Little Women, Big Sacrifices

"I will do something by and by," Louisa May Alcott wrote as an adult in the voice of her youthful self. "I'll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won't."

Alcott would indeed become rich and famous in her lifetime for writing Little Women [2]. In the 141 years since its first publication, the beloved young-adult novel has never been out of print, and has inspired plays, films, TV series, an opera, a Broadway musical, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Next up: the literary remix Little Women and Werewolves [3], by the publisher of the bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [4].

Now, with Alcott herself on the verge of a period of cultural ubiquity almost equal to her most famous novel, we can get better insight into whether she ever achieved that last goal: to be happy. On Dec. 28, the PBS series American Masters will portray her life story in a 90-minute documentary. The special's screenwriter, Harriet Reisen, has written an affiliated biography, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women [5], published this week. The Louisa lovefest continues next spring with the release of a novel called The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott [6], which imagines the writer choosing between a love affair and a career in the summer of her 23rd year. This coincidental cluster of new works gives us greater insight into Alcott's interior life, which she protected so fiercely from public view during her lifetime.

Reisen's biography convincingly casts her subject as a proto-feminist heroine. Alcott organized reading groups about the importance of suffrage and circulated petitions on the topic. She was the first woman in Concord, Mass. to register to vote (in a town election decades before the 19th amendment was passed). In a 1868 article in the New York Ledger, she advised young women that "liberty is a better husband than love to many of us." A bad marriage, she wrote, "is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being called 'Mrs.' instead of 'Miss.'" She pursued professional success relentlessly, churning out novels for children and adults, along with scores of short stories, poems, nonfiction sketches, essays, and pseudonymous potboilers she called her "blood and thunder" work. She openly took pride in her earning power: When her poem about Henry David Thoreau was published in the Atlantic in 1863, she wrote, "I liked the $10 nearly as well as the honor of being a 'new star' & 'a literary celebrity.' "

That unsentimental spirit comes across in Jo March, the headstrong, tomboyish protagonist of Little Women. Jo spunkily lops off her hair for cash, spurns a marriage proposal, longs to be a writer, and moves from a small town to New York City. Jo has often and rightly been called a feminist heroine. Reisen characterizes Jo as her creator's self-acceptance personified: "After years of trying to curb her pride, control her impulses, [and] rein in her wild side ... Louisa finally gave herself approval in the sublime creation of Jo March."

But Jo, like Alcott, eventually finds her girlish ambition tempered by harsh lessons about adult submission. When Little Women’s first half was published as a stand-alone novel, readers clamored to find out what became of the four March girls. So Alcott’s publisher requested a sequel. (The two halves are now sold as a unit here, though they're still published separately in England.) The obvious choices would have been to let Jo remain single or to match her with Laurie, the dreamy boy next door.

In private, Alcott lamented that "girls write to ask who the little women marry. As if that was the only end and aim of a woman's life. I won't marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone."

Alcott did keep Jo and Laurie apart, but had to compromise. Instead of having Jo remain "a literary spinster," as she hoped, she had her wed the older, staid Professor Bhaer, an unromantic choice who nonetheless enables her to find a fulfillment of sorts. Later sequels Little Men [7] and Jo's Boys [8] focused on the boys who attend a progressive school that Jo and her husband go on to found.

That idea of compromising—expecting less, accepting fate—is one that shows up frequently in Alcott’s work, and throughout her life. As John Matteson pointed out in his 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father [9], most of Alcott's heroines, including all four March sisters and many other lesser-known characters, respond to life's challenges not by speaking up for their needs, but by learning to tamp down their own desires.

Alcott saw sacrifice as part of a worthwhile life—even at the expense of self-expression and fulfillment. This stanza of a poem she wrote at 13 sums up what would be her lifelong quest to master her own supposed selfishness:

How can I learn to rule myself,
To be the child I should,
Honest and brave, nor ever tire
Of trying to be good
How can I keep a sunny soul
To shine along life's way
How can I tune my little heart
To sweetly sing all day.

Her struggles with control and compromise are not the only thing that kept Louisa from a "sunny soul"; she seems to have been constitutionally unhappy. She wrote of frequent despair even as a very young woman, and in her mid-20s contemplated throwing herself into the Charles River. Matteson makes the convincing case that she suffered from a form of manic depression. The last few decades of her life were also filled with physical pain. The conventional wisdom has long been that she suffered and eventually died from mercury poisoning contracted in a Union hospital during a brief Civil War nursing stint. Reisen, citing a 2007 study, argues that in fact Alcott suffered from lupus. (A misleading bit of editing in the book appears to date the study to 2001.) Regardless of her exact constellation of maladies, by the end of her life her body had become a burden.

And then there was her relationship with her father. Biographers, including Reisen (but not Matteson), routinely cast Bronson, a head-in-the-clouds Transcendentalist who seemed incapable of providing for his family, as the villain in his daughter's life. He dragged his four daughters around New England on quest after Utopian quest, always confident his big break as a thinker and educator was around the next corner. Reisen reports that the family moved 30 times between Louisa's birth and her mid-20s. But Bronson also provided encouragement, intellectual stimulation, and intimate access to figures including Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Louisa routinely paid her father's debts—in fact, this was the reason she began writing in the first place. She supported her entire family financially from the earliest age she could. Late in her life, she also helped raise her sister May's daughter. Her father praised her as “Duty's Faithful Child” in a sonnet that was read at her funeral.

Reisen observes Alcott's unhappiness and sees oppression and thwarted dreams. If only her father had been more financially savvy, more warm-hearted, perhaps things would have been different. But finding even a flicker of anger toward her unusual family in any of Alcott's copious surviving papers takes some real contortions. Reisen tries, musing (somewhat awkwardly), "That the complete record would include a good deal more anger toward Bronson seems reasonable to assume." But the simplest explanation is that Louisa in fact saw her suffering not as a burden, but a step toward the goodness she so craved.

Even after decades of such legitimately noble sacrifice—not to mention the eschewing of romantic love for the freedom to "paddle [her] own canoe"—Louisa never seemed to be quite content with her own soul. At age 11, she wrote in her journal: "I was cross today, and I cried when I went to bed. I made good resolutions, and felt better in my heart. If I only kept all I make, I should be the best girl in the world. But I don't, and so am very bad." Decades later, she returned to the journal and attached a note to the entry: "Poor little sinner! She says the same at fifty." For Louisa, self-acceptance at the expense of moral duty was not a virtue.