How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  While Meg’s not allowed to be pretty, Jo’s not allowed to be angry and Beth’s not allowed to rest, Amy gets off scot-free. She’s a selfish minx, and always gets what she wants. Because she’s ladylike and keen to please, their rich aunt takes her to Europe instead of prickly Jo. There she pragmatically abandons her creative ambitions and decides she’ll be a patron of the arts instead. She promptly attracts an embarrassment of rich suitors. You’d think this would make her a pariah to the self-denying Marches. But when she coolly writes home saying she’s going to marry money, does Mr March send a stern letter? Does Marmee start firing copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress across the Atlantic? No. Apparently they don’t mind Amy being a simpering little gold-digger. When her conscience pricks her, she does nobly reject one wealthy admirer, but then she marries Laurie, who is even richer!

  Then, this made me grind my teeth in rage. But now I’m treacherously thinking I might learn something from Amy. She knows what she wants and how to get it. She’s pretty, but she works at it. She is the mistress of playing hard to get. When Laurie runs into her in Europe he’s so mesmerised, he’s practically stammering to find out where she learned to look so stylish. She casually says she’s used to making the best of herself, and that she knows how to make cheap flowers look good. Which makes Laurie admire her resourcefulness as well as her style.

  Still, Alcott doesn’t let Amy seal the deal until she’s been broken down. After Beth’s death, Laurie finds Amy sad, homesick and grieving. Like a replay of the scene where Mr March praises Jo for being ladylike when actually she’s worn to shreds, Laurie falls for Amy’s ‘womanly pain and patience’. The men of Little Women like women better when they’re weak. Worse, this storyline makes Beth merely instrumental to her sisters’ personal growth.

  The other infuriating thing is that Laurie’s supposed to marry Jo. I found it very hard, then, to hear Jo turn him down, saying he should find a lovely, accomplished girl to be the mistress of his house. Why can’t he marry Jo and have fun in his house? They could slide down banisters and sprawl in front of the fire and call each other ‘good fellow’ and go boating and skating all day long. The line is that Laurie’s still too much of a boy for Jo. And maybe she’s too complex for him. But why can’t Alcott just make him grow up and become good enough for her? Especially as poor Jo is dreading becoming ‘a literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame’. This doesn’t sound so bad. It sounds better, anyway, than hooking up with Professor Bhaer, who makes her stop writing.

  When she first meets Bhaer, Jo is writing sensation fiction – the schlocky, melodramatic thrillers beloved of so many Victorian women (and often written by them, too), where passion trumps propriety and no plot twist is too unlikely, no emotion too extreme. Jo’s writing helps support her family, but Bhaer doesn’t care. He tells her that good young girls shouldn’t read, let alone write, such trash. And so she burns her work. In the 1994 film, which tries to square Little Women with feminism (Susan Sarandon’s Marmee rails against corsets, Winona Ryder’s Jo wants the vote), Bhaer is played by a rugged, sexy Gabriel Byrne who isn’t nearly so stern. Quizzically, he asks if she’s really fascinated by lunatics and vampires (sensation fiction staples), but then immediately apologises for being critical, advises her to write from her heart, and inspires her to write Little Women. Alcott’s Bhaer is not so twinkly. For me the saddest bit of Little Women, much sadder than Beth’s sentimental deathbed scene, is when Alcott tells us that ‘Jo corked up her inkstand’.

  Alcott didn’t cork up her inkstand. Again, I wonder why she wrote an author avatar and sold her short.

  Alcott’s publishers were partly to blame: they pressured her to marry off the Marches. But they also made Little Women happen. Alcott had been bashing out sensation fiction for years and didn’t want to write a book for girls. She claimed she never liked girls, or knew any, apart from her sisters. So when she got the commission, she based the book on them. She was stunned when it made her name. Its vast success warped the sequels. Alcott wrote to a friend that ‘Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie or somebody, that I didn’t dare to refuse and out of perversity went and made a funny match for her.’

  Now I can see how conflicted she must have been about it. In Good Wives, just after Jo has been doomily predicting that she’ll always be a spinster, Alcott strikingly breaks convention to address her readers directly: ‘Don’t laugh at the spinsters, dear girls, for often very tender, tragic romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns.’ She goes on to insist that ‘Even the sad, sour sisters should be kindly dealt with, because they have missed the sweetest part of life.’ Heartbreakingly, she implores ‘Gentlemen, which means boys, be courteous to the old maids . . .’ She wrote this at 35, a spinster herself. Maybe she felt sad and sour. And maybe that’s why she gave Jo the kind of husband she might have liked for herself: Professor Bhaer, pushing 40, gentle, freethinking and clever, could have been a perfect match for Alcott. And even though he’s too old for Jo (who is ten years younger than her creator, at only 25), Alcott does her best to make him not too perverse and funny a match; I love the scene where he proposes, adorably, ineptly, laden with parcels, hampered by his comical accent, in a storm, and just like in Four Weddings and a Funeral, they’re so in love they don’t notice the rain. However, it is infuriating that Jo immediately promises she’ll stick to a woman’s sphere from now on, that she uses her inheritance to set up a school where Bhaer will teach and she’ll be matron, and, gallingly, only boys will be admitted. And she doesn’t write a word through all of Little Men.

  Alcott never stuck to a woman’s sphere. In real life, she, not her father, joined the Civil War; when she was 30, she travelled five hundred miles to become an army nurse and caught typhoid that nearly killed her. Mr March annoys me even more now I know that he monopolises the heroism that, if she was really going to write autobiographically, Alcott should have given to Jo. I didn’t know that years later, when Alcott was dying of mercury poisoning, from the medicine she’d taken for typhoid, she decided to give Jo the happy ending she deserved.

  As a child, I never got as far as Jo’s Boys. I wasn’t interested in boys, and I’d found Little Men depressing. But now I wish I’d ploughed on. Jo’s Boys is not a wonderful book, but it’s the book where Alcott took her gloves off and wrote what she wanted.

  Jo starts Jo’s Boys bursting with pride because her school’s one female pupil is studying medicine – and when a boy tries it on, Jo indignantly declares, ‘That girl’s career shall not be hampered by a foolish boy’s fancy’. So much for women sticking to their sphere. This Jo has had a feminist awakening, and remembers the feisty girl she used to be. She reads to her sewing circle from the very latest feminist books – I particularly like the sound of Mrs Duffy’s No Sex in Education and Mrs Woolson’s Dress Reform, both of which were real books Alcott was taking the opportunity to champion. She even spells out that they are ‘excellent books wise women write for their sisters, now that they are waking up and asking: “What shall we do?”’

  And then Alcott plays her trump card. She reveals that Jo has written Little Women! She’s become a hit writer, and Bhaer is now so supportive that Jo calls him a thoughtful angel. It’s a brilliant last-minute save. But it is very last minute. Most readers miss it. I certainly did. But I’m glad to have found it now, and glad that Alcott did her best for her heroine in the end.

  Montgomery also wanted to go back on her decisions about Anne. So in 1923 she created a new heroine, who was basically a rewrite of Anne. Emily Byrd Starr is another orphan and writer, and she also wins over her guardians and marries her childhood sweetheart. But where Anne is articulate and winsome, Emily is watchful and fierce. Montgomery raided her diaries for material and even gave Emily ‘the flash’, her private word for imagination. The Emily trilogy was writte
n by the flash’s uncanny light. The prose is elated, kinetic. The Anne books came slowly and non-chronologically but Montgomery wrote the Emily trilogy fast and in order. They’re so raw and vivid, they make their predecessors feel sentimental and sepia. Montgomery also gave Emily an antagonist – and based him on her own envious, embittered husband.

  Dean Priest is a relative who saves Emily’s life the first time they meet, and immediately spoils the moment by saying that now he’s saved her life, he owns it. To add to the creepiness, he’s 36 and she’s twelve. Montgomery builds to a scene that is almost the inverse of the one where Anne has to swallow down her disappointment when her story is turned into a baking powder advert. Diana is the wrong person to read Anne’s story because she’s kind and clueless; but Dean is the wrong person to read Emily’s novel because he is a toxic critic, a false friend. His killer line – ‘How could you write a real story? You’ve never lived’ – makes Emily burn her manuscript. Blinded by her tears, she trips and falls down the stairs and, soon after, agrees to marry Dean. Thankfully, she does break free of him. And he confesses that he thought her novel was brilliant, and only lied because he wanted her all to himself. He was jealous of her writing. Although Emily finds love in the end, that’s not the point of the story. Her journey is towards learning to put her writing first. Montgomery evidently wrote the Emily books as a sort of letter to her younger self. They are full of exhortations to keep writing, and so much writing advice that they almost form a writer’s primer. She makes writing seem heroic – even claiming, in a very forgivable bit of wish-fulfilment, that the ‘violet shadows [under Emily’s eyes] always seemed darker and more alluring after Emily had sat up to some unholy . . . hour completing a story’.

  As I started copying out my poems and sending them off to competitions, and dreaming of seeing them in print, it might have been good to have Emily’s example of toughness and endurance. But I’m not sure she would have eclipsed Anne. Because I don’t think writing is heroic, in itself. And anyway, the biggest thing Anne did for me was not to show me I wanted to be a writer but to make me think that imagination, instead of being a flaw, might be my best hope. The grown-ups around me might be bewildered, struggling and uncertain, but although I didn’t have to look after them, I could at least try to understand them.

  I’d need to – because I was growing up too. Everything seemed to be happening very fast. When I started my period at nine, my mother said ‘Now you can have babies!’ She didn’t mean immediately, but still, that now! I started to realise that when bold, clever, creative girls like Anne and Jo became women, something happened. They became less themselves. This was a worry because I would soon be a woman myself.

  3

  LIZZY BENNET

  AT TWELVE, I had my bat mitzvah (in ruched fuchsia, and black lace that I thought was totally like something Madonna might wear) and became officially a woman. We saved a tier of the cake, installing it in our second freezer, where it took up a whole shelf (this was one of the reasons we needed two freezers), ready to be eaten at my wedding. If I wasn’t going to poison the guests, I’d have to marry young.

  My grandmother had had an arranged marriage at eighteen – she met my grandfather for the first time at their own engagement party. He was exactly twice her age. For their honeymoon, they took a train to Istanbul. She came back pregnant. There is a picture of her taken soon after, sharing a hammock with her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and, incredibly, her great-great-grandmother. Five generations on the one hammock (six, if you count the baby she was carrying). At 45 she had her first grandchild: me. My mother had married for love, at all of 22. She met my father at the Iraqi Jewish social club in London. He had been here for ten years, in business with his brother, importing and exporting everything from fabric to novelty telephones. When they were going out, they would go to Heathrow to watch the planes come in. One evening, driving round and round the airport, he proposed. For their honeymoon, they went to Disney World.

  In the late 1980s, as I turned twelve and started wondering how I might get to be a bride myself one day, my community was turning in on itself. Terrified of assimilating and losing ourselves, we clung to tradition. We went from warm, noisy and loving to just plain claustrophobic. I was lost in a maze of codes and values and strictures. And all because I was a girl. When my brother had his bar mitzvah, we didn’t save the cake. At parties, men and women sat separately; the men talked business and politics, while the women talked children, food and scandal. At Hebrew school, where once we’d all sung ‘We All Live in a House in Golders Green’ (to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’) and ‘Puff the Kosher Dragon’ (in which Puff learns that Jewish dragons don’t eat meat that comes from little piggies with their dirty, dirty feet), the boys were now studying fascinating, abstruse Talmud, while we girls learned each festival via its cakes. We baked honeycake for Rosh Hashana, hamantaschen for Purim, macaroons for Pesach. One day we left the creamy Shavuot cheesecakes to cool while we went off to learn about the purity laws. We returned to find nothing but crumbs. The boys had eaten the cakes. As we washed up the empty tins, I wondered why no one else was angry.

  It was a different story at my school, in the City, where lessons took place to the din of drilling as shiny new skyscrapers shot up around us. We were encouraged to become businesswomen – sharp shouldered, scarlet lipped. In one drama class, we improvised a play about suffragette Emily Wilding Davison throwing herself in front of the King’s horse (I played the horse). At home, my grandmother told me about her mother being taken out of school at fourteen because reading was spoiling her eyes and men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. It was confusing. Sometimes the pressure of The Cake would get to me and I’d fantasise about tiptoeing down in the middle of the night, opening the freezer door and letting it defrost.

  So while my friends were reading Judy Blume, Jane Austen felt more relevant to my life, and Pride and Prejudice was my new favourite book. Like me, the five Bennet sisters were under pressure to marry. Jane was too sweet, Mary too priggish, Kitty too air-headed, Lydia too flirtatious, but I loved Lizzy. I loved her for her muddy petticoats, her irreverence and her big heart. But mostly I loved her defiance of convention. Her cake in the freezer, her ticking clock, is the fact that the Bennets’ home is entailed to Mr Collins and will go to him when Mr Bennet dies. So when Mr Collins shows up, wanting to marry her, of course the family all want her to rescue them from the horrid fate of losing their home.

  I thought Jane had it easy. She conveniently falls for the man her mother wants for her, wealthy Mr Bingley. But Lizzy can’t stand Mr Collins, and nor could I. He is so unctuous, so objectionable in every way that I practically cheered when I first read the scene where he proposes and Lizzy turns him down. It’s particularly satisfying because he’s so vain that he can’t believe a woman would ever reject him, so she has to really squish him. It’s incredibly brave of her to do it when the stakes are so high. I was sure her parents would be furious. But she’s lucky. Her mother screeches and blusters and threatens, but her father supports her.

  My first attempt to resist society didn’t go so well. I was going to my first henna party – where a bride has henna put on her hands (a fertility ritual inspired by the crashingly obvious symbolism of dry, green henna going soft and red when it is moist). My mother had zipped me into a party dress and spent an hour blow-drying my hair poker-straight and now she wanted to sew salt into the hem of my dress. But I refused.

  She always sewed salt into my dresses to ward off the Evil Eye, which we believed was a freewheeling spirit that could possess anyone. It was activated by jealousy. So if someone envied you, the Evil Eye could turn their gaze into a curse. You could ward it off by saying ‘seven’ a lot, by wearing the blue Evil Eye symbol (which was both obvious and rude as it implied you thought your friends might be possessed) or by wearing a symbol of a hand or a foot (ditto). Or you could discreetly carry salt. My mother saved sachets of salt from plane trips and restaurants. That d
ay she had one marked ‘British Airways’, she had her seam ripper, needle and thread. But I said no. It was superstition, I said. Cool, rational Lizzy would never allow her mother to sew salt into her clothes. I kept saying no, all the way to the party.

  At midnight, all the girls were given long candles and we made a circle around the bride. The women were belly-dancing, laughing, ululating, and jamming balls of dark, gooey, glittered henna on the bride’s fingers. Her hands shimmered. And then I saw a flame. I realised it was coming from my head. I smelled burning. I saw flames lick and loop through my hair, and started getting hotter – then someone chucked champagne over me, someone else chucked orange juice, and I was wet, sticky, drowned in Bucks Fizz, clutching a clot of singed hair as big as my fist. So much for fighting tradition.

  I do still carry salt – on first dates, to stressful meetings; and on opening nights, if the stage manager’s amenable (or not looking), I even sprinkle salt on the stage to protect my play from whatever spooky magic might seep out of the audience’s eyes. I know Lizzy would laugh at me, but on my first attempt at resisting convention, my hair caught fire. If the same had happened to her when she refused Mr Collins, would she have been able to do it again?

  Because she does. I told myself that if Mr Darcy proposed to me, I too would muster the courage to say no. Of course I would. I hated him for saying at the ball that Lizzy is ‘tolerable, but not handsome enough’. Ouch! Chubby and awkward, I knew all about being a wallflower. My bat mitzvah, and all the parties I went to, were as ordered as Regency balls, with the dizzying circles of the Israeli hora giving way to Arabic music for the women to belly-dance to, the men relegated to the sidelines to clap or wave handkerchiefs, and finally the disco, where it was fatal not to have a boy to dance with. I often didn’t.