Louisa Alcott - Good Wives

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Louisa May Alcott was born into a family of American transcendentalists, the second of four daughters. Transcendentalism was essentially a movement initiated in reaction to a feeling that society was eroding its mores and was consequently in need of reform. Alcott was therefore immersed in an environment of progressive thinking and intellectualization during her formative years. This included a strong moral objection to the notion of slavery, which would become the lynchpin of the American Civil War (1861–5). The Alcotts hid a runaway slave in their house in 1847, such was their commitment to the cause.

During the war itself Alcott worked as a nurse and it was her experiences that served to hone her story-telling skill. It wasn’t until early middle age, however, that she became a success. In 1868 the first part of Little Women was published to great acclaim and her reputation grew from there. But her life was not a long one, and she died of ill health at the age of 55 in 1888.

Apart from the Little Women trilogy, she wrote many other novels and children’s stories, which are better known in the United States. Her writing style remained more or less similar to Little Women , because she was primarily interested in the comings and goings of people in her stories. They are the forerunner of the cast novels written by modern-day writers such as Maeve Binchy, where the stories are windows into many interrelated lives.

On a socio-political level, Alcott’s legacy is that she is held aloft as an early feminist and humanitarian. Her high intellect rendered her unable to resist the testing of conventions in her real life and in her literary alter-egos. She lived through the turbulence of the American Civil War and saw America metamorphose into a modern nation where slaves were freed of their literal chains and women were freed of their metaphorical chains. It was a dual emancipation and Alcott effectively documented the event in her prose.

Little Women

Published in its entirety in 1880, Little Women is a novel about an American family from a female perspective. Louisa May Alcott based the story on the formative years of herself and her three sisters. It is a novel that says a great deal about people and society without requiring a complex or sweeping plot to carry the reader along.

The primary theme is that siblings each have different personalities despite their having been brought up in the same family environment – nature versus nurture. Alcott gives each of the four sisters particular idiosyncrasies that signature their personalities and generate advantages and disadvantages for them. Thus they are each known for being vain, quick-tempered, coy or selfish. The novel is partly about the extent to which children live up to their ascribed personality traits once they are known for them, or rather are allotted them, as if parents need to compartmentalize their children’s characters.

Alcott was writing at a time when people held deeply Christian values, where the ideal person was the opposite of all of these traits: modest, level-headed, outgoing and giving. The idea was to pretend to be that ideal, albeit unattainable, synthesis. It was all about being virtuous and wholesome in the eyes of the Christian God, and also a good prospect as potential wife or husband material in the eyes of others who held the same views. Thus Alcott generally regards the traits of the March sisters as personality flaws, as opposed to strengths, and the four sisters struggle to overcome them rather than embrace them.