Louisa Alcott: Little Women, Little Men

I was given Little Men by Louisa Alcott when I was about 13, and somehow it was the perfect book to get me started on reading.  Of course, thirteen is a little late for learning to read, but I was reading "children's books" until then, and Little Men was a sort of transitional book.

It was transitional in a way that Little Women never was.  To this day, I don't know what it is about Little Women that sets it a little apart from other books of that time; even the Laura Ingalls Wilder books were---different---from the Louisa May Alcott books.  I could try to put my finger on some differences, but they may not be the crucial ones.  Little W. had a large palette canvas; as far as I am concerned, it tells me almost all that I need to know about Louisa M. Alcott and her times, and her concerns, and her values!  It taught me about people, and about how life is so unfair.

In contrast, Little Men seemed to speak about simple things: decency, generosity, honesty, responsibility, and industry, and also greed and indolence!  Little W. was also about heartbreak, and patience, and rebelling against societal norms; both books are about that, I must concede.  I ought to go back and read Little Women, but I seem to remember a lot less editorializing in that one, whereas Little Men, I'm sorry to say, has lots of embedded sermons, as though LMA didn't trust her audience to draw the right morals from the story.  But that was the state of the art at that time; authors were obliged to underscore the morals in their work.  Some authors, such as Jane Austen, would point out obvious and superficial morals, while there were deeper implications hidden between the lines, which she left alone.  Maybe I'm imagining it, but I thought I saw numerous values that Jane Austen didn't care to, or dare to, draw attention to.

Today we know---have known for years---that Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and is considered a transcendentalist.  Many of the values that Louisa embeds in Little M. are ahead of their time, and flow from the ideas of the transcendentalists.  For whatever reason, I have to confess that though I am not a practising Christian, in the sense of being subscribed to an accepted denomination, I broadly accept the moral teachings of Jesus.  But from a practical point of view, I recognize that my morals are derived largely from Little Men by Louisa May Alcott.  ('May' is actually Louisa's mother's family name.)

There are a few clichetic features in both stories; they both propagate the principle that it is good and innocent people who die young.  In Little Women, Beth, the pianist, the sister whom everybody loves, dies of scarlet fever; in Little Men, John Brooke, who is initially introduced in Little Women as the long-suffering tutor of young Teddy Laurence, who eventually marries Meg March, Jo's oldest sister, dies.

Jo (Josephine) Bhaer (nee March) is, without doubt, Louisa Alcott's most brilliant invention.  There are some amusing surveys in Good Reads for readers to vote for their favorite character in each of the Little books, and I shake my head at any choice but Jo.  Of course, all the characters are painfully wonderful, and eminently worthy of being 'favorited'.  But the transformation of Jo's character is just too beautifully carried out to leave me the option of choosing anyone else, though Meg, Beth, and Laurie, and Amy, and even their mother, 'Marmee', are all perfectly reasonable choices.  (Apropos of nothing, Christian Bale, who plays Laurie in the Winona Ryder version of Little Women does such a good job, that no other version could possibly work for me!  Apologies to Saiorse Ronan.)

Though I have criticised aspects of these two books, and it is tempting to speculate whether they can be edited to conform with 20^th-21^st century literary norms, I am certain that modifying the stories in any way would be to their detriment.  But I could be wrong; someone might do it, and we might marvel at the success of the experiment!  These are amazing books, and if you anticipate that there might be moralizing to be found, you could safely skip the offending paragraphs if you're reading the books for the first time.  Warning: some of the moralizing is essential, but I can't think of how to identify those portions.

Kay