A Man Reads ‘Little Women’

Beth (Margaret O’Brien), Meg (Janet Leigh), Amy (Elizabeth Taylor), Jo (June Allyson) in the 1949 film

Among the classics of American literature, Alcott’s Little Women (1868) surely ranks high among Most Famous Books Girls Read and Boys Don’t.

Each summer I’ve been trying to read one thing I’ve never studied and will never teach. Last summer was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is fascinating in awful ways too numerous to spell out here, but I suspect has had a readership with a considerably more equal gender balance than Alcott’s best-known novel.

Her subjects are, of course, four sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March. Meg and Amy concern themselves with the world, Beth with dying, Jo with writing and independence. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of men I know who have read it.

Yet everybody “knows” Little Women. There are the films, of course, so that anyone into film history — women or men — might have encountered Katharine Hepburn’s 1933 Jo or Elizabeth Taylor’s 1949 Amy. There are lots of other versions. There’s even a 1998 opera by Mark Adamo, and like all operatic adaptations, it picks and chooses moments to make music out of, as the many film versions pick and choose moments to turn into compelling visual narrative.

Anybody can read this book, but Alcott knew who she was writing for: girls and persons who had once been girls.

“Any girl-reader who has suffered like afflictions,” Alcott writes, “will sympathize with poor Amy, and wish her well through with her task.”

Indeed, girl-readers sympathized with all four sisters, as well as with their mother, Marmee, and had sympathy left over for the novel’s lads and dads, heartbroken or heart-healing.

Little Women is a big novel of small things in modest space. Unlike Austen, Alcott doesn’t give us any real bounders, or guys who gleam with pride and prejudice and look great in a wet shirt. Sisters read, feel, scrap, commiserate, grieve, have modest experiences (even Amy’s European tour seems modest), meet boys and men. Jo, Alcott’s stand-in, struggles to become a writer, then seems to ditch it all.

It’s a coincidence that just when I’d finished the novel, my copy of The New Yorker arrived in the mail. It included a piece by Joan Acocella all about Little Women, its almost painfully autobiographical nature; Alcott’s own difficulties financial, artistic, and physical; and the weirdness of her Transcendentalist father Bronson Alcott.

But this is a language blog, so here are some reader’s notes, at least a few of which are language-y.

In the novel’s opening pages, when we meet the four sisters, all still in their teens, Amy and Jo are carping at one another’s use of terms. The bookish Jo, age 15, laughs at younger Amy’s confusion of libel and label. Amy replies, “with dignity”: “I know what I mean, and you needn’t be ‘statirical’ about it. It’s proper to use good words, and improve your vocabilary.”

Amy, who gets the novel’s malapropisms, complains that their stern aunt is a “regular samphire.” The word she’s looking for is vampire, though that seems a bit harsh. The lady in question isn’t exactly an auntie ex machina, but in the book’s final pages Aunt March does bequeath her house to Jo, who will turn it into a school to be presided over by her professor husband. (And was samphire, that now trendy restaurant garnish, an everyday food in the American 19th century?)

Restless Amy will improve herself. “I shall learn to make buttonholes, and attend to my parts of speech.” Domestic tasks and linguistic accuracy would seem to sum up everything that a March sister needs to do, except of course mature in matters of the heart and mind.

There aren’t any particularly hard words in Little Women, but Alcott is an eyewitness to a moment of post-Civil War America, and she uses terms for fabric and clothing and domestic life that aren’t current now.

She’s also eyewitness to a moment of American usage.

“The lunch looked charmingly,” she writes. I can’t be the only reader who wanted to ask, “The lunch looked charmingly at what?” It’s a grammatical form we have lost, or at least abandoned.

The cartoonist Alison Bechdel, inventor of the Bechdel Test, evaluates a work of fiction or film on whether it contains two women who have a conversation about something other than men. There are lots of those conversations in Little Women, and then there’s Alcott’s startling, unprettified observation about “the love of power, which sleeps in the bosoms of the best of little women.”

Ah, the love of power, sleeping or awake, in bosoms or elsewhere, regardless of gender. What might it have to do with who chooses to read Alcott? And what might it have to do with the power of language, which Alcott herself clearly understands?

More ruminations on Alcott and Little Women in my next post, which seems only fair. Alcott published the novel in two parts, after all.