S1E8 Little Women: How 4 Sisters Defined A Generation

WOMEN OF DOLOR
Jun 8, 2020
4 min read

Updated: Jul 13, 2020

How has Little Women inspired feminism in entertainment and literature? How do the characters in the story emphasize nuance and complexity and how can we continue to acheive that today?

Why does Little Women still resonate?
- Sisterhood, subversion of gender roles, cultivating individualism, support, how and why to love
- Anne Boyd Rioux, a professor at the University of New Orleans and a scholar of 19th century literature written by women (Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters)
  - "Little Women has been called 'the mother of all girls' books.' It is also, arguably, the most beloved book of American women writers (and near the top for women writers around the globe) and has exerted more influence on women writers as a group than any other single book."
  - Jo March
- Often wished to be boy
- Daring, reckless, slang-use → exhibits masculine behaviors/ unrefined
- Seen in her unwillingness to adhere to feminine outerwear (dresses and skirts and hair)
- Cuts her hair to pay for Marmee’s trip to see injured father
- She was vocal about thinking for herself, took pride in shunning female manners and fashion, and was unlikely to succumb to the pressures placed on women at that time → hated becoming fully female at the risk of losing liberty
- “I’ve got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.”
Meg
- Autonomous femininity
- Chooses domestic life with John Brooks
- Not beyond vanity → at fault for ‘womanly’ tendencies
- “Tomorrow I shall put away my “fuss and feathers” and be desperately good again” → endeavors to be good but spend entire novel taking care of family and being the ‘good’ one
- Her goodness is all dependent upon her vanity; one slip and it's gone
Beth
- Introverted, reliant on the family for livelihood/ youth
- The ideal woman of manner and grace and solitude
- Maybe she is killed to make a point: that kind of quiet femininity is dead in Alcott’s world
- Or it’s all the more sad bc women like her, who are arguably the “best” of all women, can’t exist in this world
- Jo talking about Beth: “For with eyes made clear by many tears, and a heart softened by the tenderest sorrow, she recognized the beauty of her sister’s life--uneventful, unambitious, yet full of the genuine virtues which ‘smell sweet, and blossom in the dust’, the self-forgetfulness that makes the humblest on earth remembered soonest in heaven, the true success which is possible to all. ”
Amy
- Limes → ignorant of reality; while aesthetically comforting in her childishness, ideologically blind
- Portrayed as the everlasting girl child
- Manipulative (Jo’s writings) and Lacanian mirror stage (“Ideal I”)--> sees herself as a ‘lady’ and attaches to becoming that unattainable perfection and does so through men (Rich Man, Laurie) → still ignorant of finances as she ditches “riches” for Laurie but he too, is rich
- “You laugh at me when I say I want to be a lady, but I mean a true gentlewoman in mind and manners, and I try to do it as far as I know how. I can’t explain exactly, but I want to be above the little meannesses and follies and faults that spoil so many women”
Marmie
- Single parent
- Religiously charitable
- Conscious of the absent father
- “Don’t you feel that it is pleasanter to help one another, to have daily duties which make leisure sweet when it comes, and to bear and forbear, that home may be comfortable and lovely to us all?”
Laurie
- Petulant and childish but adultified through economic means
- Jo makes him childish via her behavior
- Still a patriarchal male as he misbehaves after Jo’s rejection in the hopes of getting her attention
- Is redeemed by marrying Amy
- Needs women to correct him or to restore his MANHOOD
- “"I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks; and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end."
Mr. Laurence
- Solemn and lost a child; at first stoic
- Grows to like Beth paternally
- Gifting the piano is an inherently patriarchal gesture that lays his claim to Beth
- Only Beth must be grateful while he can reclaim his space as a father figure
Fredrick Bhaer
- Old, ugly German professor
- Critiques Jo’s work → she falls for him
- Opens a boy’s school in the end with Jo
- Completely autonomous in a way Jo could never be
- He has the means to open his castle in the air
- “Ah! thou givest me such hope and courage, and I haf nothing to gif back but a full heart and these empty hands”
  - Fake modest bc he reads her poem and thinks I will have her or I will die → super toxic
John Brooke
- “He was a faithful servant, and made himself so valuable to those who employed him that they will find it hard to fill his place. He was a good husband and father, so tender, wise, and thoughtful, that Laurie and I learned much of him, and only knew how well he loved his family, when we discovered all he had done for them, unsuspected and unassisted.”