jo's long preparation for that marriage in an independent life in pursuit of a writing career meets Fuller's prescriptions for partners' self-development as whole souls before marriage (153). Both Friedrich and Jo have family vows to keep before making marriage vows (155), and Jo has had time to mature emotionally and vocationally while living in New York (155–56). Jo's and Friedrich's marriage, offering "'intellectual companionship'" and mutual burden-bearing, fulfills Fuller's highest ideal for marriage (157).

While Matteson seeks to demonstrate that not all of Alcott's "childhood influences" were Transcendental (22–23), Trites works to unveil the critically overlooked Emersonian philosophy that underlies Little Women. Reflecting on Alcott's humiliating experience with reviewers' jibes at the Emersonian ideals she unwittingly showcased in Moods, Trites asserts that Alcott determined to hide her Emersonian worldview in Little Women beneath a more widely accepted author's well-known text, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

Identifying Little Women as a "palimpsest" written over other, less visible texts (38), Trites offers compelling evidence for the Emersonian thought that motivates Little Women's emphasis on self-reliance, expounding this thesis thoroughly and well. She explains: [End Page 211]

Jo and her sisters are pilgrims journeying toward salvation, although the divinity they seek relies more on their parents' philosophy and Emersonian concepts of nature than on Christ's intervention in their lives. Alcott consciously relies on Bunyan to evoke Emerson's metaphor of life as a journey of experiences lived on a highway that we never completely comprehend. She also uses The Pilgrim's Progress to communicate information about how emotions (or "moods") affect people, about learning from experience, about transcendence, and about faith, which can be found perhaps more easily in nature than in church.

(52–53)

This carefully structured essay painstakingly builds the Emersonian context. Trites observes, for example, that "only while observing nature have Jo and Beth found the language to talk about the spiritual journey the latter must face alone" (57), and she persuasively defends Bhaer's critique of "blood-and-thunder" stories on Emersonian grounds (55).

I'd like further evidence, though, that Alcott deliberately chose The Pilgrim's Progress, a favorite text of her childhood, for the purpose of hiding her Emersonian echoes. Additionally, Trites's carefully structured argument at times seems too insistent on similarities between Emerson and Bunyan. Trites explains early in her essay the tension between Emerson's and Bunyan's contrasting views of Christ and conversion, but her use of the terms "salvation," "conversion," and "self-reliance" for Emerson's, Alcott's, and Bunyan's versions of these ideas at times obscures essential differences between the Emersonian and Puritan views. Contrasting Emerson and Alcott's Romantic vision of humanity to Bunyan's belief in innate depravity and the need for new birth would help to clarify matters that for me become muddled when the essay insists that Bunyan's text espouses self-reliance: "For both philosophers, all pilgrims' salvation is also their own self-reliant responsibility," and "we learn from experience along an individual path to salvation" (47).

In an essay emphasizing visual communication in the novel, Clark examines illustrations that depict gender mobility—"at least a partial metaphor for social and/or economic independence"—through "transportation," in contrast to "illustrators' portrayals of what is usually perceived as an image of stasis and rootedness: the house" (89). In her consideration of eighty-four illustrated editions of Little Women in English whose illustrators' sex could be identified, Clark determines that male illustrators most frequently depict some mode of transportation. Frank Merrill, whose plentiful illustrations occupy significant space in [End Page 212] both Clark's and Phillips's essays, created "the most images depicting transportation" (90), twenty-three in all.

Illustrations of transportation modes might show "upper- and upper-middle-class privilege" by depicting horses and carriages or boats, symbols of leisure when linked to the middle and upper classes, so that wealthy families in Little Women own horses and carriages and use boats for leisure, while "for the genteel poor such as the Marches, carriages are associated with emergencies and largesse, sometimes both (think of Laurie offering Meg a ride in his carriage after she sprains her ankle at the Gardiners' party)" (90). While boating might signal moneyed leisure or vigorous exercise, it also gives Laurie "a way to work through negative emotions" after Jo refuses him (91). Yet the boat in which Laurie proposes to Amy can appear as either picturesque or egalitarian, in accord with Laurie's invitation to Amy to "always pull in the same boat" (91). Illustrators sometimes ignore the text's cues and give Laurie control of the oars as well, or accentuate the scenic or romantic elements of this tableau.

Public transportation in the illustrations reveals tensions in the text; the omnibus and railroad were perceived as democratizing modes of transport that might produce undesirable social mixing or expose the economic necessities of the Marches, as when the lobster Amy buys for her ill-fated party escapes its basket and is seen by one of Laurie's wealthy friends (96). Trains both unify Americans and highlight their class and ethnic differences, as when New York-bound Jo throws gingernuts into the open mouths of roaring Irish children, to silence or amuse or tame them (97). The incident reveals once more the anti-Irish undercurrents in the novel (98), but illustrators have frequently treated it romantically—showing Jo smiling or looking kindly on the children (98–99).

Shealy dedicates the work to the late Joel Myerson, his colleague at the University of South Carolina and his frequent collaborator on Alcott projects. Both Myerson and another Alcott studies giant, Clark, died while this essay collection was in press (ix). Both scholars' presence in the volume extends beyond their individual essays—Clark's on illustrators' treatment of girls' and women's mobility in of Little Women, and Myerson's on the echoes of Little Women in Ethel Turner's Seven Little Australians (1894), as every essay references one or more of Myerson's coedited collections (with Shealy and Madeleine B. Stern) of Alcott's letters, journals, and sensation fiction, and every essay refers to Clark's The Afterlife of 'Little Women' (2004), her Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary [End Page 213] Reviews (2004), or both. Eiselein also refers to Clark's Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America (2003), her important articulation of children's books such as Little Women being moved to the margins of literary culture; and Phillips and Doyle cite several essays in Clark's co-edited collection, with Janice M. Alberghene, "Little Women" and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays (1999). In his acknowledgments Shealy links these extraordinary teachers, scholars, and friends to Amy March's desire to be "'great, or nothing." "Beverly Lyon Clark and Joel Myerson," Shealy concludes, "were 'great'" (x).

Little Women at 150 is a rich, mature volume that rounds out at least thirty years of Alcott criticism and children's literature scholarship. It could usefully supplement an Alcott seminar at the graduate level, offer rich and accessible essays for undergraduate teaching, fuel further Alcott research, and enrich teaching and scholarship in not only children's literature but cultural studies, gender studies, history, American and transatlantic studies, and book history. It's also a volume simply to read for pleasure and enjoy.