Little Women полностью

The March girls’ relationship with their mother is noteworthy for how it reinforces a rather claustrophobic household dynamic. Although many readers, particularly mothers, may find it touching that Meg reserves the “first kiss” that concludes her marriage ceremony for her mother, most others will note the utter strangeness of this choice. Marmee happily accepts what should be the new husband’s right. What’s going on here? Marmee’s total love sometimes seems to negate her daughters’ desire for adult romantic relationships, which they instead seem to fear. Marmee’s fully embraced devotion unsettles the normal course of the girls’ adolescent development from sheltered dependence into autonomous adulthood; indeed, the thought of one sister leaving the nest throws the household into emotional turmoil. Of course, nineteenth-century families thought of themselves differently than twenty-first-century families do, but Meg’s kiss is still quite unusual. Jo swears she’d never pop the family’s heretofore hermetic bubble, as Meg has done through marriage, yet she quickly moves to New York City to work and to try her talents as a writer. Proximity, apparently, does not define the word abandonment in the March household; rather, the commencement of a separate, conjugal life does. Jo seems to realize the danger – and demonstrates her progress from self-centered idealist to a more thoughtful, practical type – when she notes late in part two, “Mothers are the best lovers in the world, but… I’d like to try all kinds” (p. 422).

Marmee tells her daughters early on that being chosen and loved by a good husband is the best thing that could ever happen to them. Of course, this is better than being chosen by a bad one, but many readers may secretly wish that someone like Alcott hadn’t written such things! We know the author didn’t achieve this vaunted feminine ideal herself – she served instead as her family’s caretaker to the end of her life, dying just two days after her father. Glorifying marriage here reads either as a sad, perhaps even pathetic statement on the relationships her own spinster status had caused her to miss, or as a purely disingenuous commentary on what had traditionally been expected of women. Which is worse? Is Alcott bending over backward in trying not to instill her own “outlandish” beliefs in young girls? Is she trying to conciliate traditional values in order not to damage her book sales? Is this inclusion some kind of apology ripe for psychoanalytic critique? If, however, through the girls’ trials we are made to see Marmee as a comforting voice of reason, how are we to interpret her prediction, given as domestic gospel truth? The central question remains: Where is the real Louisa May Alcott, and why doesn’t she appear in Little Women? The most accommodating answer would insist that she does appear, frequently in specific autobiographical details. She isn’t present enough, however, to satisfy some critics, who view Little Women as a wasted opportunity for Alcott to have had her characters walk the feminist walk instead of, in Jo’s case in particular, make compromises.

Alcott’s cynicism about women’s traditional roles – and the impossible standards to which many women hold themselves in trying to adjust to a new prescribed role – does come across more directly on certain occasions in Little Women. The satirical “salute” to Babydom, which Meg and her husband, John, inhabit in chapter 38 following the birth of their twins, portrays one perspective on overindulgent parenthood but also reveals some limits on just how far the author was willing to stretch her patience in depicting the trinity of hearth, home, and husband as the pinnacle of success for any woman. “If [John] hinted at [attending] a lecture or concert,” Alcott writes, “he was answered with a reproachful look [from Meg], and a decided – ‘Leave my children for pleasure, never!’” (p. 377). Alcott’s commentary on spinsters (her own social category) is also telling; she carefully entreats her readers not to laugh at older unmarried women, because “often very tender, tragic romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns, and many silent sacrifices of youth, health, ambition, love itself, make the faded faces beautiful in God’s sight” (pp. 424-425). Alcott undercuts the seriousness of these ideas by joking that her readers, as Jo has done in the part of the story these passages interrupt, have probably fallen asleep during her digression, yet her points are well taken. This defense of spinsterhood, if sentimental, also comes across as perfectly sincere, and for very good reason.