Scan barcode
A review by bluestjuice
March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women by Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado, Jane Smiley, Kate Bolick
3.0
Four essays considering the four sister characters from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women: one essay per, by four different authors. Meg's focused on the relationship between women and their clothes, on how we want to look distinctive but not stand out in a bad way, how our clothes simultaneously have to reflect us as people yet also form the basis on which others form their opinions on us. Jo's digs into the spectre of responsibility vs. the drive of ambition, the dichotomy between family and career and which self is the more real. Beth's assesses a macabre portrait of a girl frozen through literature on the perpetual cusp of womanhood which she is never allowed to attain, and considers the implications of this in light of the real-life inspiration for the character, Alcott's younger sister Lizzie. Amy's discusses the role of the youngest March girl in serving as a foil for the brash, aspirational, Mary-Sue that is Jo, but goes further to analyze how Amy represents the most modern type of aspirational womanhood, and succeeds farther than any of the other sisters at realizing Marmee's objectives for her daughters in terms of virtue and success.
Each of the essays was well-written and thought-provoking, but my favorite was probably that of Amy, a character who is easy to overlook or laugh off in the first half of the novel but who comes into her own as a strong lead character in the second half. Smiley does an excellent job of tracing the lines of Amy's character through the entire novel, however, showing how the traits which Amy exhibits at twelve blossom in her into the culmination of womanhood by the novel's end. Far from being a petted princess who has everything handed to her by good fortune, she is a hardworking and diligent master of her own fate who is pragmatic enough to learn how to improve and ultimately get whatever she wants.
Each of the essays was well-written and thought-provoking, but my favorite was probably that of Amy, a character who is easy to overlook or laugh off in the first half of the novel but who comes into her own as a strong lead character in the second half. Smiley does an excellent job of tracing the lines of Amy's character through the entire novel, however, showing how the traits which Amy exhibits at twelve blossom in her into the culmination of womanhood by the novel's end. Far from being a petted princess who has everything handed to her by good fortune, she is a hardworking and diligent master of her own fate who is pragmatic enough to learn how to improve and ultimately get whatever she wants.