Alcott’s Gothic sensational stories – of a type popular with the masses (and with Jo, until she is instructed otherwise) but considered rather lurid by the literary establishment of her day – offered her a bit more freedom than Little Women’s realism did. In some of these, Alcott pushes harder on girls’ impulses toward independence, evidenced by the innate (but usually suppressed) disrespect for authority that Jo demonstrates in Little Women. For example, the frustrated, impetuous teenage heroine of Alcott’s sensational novel A Long Fatal Love Chase (written in 1866 but not published until 1995) – the evocatively named orphan Rosamond Vivian – shrieks in a fit of adolescent pique to her uncaring grandfather that she would sell her soul to Satan for a year of freedom, rather than have to endure her stultifying, lonely life with him (a vow she comes to rue shortly after her grandfather’s mysterious friend Phillip Tempest wins her in a card game). Words such as those never issue from the mouth of Jo March, who, although somewhat constrained, at least has a loving home life. When Jo approaches such sentiments, she gets a moralizing lecture from Marmee or another March sister by way of counterpoint.
Some critics also regret, early in the book, the girls’ having to assume masculine identities in order to compose their family newspaper, based on Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Alcott personally knew the influential feminist writer Margaret Fuller, who edited the main transcendentalist journal, the Dial, and she easily could have adapted Fuller’s experience for her March sisters and had them create the newspaper without resorting to male drag. But had Alcott written the scene without the girls’ imaginative adoptions of famous fictional personae, would the newspaper meetings have been as colorful? Probably not, nor nearly as entertaining for children. Essentially, although Alcott’s choices in Little Women may be frustrating, we have to remember that the author’s goals for the novel – to sell books and to entertain children, both of which she achieved – are different from the ones we assign to her with hindsight.
It’s true that Alcott’s most famous novel is a period piece; but when compared to traditional nineteenth-century literature for children available at the time, Little Women’s protagonists are remarkably complex, even slightly – if an emphatic slightly – subversive. Generally speaking, the young characters in popular American children’s literature prior to Alcott’s time were either wholly wicked brats who entirely deserved the strict punishment they received or purely angelic little saints in whose mouths the proverbial butter could never melt. In either case, these fictional children spoke like little adults; one early criticism of Alcott’s novel involved the characters’ (especially Jo’s and Laurie’s) use of slang terms (Jo often uses work in the revised text, when she had used grub in the original) and quasi-cusswords, like “Jupiter Ammon!” and “Christopher Columbus!” – bone-chilling language, to be sure. (Contemporary critics also bemoaned the March girls’ shocking practice of staging plays on the Christmas holiday.)
In 1880 Alcott’s British publisher suggested a revised version of Little Women, one that would not only eliminate quirks of New England regional language (the word quinydingles, for example, was changed to notions) but also reduce much of the slang terminology in general to provide for a more ladylike tone. (This 1880 version is the one most readers today are familiar with, and it is used in the present Barnes & Noble classics edition.) Notwithstanding such changes, critic Barrett Wendell in his 1900 Literary History of America still insists of Little Women, “instead of unquestioning self-respect, its personages display that rude self-assertion which has generally tainted the lower middle class of English-speaking countries.” It is a testament to Alcott’s skill as a storyteller that the text still retains a youthful spirit of play and naturalness that the revision could not obscure.
