A Man Reads ‘Little Women’ (Continued)

Rossano Brazzi as Professor Bhaer in the 1949 film, with June Allyson as Jo

As I wrote two weeks back, I began reading Little Women to see what it was all about, and became increasingly interested in what the March sisters had read, or what the author wanted us to know her narrator had read.

Two writers loom over Alcott’s novel. The first is John Bunyan, 17th-century allegorist par excellence and author of Pilgrim’s Progress, which if you haven’t read it is a bit like a cleaned up Children’s Illustrated Bible, written for adults and minus the illustrations. It’s got characters named Formalist and Talkative, neither of whom are modern academics. If an allegory of salvation can be trippy, this is it.  It’s also one of the most popular books ever written in the English language.

The March girls read Shakespeare and a lot of improving literature, but after Bunyan their favorite author is Dickens, then still a living, breathing self-promoting powerhouse of English fiction. Alcott adored Dickens’s writings, but was less impressed when she saw the man in his last decade giving his reading-performances.

Alcott’s fictional sisters, and their narrator, have read lots of Dickens, probably more than anyone today except for diehard fans and specialists. (Did you really finish Barnaby Rudge?)  Of particular interest to the March girls is Dickens’s Pickwick Club, with its four men entertaining one another and writing about it. So they create their own.

It’s a wonderful exercise in reframing the Dickensian quartet through the looking glass of gender, so that each of the sisters takes on one of the Club’s personae for herself, girls imitating Dickensian men. Adaptors of literature for the big screen, take note: The Pickwick Club is crying out for a full-dress gender reinvention in glorious ironic period settings. When this happens, credit Alcott.

Alcott’s novel also gives a brief nod to Susan Warner’s immensely popular The Wide, Wide World, a novel that critics like Jane Tompkins and the late Nina Baym, among others worked hard to bring back onto the reading list.

The mention of Warner’s novel marks a division of emotional and psychic labor for Jo, the sister we care most about. Alcott writes that Jo spends “the morning on the river, with Laurie [the boy who becomes the man she will not marry], and the afternoon reading and crying over ‘The Wide, Wide World,’ up in the apple-tree.”

In Alcott, important things happen up in trees. In the novel’s final pages (or the final pages of its second part), when Jo marries Professor Bhaer — and why she must marry at all is a question generations of readers have asked — the ceremony is capped by a song. Jo’s words, Laurie’s music, Professor Bhaer’s voice, and then a chorus of boys, concealed in the branches, including a “little quadroon, who had the sweetest voice of all.”

Quadroon, a person with one grandparent identified as black, as if mathematical precision could possibly be meaningful in the matter of race and identity, is a word we no longer use.

Daughter of an abolitionist, Alcott almost entirely erases questions of race in Little Women. The late introduction of a boy of one-quarter African-American heritage reads larger than its ornamental function in the plot, his sweet voice ringing out, his black body invisible.

There are boys in Little Women, and there are men, too, though they’re a lot less interesting than the sisters, and meant to be. The exception is the middle-aged Bhaer, fumbling, awkward, educated, shy, plain, and German. (In the 1933 film he’s played by Paul Lucas. In 1949 he’s played by Rossano Brazzi. Go figure.)

But why, when Professor Bhaer reads to Jo a “pleasant little Märchen” (fairy tale) — first in English, and then in German — does he choose the Danish Hans Christian Andersen instead of the German Grimms?

Surely Alcott does it to give him a chance to read aloud “The Constant Tin Soldier” (more often translated as “steadfast”), first in Jo’s language, then in his own. But it’s a conspicuously odd displacement from one 19th-centruy classic to another.

The marriages of Meg and Amy and, finally, Jo, the sublimation of the older generation, and the visible marker of the generation to come: Little Women describes and plays out a world of female possibility, constrained as Alcott saw the 19th century cinching women’s lives.

I spend my time reading many old things, but the gentle realism of Little Women is a window onto the continuing reading experience of Alcott’s girl-readers over the past century and a half.

I wondered whether boy-readers – and men — are as Alcott-immune as the common assumption might suggest. Even if you’re a former boy-reader, you might be surprised at how the quiet lives of the March sisters stick with you. Or: maybe reading a book that millions  have read and loved for a 150 years is reason enough.

I’d take a look at Pilgrim’s Progress, too. Jo and her sisters would like that.