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Louisa Alcott: Little Women

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Louisa Alcott Little Women

Little Women: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott. The book was written and set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts. It was published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. The novel follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—and is loosely based on the author’s childhood experiences with her three sisters. The first volume, , was an immediate commercial and critical success, prompting the composition of the book’s second volume, entitled , which was also successful. Both books were first published as a single volume entitled in 1880. Alcott followed with two sequels, also featuring the March sisters: and . was a fiction novel for girls that veered from the normal writings for children, especially girls, at the time.

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As such, this Alcott novel is no great fantasy, for even if the characters may seem outrageously obedient and good in a young twenty-first-century reader’s mind, they exist in the realm of nineteenth-century possibilities. The March girls struggle with real problems—vanity, restraint, shyness, envy. In large part, the terms of their struggles make the difference. If pickled limes are no longer the forbidden vogue in school, as they are at Amy’s, perhaps illegally downloaded MP3 files are. Although the restrictions on Jo’s behavior and future doubtless are stronger than those today’s teens face, Jo’s choices demonstrate how she can begin to learn to live satisfactorily within those restrictions: She does marry, but we hope she only postpones her plans to travel the globe and her ambition to be a world-famous writer. Not every reader will view her compromise as positive, but young girls can still respond to Jo’s dilemma with understanding and empathy. And today’s young readers look to Little Women in particular, of course, to learn about what daily life might have been like for them had they lived in nineteenth-century America. Alcott’s detailed lessons, in this regard, work.

More than many other children’s novels, Little Women tends to compel commentators, female ones in particular, to discuss their own personal childhood impressions of the novel and how it affected their lives. This kind of retrospection in some ways can be frightening for what it reveals. Like many young girls, I was devoted to the book; I borrowed it from the library a few times a year and reread it obsessively in its entirety. (My mother eventually bought me a handsome illustrated hardcover edition, but it seemed somehow too pretty to mar through frequent use.) After my own childhood neuroses first helped me to identify in no small degree with Beth’s painful, extreme shyness, Jo ultimately won my allegiance as my favorite character. She was the kind of girl I wanted to be: outspoken, possessed of big dreams, a bit of a tomboy. I fancifully saw television’s nervous groundbreaker Mary Richards, from The Mary Tyler Moore Show—this character being a weekly combination of the petrified and the confident—as an adult Jo March for the 1970s (note, of course, Mary’s perpetually single romantic status). I too was disappointed in Jo’s choice of husband; I found Amy particularly annoying and liked Laurie very much. Later, I too was disappointed that Jo overcame her objections to marriage itself. I remember repeatedly feeling toward the book’s end as though the plot had run away from me; I’d gone along with everything up until the last few chapters. The book seemed to me to lose its charming day-by-day sense of detail once the marriage plots start weaving. The action speeds up dramatically, and the novel ends quickly following Jo’s marriage. I think my frustration at the result ruined all marriage-plot novels for me forever—after the marriage, I observed, comes the end of the story. Whatever happens after, I thought, isn’t even interesting enough to write down.

If I were a young girl in 2004 reading Little Women for the first time, would I compare Jo to some of today’s fictional teen heroines, such as Buffy Summers, of television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer? As teenage girls can now be seen on television annihilating demons with nigh impunity (after some natural concern, of course, over how this behavior will affect their popularity in high school—some things never change), Jo comes off as quaintly mundane at best, wimpy and suspiciously susceptible at worst. Yet it is curious, and in this context somehow appropriate, that the hugely popular series Buffy should reference the hugely popular novel Little Women directly. In one of the series’ last episodes, the town of Sunnydale’s outwardly insipid yet inwardly demonic founder and former mayor, Richard Wilkins III (who, a few seasons previously, had transformed into a giant serpent and been blown up along with the high school on Buffy’s graduation day), raises the topic of his favorite character in Little Women. He claims that most people would guess he’d like Beth—for her easy-prey weakness, one supposes; but he instead prefers Meg, for her propriety and ladylike demeanor. Meg is clearly a contrast, one might say, to Buffy, the mayor’s ass-kicking nemesis. Mayor Wilkins also fondly recalls a scene he treasures: the time Jo burns Meg’s hair with a set of curling tongs. The reason why this commentary is so funny lies at the heart of recent critical debates about Alcott’s most famous novel. What can Jo March offer young girls that heroines like Buffy Summers cannot—even after earlier marvels of powerful girlhood, such as Astrid Lindgren’s 1950s super-strong heroine, Pippi Longstocking?

Much of Jo’s charm and appeal lie in the idea that, unlike Buffy Summers, she is not a superhero (although Beth’s goodness certainly appears superpowered). As Alcott writes toward the end of the novel, “Jo wasn’t a heroine, she was only a struggling human girl like hundreds of others, and she just acted out her nature. . . . She had often said she wanted to do something splendid, no matter how hard; and now she had her wish, for what could be more beautiful than to devote her life to Father and Mother, trying to make home as happy to them as they had to her? And if difficulties were necessary to increase the splendor of the effort, what could be harder for a restless, ambitious girl than to give up her own hopes, plans, and desires, and cheerfully live for others?” (p. 420). We note, of course, that Alcott made such sacrifices in her own life, and her point, although it may be hard to swallow, is that heroics come in both big and small proportions.

Overall, then, how relevant can Little Women be to twenty-first-century youth? As Americans, for better or worse, remove themselves further from lifestyles like those of Alcott’s close-knit community of charitable neighbors, is Little Women to be relegated to solely period-piece status—fine fodder for costume-drama films and small children’s bedtime stories but not much else? Particularly following feminist critiques of Alcott’s domestic novel, readers have been more vocal about finding it sentimental, even sometimes cloyingly sweet, by more modern standards. Yet it is a testament to Alcott’s descriptive powers that though the family’s shared activities may seem strange to a twenty-first-century audience, their utter sweetness and quaintness are in their own way rather stunning and just might provoke wistful feelings for a simpler kind of family life among even cynical readers—paradoxically just as the family’s episodes of cloying togetherness may sometimes raise their gorge. We may wonder at how Beth, for example, could be so unnaturally shy as to dread being the center of attention at her own birthday parties—where members of her loving, indulgent family are the only guests! No matter how unrealistic or saccharine-sweet we may find Beth’s goodness, many readers find it difficult to avoid tears at her fate.

Other sequels in the March family saga followed Little Women and continued its popular tradition. The first, Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys (1871), describes events at the school Jo founds and the adventures of her diverse crew of pupils—all little boys, with the exception of Jo’s nieces and the extremely naughty girl Nan, an even more tomboyish specimen than Jo herself had been as a child. The last book in the trilogy, Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out (1886), would be Alcott’s final novel, published only two years before the author’s death. Written slowly, while Alcott was in poor health, the book centers on romance plots between the younger characters introduced in Little Men.

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