The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  What comes next is what folklorists call a “test of obedience,” and it is one that Bluebeard’s wife utterly fails. Called out of town for business, Bluebeard gives his wife license to entertain and throw parties while he is away. Handing her the keys to various chambers and storerooms, he gives her one last key, which opens “the small room at the end of the long corridor on the lower floor,” a location that becomes all the more enticing for its remoteness. “Open anything you want. Go anywhere you wish. But I absolutely forbid you to enter that little room, and if you so much as open it a crack, there will be no limit to my anger.” Here we have J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Eternal Temptation”—the “locked door” with an explicit injunction about opening it. Who could possibly resist? And what could possibly go wrong? It is more than likely to the credit of all humans that we have an incorrigible urge to defy orders and prohibitions issued without any explanatory context, especially when there is the added temptation of a key dangling right before our eyes. Those who put fairy tales between the covers of a book did not see it that way.

  Gustave Doré, illustration for “Bluebeard,” 1862

  In Perrault’s rendition of the tale, Bluebeard’s wife loses no time getting to the room forbidden to her. All the while that her nosy female companions are rummaging through closets, admiring themselves in full-length mirrors, and declaring their envy of the wealth on display, Bluebeard’s wife is so “tormented” by curiosity that she nearly breaks her neck racing down a staircase to open the door to the forbidden chamber. For a moment, she reflects on the harm that could come to her for a flagrant act of “disobedience,” but she quickly succumbs to temptation and opens the door. Here is what she sees: “The floor was covered with clotted blood and . . . the blood reflected the bodies of several women hung up on the walls (these were all the women Bluebeard had married and then murdered one after another).”

  Living in an age when men, inspired by their monarch, thought nothing of collecting mistresses, Perrault was quick to judge Bluebeard’s wife and her friends, indicting these daughters of Eve for their envy, greed, curiosity, and disobedience. He seems less willing to denounce a man who has cut the throats of his wives. To be sure, it may seem redundant to comment on Bluebeard’s character once the corpses of his wives come to light, but, unless we take the view that this is a story of “dangerous curiosity and justifiable homicide” (as does one nineteenth-century British playwright), the repeated references to the unchecked curiosity of Bluebeard’s wife seem more than odd. What is at stake in this story, Perrault suggests, is the inquisitive instinct of the wife rather than the homicidal deeds of the husband. Fatima, as she is sometimes called in European versions of the story, has turned investigator, logically and shrewdly training all her instincts on detection and discovery.

  The homicidal history of Bluebeard takes a back seat to his wife’s curiosity (why is she so nosy about her husband’s past?) and her act of disobedience (why does she not listen to her husband?). “Bloody key as sign of disobedience”—that is the motif singled out for many years by folklorists as the defining feature of the tale. The bloodstained key points to a double transgression, one that is not just moral but sexual as well. For one critic it was a sign of “marital infidelity”; for another it marked the heroine’s “irreversible loss of her virginity”; for a third it stood as a sign of “defloration.”23 And so, like Eve, Bluebeard’s wife is vilified for her inquisitive nature. What does her in is what Augustine described as the “lust of the eyes.” By associating curiosity with original sin, Augustine turns an intellectual instinct into a sexual vice, cementing the connection between (female) curiosity and sexual desire.

  Curiosity was reviled by the ancients, who saw in it a form of aimlessness linked to snooping and prying, unlike the more honorable “wonder,” which was the true wellspring of wisdom, philosophy, and knowledge. The trait was forever giving women a bad name. Again and again, inquisitiveness and an excessive desire for knowledge are linked to women, as if to announce to the world that women’s real frailty lies in the inability to resist the urge to know more: “Curiosity, thy name is woman.” The inquisitive woman also becomes the compassionate woman, deeply invested in getting to the bottom of things and also restoring fairness to the world through concern and attentiveness, often to those who are unseen and unheard, the social outcasts and marginalized misfits of the world.

  “Literature Is a Fond and Faithful Spouse”: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women

  Where could women’s curiosity go to resist being sexualized and to remain pure and unadulterated, as it were? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published just three years before Little Women, comes to mind, but Lewis Carroll, whose attraction to little girls is well documented, made sure that Alice remained a complete innocent, untainted by the desire for much else but sweets. The real resistance was located in a form of fiction invented, almost single-handedly, by Louisa May Alcott, when she accepted a dare from her literary editor, Thomas Niles. She was to write a girls’ book, something that required her to do little more than reanimate her childhood and describe, imaginatively and inventively, the domestic world of four sisters as well as their ambitions—literary, artistic, spiritual, and domestic. The March girls set the stage for a host of other aspiring artists and writers who will appear in the pages that follow, from L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables to Hannah Horvath in Girls.

  Henry James wrote, with some envy, that Alcott had “a private understanding with the youngsters she depicts, at the expense of their pastors and masters.”24 In other words, the author of What Maisie Knew (a novel that takes us inside the mind of the child of divorced parents) worried that Alcott was conspiring with children against adults, as Roald Dahl once claimed he had done while writing books for children. Alcott turned her back on a robust literary tradition that had made as its goal the spiritual uplift of children and the taming of their unruly instincts. Children’s literature, with many strokes of Alcott’s pen, turned into something for children rather than for their own good.

  Louisa May Alcott loathed the idea of writing about girls: “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls, nor knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plans and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”25 Abigail (Abba) Alcott, the real-life “Marmee” to the four Alcott girls, described childhood activities that closely resembled what enlivens the domestic world of Little Women: “In the good old times, when ‘Little Women’ worked and played together, the big garret was the scene of many dramatic reveals. After a long day of teaching, sewing, and ‘helping mother,’ the greatest delight of the girls was to transform themselves . . . and ascend into a world of fantasy and romance.”26 “The story would write itself, Louisa knew,” one biographer claims.27 In two and a half months Alcott wrote 402 pages of the work that would become Little Women. Was she sanguine about the commercial prospects for the volume? Not at all, nor was her publisher. But when her editor gave the manuscript to his niece, Lilly Almy, the girl fell in love with the characters, could not put the manuscript down, and laughed until tears came to her eyes. Still, no one could have predicted the soaring success of Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, published in Boston by Roberts Brothers in the fall of 1868. The 2,000 copies, printed and bound in purple, green, and terra-cotta cloth, sold out before the end of October, and another 4,500 copies of the book rolled off the presses before the year was out.

  Alcott began work on the second volume of Little Women on November 2, vowing to write “like a steam engine,” a chapter a day. By November 17, she had thirteen chapters in hand (presumably she rested on Sundays), and spent her birthday, later that month on November 29, alone and “writing hard.” For her, writing was serious manual labor as well as intellectual work, but also something of an addiction. It is telling that, when her right hand was crippled from overuse of a steel pen, she taught herself to write with her left hand. Driving the passion for writing was not just the dream of literary fame but
also the need to “do good” by supporting her family.

  Jo March, the dominant figure in the quartet of March sisters, also aspires to make a name for herself. Jo loves to tell stories. An avid reader who enthusiastically quotes Isaac Watts, John Bunyan, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, she also stages plays with pathos and high drama and produces a newspaper inspired by The Pickwick Papers. She longs for nothing more than “a stable full of Arabian steeds, rooms piled with books, and . . . a magic inkstand, so that my works should be as famous as Laurie’s music.”28 Striving for immortality, she wants to do “something heroic, or wonderful,—that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead.” Though well aware that she may be building castles in the air (that is the title of the chapter in which Jo articulates her aspirations), she adds, “I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous.”29 But Jo’s ambition to become a writer runs afoul of her charitable activities (she sets up a school) and domestic arrangements (her husband rebukes her for writing “trash”). Telling stories is decoupled from social and cultural work and suddenly self-aggrandizing ambitions cannot coexist with philanthropic ventures, which require self-effacing modesty.

  The conflict between literary ambitions on the one hand and altruistic instincts and domestic bliss on the other is mirrored in the life of Jo’s creator. Louisa May Alcott, ever compassionate, benevolent, and self-sacrificing, applied for a position as a military nurse in 1862, on the day that she turned thirty, the earliest possible age for enlisting. Cleaning and dressing wounds led to a typhoid infection that compromised her health for the rest of her life. After the war, she wrote almost in defiance of her many physical ailments ranging from sore gums to bandaged limbs: “As I wrote Little Women with one arm in a sling, my head tied up & one foot in misery perhaps pain has a good effect upon my works.”30 Magically, she managed to merge writing with good deeds, churning out magazine fiction to support not just her parents but also her sisters and their families. “I dread debt more than the devil,” she reported, and it could be said that the writing addiction and the impulse to keep poverty at bay fed on each other. Writing was Alcott’s “bread and butter,” and it was also a way of enacting the main theme of Little Women: hard work and self-effacing generosity are cardinal virtues in the story of the March sisters and their pilgrimage through life. Louisa May Alcott later became the guardian of her sister’s daughter and a “father” to two nephews, and she was also the principal wage earner in the extended family for some time, making everyone financially secure by the time she reached the age of forty.

  As noted, Little Women can be read as autofiction, a form of writing about the self in an account that is made up but with strong autobiographical features. Remarkably, Alcott used a life story—domestic, self-contained, and lively yet also anything but “heroic” or “wonderful”—to ensure that she would not be “forgotten,” going down in history as the heroine of her own story. Alcott went far beyond the domestic. The March sisters have varying ambitions. They are all readers, using books as portals to other worlds that stretch their imaginations and enable them to dream, imagine, and invent. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are all shaped by the stories they read, and Louisa May Alcott created a literary universe built by the fictional works she had read, with authors ranging from Bunyan and Brontë to Shakespeare and Dickens. Writing in the shadow cast by John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, with its somber and sobering quest for redemption, Alcott inserted herself into a literary tradition but also inaugurated a new genre by writing a counter-narrative that replaced the faith-driven hero of Bunyan’s work with four girls, each able to find a calling, all forging four very different identities.

  Beyond that, Little Women is, in more than one sense, Louisa May Alcott’s brainchild. We imagine authors to be creators, godlike in their power to construct entire worlds from words and to produce literary progeny. But from God on down, it has been men who have created (hence the awkwardness of the term “authoress,” obsolete today because it has been displaced by the seemingly gender-neutral term “author”), and it has been women’s destiny to procreate. What happens, as Louisa May Alcott asks in an essay called “Happy Women,” when women choose to join the class of “superior women, who from various causes, remain single, and devote themselves to some earnest work; espousing philanthropy, art, literature, music, medicine”? Can they remain “as faithful to and as happy in their choice as married women with husbands and homes”? Alcott proceeds to marshal powerful examples of those who do, among them a woman who has followed her instincts and decided to remain a “chronic old maid.” Here is her description of a woman who is seen as a social anomaly:

  Filial and fraternal love must satisfy her, and grateful that such ties are possible, she lives for them and is content. Literature is a fond and faithful spouse, and the little family that has sprung up around her . . . is a profitable source of satisfaction to her maternal heart. . . . Not lonely . . . not idle, for necessity, stern, yet kindly teacher, has taught her the worth of work; not unhappy, for love and labor, like good angels, walk at either hand.

  Literature as the spouse who will always remain “fond and faithful”! And what else is the “little family” that has issued forth but literary progeny? Louisa May Alcott is more than likely the real-life old maid described in “Happy Women.” She is, in any case, one of that number, a spinster par excellence, who gives birth to Little Women, a work marked by many literary forebears. With a touch of regret, Alcott once wrote that her stories were like offspring: “I sell my children, and though they feed me, they don’t love me as Anna’s do” (Anna was the author’s older sister and the inspiration for Meg of Little Women). But through her literary issue, Alcott was able to “cherish” the talent she possessed, “using it faithfully for the good of others,” and turning her life story into a “beautiful success.” Writing came to rhyme with doing good.

  In 1979, during the high tide of second-wave feminism, with its harsh critique of male-centered ideologies, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published a volume of literary criticism with a title alluding to Bertha Mason, the captive “monster” in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The Madwoman in the Attic documented in detail the degree to which Western culture defines the Author as “a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power.” Everything that happens in the stories that constitute the literary canon can be seen as Athena is to Zeus, a brainchild of a male writer. The “man of letters” becomes not just authoritative and influential but also heroic, a spiritual trailblazer and patriarchal leader.31

  If Western religion installs a male God as the creator of all things, and the culture surrounding it assimilates that model for all creative efforts, where does that leave women? That is the question Gilbert and Gubar spend several hundred pages answering. Can women also produce brainchildren or are they limited to biological procreation? Louisa May Alcott charted one path for the female writer, giving us the unprecedented story of the birth of the artist as a young woman, setting her tale in a time that is hostile to the notion of women making a living from writing. Strong-willed Josephine March becomes not just a woman who asserts her right to self-expression and professional self-actualization but also a role model for the real-life readers who come after her (just like her author, Louisa May Alcott).

  To measure Jo’s impact on girl readers, we can turn to another literary success story: the British Harry Potter series. Its author, J. K. Rowling, tells us: “My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.” Or listen to Ursula Le Guin, who writes: “I know that Jo March must have had real influence upon me when I was a young scribbler. . . . She is as close as a sister and common as grass.”32 Yet there are limits to Jo March’s breakthrough, as there were to Alcott’s. Had Alcott become what her mother Abigail called a “beast of burden”? Some worried that Alcott had remade girlhood in the figure of Jo but was un
able to reinvent what it meant to be a grown woman.33

  Marriage to a flesh-and-blood “fond and faithful spouse” puts an end to Jo’s ambitions to become a great writer. In a chapter called “Harvest Time,” Jo has not yet given up the hope of writing a good book, “but I can wait,” she tells herself. Jo settles into the more traditional role of mother and teacher, not only raising a family but also founding a school. “You should be ashamed to write popular stories for money,” Professor Bhaer tells Jo in a book written by a woman to earn money. And, in a second ironic twist, an author who renounced marriage and devoted herself to a literary career writes a book about abandoning writing and embracing the pleasures of marriage. To be sure, Alcott would have preferred turning Jo into a “literary spinster,” but so many “enthusiastic young ladies” clamored for marriage to Laurie that, “out of perversity,” the author made a “funny match” for her. Unfortunately, the joke is on Jo, and it does not land without some of the same pain and humiliation Louisa May Alcott suffered as she navigated her way to professional success and literary spinsterhood.

  Orphan Anne’s Imagination

  Although some forty years separate Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) from Little Women, Jo and Anne have much in common, despite their dramatically different family circumstances. The Canadian writer knew the work of Louisa May Alcott well, and no doubt found inspiration for Anne in the figure of Jo March. But Montgomery’s Anne Shirley is an orphan, without steady support from loving parents, warmhearted siblings, and generous neighbors who care for her, guide her, and keep her from becoming bored. Montgomery’s novel chronicles the endless escapades and scrapes of a spirited orphan, adopted by middle-aged siblings, showing how she wins the hearts of her adoptive parents and creates with them a true family. Anne, like Jo before her, has an oversized imagination, and she finds in writing an expressive outlet for her inventiveness.