A review by beatrice_k
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
5.0
As a preteen and teenager I avoided this novel because I thought it would be a boring 19th century marriage plot-y epic. This isn’t what it is, it’s more complicated than that. Little Women is a domestic drama about timeless themes. It happened to be written in the 19th century. It’s an adult drama. I can’t even understand what a teenager could possibly get out of this rich text.
Jo March is the teenage protagonist, and storyteller of this tale. In Little Women we watch her and her sisters grow up. Jo creates stories out of the girls’ lives and loves the cozy, matriarchal homestead in which she and her sisters exist. It’s a matriarchal household by circumstance: The March father is fighting in the Civil War and the four sisters are cared for by their mother and Irish housekeeper, Hannah.
A matriarchal household is a poor household in the 19th century and without their father’s salary, the family is incontrovertibly poor where before they were maybe middling or at least more than just getting by with their father’s salary. The Marches will remain poor for as long as we know them in the book and their intelligence, talent, and relative poverty will affect the way the girls act in and view the world.
Jo, the second-born daughter, is old enough to realize that when you leave, you can never really come back. She rages and fights against any more changes to the cozy life that she and her sisters live. This life is built around the absence of their father, but it becomes more real than whatever life existed before it. This is the important part, this break and this beginning of them realizing what they can do as women in the world (spoiler: not much, but that doesn’t stop them).
It’s so pure and childish and heartbreaking how Jo wants everything to remain the same, for their father’s absence and what’s grown around it to be the final change the family will ever have to face. The only alternative to growing up is dying, and that comes in this story, too, a sort of Grimm’s fairytale misinterpretation and granting of Jo’s wishes. You simply can’t stay home forever. Louisa May Alcott has given us a timeless story about the cost of becoming, the gains and the losses and how you weather them—and with whom you do the weathering. There's life and life and more life if you want it. If you're willing to go to it, to be a part of it.
It’s so beautiful, it’s so goddamn beautiful.
Jo March is the teenage protagonist, and storyteller of this tale. In Little Women we watch her and her sisters grow up. Jo creates stories out of the girls’ lives and loves the cozy, matriarchal homestead in which she and her sisters exist. It’s a matriarchal household by circumstance: The March father is fighting in the Civil War and the four sisters are cared for by their mother and Irish housekeeper, Hannah.
A matriarchal household is a poor household in the 19th century and without their father’s salary, the family is incontrovertibly poor where before they were maybe middling or at least more than just getting by with their father’s salary. The Marches will remain poor for as long as we know them in the book and their intelligence, talent, and relative poverty will affect the way the girls act in and view the world.
Jo, the second-born daughter, is old enough to realize that when you leave, you can never really come back. She rages and fights against any more changes to the cozy life that she and her sisters live. This life is built around the absence of their father, but it becomes more real than whatever life existed before it. This is the important part, this break and this beginning of them realizing what they can do as women in the world (spoiler: not much, but that doesn’t stop them).
It’s so pure and childish and heartbreaking how Jo wants everything to remain the same, for their father’s absence and what’s grown around it to be the final change the family will ever have to face. The only alternative to growing up is dying, and that comes in this story, too, a sort of Grimm’s fairytale misinterpretation and granting of Jo’s wishes. You simply can’t stay home forever. Louisa May Alcott has given us a timeless story about the cost of becoming, the gains and the losses and how you weather them—and with whom you do the weathering. There's life and life and more life if you want it. If you're willing to go to it, to be a part of it.
It’s so beautiful, it’s so goddamn beautiful.