Jo March in Little Women,
by Louisa May Alcott
Any mention of her “works” always had a bad effect upon Jo, who either grew rigid and looked offended, or changed the subject with a brusque remark, as now. “Sorry you could find nothing better to read. I write that rubbish because it sells, and ordinary people like it.”
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT,LITTLE WOMEN
Louisa May Alcott had always imagined her return from her first trip to Europe as a kind of triumph, a graceful homecoming replete with happy memories and artistic and romantic accomplishments aplenty. The reality was somewhat different: fourteen nauseous, boring days aboard the Africa led not to fanfare and tearful reunions but to the damp, anticlimactic feeling that overcame her as she looked out over the Boston harbor that meant home. The Europe of her childhood fantasies had been something to energize, inspire, and satisfy; the one she had just seen had turned her into an invalid nearly as cranky as the one she had been sent to supervise.
As a companion to Anna Weld, the thirty-three-year-old had seen Switzerland, London, Paris. But her obligations to her nervous, frivolous charge had kept her from wandering or exploring on her own, a fact she resented more with every passing day. Miss Weld didn’t care about the scenery that surrounded her, and her neurotic chatter drove Louisa nearly mad with boredom and anger. Neither new friends nor unfamiliar sights could undo the fact that here, too, was unrelenting work, her constant companion since childhood. Even the sudden gift of money from her mother was just a stopgap measure. While it allowed her to spend a few brief weeks luxuriating in London, she knew she was operating on borrowed time. Characteristically, she was also doing so on borrowed money. When she came home, listless and sick, she realized that the gift had been lent by well-meaning friends. Guilty and angry, she went through the family finances, falling back into her old role of problem-solver and reluctant breadwinner.
It was in this fretful state of mind, compounded by the recent death of her beloved brother-in-law, that Louisa received her publisher’s commission—and it was an unusual one. She’d made her career first as an anonymous writer of lurid serials, then as author of a wildly popular book drawing on her experiences as a nurse in the Civil War. To her surprise, publisher Thomas Niles wanted neither—he wanted a book for girls. Louisa herself was an unmarried tomboy who knew little about children, let alone little women. She was also poor. “Niles asked me to write a girls book…. Fuller asked me to be the editor of [popular children’s magazine] Merry’s Museum. Said I’d try,” she wrote in her journal. “Began at once on both jobs, but didn’t like either.”
That statement about sums up Louisa’s complex relationship to the only constants in her life: work and ambition. What we today associate with clocking in, sitting in meetings, or standing behind a counter meant something very different in the 1840s, when Louisa was a girl. To the Alcott sisters, “work” was the backbreaking labor expected of a woman, shorthand for the hours of sewing, mending, fitting, and patterning a girl had to perform simply to have clothing to wear in a world that lacked washing machines, detergent, or ready-made anything. “Work” was scrubbing a blackened hearth, kneading bread, lugging heavy buckets of water into the house from an outdoor well. For Louisa, this drudgery distracted from her true ambitions, desires born as much from deprivation as dreams.
When the family moved to Fruitlands, a utopian community in Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843, their workload only increased. The community was the brainchild of Louisa’s father, Bronson, and his deluded apostles, men with an insatiable, albeit impractical, need to put their lofty philosophies into action. When they moved to the rocky farm, the “consociate” family took a vow never to use any product of an animal’s life or toil, be it wool, silk, or fields plowed by horses. Louisa and her siblings starved together on sour apples (potatoes and other root vegetables were off-limits due to their “toxic” downward-pointing tendencies) and watched their parents’ marriage nearly fail, unable to withstand suggestions of celibacy or wife-sharing. Over the course of that dreary year, Louisa and her sisters watched their father reduced to a shell of his former self, a man even more unfit for honest labor than he had been in the early days when he wandered the country as a peddler of household goods, living on the kindness of strangers and the less-than-edible fruits of his complex philosophical tenets.
In those days, a father unable or unwilling to provide for his family exposed them to the very real prospect of illness, imprisonment, and starvation. Abba Alcott and her girls had long lived side by side with debt and dependence; they’d relied on family members and the charity of Bronson’s more stable Transcendentalist friends. Now they themselves had to go out to work, taking on positions as teachers, governesses, and social workers.
Herself the prisoner of complex ambitions and overwhelming insecurities, Louisa longed to prove herself. She had already tried and failed to sell her sewing and her stories; now, despite her mother’s misgivings, she agreed to work as a maid in the home of James Richardson, a family friend. Eager to see something, anything, of the world, she arrived at the Richardson house ready to earn a living.
The position was a bit more than she had bargained for; in addition to her stated work, she was apparently expected to act as a sort of paid girlfriend to Richardson, who regaled her with long philosophical ramblings and sexually harassed her. When she objected, her language tart and charged with anger, she paid the price. Her new tasks included shoveling snow and withstanding the abusive notes Richardson shoved under her door. She drew the line at blacking her inappropriate employer’s boots, fleeing at the first possible opportunity. In exchange for two months of boring, humiliating, and unsatisfying labor, she was paid just four dollars. She sent the money back, traumatized and embittered by her first real experience working outside the home.
From then on she teeter-tottered between pride in her efforts and hatred for work itself. The ugly realities of a woman’s work were sometimes offset by her anxiety to make something of herself. But the women she saw all around her never got that opportunity. Ultimately measured by their ability to marry well, the women in Louisa’s life were limited to “ladylike” pursuits that were inevitably lowly and poorly paid. Sewing and tutoring, cleaning and governessing, were like torture for Louisa, who grew into a gangly, twitchy young woman with a decided lack of good grace. She knew she was a disappointment. Though she was the natural helpmeet of her industrious but harried mother, her headstrong and passionate nature had always confused Bronson, who wrote judgmental notes in her journals and publicly decried his daughter’s untamed willfulness. Unlike her sisters, Louisa could not check her impulsive temper, her tomboyish nature, or her inner critic. Uncertain of her place in her family, she buried herself in books and writing.
When the Civil War began in 1861, it both reflected and spurred on Louisa’s directionless anger, dejection, and angst. She was still mourning the dual loss of one sister to scarlet fever and another to marriage when the idea came to her: perhaps a woman could go to war. Motivated by her thirtieth birthday and a surge of patriotic fervor, she volunteered as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington. Work had a different meaning altogether in the hospital’s bloody halls. Surrounded by the chaos of death and battle, she drowned her own worries in merciful acts, neglecting her own health even as she dressed others’ wounds. But her strong constitution was no match for the typhoid epidemic that swept through the hospital like a forest fire. Soon the nurse was a patient herself, engulfed in delirium and dosed with calomel, a mercury compound used to treat the fatal fever. She was too feeble to protest when Bronson arrived unexpectedly to take her home.
As she struggled through a slow recovery, she realized that her nursing experience had resulted in nothing but poverty and bitterness. Weak and listless, she turned inward again, struggling to make sense of what she had seen through writing. Dramatic Louisa had always thrown herself into her work with an almost Byronic passion, and writing was no exception. After months of dormancy, she would let a writing “vortex” take over, sucking her down and in until she was preoccupied and unfit for mannered conversation of any kind. Armed with her pen, she angrily denied her family access to her quarters, writing day and night until completely drained and depleted. She rested, socialized, then did it again, repeating the cycle until she had a piece of salable writing that she swiftly translated into a carpet for her mother’s sitting room or a bonnet for her sister. She had no way of knowing that her stint at the hospital would forever deprive her of her health. Bent over her work, she was barely strong enough to survive the physical pain that accompanied every vortex.
It’s unsettling to realize that it’s in this state of mind—anxious, overworked, unhealthy, and tired—that Louisa set out to write a story so familiar it’s as if it were written by a family member. It’s even worse to acknowledge that Little Women—the stuff of movies and musicals, the book that’s never been out of print—was written for money and money alone. I’d much rather envision a scribbling Jo, transported by passion and pain, hurrying to eulogize her perfect childhood and pass its greatness on to other generations. Instead, reality presents me with Louisa, cranky and well dosed with morphine and opium, bent over work she neither valued nor enjoyed. Still, the net effect is the same—under pressure to produce, Louisa turned to her childhood and her own turbulent personality and gave us Jo March, a heroine who, like her creator, has plenty of work to do.
It’s almost unthinkable that a woman as spirited and funny as tomboyish Jo would be a de facto outcast in her time, someone to be subdued and suppressed. But in a world of matching gloves and strict codes of womanhood, Jo’s a worrisome anomaly. Proper girls sit up straight and are silent; Jo stretches out on carpets, singes dresses, and loses her hairpins running down hills. Real women work without a word of complaint. But while there is substantial work for Jo to do—she must sew all of her own clothing, help with the household chores, and serve as a companion to her crotchety Aunt March—she complains lustily while doing it. At the heart of Jo’s protest is overwork: can’t she be a carefree girl a little while longer? At the same time, she objects to the inanity of needle-pushing and primping when all around her there is real work to be done, the work of war and substantial wages, the work of the men who are almost entirely absent from the book. It’s frustrating to see Jo bashing up against her own ambitions with no outlet, no hope of progress, nothing but the kindliness of her family and friends to sustain her. But what a way to appreciate the freedoms we are given a century later!
Myself a feminist as staunch as Louisa, I can’t help but wonder if my affection for Little Women, with its self-sacrificing daughters and tongue-holding mothers, should go the way of the hoop skirt. Still, I can’t help loving mercurial Jo, revisiting the book to see how Louisa challenges the expectations that drip from every seam of her own beloved story. Externally, Little Women seeks to instill all of the boring values of boxed-in femininity on its readers. Pickled limes and vanity: bad! Self-abnegation and backbreaking labor: good! The need for self-denial is impressed on Jo and her sisters at every turn; instead of setting aside your dishpans and going for a hike in the woods, you should stay at home where you are needed. Cheerful Beth, who goes about her housework with a song on her lips, is a saint; Jo, with her complaints and her awkwardness and her inability to cook, is a dangerous hoyden.
But look again. Once you drop the desire to see suppression in every page, it’s easy to find Jo’s rebellion. In a move that’s outraged readers since 1869, she refuses to marry Laurie, a young man with the advantages of being dashing, rich, hotheaded, and adoring. But Jo isn’t ready to lay down her arms and take up her needle (or put on a wedding ring) just yet. By refusing to indulge her best friend, she is a better friend to herself, a self in need of air and freedom, the liberty she’d never possess in the expensive trappings of a Mrs. Laurence. Though she cries when she sells her luxurious hair to help her mother reach her wounded father, it’s something she abandons with an eye toward unencumbered movement. In the past, I always thought of these gutsy moves as idiosyncratic ones, little quirks designed to make me say, “Oh, Jo!” and smile and get back to my self-denial. But when I really read the words, I realize that these small moves of mutiny go far beyond endearing personality traits. In Jo, Louisa unwittingly (or, even better, purposely) unmasks her little outlets, the very things she relied on to drag herself through a life of crushing expectation and ugly, unremitting labor.
In one of my favorite passages of the book, Jo is, at last, “All Alone.” Every other member of the March family is occupied: Meg with her unruly babies, Beth with the angels in a heaven doubtless spackled with kittens and ugly dolls, Amy in Europe on the very cross-continental trip that’s been denied her harum-scarum sister. For the first time in her life, Jo’s at a real loss. She looks around and sees a life of endless toil:
Something like despair came over her when she thought of spending all her life in that quiet house, devoted to humdrum cares, a few poor little pleasures, and the duty that never seemed to grow any easier.
These passages are not-so-shockingly similar to Louisa’s own angsty letter to her sister a few years before:
If I think of my woes I fall into a vortex of debts, dish pans, and despondency awful to see…. All very aggravating to a young woman with one dollar, no bonnet, half a gown, and a discontented mind. It’s a mercy the mountains are everlasting, for it will be a century before I get there. Oh, me, such is life!
The expression of Louisa’s despair through Jo might seem like a mere narrative device, but there’s that outlet again. It took guts to declare your dissatisfaction with life in the 1860s, in a day and age where women’s wrongs were not just ignored, but actively stifled. And it feels good to see the sloppy, ungovernable emotion beneath Louisa’s self-proclaimed hack job.
Better yet is the delicious vent Louisa gives her own heroine. Like her creator, Jo must act when mired in the slough of despond; like Louisa, she writes her way out of every hole. Discontented with her feeble options and frustrated with her own ennui, she goes up to the attic, readjusts her ridiculous writing cap, and gets to work. Here is the true apex of Louisa’s literary rebellion: unlike her creator, Jo is allowed literary success writing books she loves. Her stint writing pulp has been unprofitable and left her numb; as it was for Louisa, the creative work she performs from a place of insecurity or lack is bound to be unsuccessful. Jo writes for herself, out of her own experience, and the truth that comes from that heroine’s self gives her the success Louisa chased her entire life.
I would rather write that Jo’s literary triumph mirrors her creator’s, but in reality they were different creatures indeed. Little Women itself was a literary sensation, but it came at an awful price. “Paid up all the debts, praise the Lord!” wrote Louisa after completing the book. “Now I feel as if I could die in peace.” But shouts of happiness over her new financial freedom were undercut by worry that her work would never be taken seriously. The ambition that drove her literary success prevented her from devoting herself to the adult novels she longed to write.
Angry with a public who disturbed her privacy and demanded constant access to their favorite literary celebrity, Louisa struggled vainly against her new role. Unable to take herself seriously, the girl her father had called “duty’s faithful child” did the only thing she knew how to do: she worked, hard, cranking out stories of placid childhoods and good little women long after there was a financial need. Her nervous system was so used to deprivation and want that she never really learned how to enjoy her fame or her money. She could not have known that she was already dying. Louisa herself thought that the cure to the typhoid she had contracted during her nursing days had brought mercury poisoning along with it; present-day scholars suspect she suffered from lupus. Either way, the work that plagued her, obsessed her, and even killed her was also her literary gift to us.
It’s hard to imagine a heroine more companionable than Jo March, a young woman whose attitude toward work was somewhat more balanced than her creator’s. In the 1860s, her power was as an alternative to the buttoned-down, boring girl who followed all rules and mastered self-sacrifice. That girl has long since faded from fashion, but Jo remains as a tantalizing option, the opposite of fear and insecurity, inaction and perfection. Jo is an Erin Brockovich in a world of corporate sheep, a Christiane Amanpour in a land of pseudo-journalists, an alternative to mundane, muted reality. When Jo works, she does so from a sense of duty, a knowledge that the bills must be paid while Father is off at the war. But she also eventually works from a place of pleasure, tackling projects that are self-supporting and self-defined. Hardworking Jo never shies away from a challenge, and her success gives us something Louisa May Alcott craved but never attained: the possibility of a life in which ambition firmly occupies its proper place.
A workaholic myself, I have much to learn from a heroine who divides her most tedious sewing into hemispheres and talks about geography as she sews. I could do worse than turn my daily struggles into a Pilgrim’s Progress like the March girls. As heroines, we inherit our foremothers’ less appealing traits and trials: a tendency to overwork, off-kilter time management skills, and the never-ending challenge of bringing our work in line with the rest of our lives. Ambition is a heroine’s trait only when it adds to life instead of detracting from it. Louisa would be proud and happy to see that a modern woman can choose any avenue for her life’s work, that our road is easier than the one she trod so resolutely and so ruefully. But fewer obstacles doesn’t mean fewer obligations. Though we have it relatively easy, we still face the challenges of being taken seriously, of proving that our efforts have some meaning and worth. It takes guts to show up for life, to tackle what we are handed. And it takes even more strength and courage not to confuse self-sacrifice with self-sustenance.
A heroine’s work—growth, self-definition, barrier-smashing—is never really done. Let us heed Louisa’s warning and do as Jo does, taking up the work that’s right for us instead of that which we feel obligated to pursue, work that consistently creates the independence Louisa sought when she wrote, “I think I shall come out right, and prove that though an Alcott I can support myself. I like the independent feeling [of working], and though not an easy life, it is a free one, and I enjoy it… I will make a battering-ram of my head and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”
READ THIS BOOK:
• After a fight with a family member or daughter
• When you’re ready to walk out on your job
• On days when you’d rather sell your hair than get out of bed
JO’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
• Frankie Landau-Banks in The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart
• Lucy Snowe in Villette, by Charlotte Brontë