Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  Ah, Jo. She is without doubt the saving grace of Little Women, the one character I want to read about. Well, not altogether: I’m quite taken with artistic Amy, a sweetly zealous social climber, full of malapropisms and a desire to fit in with the cool girls (if she was around today she’d be constantly tweeting and posting selfies). But Jo’s the one. If only I had allowed myself to like her the first time round, I might have stopped hating the book. What’s not to like? She’s a kindred spirit. At fifteen, she is a louder and bouncier version of what I was like at ten or so: clumsy, enthusiastic, impulsive, messy, innocent of fashion and allure, and quite blithe about it. You’d always know when she came into a room because something would be knocked over. Not a bit ladylike, not even girlish; indeed, she’s often described as ‘gentlemanly’, though curiously I can’t think of her as a possible lesbian. Her worst feature is her temper: I too had a bad one. Her best feature is her thick mop of hair, which she eventually sacrifices for the greater good, but the cropped curls suit her, and I’m reminded of Enid Blyton’s George. In a world where her sisters Meg and Amy agonise about their shabby dresses and stained gloves, what a relief to encounter a straightforward girl who doesn’t even know how to flirt, and wears a daggy hat to a picnic where there are boys. She reads, all the time. She writes, all the time. And best of all, she keeps a pet rat. I’m charmed, utterly.

  “Ah, Jo. She is without doubt the saving grace of Little Women, the one character I want to read about.”

  And yet, I remember, when I was just the right age to do it, I refused to identify with Jo and I didn’t like her. So much did I dislike her that in my memory I’ve mixed her up with that horrid little goody-goody Beth, who could not be more different. What on earth was I thinking of? The only significant difference between us was that as a child of the twentieth century growing up with agnostic parents, I never tried as hard to be good as Jo did. Correction: I did try once. My maternal grandmother, a devout Christian, came to stay with us, showed me a postcard of Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World and told me Jesus was knocking on my heart and I should let him in. So I did. For a week, I felt a wonderful glow of virtue, though I don’t think I actually performed any good deeds. Then I woke up one morning and it was all over. I didn’t believe any more.

  “She reads, all the time. She writes, all the time. And best of all, she keeps a pet rat. I’m charmed, utterly.”

  Alas, my last foolproof hypothesis is already fraying around the edges. Here was the perfect girl hero, offered to me on a plate, and I turned up my nose at her. Young Jane is clearly a maddening contrarian. She will not do what she is supposed to do.

  To find out why I refused to identify with or like Jo, I must go back to that feeling that Alcott doesn’t like in girls, and nor do I, though I acknowledge its insidious power: jealousy and rivalry, even towards phantoms. Jo and I were both compulsive writers and storytellers from a very early age, and we both passionately wanted to achieve something splendid. The trouble was, as I saw it, Jo achieved her ambition with very little trouble and was well set to embark on a brilliant career, whereas my career was nowhere in sight. While still in her teens, Jo was a published author, winning first prizes in competitions and earning money for stories in the newspapers: why, she got hundreds of dollars for one story! (The vagaries of inflation and exchange rates were lost on me; all I knew was that even one hundred dollars was an awful lot of money.) Then she wrote a novel, and straight away that was published too, and was reviewed in all the papers, and her family and friends all praised her! How could I compete? Well, I couldn’t, and that was deeply depressing.

  It wasn’t for want of trying. I don’t think I’ve ever been so industrious a writer as I was then, despite the fact I never revised anything, and never finished anything. My magnum opus was an epic quest tale entitled ‘The Shoshki’, which filled notebook after notebook, complete with my illustrations. The Shoshki, a little elf-like creature called Arabis, was after some magic elixir to save Mrs Rabbit’s sick baby bunnies, who seemed to have escaped from a younger children’s book. Arabis used magic to summon a boy and girl to help him and Mervyn the flying dragon carried all their baggage tied to his tail. It was necessary to invent all sorts of pretexts to ground Mervyn so they could have adventures on the way to… wherever it was they were going, I’m a bit hazy about that. On and on they went, fighting wolf-men and a narwhal and a giant crab. Like everything else I wrote, it was unfinished, but I was pretty proud of it: I knew how to write by then. I knew that you never used a simple word like ‘saw’ when you could use ‘perceived’, and if you trembled, you trembled ‘like an aspen leaf’, whatever that was.

  Unbeknown to me, my mother got hold of ‘The Shoshki’, became quite excited about it, typed up a copy of my scrawls, and sent it off to a publisher, without mentioning my age. It was rejected, of course, but in those more leisurely days they would send out a detailed reader’s report with a rejection, and with the best and kindest of intentions, my mother showed it to me. I suppose she thought I’d be thrilled to get some tips from a real-live publisher. I have drawn a veil over what the report said. All I remember is a feeling of bottomless shame that someone else had read my pride and joy and had thought so little of it. About this time, crippled with doubt and insecurity, I also read an article in my father’s copy of Punch about a celebrated girl novelist who was just nine years old. A year younger than me! It totally escaped me that the article was meant to be a parody of precocious authors and the young novelist didn’t actually exist. Only ten, and already I was a failed writer, routed by younger competition. Meanwhile, Jo was coasting from triumph to triumph. No wonder I hated her.

  Reading about Jo’s literary exploits now, I feel protective. Suddenly I realise how fragile her hopes are, how vulnerable she is, how torn between the desire to write something good and something that will sell, and how she can’t quite see yet that they might not be the same thing. She starts off so happy and unselfconscious a writer, as I was, writing plays and stories for her family’s amusement, and acting them out with her sisters. Her work is very precious to her, as it was to me; when she and Amy quarrel and Amy destroys her manuscript, Jo retaliates by neglecting to tell her about the thin ice when they go skating, and to her consternation, Amy falls into the river. If it were my manuscript Amy had destroyed, I’d break the ice and push the minx in.

  “Reading about Jo’s literary exploits now, I feel protective. Suddenly I realise how fragile her hopes are, how vulnerable she is, how torn between the desire to write something good and something that will sell, and how she can’t quite see yet that they might not be the same thing.”

  Just as my material was lurid children’s fantasy, so Jo’s is lurid melodrama, which was all the rage at the time. Then she begins to wonder if she might get published. There is ego involved, but there is also fear; there is a yearning to make a name for herself, but also to keep her work secret and anonymous; to reward herself with praise, but also to reward her family with gifts they could not otherwise afford.

  Yes, she succeeds, but at a cost. She is ashamed of the stories that are published, calls them ‘my rubbish’. And they do sound like hack work. When her novel comes out, after she has cut it and changed it at the editor’s behest, she is confused and vaguely disappointed by the reviews: everyone seems to think something different about it, it is overpraised or over-condemned, and the over-whelming sense is of anticlimax (a very common experience for first-time authors, including myself). She works for a cynical and exploitative newspaper editor, Mr Dashwood, who underpays her and takes out all the ‘moral reflections’ from her stories. ‘People want to be amused, not preached at,’ he says. ‘Make it short and spicy.’

  “Then Alcott goes and ruins it yet again by wagging the finger and telling us that Jo’s problem is not that she hasn’t yet found the right material to write about, but that she gets corrupted by the salacious tales she dreams up.”

  Then Alcott goes and ruins it yet again by wagging
the finger and telling us that Jo’s problem is not that she hasn’t yet found the right material to write about, but that she gets corrupted by the salacious tales she dreams up. ‘She was living in bad society; and, imaginary though it was, its influence affected her, for she was feeding heart and fancy on dangerous and unsubstantial food, and was fast brushing the innocent bloom from her nature by a premature acquaintance with the darker side of life…’ By that measure, anyone who writes thrillers or crime fiction must be irredeemably demonic.

  By the time I reach the end of Little Women –it’s been quite a slog, and I never want to read a homily again – Jo’s literary ambitions are not quite quenched, but definitely on the backburner. She has married Professor Bhaer, a funny little German chap several years older than her, who is very virtuous and lectures her about her salacious melodramatic ‘trash’. Despite the professor’s rampant beard, I can detect no sexual chemistry between them. (Christopher Columbus, why didn’t she run away with Laurie?) Jo has children of her own and her days are spent running a school for boys in her late Aunt March’s mansion. She has found her metier – realistic stories that are laying the foundation for ‘the sensation story of her own life’ – and she may still achieve something splendid, but she’s in no hurry. What with her own children and the boys in the school, I don’t see how she can have any time to write. We are told she’s very happy, as indeed are all the surviving Marches, and the book ends with a hymn of praise, an avalanche of cute grand-children and a shower of love for Marmee, the great good influence, on her sixtieth birthday.

  But I prefer to think of Jo not at this time of her life but a few years earlier, when she’s still single, re-tiring to write in a fever of creation that she calls her ‘vortex’, wearing her ‘scribbling suit’ (a black pinafore that won’t show ink stains) and a black cap with a red bow. If the cap is low on her forehead, it’s a sign of hard work; in exciting moments, it is pushed rakishly askew; and ‘when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor’. I know the cap will soon be on again, for Jo gives herself utterly to the writing fit while it lasts. She’s in the zone, as we say now. The family says of these fits ‘Genius burns’ and what I like about this is that while nobody, least of all Jo, really thinks she’s a genius, there’s just the faintest suspicion that something genius-like is happening. I can resist just about everything in Little Women, unfortunately, but I can’t quite resist Jo. What a shame I resisted her so resolutely the first time round.

  “I can resist just about everything in Little Women, unfortunately, but I can’t quite resist Jo.”

  Is there anyone else out there who had the same problem? If so, they are hiding. Many famous women writers have had absolutely no need to resist Jo: indeed, as girls they found her a shining role model and an inspiration for their own future careers. In her introduction to my 1989 edition, Elaine Showalter mentions Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, Joyce Carol Oates and Cynthia Ozick, who read Little Women ‘ten thousand, thousand times… I am Jo in her “vortex”, not Jo exactly, but some Jo-of-the-future.’

  How exactly does this fandom play out, though? I’m intrigued to learn of Oates’s 1982 novel A Bloodsmoor Romance, supposedly inspired by the March sisters’ world but pushing it into outrageous Gothic fantasy, ‘like Little Women as told by Stephen King,’ as one reviewer put it. More recently, Geraldine Brooks burst the Little Women bubble by venturing outside to follow Mr March into the Civil War in her Pulitzer Prize– winning novel March. So it seems that even if you loved Alcott’s book, as a writer you might still want to go to places that Alcott didn’t go.

  The places that Alcott did and didn’t go raise some fraught and fascinating questions, and after reading Showalter’s introduction and some other biographical information I’m a good deal more sympathetic towards the author, if not so much towards her book. It comes as no surprise to learn that the story is broadly autobiographical and that the young Louisa was very much like the young Jo, with three sisters much like Meg, Beth and Amy; and one of them died young, like Beth. But their later lives took a different turn: although Louisa is said to have had a romance with a young Polish man whom she identified as the model for Laurie, she never married. Her reasons are not clear but might have included her desire for independence and possibly her sexuality. ‘I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul,’ she once wrote, ‘put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body… because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.’ She was tempted to leave Jo a spinster too, but in the end she just couldn’t do it.

  Showalter sees Alcott as torn between conflicting urges, living a double life as dutiful daughter and rebellious fantasist. I wish the rebellious fantasist had won the battle a bit more often, but the odds were against her. While her mother Abba encouraged her writing ambitions, her father Amos Bronson Alcott – the saintly, vague and mostly absent ‘Mr March’ in the book – decided very early on that Louisa was a girl who needed taming, and he devoted himself zealously to that task. When she was just two, Bronson tested the girls’ obedience by leaving out prohibited apples. Her older sister Anna, aged four, resisted temptation, but Louisa ate one, declaring ‘Me must have it.’ Well, there was trouble.

  “after reading Showalter’s introduction and some other biographical information I’m a good deal more sympathetic towards the author, if not so much towards her book.”

  Bronson was a writer himself, though never as successful as his daughter. He was sternly intellectual and wildly impractical, a visionary reformist whose grandiose oddball plans never came to anything (Fruitlands, his utopian dream community, involved cultivating only vegetables that grew upwards). He was hopeless with money; even his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson called him a ‘tedious archangel’. Sometimes his family was on the verge of starvation. Louisa admired her father very much, say some scholars: others say she despised him. Quite possibly she did both.

  Not that Bronson was a tyrant who stopped Louisa writing: indeed, she was encouraged to read the works of the great and wise geniuses (all men, of course). Her early writing, like Jo’s plays and stories and satirical articles for the sisters’ Pickwick Club, was exuberant and dashing, if juvenile and derivative. But again like Jo, when she began to write for publication and for money, her motives and influences were conflicting. The pressures were huge: times were very hard indeed for the Alcott family, and at one point when Louisa could not find a job, she contemplated suicide. She churned out melodramatic thrillers under a pen-name. She turned her hand to moralistic fables. Whatever publishers wanted. As Showalter says, there was something Faustian about her teenage vow, which also reminds me of the young Tove Jansson: ‘I will do something by-and-by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!’

  “The pressures were huge: times were very hard indeed for the Alcott family, and at one point when Louisa could not find a job, she contemplated suicide.”

  Reader, she was. Rich and famous, anyway. Little Women was begun reluctantly, because a publisher asked her for ‘a girl’s story’. In those days, that meant a highly moralistic tale which as Showalter says, preached suffering and resignation to women. So maybe instead of being cross about Alcott’s moralising, I should instead be grateful that she just wouldn’t provide pious sentiments to the degree the publisher expected: Jo-like mischief would keep creeping in. It was a winning formula: the book was an instant hit, publishers clamoured for more, and Alcott wrote a succession of sequels, including Jo’s Boys and Little Men.

  “So maybe instead of being cross about Alcott’s moralising, I should instead be grateful that she just wouldn’t provide pious sentiments to the degree the publisher expected”

  Today, Little Women still has millions of appreciative readers, and remains one of the world’s best-loved books. New Yorker writer Joan Acocella says it’s extraordinary, more like the Maha
bharata or the Old Testament than a novel. More down to earth is this comment from an Amazon reviewer: ‘Her warmly realistic stories, sense of comedy and tragedy, and insights into human nature make the romance, humour and sweet stories of Little Women come alive.’ Curiously I couldn’t find any online reminiscences from girls who cried when Beth dies, but I found a few from girls who cried when Jo rejects Laurie.

  “Who hasn’t liked the book, apart from me? Mostly men, it seems”

  Who hasn’t liked the book, apart from me? Mostly men, it seems, and I’m quite glum to find myself in patriarchal company. There has been a feminist backlash against the book from writers who thought that Alcott bent over backwards to suit her father’s pious views; but since then, other feminists have claimed Alcott as a champion, because she highlighted that tension between dutiful daughter and rebellious fantasist. ‘Anything to help the family’ versus ‘Me must have it’.

  In 2018, the 150th anniversary of Little Women’s birth prompted a new surge of interest. So there’s a biography of the book, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, by Anne Boyd Rioux; a recent BBC TV adaptation; and a forthcoming film adaptation of Little Women, the latest of many, directed by Greta Gerwig. There seems to be a return to the view that Alcott was forced to include the aspects of the book I dislike most, by either her publisher or her father. Monash University PhD student Ryna Ordynat writes that Alcott created Little Women because her father wanted her to, and he dictated its terms, morals and lessons. And more readers, even the most admiring ones, are admitting to their worry about the book. Why can’t it end halfway through, they ask, and spare us the Good Wives second half with its depressing endings? ‘It’s downright strange,’ writes Hillary Kelly in Vulture, ‘that intelligent women would call a book that disposes of its protagonists’ dreams in order to settle them into lives darning socks “required reading” for young girls today.’ She recommends you rip out the last 300 pages.