Erin Blakemore - The Heroine's Bookshelf - Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

From then on she teeter-tottered between pride in her efforts and hatred for work itself. The ugly realities of a woman’s work were sometimes offset by her anxiety to make something of herself. But the women she saw all around her never got that opportunity. Ultimately measured by their ability to marry well, the women in Louisa’s life were limited to “ladylike” pursuits that were inevitably lowly and poorly paid. Sewing and tutoring, cleaning and governessing, were like torture for Louisa, who grew into a gangly, twitchy young woman with a decided lack of good grace. She knew she was a disappointment. Though she was the natural helpmeet of her industrious but harried mother, her headstrong and passionate nature had always confused Bronson, who wrote judgmental notes in her journals and publicly decried his daughter’s untamed willfulness. Unlike her sisters, Louisa could not check her impulsive temper, her tomboyish nature, or her inner critic. Uncertain of her place in her family, she buried herself in books and writing.

When the Civil War began in 1861, it both reflected and spurred on Louisa’s directionless anger, dejection, and angst. She was still mourning the dual loss of one sister to scarlet fever and another to marriage when the idea came to her: perhaps a woman could go to war. Motivated by her thirtieth birthday and a surge of patriotic fervor, she volunteered as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington. Work had a different meaning altogether in the hospital’s bloody halls. Surrounded by the chaos of death and battle, she drowned her own worries in merciful acts, neglecting her own health even as she dressed others’ wounds. But her strong constitution was no match for the typhoid epidemic that swept through the hospital like a forest fire. Soon the nurse was a patient herself, engulfed in delirium and dosed with calomel, a mercury compound used to treat the fatal fever. She was too feeble to protest when Bronson arrived unexpectedly to take her home.

As she struggled through a slow recovery, she realized that her nursing experience had resulted in nothing but poverty and bitterness. Weak and listless, she turned inward again, struggling to make sense of what she had seen through writing. Dramatic Louisa had always thrown herself into her work with an almost Byronic passion, and writing was no exception. After months of dormancy, she would let a writing “vortex” take over, sucking her down and in until she was preoccupied and unfit for mannered conversation of any kind. Armed with her pen, she angrily denied her family access to her quarters, writing day and night until completely drained and depleted. She rested, socialized, then did it again, repeating the cycle until she had a piece of salable writing that she swiftly translated into a carpet for her mother’s sitting room or a bonnet for her sister. She had no way of knowing that her stint at the hospital would forever deprive her of her health. Bent over her work, she was barely strong enough to survive the physical pain that accompanied every vortex.

It’s unsettling to realize that it’s in this state of mind—anxious, overworked, unhealthy, and tired—that Louisa set out to write a story so familiar it’s as if it were written by a family member. It’s even worse to acknowledge that Little Women —the stuff of movies and musicals, the book that’s never been out of print—was written for money and money alone. I’d much rather envision a scribbling Jo, transported by passion and pain, hurrying to eulogize her perfect childhood and pass its greatness on to other generations. Instead, reality presents me with Louisa, cranky and well dosed with morphine and opium, bent over work she neither valued nor enjoyed. Still, the net effect is the same—under pressure to produce, Louisa turned to her childhood and her own turbulent personality and gave us Jo March, a heroine who, like her creator, has plenty of work to do.

It’s almost unthinkable that a woman as spirited and funny as tomboyish Jo would be a de facto outcast in her time, someone to be subdued and suppressed. But in a world of matching gloves and strict codes of womanhood, Jo’s a worrisome anomaly. Proper girls sit up straight and are silent; Jo stretches out on carpets, singes dresses, and loses her hairpins running down hills. Real women work without a word of complaint. But while there is substantial work for Jo to do—she must sew all of her own clothing, help with the household chores, and serve as a companion to her crotchety Aunt March—she complains lustily while doing it. At the heart of Jo’s protest is overwork: can’t she be a carefree girl a little while longer? At the same time, she objects to the inanity of needle-pushing and primping when all around her there is real work to be done, the work of war and substantial wages, the work of the men who are almost entirely absent from the book. It’s frustrating to see Jo bashing up against her own ambitions with no outlet, no hope of progress, nothing but the kindliness of her family and friends to sustain her. But what a way to appreciate the freedoms we are given a century later!

Myself a feminist as staunch as Louisa, I can’t help but wonder if my affection for Little Women, with its self-sacrificing daughters and tongue-holding mothers, should go the way of the hoop skirt. Still, I can’t help loving mercurial Jo, revisiting the book to see how Louisa challenges the expectations that drip from every seam of her own beloved story. Externally, Little Women seeks to instill all of the boring values of boxed-in femininity on its readers. Pickled limes and vanity: bad! Self-abnegation and backbreaking labor: good! The need for self-denial is impressed on Jo and her sisters at every turn; instead of setting aside your dishpans and going for a hike in the woods, you should stay at home where you are needed. Cheerful Beth, who goes about her housework with a song on her lips, is a saint; Jo, with her complaints and her awkwardness and her inability to cook, is a dangerous hoyden.

But look again. Once you drop the desire to see suppression in every page, it’s easy to find Jo’s rebellion. In a move that’s outraged readers since 1869, she refuses to marry Laurie, a young man with the advantages of being dashing, rich, hotheaded, and adoring. But Jo isn’t ready to lay down her arms and take up her needle (or put on a wedding ring) just yet. By refusing to indulge her best friend, she is a better friend to herself, a self in need of air and freedom, the liberty she’d never possess in the expensive trappings of a Mrs. Laurence. Though she cries when she sells her luxurious hair to help her mother reach her wounded father, it’s something she abandons with an eye toward unencumbered movement. In the past, I always thought of these gutsy moves as idiosyncratic ones, little quirks designed to make me say, “Oh, Jo!” and smile and get back to my self-denial. But when I really read the words, I realize that these small moves of mutiny go far beyond endearing personality traits. In Jo, Louisa unwittingly (or, even better, purposely) unmasks her little outlets, the very things she relied on to drag herself through a life of crushing expectation and ugly, unremitting labor.

In one of my favorite passages of the book, Jo is, at last, “All Alone.” Every other member of the March family is occupied: Meg with her unruly babies, Beth with the angels in a heaven doubtless spackled with kittens and ugly dolls, Amy in Europe on the very cross-continental trip that’s been denied her harum-scarum sister. For the first time in her life, Jo’s at a real loss. She looks around and sees a life of endless toil:

Something like despair came over her when she thought of spending all her life in that quiet house, devoted to humdrum cares, a few poor little pleasures, and the duty that never seemed to grow any easier.