Timeless Preoccupations and Old-School Virtues

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From The Wall Street Journal:

 

Louisa May Alcott’s 150-year-old novel, “Little Women,” has remained in print despite a message strongly at odds with contemporary mantras of acquisitiveness, self-indulgence, self-promotion and vulgarity.

The tale of a quartet of sisters in Civil War-era New England has an unfashionable theme: Virtue is always rewarded. Profound tensions—over money, marriage and a woman’s role in the world—propel the novel, slingshotting Alcott’s work into the pantheon.

Alcott wrote “Little Women,” which was published in installments in 1868 and 1869, in a matter of months. The book follows the March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy—who live in straitened circumstances and have fallen on even harder times now that their father has gone off to war as a chaplain. That leaves their mother, Marmee, a single parent to the girls. Meg and Jo, 16 and 15 years old when the story begins, already are working—Meg as a governess and Jo as a companion to Aunt March, the family’s well-off relative. Beth, a frail and shy 13-year-old, keeps house and plays the piano while Amy, 12, is still in school.

As illness, disappointment and other tribulations pile up on the Marches, Marmee keeps her daughters cheerful and resolute. But life among the little women isn’t all bearing up under adversity, even if the March girls lack the guile of Becky Sharp, the peerless schemer in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair.” Laurie, the Marches’ handsome and prosperous neighbor, becomes a family favorite. Jo, an aspiring author, finds success with her writing. And, in the end—spoiler alert—most of the Marches end up happily married.

. . . .

Alcott’s genius is her timeless preoccupations—love and death, jealousy, fear and joy—which, despite changing mores, have kept the March family current for 1 1/2 centuries. The conversational prose often sounds as if the author’s pages flew directly from her desk to the printing press. She flouts chronology—“The three years that have passed have brought but few changes to the quiet family”—and sometimes ducks out of the narrative to address the reader directly. The occasionally insipid family scenes are leavened with bracing displays of bad behavior. Alcott details the Marches’ humiliations, such as Meg’s fashion missteps, Jo’s disastrous attempts at cooking and Amy’s star-crossed social-climbing. The author wrings a humanity from her characters that magnifies even the smallest events, such as when Beth dares to venture over to the neighbors’ house and is bewitched by the piano.

. . . .

Jo, the character who most reflects Alcott’s spirit, aims to earn a living with her writing and insists that her independent nature renders her anything but marriage material. Alcott gives Jo the book’s opening line, in which she vents over the family’s meager holiday plans: “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.” It’s a startling outburst, even if the girls do reconcile themselves to Marmee’s heartfelt if austere gifts: copies of John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” slipped under each daughter’s pillow. “Little Women” often reads as if Alcott had Bunyan’s work—something of a roadmap for a soul’s trek to heaven—in mind while writing.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

 

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