Headshot of Louisa May Alcott, American novelist, at age 20 by an unknown photographer/ Wikipedia.
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"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. 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, by the publisher of the bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
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, published this week. The Louisa lovefest continues next spring with the release of a novel called The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, 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.
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Comments
Bronson & Louisa
By: EBarney | Mon, 11/02/2009 - 19:56
Not having read the biography, I wouldn't want to take issue with it's portrayal of her psyche too quickly, but I'm not convinced that Louisa's continual struggles should be seen in such a dreary light.
I do think it's not that difficult to find "a flickr of anger" towards her father in her writings. I wrote a paper in college years ago comparing the portrayal of the Mr. March in Little Women and Abel Lamb in "Transcendental Wild Oats" to comments and anecdotes found in Bronson & Louisa's diaries that shed light on their relationship. (The paper is now up on google docs, if anyone is as interested in this topic as I am: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgqcqmms_576hk27p8d5)
There are no blatantly resentful diatribes against her father in anything I read, but her struggle to define herself always seems to fall between a desire to live up to his ideals and a bemused frustration with his impracticality. For example, these passages are from her journal at 17 and a definition she gave of a philosopher later in life:
Her fiction gave her a chance to rewrite Bronson and his effect on her family, but I think she wrote Professor Bhaer in part because she couldn't solve the problem of her father. She had to make a new man to make her family's experiences into something Jo could live with. This was partially because her readers probably wouldn't actually accept a woman doing all of those things on their own. And obviously she had to whitewashing his radicalism, turning him from a transcendentalist founding communes and strange schools to a clergyman, etc. But she also had to grant him a different temperment and wisdom in relationships and practical concerns for the most basic success to be feasible.
I don't think she could have been satisfied with complacent self-acceptance any more than she could simply accept her father the way he was. And I don't think that would have been nearly as satisfying a message to find in her stories anyway - her characters are always working away at their identities and their dreams in the context of a whole community of relationships.
It seems a stretch to say
By: matchbookhymnal | Mon, 11/02/2009 - 19:12
It seems a stretch to say that "Louisa never seemed to be quite content with her own soul" because she wrote about her struggle to become a better person. It is exactly as the last line of the article states: "For Louisa, self-acceptance at the expense of moral duty was not a virtue." It seems clear that her "compromises" were not made out of a desire for self-abnegation or social assimilation-- she genuinely admired the qualities of kindness and diplomacy she embodied in, for example, Beth and Meg, while still making the more headstrong Jo the novel's heroine. I find it difficult to believe that Alcott's quest for self-betterment was the source of her "private misery."
Professor Bhaer was a romantic choice
By: ranger | Mon, 11/02/2009 - 14:41
Little Women opens with Jo wishing to receive the novels Undine and Sintram for Christmas. These are novels are by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque and show Jo's attraction to German Romanticism. Professor Bhaer to Jo is not staid, but a personification of the dreamy German Romantic.
Middlebrow
By: Bo | Mon, 11/02/2009 - 10:54
Was Alcott more miserable than Poe or Dostoevsky? They're both more important writers, and certainly had their own shares of tragedy.
Depression is a handy modern tag to slap on anyone who's not obviously happy and shiny. And American Masters is middle-brow infotainment--a sure way to trivialize a person's life and work.