Eden's Outcasts (52 page)

There is no evidence that Louisa revised her first dozen chapters in response to Thomas Niles's initially negative judgment. Indeed, Niles observed that he thought he had never supervised a book that had required so little alteration or correction.
¹⁵
Following the first twelve chapters, however, the structure of Alcott's narrative promptly becomes more sustained, and her plot acquires a longer view. The change begins in chapter 13, “Castles in the Air.” Nestled on a hillside on a September afternoon, the March sisters and their friend Laurie exchange visions of what they want to achieve in life. Meg seeks material comfort; Jo and Amy covet success, respectively, in literature and art; Beth wants only to stay at home and care for the family. From this moment, Alcott's story forms itself around a different question; we are prompted to examine how well the March sisters measure up to their own expectations. Prior to this moment, self-mastery has been presented as paramount. Henceforth, however, the novel's moral universe becomes more complicated, for the March family's ethics of self-denial and family unity may eventually run counter to the fulfillment of personal ambition and individual dreams. The remainder of
Little Women
continually wrestles with the possibility—an uncomfortable one for a veteran of Fruitlands, Abba Alcott's intelligence office, and the Union Hotel Hospital—that living for the realization of one's self-gratifying dreams might actually be a good thing.

Early in part 1, Alcott distributes her attention fairly evenly among the four sisters. Thereafter, the novel becomes ever more focused on Louisa's alter ego, Jo. As Jo receives more attention, the same concerns that troubled Louisa as an adolescent move to the foreground. In earlier chapters, the process of growing into adulthood has been taken for granted. Gradually, however, one discovers that
Little Women
is not just about growing up. It is also about the dread of growing up. Eager to lead her siblings into almost every other kind of adventure, Jo not only resists her own coming of age, but also resents the comparative ease with which her sisters appear to be making the transition. In chapter 14, Jo anxiously pleads, “Don't try to make me grow up before my time… let me be a little girl as long as I can.”
¹⁶
Soon after, she wishes that wearing a flatiron on her head would keep her from getting older.
¹⁷
At first Jo would rather be a boy than a girl. Later, Alcott shows that Jo would rather remain a girl than become a woman.

Jo's desire for an artificially prolonged childhood arises in part from Louisa's contradictory experiences in growing up as an Alcott. On the one hand, the Alcott girls had been expected early in life to begin working and bringing in the money that Bronson was unwilling or unable to earn. The inclinations of their parents toward philosophy and reform had also led the girls to ponder questions usually reserved for older heads. Simultaneously, however, Abba and Bronson had shielded their children from other aspects of worldly sophistication. At an age when many of her contemporaries were already married, Louisa was still very much under her parents' protection, writing fairy tales when her peers were reading them to their own infants. Time played strange tricks in the Alcott family, where children were both enfolded in innocence and expected to be mature beyond their years.

Moreover, while they lavished intellectual and moral stimuli on their daughters, Bronson and Abba were not clear as to what ought to become of all that knowledge and training when its recipients reached womanhood. The two daughters Bronson loved best, Anna and Lizzie, never achieved a life outside the domestic sphere. In
Little Women
, even the meek and accommodating Beth admits in despair that her choice of a domestic life has resulted more from a failure of talent and imagination than a vision of fulfillment: “I'm not like the rest of you; I never made any plans about what I'd do when I grew up…. I couldn't seem to imagine myself anything but stupid little Beth, trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there.”
¹⁸
The Alcott family emphasis on juvenile self-culture would seem to have been largely futile, even absurd, if it necessarily gave way to mature self-sacrifice. If childhood were all about self-discovery and adulthood were all about self-denial, who indeed would want to grow up?

The struggles of the first dozen chapters of
Little Women
, as well as Jo's ongoing battle not to grow up, are principally internal. However, the second half of part 1 shows the March sisters dealing primarily with external challenges, most notably Beth's illness and Mr. March's brush with death in a Union army hospital in Washington. Significantly, whereas one may associate
Little Women
with Louisa's years at Hillside, the real-life correlatives of these two challenges—Lizzie's initial bout with scarlet fever and Louisa's nursing service—happened much later. Because the chronology of her story forced Louisa to keep her women “little,” it is the family's father, not a daughter, who goes away to war.

When Mr. March returns from the front, it is as if his daughters, having studied their moral lessons, must submit to examinations. All four pass with honors; March commends each girl in turn for the substantial conquest of her particular fault. Interestingly, when he praises Jo, he takes special notice of his daughter's face, which he says is “thin and pale.”
¹⁹
It is the face of Louisa after
her
return from Union Hotel Hospital. As the author who created her had done, Jo wins her father's acceptance after an experience of war has aged her and demanded that she sacrifice. Mr. March admits that he will miss the wild girl that Jo once was, though he is pleased to see the “strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman” who stands in her place.
²⁰

The reunion is a moment not only of judgment but also of unveiling. After twenty-one chapters of anticipation, the reader finally prepares to meet the father of the little women. In introducing the reader to Mr. March, however, Alcott is less than obliging. Like a resurrected messiah, Mr. March returns to judge and to bless. Curiously, however, these are almost his only functions. When he first appears, Alcott declines to describe him other than to say that he is “tall.” No sooner does she bring him into the scene than she obscures him again. Only two sentences after entering his home, he becomes “invisible in the embrace of four pairs of loving arms.”
²¹
Louisa uses the love of the March family to hide Jo's father and shelter him from scrutiny.

For the rest of the novel, Mr. March is present in the household, but he never receives more than sparse attention. Unlike Bronson, he is a man of few words, remaining virtually barricaded in his study for the duration of the novel. There are a host of practical reasons why
Little Women
belongs to Marmee and the March sisters, instead of yielding much of the spotlight to a Bronson-like patriarch. When Louisa wrote
Little Women
, she was still planning to write a book with Bronson as its focus. “The Cost of an Idea,” her projected tale of her father's upbringing and quixotic struggles, had been on her list of projects for more than a decade, and her journal reflects her intention to write it as late as 1872.
²²
It would have been unwise if, in
Little Women
, she had drawn heavily on the material she expected to use in this other work.

Moreover, Louisa had expressly promised Thomas Niles a girls book, and since she had recently finished her essay “Happy Women,” the theme of feminine autonomy was very much on her mind. To have injected a father too forcefully into
Little Women
would have interfered with the story she wanted to tell about the virtues and difficulties of womanhood. Paradoxically, if Bronson was too masculine to fit Louisa's vision of a female household, he may not have been manly enough to find a place in an ideal fictional family. His gentle nature, his fascination with child rearing, and his rejection of the masculine world of commerce made him more of a second mother to his children than a traditional father. For this reason, Alcott biographer Madeleine Stern has stated that a fuller representation of Bronson in
Little Women
might have been “redundant” of Louisa's characterization of Marmee.
²³

Furthermore, Alcott knew something about the public for which she was writing. Just three years earlier, the nation had concluded a war that had torn approximately three million men away from their hearthsides and killed more than six hundred thousand of them.
²⁴
The number of Megs, Jos, Beths, and Amys they left behind can never be precisely ascertained. It seems clear that Alcott wanted to write a book in sympathy with these children's losses and to offer her young readers an example of how one might carry on when one's family was no longer whole. For all of these reasons, Louisa acted judiciously when she chose to keep Mr. March primarily in the shadows.

And yet Bronson Alcott is firmly present in
Little Women
through the Bunyanesque subtext of the novel. The elder Alcott identified his moral outlook so deeply with Bunyan's that, whenever Louisa alludes to
The Pilgrim's Progress
in
Little Women
, she suffuses the scene with her father's ethical ideas. Like Christian, Mr. March in
Little Women
is not physically present during the pivotal portions of his family's journey toward redemption. However, he does not need to be. In imitation of Bunyan's hero, he has already blazed a spiritual trail, making it easier for his family to complete the same journey. If Bronson, in the form of Mr. March, is barely present in the overt action of
Little Women
, he is spiritually omnipresent.

The public response to part 1 of
Little Women
was astounding. Julian Hawthorne, with what degree of exaggeration and invention is anyone's guess, related in his memoirs the story Louisa told of the day she learned she had written a best-seller. Having had no news of her manuscript for months, she resolved to visit the publisher and demand an explanation. When she arrived, she saw a small brigade of truckmen loading packing crates onto drays and a busy detachment of clerks hurrying in and out of the building. Suspecting that the establishment had been seized for debts, she mounted the stairs to the office of the publisher, who was signing a check. Without looking up, he waved his hand dismissively. “Go away,” he grumbled, “I've given orders—most important. How did you get in here?”

Louisa's resolve stiffened. “I want my manuscript!” she exclaimed.

“I told you to get out—” the man began. Looking up for the first time, though, he froze as if petrified by a gorgon. An instant later, the story goes, he vaulted over his desk toward her and grasped her by the elbows with the aspect of a madman. As she feared for her safety, Louisa suddenly understood what he was trying to tell her: “My dear—dearest Miss Alcott! At such a juncture! You got my letter? No? No matter! Nothing parallel to it has occurred in my experience! All else put aside—street blocked—country aroused—overwhelmed—paralyzed!
Uncle Tom's Cabin
backed off the stage! Two thousand more copies ordered this very day from Chicago alone! But that's a fleabite—tens of thousands—why, dearest girl, it's the triumph of the century!” The check on the publisher's desk had her name on it, and the packing crates were filled with copies of
Little Women
.
²⁵

Very little, if any, of this anecdote truly happened as Hawthorne describes it. The quoted sales figures are vastly overstated, and Hawthorne himself admits “the amusing exaggeration” of Louisa's “spirited account.” Yet the underlying import of the story is true enough. The first printing of two thousand copies sold out within days of the book's release, and another forty-five hundred were in print by the end of the year.
²⁶
Before she could even begin the second half of her story, part 1 of
Little Women
had made Louisa May Alcott famous and very nearly rich.
²⁷

Fan mail poured in. Niles told her that an edition was being prepared for publication in England. There was no question now that a second part would be wanted. “A little success is so inspiring,” Louisa told her journal, and she plunged back into a creative vortex on November 1, vowing to write a chapter a day.
²⁸
She worked “like a steam engine,” taking a daily run as her only recreation and barely stopping to eat or sleep.
²⁹
Falling behind the ambitious schedule she had set for herself, she spent her birthday alone, “writing hard.”
³⁰

Only three months separated the publication of part 1 at the end of September 1868 and Louisa's delivery of part 2 to Roberts Brothers on New Year's Day 1869, but in the interval, much more than Louisa's level of enthusiasm had changed. Whereas she had based her work thus far on events from her family's past and had felt some obligation to stay reasonably close to fact, she would now be able to “launch into the future” thus her “fancy” would have “more play.”
³¹
Had she been able to indulge this fancy without restraint, Louisa would have used part 2 to craft Jo into a grown woman very much resembling the veiled self-portrait she had drawn in “Happy Women.” Having created her main character in her own image, Louisa knew precisely the life that, from Jo's point of view, would constitute a happy ending: the professionally satisfying career of “a literary spinster.”
³²
More broadly, she wanted part 2 to be a searching inquiry into the moral ambiguities of adulthood from which her main characters' youth had thus far kept them exempt. As long as the highest goods in the March sisters' world are their mutual support and the approving judgments of their parents, there is little or no conflict between moral action and the kind of gratification they have been taught to prize most highly. However, Alcott causes tension to erupt forcefully in part 2 when other objectives—wealth, professional achievement, or an independent sense of one's value—become more important than pleasing Marmee. Part 1 is about the formation of character. Part 2 is about young women who, having achieved a sense of self, must struggle against worldly forces—for example, mortality and male-dominated social conventions—that threaten to diminish or destroy those selves. This theme makes the second half of
Little Women
a deeper, more thoughtful work than the first.