Little Women
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Monaco is a small principality on the Mediterranean coast, near the border of France and Italy; Valrosa is a fictional mansion near Nice, taken from Alcott’s own posthumously published sensational novel A Long Fatal Love Chase, written in 1866.
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That is, capeline; a light woolen hood.
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Section of the western Alps extending to the Mediterranean Sea.
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Sweet idleness (Italian).
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Title of a story from The Parent’s Assistant (1796), a collection of children’s stories by Maria Edgeworth.
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Reference to the third-century Roman martyr Saint Lawrence, who was roasted to death on a gridiron.
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Xavier Jouvin was a nineteenth-century French glove-maker who devised a method for standardizing glove sizing.
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Signet rings.
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My brother (French).
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Goodbye, miss (French).
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In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, searches for his missing father.
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Cloth needle case.
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Illegible, scrawled writing.
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In The Pilgrim’s Progress (see endnote 1), the inhabitants of Beulah, a land adjacent to Heaven.
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Shore.
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Insincere, deceptive person.
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Weeds that grow in grain fields.
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Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) fell in love with the young soprano Aloysia Weber and proposed to her (despite his father’s disapproval) but was rejected; four years later, in 1782, he married her younger sister Constanze.
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In the Catholic Church, a long mass marked by singing.
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Matches (French).
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Port city in Italy, located between the Apennine Mountains and the Ligurian Sea.
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In a small hotel (French).
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Gathering nuts, usually by shaking or beating them out of the tree.
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Weight for the kite.
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Stripped of ornament, plain.
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Paraphrase of a famous remark Samuel Johnson made in a letter to Lord Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1694-1773), an early patron of his dictionary, when Chesterfield sought credit for sponsoring it after having neglected Johnson for ten years.
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Rascal.
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Act like a schoolmarm.
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In Dickens’s novel David Copperfield (1849-1850), the fisherman Daniel Pegotty is the brother of the Copperfields’ housekeeper; upon seeing David after many years, he repeatedly proclaims David and his companion “gentlemen growed.”
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In Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun,” the sun and the wind vie to see which can make a man remove his coat; after the wind tries to blow the coat off the man, the sun wins through gentleness, warming the man until he removes the coat.
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Ornamental chain or clasp worn at a woman’s waist to hold keys, charms, and so on.
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At one’s pleasure (Latin).
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Fine lace made with a needle.
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Mr. One-too-many (French); that is, Mr. Bhaer is afraid he’ll be intruding.
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Commanding, strong; Jove, or Jupiter, is chief of the Roman gods (the Greeks called him Zeus).
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Removed.
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From “Come, Ye Disconsolate” (1816), by Irish poet Thomas Moore; the March sisters probably sing lyrics slightly revised by American hymn writer Thomas Hastings (1784-1872).
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Reference to “Kennst du das Land” (see footnote on page 00).
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Notched device for removing boots.
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Juliette Recamier (1777-1849), French society beauty and wit famous for her fashionable intellectual gatherings; a friend of Madame de Stael, she is portrayed in de Stael’s novel Corinne (see note to p. 342).
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Fourth-century B.C. Greek philosopher and tutor of Alexander the Great who wrote on many topics, including logic, metaphysics, poetics, and rhetoric.
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That is, a person who begrudges to others what he cannot use himself; allusion to an Aesop’s fable about a dog who won’t let an ox get near the manger full of straw in which the dog lies.
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In the Bible (see Acts 9:36-41), Dorcas is a disciple of Christ who does good deeds for the poor; she is often depicted holding a basket.
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Fourth-century French prelate and founder of the first monastery in Gaul; legend tells that he gave half his cloak to a beggar who turned out to be Jesus Christ.
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The ancient Greek philosopher and teacher Socrates often taught by asking questions.
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Fifth-century B.C. Athenian general and politician; a student and friend of Socrates.
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The Artful Dodger is a bold young pickpocket in Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (1837-1839).
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Love of children.
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Little boy, scamp (German).
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Sturdy cotton fabric with a twill (diagonal) weave, used for linings and pockets.
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Offices for bookkeeping and other business transactions.
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Youngsters (German).
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Large, narrow-necked bottle, usually wicker-encased.
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The first love is the best (German).
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Awkward young person.
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It tosses the dog in the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built”
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Of one-quarter black ancestry.
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Also known as the Teutonic Order, the Teutonic Knights were a powerful German military religious order of nobles founded in 1190 in Jerusalem; the knights took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
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The Roman goddess Pomona is the protector of fruits and orchards.
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Sour apples.
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Cuts.
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Near-quotation Near-quotation of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Rainy Day” (1842).
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Comments
1
(p. 3) “Go then, my little Book, and show to all….” JOHN BUNYAN: Throughout Little Women, Alcott makes much use of English writer John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, from This World to That Which Is to Come. This epigraph is recast from part two (1684) of this moral-instruction classic, which Alcott absorbed as a child. Bunyan’s text narrates the journey of a character named Christian through many perilous adventures on his way to the Celestial City, or Heaven. During his journey, Christian encounters many evocatively named people and beings who try to help or to hinder him, including Faithful, Hopeful, and the Giant Despair. The book preaches for the bearing of life’s burdens and for remaining resistant to temptation. Many of the chapter titles in Little Women refer to events and locations in The Pilgrim’s Progress – “Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful,” “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation,” “Jo Meets Apollyon,” “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair,” “The Valley of the Shadow,” and so on – as each of the March daughters takes on one of Christian’s temptations particular to her temperament and personal failings.
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(p. 18) “Do you remember how you used to play Pilgrim’s Progress when you were little things?”: In the discussion that follows Mrs. March’s question, references to The Pilgrim’s Progress (see endnote 1) include: the City of Destruction, the evil birthplace of Christian and the starting point of his journey to the Celestial City (Heaven); Apollyon, the hideous fiend who attacks Christian in the Valley of Humiliation; the Slough of Despond, a treacherous bog in which Christian is trapped; and the roll of directions, instructions for Christian’s journey.
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(p. 72) the little Irish children, who were their sworn foes: Amy’s scorn for the Irish children, although Alcott doesn’t go into it at length here, expresses the author’s own prejudices against this ethnic group; the Irish population had been burgeoning in the United States since the Great Famine in Ireland (1845-1850) and its consequent mass emigration. Even though Alcott and her mother, at one time a social worker in Boston, made a point of defending and accepting the humanity of other persecuted groups of the time – such as German-speaking immigrants (represented by the Hummels in this book) and African Americans (see Jo’s eagerness at the end of Little Women to include a boy of mixed race in her school) – the Alcotts dismissed the Irish as being lazy, dirty, and unwilling to help themselves in order to improve their situation.
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(p. 111) Plumfield is about as gay as a churchyard: Plumneld is a thinly disguised reference to Fruitlands, a utopian vegetarian and shared-work community cofounded by Alcott’s father in the rural town of Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843, when Louisa was ten years old. Alcott’s family resided there for the duration of the community’s eight-month existence, suffering much deprivation and hardship, particularly toward the end.
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(p. 127) a smooth strip of turf for croquet: Croquet is a lawn game that was popular during the nineteenth century. Players use mallets to send wooden balls through hoops, called wickets, that are arranged on the lawn to form a course. Croquet terms used here include: stroke, a swing at the ball with a mallet; and stake, a marker at the end of the course.
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(pp. 131-132) “Up with the jib… ‘To the bottom of the sea, sea, sea,‘ where – ”: Fred loosely drops many nautical terms here: Up with the jib is an order to raise the jib, a triangular sail forward of the mast; reef the tops’l halliards means to lower the topsail with ropes, or halyards; helm hard alee means turn the ship to the leeward side – that is, away from the wind – in order to tack, or bring the bow through the wind; a schooner is a two-masted vessel; lee scuppers are drain holes on a ship’s leeward side; the Bosun’s mate is the assistant to the boatswain, the officer responsible for maintaining the ship’s hull; take a bight of the flying-jib sheet is an order to slacken the rope that regulates the angle of the jib sail; start this villain means to start someone walking the plank; tars is a slang word for sailors; to scuttle a ship is to make holes in its bottom in order to sink it; all sail set means the sails are raised.
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(p. 231) PART Two: Originally titled Good Wives, the second part of Little Women appeared in 1869, a mere six months after publication of part one, as a response to the first March volume’s phenomenal overnight success. Readers had begged Alcott for information about their beloved girls’ future, especially how well and to whom they were married. Alcott wrote this sequel very quickly (in two months’ time); although she catered to popular taste by consenting to marry off her heroines, she refused to partner them in accordance with her audience’s expected, hoped-for conclusions.
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(p. 251) Murillo… Rembrandt… Rubens… Turner: Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617 – 1682) was a Spanish religious and portrait painter. Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606-1669) was a Dutch painter known for his mastery of light and shadow. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was a Flemish painter known for his voluptuous female figures. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was an influential, groundbreaking English landscape painter famous for his brilliant use of color and abstract, dreamlike effects.