Little Women полностью

Jo’s masculine identification may begin to explain why at the end of the novel she opens a school for boys instead of for girls, which her social beliefs might dictate as appropriately reparative. Her empathy with the male gender seems to preclude any sympathy she might have for her fellow young women, and her decision to open a boys’ school, even given her unorthodox admission policies, is a fairly conventional one. Jo, depicted throughout Little Women as an eccentric, outrageously unconventional character, makes some customary choices in the end and is certainly no radical. Although her husband may be unexpected, she marries nonetheless. Overall, Jo’s feminism and mas culinity have suggested to some later commentators that a latent homosexuality lies beneath her surface, and, by extension, beneath her creator’s as well. Alcott’s own disinclination to marry and her devotion to feminist reform work and agitation have led these critics to question her sexual preferences.

Once one begins to think further about Alcott’s novel, certain contradictions emerge, particularly for more recent readers. There were always things about the March sisters that puzzled me, for example. The family complains of being poor, and indeed can’t even afford to buy each other Christmas presents, yet they keep a servant, the faithful Hannah. How impoverished, then, could the Marches be? The family’s financial situation must have been very bad indeed for Aunt March to offer to adopt one of the daughters, thus the Marches’ priorities are very interesting. Would it have been unseemly in its social circles for the family not to employ a servant? Is Hannah another charity case? That is, was it more important for the Marches to spend what extra money they did have to provide another person with a livelihood than to spend it on material luxuries (even if, as is the case with their Christmas breakfast, donated to a truly impoverished immigrant family, those material luxuries were food)?

Clearly the Marches are not as poor as Meg thinks they are. The sisters’ Christian-inspired self-sacrifice, however, can seem at times to border on masochism, which may lead one to question the girls’ motivations. Are they so generous and accommodating because they want to be, for altruism’s sake? Are they competing with each other in trying to please their impossibly good mother, the judge of their virtuousness? Or have they come to enjoy abnegation for what it represents: their worthiness to God and society? Beth and Jo’s selflessness competitions – when, for example, Jo wins a writing contest and offers Beth a trip away with her spoils – at times suggest the elaborate sacrifices of medieval saints. Beth, a household saint in her homely shrine, wears a metaphorical hair shirt and practically flagellates herself daily, even within her transcendental universe. One wonders how much Beth’s fate itself is actually a sacrifice in Alcott’s mind. Such a typical Marmee maxim as “a kiss for a blow is always best” is a bit disturbing when taken with her other advice as a reinforcement of the need for female sacrifice, even if it does echo New Testament doctrines to turn the other cheek.

Marmee displays her tremendous devotion to God in a few preachy monologues, particularly in chapter 9, yet the family, although clearly Protestant, is not described as belonging to any particular sect – perhaps another extension of the novel’s planned universality. As important as religion seems to be in their lives, the Marches offer little formal worship; they do not attend church services, for example, and their relationship to God seems very general, represented through praying privately, singing religious hymns, and imitating Bunyan’s questing hero, Christian, from The Pilgrim’s Progress. Aesthetic Amy’s fascination with the colorful, exotic Roman Catholicism of Aunt March’s French maid is thus understandable, and Marmee does not reject out of hand the religious objects, such as rosary beads and a devotional print of the Virgin Mary, that Amy brings back from her aunt’s house.