Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film was lauded as a successful effort to subtly renovate a classic into a germane story for modern audiences. While nothing can keep the characters from occasional ventures into sainthood, Armstrong valiantly downplays the story’s more saccharine elements; in bringing Alcott’s feminist sensibility to the fore, Armstrong nicely balances the compulsory old-fashioned conduct of the characters. The film features autumnal New England scenery and the formidable talent of a large ensemble cast: Winona Ryder as Jo; Susan Sarandon as Marmee, the flawless mother; Kirsten Dunst, who almost steals the show as the young Amy; Claire Danes as Beth; Eric Stoltz as John Brooke; Gabriel Byrne as Professor Bhaer; and a cavalcade of others. Winona Ryder’s performance, Thomas Newman’s score, and Colleen Atwood’s costumes were all nominated for Academy Awards.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Little Women through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Mr. N. wants a girls’ story, and I begin ‘Little Women.’ Marmee (mother), Anna and May approve my plan, so I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, excepting sisters; our queer ways and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.
—from her diary, in Louisa May Alcott: Her Life,
Letters, and Journals (1889)
THE NATION
Miss Alcott’s new juvenile is an agreeable little story, which is not only very well adapted to the readers for whom it is especially intended, but may also be read with pleasure by older people. The girls depicted all belong to healthy types, and are drawn with a certain cleverness, although there is in the book a lack of what painters call atmosphere—things and people being painted too much in “local colors,” and remaining, under all circumstances, somewhat too persistently themselves.
—from a review of Little Women (October 22, 1868)
HENRY JAMES
It is sometimes affirmed by the observant foreigner, on visiting these shores, and indeed by the venturesome native, when experience has given him the power of invidious comparison, that American children are without a certain charm usually possessed by the youngsters of the Old World. The little girls are apt to be pert and shrill, the little boys to be aggressive and knowing; both the girls and boys are accused of lacking, or of having lost, the sweet, shy bloom of ideal infancy. If this is so, the philosophic mind desires to know the reason of it, and when in the course of its enquiry the philosophic mind encounters the tales of Miss Alcott, we think it will feel a momentary impulse to cry Eureka! Miss Alcott is the novelist of children—the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room. She deals with the social questions of the child-world, and, like Thackeray and Trollope, she is a satirist. She is extremely clever, and, we believe, vastly popular with infant readers.
—from an unsigned article in the Nation
(October 14, 1875)
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
The career of Miss Alcott has not only given pleasure to many readers, and real benefit to not a few, but it has afforded an example of what may be accomplished by talent and industry in the way of worldly success, and this of rather a high kind. She fulfilled that which is to-day the dearest dream of so many young women. Earning her living first by domestic service, she soon passed beyond that; by her own unaided pen she lifted an exceedingly impecunious household into lifelong independence and comfort; and she nursed, in what was for him luxury, the extreme old age of a father whose ideal and unworldly nature had made it very hard for him to afford ordinary comforts and advantages to her youth. This she did without tricks or meanness or self-puffing; without feeling jealousy, or inspiring antagonism. She had the delight of sending sunshine into a myriad of scattered homes, and of teaching many young girls, doubtless, the way to a more generous and noble life.
—from Short Studies of American
Authors (1888)
LUCY C. LILLIE
The story of Louisa Alcott’s life has been, to a certain extent, told by herself in “Little Women.” At least, the character of Jo was drawn from her own experiences and full of her own individuality, but hers throughout was a more notable history than the world knew. A girl, whose earliest teacher was Margaret Fuller; who, at ten years of age, learned to know the seasons in their varied dress and nature in its deepest meanings under Thoreau’s guidance; to whom, men like Emerson, Channing, Ripley, and Hawthorne were every-day company, yet who was brought up almost in poverty, and with the necessity of work at home if not abroad; who had a fund of downright common sense and keen humor underlying all transcendental influence, —is one who, as a woman, might be expected to have made her mark, and she did it by the simplest, kindliest, cheeriest of writing, and the sweetest of companionship and kindness toward others.
—Cosmopolitan (May 1888)
Questions
1. Is it possible to formulate just what it is that has made Little Women so popular for so long—or does the answer lie in intangibles?
2. Do you feel Alcott pressuring the reader, no matter how obliquely, to take Jo as a role model?
3. Which of the sisters do you find most congenial? Why? Which of the sisters do you find most admirable? Why? Is this difference significant?
4. What might a man find to interest or move him in Little Women?
FOR FURTHER READING
Biographies and Primary Sources
Alcott, Louisa May. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, and Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.
—. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, and Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987.
Bedell, Madelon. The Alcotts: Biography of a Family. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1980.
Cheney, Ednah Dow, ed. Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals. Boston: Little, Brown, 1928.
Elbert, Sarah. A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984.
Saxton, Martha. Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Stern, Madeleine B. Louisa May Alcott: A Biography. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. A new edition of the standard Alcott biography.
—. Louisa May Alcott: From Blood & Thunder to Hearth & Home. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.
Reference Texts
Eiselein, Gregory, and Anne K. Phillips, eds. The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Payne, Alma J. Louisa May Alcott: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.
Lesser-known Works by Alcott
Alternative Alcott. Edited and with an introduction by Elaine Showalter. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Includes selections from Hospital Sketches, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Work, and many others.
The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman’s Power. Edited and with an introduction by Madeleine B. Stem. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. Includes “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” “V.V.: or, Plots and Counterplots,” “Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power,” and “Taming a Tartar.”
The Inheritance. Edited by Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy. New York: Penguin, 1998. Alcott’s first novel, written when she was seventeen years old.
A Long Fatal Love Chase. Edited by Kent Bicknell. New York: Dell, 1995. Unpublished as too sensational during Alcott’s lifetime.
A Marble Woman: Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Madeleine B. Stern. New
York: Avon, 1976. Includes letters between Alcott and her publisher, “V.V.: or, Plots and Counterplots,” “A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model,” “The Skeleton in the Closet,” “A Whisper in the Dark,” and “Perilous Play.”
Critical Studies
Alberghene, Janice M. and Beverly Lyon Clark, eds. Little Women and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. Collected essays and commentary by scholars.
Delamar, Gloria T. Louisa May Alcott and “Little Women”: Biography, Critique, Publications, Poems, Songs and Contemporary Relevance. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990. Includes excerpts from reviews, polls, and commentary.
Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. Little Women: A Family Romance. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. Part of the Twayne’s Masterwork Studies series. A psychological reading.
—. Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Examines Alcott’s sensational stories, children’s literature, and adult novels to reveal her subversion of conventional women’s values.
MacDonald, Ruth K. Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. Part of Twayne’s United States Authors series. Establishes Alcott’s pragmatism in contrast to her father’s idealism; discusses the March family stories at length.
Stern, Madeleine B., ed. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.
Strickland, Charles. Victorian Domesticity: Families in the Life and Art of Louisa May Alcott. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985.
Books with Critical Studies of Alcott
Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Includes studies of Little Women, as well as of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Henry James’s The Bostonians, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss lean Brodie.
Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Comprehensive study; includes information on two of Jo’s favorite novelists, E.D.E.N. Southworth and Susan Warner.
Foster, Shirley. What Katy Read: Feminist Re-readings of “Classic” Stories for Girls. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. Chapter on Little Women, as well as on Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (mentioned in Little Women), Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain, L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, among others.
Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Section on Little Women, as well as on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.
a Two romances about a water sprite and a knight, respectively, by German novelist and poet Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué (1777-1843); very popular among children.
b The stage.
c Through which the ghost of the murdered Banquo may reappear in Shakespeare’s play (act 3, scene 6); Jo goes on to quote from Macbeth’s famous “dagger speech” (act 2, scene 1), in which he prepares to kill Duncan, the king.
d That is, vivandière, a civilian woman accompanying an army to sell provisions such as food and liquor (French).
e Bags containing fabric remnants.