Little Women полностью

The sequel was written to appease Alcott’s many fans, who had been begging the author for more information about the March sisters’ future experiences – namely whom, and how well, they married. Although as a feminist Alcott personally resented the implication that her March girls’ future happiness depended upon marriage as an end in itself, she did succeed in pairing off most of her characters, although not in the neat ways her romantic readers had desired or even anticipated. Alcott’s unusual choices in this regard mystified and disappointed not only many of her contemporary nineteenth-century admirers but generations of girls to follow, who wanted the outspokenly independent, ambitious second sister, Jo, married off according to their own fancy – not to mention future generations of feminist literary critics who bemoaned Alcott’s decision to marry her off at all.

Alcott absorbed much of her reform interests from her mother, Abigail “Abba” Alcott (nee May). Marmee in Little Women is an idealized version of Abba. Whereas Marmee represses her anger for the good of her family, Abba was known for her sharp tongue and occasional inability to get along with her neighbors. Abba actively participated in various contemporary reform movements, agitating against slavery and for temperance and women’s rights, among other causes, and providing an excellent example of activism for her daughters. Even more than Marmee does, Abba Alcott worked and struggled to keep her family financially afloat; the shabby-genteel aspect of the March household stems from the Alcotts’ own straitened financial circumstances. Papa Alcott, unlike Papa March, however, was not absent on such a selfless mission as army chaplaincy. Writer and educator Bronson Alcott was associated with the original group of New England transcendental philosophers, and he tended in practice to worry more about how his family conformed to his social theories than about its livelihood.

The transcendentalism Bronson Alcott espoused was an extremely influential quasi-religious American philosophical movement that flourished in the 1830s and ‘40s, most neatly summed up in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature. As a behavioral program, transcendentalism promoted living simply, in intellectual fellowship with other like-minded thinkers and in close contact with nature, and keeping one’s body pure by avoiding alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and often, as in the case of the Alcott family, meat. As an explanatory counterpart to these lifestyle recommendations, transcendentalism’s more mystical aspects emphasized human beings’ metaphysical, intuitive spiritual core, which, in turn, evidenced mankind’s inherent personal divinity. The reverence for nature, manual labor, and self-reliance took its most notable form in Henry David Thoreau’s famous Walden Pond experiment in self-sufficiency (1845-1847). Emerson and Thoreau, friends of Bronson’s (Emerson had provided funds toward the Alcott family’s support), were two of young Louisa’s romantic crushes; some scholars have suggested Emerson as a partial model for Professor Friedrich Bhaer in Little Women. Bronson Alcott raised his daughters according to his own transcendentalist-influenced educational beliefs, encouraging stringent self-analysis from them starting at an early age, through written assessments of their behavior and development that they would produce about themselves for his perusal.

Bronson Alcott seemed to have absolved himself of nearly all financial responsibility toward his wife and children; this would have been scandalous or unforgivable at the time in most social circles, except that he styled himself as a genius – a philosopher, not a worker. Yet a family cannot live on social and educational theories alone. At one point, around the time of his ill-fated utopian communal-living project, Fruitlands (1843), Bronson seriously considered formally abandoning his wife and young children; his abstract intellectual nature led him to raise the issue with them as a matter for family debate. Facets of Bronson Alcott do appear in Father March: His favorite place is his study, and he loves his books and discussing philosophy. But a reader who knows that Bronson Alcott’s own family skills left much to be desired will find even more poignant Father March’s gentle strength and paternal perfection, as well as the confidence his daughters have in his emotional support and devotion to his family.