The absolute favorite books of my childhood were strictly for boys, written by Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers and its numerous sequels, which I devoured, or by James Fenimore Cooper, the author of The Last of the Mohicans and its own sequels, which likewise I devoured. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, was, by contrast, strictly for girls. I knew this because, unlike the works of Dumas and Cooper, which sat on my own shelves, Little Women sat on my sister’s shelves, together with other works by Alcott. But there was no bar to my taking a peak, and the illustrations enticed me, and the pages turned, and somehow I devoured Little Women, too.
I cannot say that Little Women made as deep an impression as The Three Musketeers. Not long ago, I gave The Three Musketeers a new read, and I discovered that whole passages of the book were chiselled in memory, such that my mature identity and The Three Musketeers can only be regarded as intermingled, which is inspiring to consider (I am reminded to draw my sword a little faster). But just now I have given Little Women its own new read, and I notice that, although the tone and melody of the book are recognizable to me, time has carried away the sharpness of events and personalities. It may be that, when I first read the book, I was less than enthralled by the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth, and their next door neighbor, Laurie, the likeable rich boy. A principal tension of Little Women revolves around the question of which of the girls is going to grow up to marry Laurie; and I did not care. Nor did I care whether Jo, the tomboy sister, had a success in establishing an independent woman’s career as a writer for the New York magazines, which is a theme of the novel’s second volume.
But something about the book did appeal to me. It was in the half-remembered details: the family banter in the March home; the peculiarities of New England English from the 1860s; the exciting moment when people say “thou” to one another; the piano that comes to occupy the parlor; the books in father’s study; the old sofa; the carpet; the upstairs room that is Jo’s. Greta Gerwig filmed her own version of Little Women back in 2019––a decided logic has led from Little Women to Barbie––and she lingers handsomely over various of those details, naturally to excess. Everything looks like a million bucks, Hollywood style, in Gerwig’s movie––the texture of surfaces, the fabric threads, the grain of the woodwork. It is too much. Still, an affectionate touch figures in some of the lingering, as if petting a dog. And some of the lingering improves on the book, if only because, having paused over the domestic interiors, Gerwig‘s camera goes on to pause over the exteriors, as well, which do not appear in the book, but ought to have done so.
These are the exteriors of the March family home, which, in the movie, turn out to be the exteriors of the real-life childhood home of Louisa May and the Alcott family. And the movie lingers for a moment or two over the surrounding village, which turns out to be Concord, Massachusetts, just to make clear that American national mythology is one more atmospheric element in Little Women––Concord, the village where, after all, “Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.” Not to mention the transcendentalists!
But mostly what I liked, as a child, was the cultural and religious energy that, in the pages of the novel, hovers over those details, which is not something I could have defined at the time. This particular aspect of Little Women, I am sorry to say, makes its presence known in Gerwig’s movie only in a few lines of dialogue that hurry by too quickly to make an impression. The cultural and religious energy does not hurry by in the novel, though. It is a matter of assumptions and commitments, which are imparted to the girls chiefly by Marmee, their loving mother, and then seem to float in the air, like pollen. Even Hannah, the servant, joins in advancing the assumptions and commitments––Hannah, who, in another of Gerwig’s improvements on the novel, is presented in the movie as an elderly white woman with a hint of a brogue, instead of a comically dialect-speaking Black woman, as in the novel (though I should add that, generally speaking, Louisa May Alcott was not prejudiced against Blacks, and was sometimes strongly sympathetic, but was prejudiced against Irish immigrants).
The assumptions and commitments add up to the March family cause, and the cause drives forward almost everything that happens. This is a dedication to individual self-improvement, and it takes the form most visibly of a commitment to reading and education, especially the education that each of the March girls gives to herself, sprawled across a chair or tucked away in a corner of the crowded house. The particular field of education does not matter, so long as self-improvement appears to be the goal. Jo studies literature, Amy studies art, Beth studies music. Everyone studies foreign languages, especially French. Study is play. The girls produce a family magazine. They perform family theatrical works.
Laurie next door is a little slow at bending to his own studies, though eventually he gets around to it. Then again, self-improvement does not have to be a matter of academic study. The eldest of the March girls, the beautiful Meg, chooses a variation on the family ideal by devoting herself to perfecting the housewifely arts and marrying Laurie’s tutor. This is Mr. Brook, who is himself a perfect representative of the ideal of self-cultivation in its bookish version––Mr. Brook, who hasn’t a penny, and has very little in the way of professional prospects. But crass and worldly goals are not the idea. Cultivation of the mind and perfection of the moral sensibility are their own goals. This is the nineteenth-century bourgeois ideal that, in its cozy secular version, is symbolized even today by the living room tableau of a baby grand in one corner and a bookcase in another, which everyone can recognize.
Only, the cozy ideal in its March family version is not, in fact, secular. Mr. March, the father, is a parish minister. He is absent for most of the novel, performing unspecified duties for the Union Army in the Civil War and recuperating from equally unspecified but nearly fatal wounds or illnesses. When he reappears, healthy at last, the role he plays is mostly wordless. He halfway dominates, even so: “the quiet man sitting among his books was still the head of the family.” About the books in question, we learn very little.
We do not even learn the denomination of his parish. Still, Alcott’s readers, back in 1868 and ’69, when the novel came out, would have assumed that Mr. March’s church might be Congregationalist (the most probable), or perhaps Unitarian, or might be affiliated with a breakaway denomination of some sort. But, in any case, his church would have stood in a theological line descending from the Puritan settlers of the seventeenth century. Puritanism is Mr. March’s doctrine––Puritanism in an updated nineteenth-century version of some kind, liberal or conservative or something-ish. The March family is a Puritan family, even if they inhabit the modern 1860s. And Little Women is a Puritan novel––which may not be obvious to us today, and is not at all obvious in Gerwig’s movie. But Alcott meant it to be obvious.
The preface is an epigraph in verse, which Alcott freely adapted, she tells us, from the most hardbitten of the English Puritan writers of the seventeenth century, who was John Bunyan, the prison autodidact. Bunyan says, in indication of Little Women‘s theme:
For little tripping maids may follow God
Along the ways which saintly feet have trod.
And Bunyan’s masterwork, The Pilgrim’s Progress, is everywhere in Little Women, doubly so in the vivid early chapters. The opening chapter is called “Playing Pilgrims” because The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan is the March girls’ inspiration for play. It goes on to become the source of the family nostalgia: “Do you remember how you used to play Pilgrim’s Progress when you were little things?” The Pilgrim’s Progress is the inspiration for the family language. It is a hymn, sung at a family event, which means that, in Little Women, you can practically hear The Pilgrim’s Progress, with piano accompaniment.
The Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the tiny details that I did sharply remember from my childhood reading of Little Women. Somehow I understood that, in the era of the novel, everybody had read The Pilgrim’s Progress, whatever that was, and everybody revered it. I came away believing that I myself must somehow have read The Pilgrim’s Progress, because didn’t everyone know the book? Wasn’t The Pilgrim’s Progress like the Bible, in that respect? My father’s library amounted to two or three hundred treasured volumes, and did not extend to every possible literature in the world, and yet, by marvelous happenstance, did include an edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress. This was a pocket-size volume with a red cover. It lurked on a floor-level shelf behind the dinner table, where it was inaccessible to those members of the family who liked to stand up, and was convenient to those members who preferred to crawl on the floor. The volume was an abridged version from the 1920s, edited by someone with the fine old New England name Edith Freelove Smith and illustrated with silhouettes by the no-less remarkably named Harriet Savage Smith. In this instance, the illustrations failed to entice me, and I was not old enough to be curious about someone named Freelove and her colleague, Savage. Back went The Pilgrim’s Progress on the bottom-most shelf.
Still, now that I have reread Little Women, I have given The Pilgrim’s Progress another try, this time in the Penguin paperback edition. The Pilgrim’s Progress has had a bad reputation in the literary world for the last few hundred years, but I have arrived at the view that its bad reputation is a terrible error, and The Pilgrim’s Progress is, in its very peculiar fashion, a grand masterpiece, and the March family was right. The book recounts a dream about a pilgrim named Christian, who makes his way from the City of Destruction to the Delectable Mountains and the Celestial City, which is Mount Zion. The story is an allegory, or, as Alcott says (in Little Men), an “awgorery”. Everything stands for a something else that is large and abstract, beginning with Christian himself, who stands for the faithful of Christianity.
But, apart from being an allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress turns out to be a theory of allegory, and a meditation on the theory, and an interrogation of metaphor, which is the heart of allegory, and a theory of the cosmos, based on a theory of allegory, which amounts to a theory of language. The whole thing is, all in all, a post-modernist meditation on the nature of mind and language, except that, instead of being post-modern, it is pre-modern, which is preferable, albeit alarming, because post-modern signifies the deadpan hipness of ironic detachment, and pre-modern signifies a bug-eyed anti-hipness that regards deadpan detachment as sinister. The Pilgrim’s Progress is wild, in sum. It is delirious. A burbling brook of insane images floats across the page. And the dreamy delirium is the key to Little Women.
Christian’s challenge in The Pilgrim’s Progress is to make right choices as he wends his way toward the Celestial City. But it is hard to know which choices are right: whether to follow the advice of Mr. Worldly Wiseman (the wrong choice) or Evangelist (the right choice); whether to visit the town of Morality (the wrong choice) or to pursue pure faith (the right choice)––and thus through a series of possibilities: Moses (bad, because heartless) or Jesus (good); timorousness (bad) or courage (good). Ultimately these are choices between pure faith and something that may pretend to be God’s will, but is not, and may even be evil. Purity is, in each instance, always and forever the right choice: purity of mind and emotion, purity at each new turning point, sufficient to fend off the bandits and deceivers who lie in wait along the road, ready to assail the wayfaring pilgrim.
The pilgrimage itself appears to be a physical journey, and it takes Christian downward into the slough of Despond and to the town of Vanity and its Vanity-Fair, where everything is sinfully for sale and the dangers are great. Christian’s traveling companion, Faithful, goes on trial in Vanity and is executed by stoning, stabbing and fire, just to show how great are the dangers. But the pilgrimage is not merely a physical journey, or perhaps is not physical at all, or perhaps is physical only conceptually, which means less than physical, or more than physical, or metaphysical. Pilgrimage is purification. And, in Little Women, spiritual purification is the true meaning of the family dedication to constant self-improvement.
Marmee is always counselling her four girls to be more loving and generous to one another, and to strip away the impulses that stand in the way of a loving generosity; and the girls piously strive to do as she advises. That is the plot. It is an excellent plot because, although Alcott is mostly a sentimental observer of human nature, she is acute in observing one thing in particular, which is the grand theme of The Pilgrim’s Progress, namely, progress. In Alcott’s novel, progress means maturation, which, if soberly guided, constitutes the pilgrimage toward a pious life, and beyond. The girls are carefully observed to be of different ages, and the different ages advance.
The one line that everyone remembers from Little Women is the opening line––“‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug”––which is superb because, with a good deal of charm, it announces the two themes of the novel. These are the principle of spiritual purity––which means material self-abnegation, as represented by a Christmas without presents. And childishness––as represented by lying on the rug. By the end of the first volume, the Rev. Mr. March, having returned from the war, notices that his little Jo no longer lies on the rug. She is growing up! And on the very last page, she is described lounging on a low seat––one of the indications that “my pilgrims,” as Marmee calls her little darlings, have indeed made progress, morally and culturally, which means spiritually.
Everyone’s fate in the second volume, or “Part Second,” is a sign of this sort of progress. Beth, the musician, dies a Christian martyr with The Pilgrim’s Progress on her lips, having never recovered from an illness contracted in childhood while ministering to the poor and the ill. Progress toward spiritual perfection by the other sisters is more modest, and yet is progress nonetheless. The beautiful Meg bravely resists the allure of fine clothes in order to perfect her marriage to the perfect Mr. Brook. Amy, the shakiest of the girls, morally speaking, rejects marriage to the hugely wealthy Mr. Vaughn, whom she does not love, in favor of the merely wealthy Laurie, whom she does love.
And Jo, having shown no interest in marriage at all, settles down, at last, with her German tutor, Professor Bhaer, the impoverished scholarly immigrant, who is much too old for her and is stout and speaks in a comic German dialect (though Gerwig in her movie wittily and cheesily presents Professor Bhaer as young, trim, sexy, and French-accented). But the professor is a good man––indeed, a very good man: a defender of religion against his atheistic philosopher friends, and an enemy of wine. Every one of the March sisters chooses, in short, to reject the Satanic advice of their Aunt March, who, lying in wait, bandit-like, on the road to the Celestial City, advises them to marry for money. And Jo displays additional merit by achieving a professional career, originally as a “young authoress” for the New York Weekly Volcano and then, having been alerted by Professor Bhaer to the immoral nature of magazines like the Volcano, by taking up a morally preferable career as a warm and charitable school mistress, with a child of their own.
We moderns are likely to feel that, in Little Women, these several cultural and religious ideas are merely curiosities of the landscape, like funny-shaped trees, to be enjoyed as scenery, and otherwise ignored. We are likely to focus our attention on the sisterly loyalties and occasional betrayals of the four girls, and the hinted ambiguities of sex and romance as the girls grow into women, which are rendered still more ambiguous by an almost creepy absence of sexual pressure amidst the hintings (except among the other gender, about whom someone tolerantly says, “Let the young men sow their wild oats if they must”). And we are likely to attend to the practical question of whether a woman can establish herself professionally.
This amounts to a proto-feminist theme, openly stated (without the word feminist) in Part Second, and elaborated more fully in one of Alcott’s later novels, intended for adults, Work (the title says it all), about an orphaned farm girl who pluckily insists on rising above her station. As for pilgrimages and quests for spiritual purity––well, we moderns of the novel-reading class are skeptical of the whole business, unless the spiritual quest takes the form of a revolt against the bourgeois family and the piano in the parlor, perhaps along the lines of Beat literature hitch-hike pilgrimages or Trappist monk reclusions, which is definitely not Little Women.
Or we overlook the cultural and religious aspects for another reason, having to do with an additional snobbism of our own era, convinced, as we are, that life in the nineteenth century was not up to our own standards. We have no trouble imagining the frustration that women must have felt at being kept out of the colleges and seminaries. And we imagine that, stranded at home, the women must have brooded a bit over how exciting and expansive, intellectually speaking, were the lives of their studious brothers and husbands-to-be, compared to how constricted were their own cultural existences and book-reading adventures in the parlor. But this may be another error, comparable to the error about The Pilgrim’s Progress.
We have always known a lot about the intellectual and artistic men of nineteenth-century Boston and its suburbs, mostly because they wrote books about themselves, and because entire armies of scholars and biographers have written still more books about them. But in recent decades we have also learned a good amount about the sisters and wives, and the new information reveals pretty clearly that, in ways foreign to our own era, the homebound cultural universe of the women was more sophisticated and well-organized than we might suppose, and sometimes it adhered to the same expectations and discipline as in the colleges and seminaries, and, in short, home and Harvard were not always very different.
You can see this in a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life, which shows that Hawthorne’s two sisters, homebound both of them, tended to be just as keen about literature and adventures of the mind as their talented brother (and Hawthorne considered that one of those sisters was more talented). The same phenomenon turns up in a group biography of Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia Peabody, and her own sisters, The Peabody Sisters, by Meghan Marshall. The Peabody family in real life were, economically speaking, poorer even than the fictional March family of Alcott’s novel. And yet, in their straitened homelife, the real-life Peabody girls and their mother lived out a dedication to the most rigorous of educations in literature, multiple languages, the arts, and theology, and did so at a level of cosmopolitan awareness that was the equal of anyone’s. The young Emerson was the visiting Greek tutor in the Peabody home, and he was sufficiently impressed to appoint one of those sisters, the intellectually imposing Elizabeth Peabody, as the editor of his magazine. Elizabeth Peabody went to work for Louisa May Alcott’s father, the cranky Bronson Alcott, in Bronson’s progressive school experiment in Concord at mid-century.
The social connections among those lively people were thick and productive. And if the two Hawthorne sisters, with their cultural interests, resembled somewhat the three Peabody sisters, all of those real-life sisters resembled, as well, the four fictional March sisters of Little Women. The real-life Peabody sisters even went about dividing up the arts and sciences more or less the way that Alcott had her fictional March sisters do, with Elizabeth Peabody taking up philosophy, and Sophia (the one who married Hawthorne) taking up painting, and a third sister devoting herself to family life with her husband, the educational reformer Horace Mann. And all of those households, the real and the fictional, appeared and appear to operate on the basis of the same personal aspiration. It is the aspiration, entirely devout, to improve oneself, not principally in search of worldly success, but in search of a balanced relation to the world in its material and spiritual dimensions. These people are the serious-minded daughters of The Pilgrim’s Progress, even if their seventeenth-century Puritan origins are sometimes hidden behind a variety of nineteenth-century concerns.
Alcott’s fatal error as a writer was not to notice that John Bunyan’s spiritual advice might contain some handy tips for better writing. She had a knack for amusing dialogue and an eye for character in its stages of growth, and she had a positive talent for slathering a yellow ooze of sentimentality across the page, Dickens-style. But she needed Bunyan to tell her to cut through the ooze, Dickens-style again, with black streaks of truth-telling vinegar. And without the lash of Bunyan’s ferocious denunciations to drive her foward, she fell into a sin far more grievous than unchecked sentimentality. This was intellectual exhaustion, or maybe despair, or maybe cupidity, which, on one page or another, causes her to leap, as if jumping off a bridge, into the formulas of the hack-literature of the age, with its stock characters, and the women’s-magazine marital advice, and the fancy-dress ballroom scenes that lend themselves to Hollywood.
It is too bad. Her literary career ended up reenacting The Pilgrim’s Progress in reverse. She started out atop the Celestial City’s Mount Zion in the first volume of Little Women, and thereafter descended slowly downward into the Slough of Despond, where her other books can be found, writhing in pain, beginning with Part Second, and then Little Men, which is treacly, and onward to still other books that, in my late-onset renewed interest in Alcott, I have no longer had the courage to read in full. But no one should be judged by the Slough of Despond.
Alcott intended Little Women for an ideal reader perhaps fourteen years old, which does somewhat limit the book, unless you are fourteen. But, taking the readership into consideration, Little Women and its account of of little tripping maids on the way stations of maturation has something to say, I think, about the maturation of America’s intellectual and spiritual life as a whole––which is still another observation that I did not make when I first read the book. But it strikes me now. Little Women ought to count as a post-Civil War young-adult episode in what used to be called the “American Renaissance,” meaning the pre-Civil War flowering of Emerson, Hawthorne, et al. Alcott was a generation younger than everyone else in that group, but her imagination, like theirs, was still rooted in the metaphysical energies and religious instincts of the seventeenth century, which made her one of them.
Only, in her case, the energies and instincts led her into a post-metaphysical secular universe that is recognizably our own––which is ultimately the meaning of Little Women’s plot, as Jo makes her way from a girlhood immersed in the interior universe of The Pilgrim’s Progress to the grown-up quandaries of which path to choose in the exterior universe beyond the home. Little Women turns out to be, in this respect, an emblem of the sometimes hard-to-see basement-and-ground floor architecture of American civilization. This is the civilization whose bottom level has always been a seventeenth-century basement of Puritans and their inward-looking zeal for spiritual self-improvement. And above the basement, concealing the ancient foundations and everything that is down below, stands a sleek, secular, outward-looking culture where bright young women like Jo do, in fact, wonder in a practical spirit whether they can make a go of it in the glamorous but dubious New York magazine industry. Or should they take up a promising career in education, instead?