Young Women, Little Women, Liberated Women

THE TORMENTED MURDERER in one of Graham Green's novels read The Old Curiosity Shop over and over again late at night; he read it as an escape to a time when adult memories didn't exist for him. Some return periodically to Little Women for that same reason.

Louisa May Alcott's books are useful as later-life panaceas because the initial reaction to Little Women or to Rose In Bloom at age 13 was probably a serene one. In Little Women the circle of four girls--sisters in an impoverished family--is tight; their family protects them from the outside world. Cozily ensconced, they cope with various emotional and moral problems while the Civil War rages in the background, sensed but not really perceived. Anybody can remember her adolescent tears shed at Beth's death and the laughter at Jo's contests with Aunt March.

The associations with Alcott's works then, strictly in the context of childhood and safety, make a dispassionate return to her work difficult. If you reread them with any other purpose than to find a safe passage back to a neutral world, you are disappointed. A serious re-reading usually finds the plot as soppy as Love Story and the once beloved characters about as interesting as Pollyanna.

The various reviewers who pop up every ten years or so to re-examine Alcott seem to be caught in this disgruntled nostalgia syndrome. In 1924, one disappointed woman on the New Republic wrote that the only reason little girls continued to read Alcott was that it was pap and therefore bad for them: "Could any but pernicious influence hold such a fascination for so long?" she wrote.

Nevertheless, there is something about Alcott ...something about her plots and characters and all-pervasive philosophy that puts her in the ranks of relevant writers. Certainly today she is important as an early feminist -- though hers was more subdued than today's irate campaign.

It is very difficult to call Alcott a feminist, for she is hardly outspoken about it. In Jo's Boys, where the grown-up Jo from Little Women runs a school for boys, there is little talk of women's rights in the outside world. In the boys school, the girls are first admitted almost as an afterthought. But as the school develops, the boys and girls compete on an equal level, emotionally and socially. And the girls are trained both for their lives as mothers and as professionals. It is true that most marry, but for the boy who is a violinist, there is a girl who becomes a sculptress. For the boy who becomes a journalist, there is a girl who becomes a famous and respected physician.

IN ROSE IN BLOOM, Alcott describes the societal pressures on a woman to be ornamental. Rose, an orphaned young heiress, is pressured by her aunts to join society and to use her wealth to attract suitors. Instead, with the aid of a sensible uncle, she learns to manage her money wisely and to devote herself to philanthropic affairs -- not by conducting bazaars or charity balls, but by constructing and maintaining low-income housing in the poorer sections of town. She marries in the end, of course, but she marries the professor who respects her, not the handsome dandy who admires and dotes on her.

Perhaps it could be said that Alcott was an innate feminist. Although the late-19th century moral style at times makes any of her stories too tepid and saccharine for the grown-up little girl, there is much to recommend her philosophies and attitudes and her ways of incorporating them into an internally-consistent thesis. Her respect for women is basic and sound, and it pervades all of her works.

The Marmee that in Little Women seems the prototype of the gentle, graying mother is nevertheless a strong woman. She holds the family together through financial difficulty, war and illness. Rose as well is a strong woman. She braves her family's ridicule and a vague, whispered condemnation by her rich society to accomplish her goals. The Jo of Little Women is a strong woman. She is so strong, in fact, that she almost eclipses her gentle German husband; when she grows up and runs the school, it is to her that the children come for advice and comfort.

The element of Alcott's writing that makes it most difficult to get by her style and to her content is precisely that which makes her most valuable as a model for writers who wish to drive home points about the equality of women. Alcott is subtle. All of the conflicts she describes are buried deep in her characters and in the society she so realistically describes.

In Alcott's writing there is none of the "pseudo-liberal horseshit" that characterizes so much of today's writing by and for women and little girls. She never cries out "I am a woman, respect me, give me my rights." She goes farther than that. Her unconscious feminism grows out of a basic confidence. Her women can be feminine with integrity. They become what they want to be.