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| "Louisa May Alcott Grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts" (2017; Kenneth Zirkel) |
From Little Women (Part 2, Chapter 27).
Click here for full text.
For a little extra about the author, read this article, published (1/9/2023) in the New York Times, which asks to what extent Alcott identifed as a man.
Other themes worth exploring:
Pure Individual vs. Corrupt Community?
. . . Sure, money isn't why we write, but it is a boost in
motivation, and it decides how much we can write. Jo struggles to decide
whether togut her novel and says, "Now I must either bundle it back into my
tin kitchen to mold, pay for printing it myself, or chop it up to suit
purchasers and get what I can for It." Two thoughts run through her head:
1) Writing isn't about the money, and 2) I need money to commit to writing
fully. This conflict made me wonder about all the books I've previously read
and whether or not the final copy was what the author had intended or if a
publishing company forced them to rewrite 50% of it for a marketing strategy. I
wonder too, how much of what we write is what we intended to write and how much
of it is manipulated and revised so that we can please an audience?
Consider: Mrs. March’s Counter: "Criticism is the best test of such work, for it will show her both unsuspected merits and faults, and help her to do better next time. We are too partial, but the praise and blame of outsiders will prove useful, even if she gets but little money.”
Consider: The Narrator’s conclusion:“ . . . it was a hard time for sensitive, high–spirited Jo, who meant so well and had apparently done so ill. But it did her good, for those whose opinion had real value gave her the criticism which is an author's best education, and when the first soreness was over, she could laugh at her poor little book, yet believe in it still, and feel herself the wiser and stronger for the buffeting she had received.”
Consider:
Transcendentalism, Democracy, American Identity Narrative, Civil War
The Author’s Body:
“. . . the language she uses to describe the guttural need
to write, unbothered by physical aids like food and sleep and nice
weather is something that any writer at heart will instinctively understand.”
Consider: Transcendentalism, Marxism. How important are the body's needs? Are "food" and "sleep" annoying distractions?
Does Genius Burn?
“ . . . some of the wording that confused me ended up being
some of my favorite parts, like ‘…for the story belonged to that class of light
literature in which the passions have a holiday, and when the author's
invention fails, a grand catastrophe clears the stage of one half the dramatis
personae, leaving the other half to exult over their downfall.’ It took me
a while to fully understand what she was saying here . . .
Consider: Enlightenment; Romanticism; the history of
the novel.
The Sunny Side of Poverty
Alcott: “Wealth is certainly a most desirable thing, but poverty has
its sunny side, and one of the sweet uses of adversity is the genuine
satisfaction which comes from hearty work of head or hand, and to the
inspiration of necessity, we owe half the wise, beautiful, and useful blessings
of the world. Jo enjoyed a taste of this satisfaction, and ceased to envy
richer girls, taking great comfort in the knowledge that she could supply her
own wants, and need ask no-one for a penny.”
… this quote reminded me of a particularly stunning song by
Cass Elliot of The Mamas and the Papas, titled, “Don’t Let the Good Life PassYou By.” The over-arching theme of this song is about the enjoyment of life in
its most real ways—in the face of adversity, one can find a silver-lining if he
only gave it a try, “Man was made for lovin’, not for buyin’ / Gold can’t get
the things we really need / Just look, my friends, there’s happiness in livin’
/ somewhere between broke and bein’ free.
Consider: Fruitlands. “In 1843, when Louisa May Alcott was ten, her father founded Fruitlands, a vegetarian reform community near Concord that banned money and regarded participants as members of one large family. His family moved there, but after several months of hardship in which, according to his wife’s view, the men did nothing but think and the women did all the hard physical work, Abigail [Louisa’s mother], threatened to leave with her children, even if that meant severing ties with her husband. He reluctantly gave up on the project early in 1844 and moved the family back to Concord (Alcott would later satirize the community in her short story ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ [1873].) Because Bronson had invested all of his money in Fruitlands, for years afterwards the Alcotts lived in poverty” (from the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition, 1304).
Incest! Suicide! Drug Addiction!
“Eager for money and desirous of experimenting with fiction
that would allow her to write unconventionally about such topics as incest,
suicide, drug addiction, sexual passion, and the supernatural, [Alcott] began
publishing melodramatic sensation stories under the name of A. M. Barnard
earning around $100 (around $1200[+] in today’s currency) for each story. Those
stories, discovered by the critic Madeleine Stern during the 1980s and 1990s,
helped transform critics’ understanding of Alcott, who for over a century was
known mainly as the author of Little Women” (
Ask No One for a Penny
Alcott puts a high value of generosity in her description of
Jo’s decision to send her mother and sickly sister to the beach. How does this
emphasis on generosity contrast with the emphasis on self-reliance that we also
find in this except: “Jo enjoyed a taste
of this satisfaction, and ceased to envy rich girls, taking great comfort in
the knowledge that she could supply her own wants, and need ask no one for a
penny.” By giving gifts to her family, was Jo depriving them of the satisfaction of supplying their own wants?
Deep Theories
Are we meant to agree with Jo when she says: "nearly
all insist that I had a deep theory to expound, when I only wrote it for the
pleasure and the money.”
Is it foolish to look
for “deep theories” in texts written by authors who make this claim?
Consider: The Intentional Fallacy
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