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Children's Literature, Volume 17, 1989, pp. 98-123 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/chl.0.0430

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Dismembering the Text: The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant

Me from Myself—to banish— Had I Art-

Impregnable my Fortress Unto All Heart—

But since myself—assault Me— How have I peace Except by subjugating Consciousness?

And since We're mutual Monarch How this be Except by Abdication— Me—of Me?

—Emily Dickinson

On the floor of an attic room slumps a thirty-year-old woman, strip- ping off her disguise as a submissive seventeen-year-old govern- ess; removing her false teeth, she takes another swig from a flask and plots a scheme to undermine and conquer an entire family. In another room sits a young girl, laboriously—albeit resentfully —stitching together small remnants of fabric as she learns simul- taneously the practical art of patchwork and the womanly virtues of patience, perseverance, and restraint. What possible connection could exist between these two women?

These two scenes—the first from Louisa May Alcott's thriller "Behind a Mask" and the second from her children's story "Patty's Patchwork"—exemplify the apparent extremes that characterize the heroines and plots of Alcott's works. Traditionally, Alcott has been considered a writer of inoffensive, sometimes mildly rebel- lious children's fiction, but the discovery and republication in 1975 and 1976 ' of Alcott's anonymous and pseudonymous adult thrillers (first published between 1863 and 1869) and the emergence of more

Children's Literature 17, ed. Francelia Butler, Margaret Higonnet, and Barbara Rosen (Yale University Press, © 1989 by The Children's Literature Foundation, Inc.).

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The Horror of Louisa May Akott's Little Women 99

thoughtful recent critical approaches to her children's stories have raised significant questions for Alcott scholars: How is the Alcott canon to be reenvisioned to explain the existence of her hidden fictional efforts? How do we account for Alcott's fascination with the lurid, the wild, the unacceptable and untrammeled heroines of the thrillers when we remember the little girls—at least superficially docile—of the children's short stories and the ultimately tamed Jo of Little Women} And, most importantly, how do these thrillers, char- acterized by violence, deceit, infidelity, and licentiousness of every kind imaginable, reshape or enrich our understanding of Alcott's classic children's novel Little Women (1868)?2

I

The seemingly contradictory aspects of Alcott's fiction can be better understood when we place her in a personal and historical con- text. She was intimately involved in the transcendental circle of her father and his friends, the literati of Concord, including, of course, its leader Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alcott embraced the transcenden- tal ideals of self-expression, self-reliance, and self-exploration as espoused by both Emerson and her father, Bronson Alcott. In a journal entry (27 April 1882), Alcott affirms Emerson's pervasive influence on her life and thought: "Mr. Emerson died at 9 p.m. suddenly. Our best and greatest American gone. The nearest and dearest friend Father has ever had, and the man who has helped me most by his life, his books, his society. I can never tell all he has been to me ... his essays on Self-reliance, Character, Compensa- tion, Love, and Friendship helped me to understand myself and life, and God and Nature" (Cheney 345). Alcott insisted, moreover, that the self-reliance and self-awareness so vaunted by the tran- scendentalists be extended to women as well as men. In a letter to Maria S. Porter, she asserts woman's right to an identity and a life of her own by calling for an exploration and redefinition of "woman's sphere": "In future let woman do whatever she can do; let men place no more impediments in the way; above all things let's have fair play,—let simple justice be done, say I. Let us hear no more of 'woman's sphere' either from our wise (?) legislators beneath the gilded dome, or from our clergymen in their pulpits." Alcott goes on to insist that woman be allowed to "find out her own limitations" (Porter 13-14).

100 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

But Alcott, well educated in the proprieties of her own time, realized the dangers for a woman of nineteenth-century America in advocating such potentially liberating attitudes too openly. In fact, Alcott seemed to sense the ambiguities inherent, at least for women, in Emerson's position, for it is Emerson, the man from whom she learned the value of self-reliance, whose censure she fears when creating (in the adult thrillers) her most self-reliant and self-assertive female characters:

I think my natural ambition is for the lurid style. I indulge in gorgeous fancies and wish that I dared inscribe them upon my pages and set them before the public.... How should I dare to interfere with the proper grayness of old Concord? The dear old town has never known a startling hue since the redcoats were there. Far be it from me to inject an inharmonious color into the neutral tint. And my favorite characters! Suppose they went to cavorting at their own sweet will, to the infinite horror of dear Mr. Emerson, who never imagined a Concord person as walking off a plumb line stretched between two pearly clouds in the empyrean. [Pickett 107-08]

Alcott was, moreover, reticent about openly advocating self-reliance and assertiveness in her works for children; she was aware of the responsibility she bore her young readers in that they so fully iden- tified with and followed the careers of such characters as Jo. In fact, after the publication of Little Women, Alcott seemed quite moved by her young readers' responses to her works: "Over a hundred letters from boys & girls ... & many from teachers & parents assure me that my little books are read & valued in a way I never dreamed of seeing them" (quoted by Stern in her introduction to Myerson and Shealy, xxxiii). And in a letter of 1872 to William Henry Venable, Alcott expresses gratitude that her stories are "considered worthy to be used for the instruction as well as the amusement of young people" (Myerson and Shealy 172).3

In the final analysis, however, it seems clear that Alcott was not unambivalently committed to the creation of "innocent" entertain- ments (Myerson and Shealy 172) for the young. In fact, her im- patience with such works becomes obvious in her more candid mo- ments: she claims in a letter probably written in 1878 that she wrote what she refers to as "moral tales for the young" because she felt pressure from her publishers and because such tales provided her

The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 101

with a much needed income. "I do it," she admits, "because it pays well" (Myerson and Shealy 232).

Louisa Alcott found herself, then, confronted with conflicting impulses: on the one hand, Alcott—educated under the tutelage of Emerson and Bronson Alcott—craves freedom and the power of self-assertion for both herself and her characters; on the other hand, she feels strongly the pressure to meet the needs of her young readers and the demands of her publishers. In Alcott's most famous novel for children, therefore, woman's development toward mem- bership in the acceptable female sphere is rendered in a surface narrative; to reveal the complex, dangerous truths of female experi- ence, the self-assertive drives toward womanly independence, Alcott (resorting to one of the ploys she uses frequently in the thrillers— disguise) must incorporate a subtext. Thus, in Little Women, Alcott, employing both a surface narrative and a subtext to disclose an extended vision of feminine conflict, presents a vision of female ex- perience at once innocuous and deadly. What appears at first to be a conventional and somewhat sentimental tale of the innocent trials of girlhood—what we have mistaken for a "feminine" novel of domes- tic education—is, on closer examination, another of Alcott's lurid, violent sensation stories. For in presenting the conflict between appropriate womanly behavior and the human desire for assertive- ness and fulfillment, Alcott finds herself forced to wage war upon her protagonist, Jo. Young Jo—fiery, angry, assertive—represents all that adult Jo can never be, and for this reason young Jo must be destroyed. Thus, while the surface narrative achieves some clo- sure, while it implies a moderately "normal," well-integrated future for Jo, the horrifying subtext of Little Women reveals that for an independent, self-determined Jo, no future is possible.

II

The horrors that lurk at the heart of Alcott's novel are, surpris- ingly, least obvious to those who cherish her work most. Even today, women who as children read Little Women remember Jo at her best, that is to say, at her most liberated. Elizabeth Janeway, for exam- ple, praises the novel's heroine as "the one young woman in 19th- century fiction who maintains her individual independence, who gives up no part of her autonomy as payment for being born a woman—and who gets away with it" (Janeway 42). Janeway seems

102 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

to repress her awareness that Jo—who never wants to marry, who values her writing above all else—does finally marry and abandon the writing she cherishes, taking up the kinds of writing her family and husband deem suitable for her.

However, two of the most hostile readers of Little Women, Leslie Fiedler and James Baldwin, have sensed a certain horror and du- plicity in it, and despite their patent distaste for Alcott's novel, their unsympathetic readings of Little Women illuminate the work. In comparing Alcott's work to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Baldwin and Fiedler denigrate both works, terming them sen- timental, self-righteous, dishonest, and inhumane—among other harsh criticisms. Both imply, too, that a secret crime or perversion hides at the center of these two novels. Fiedler finds the "chief plea- sures" of Uncle Tom's Cabin "rooted not in the moral indignation of the reformer but in the more devious titillations of the sadist" (114). And at the center of these "titillations of the sadist" is Little Eva, "the pre-pubescent corpse as heroine" (114). Fiedler compares Stowe's "orgy of approved pathos" to that created by Alcott in Little Women: "Little Eva is the classic case in America, melting the ob- durate though kindly St. Clare from skepticism to faith. What an orgy of approved pathos such scenes provided in the hands of a master like Harriet Beecher Stowe, or the late Louisa May Alcott, who in Little Women reworked the prototype of Mrs. Stowe into a kind of fiction specifically directed at young girls!" (114). James Baldwin also sees a kind of orgy of "sentimentality" in Uncle Tom's Cabin, which he condemns by comparing it with Liiiie Women: "Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the senti- mentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom's Cabin—like its mul- titudinous, hard-boiled descendants—is a catalogue of violence" (92).

Baldwin and Fiedler have sensed—perhaps because of their an- tagonism toward these novels and their lack of sympathy with the characters who inhabit these two works by women—the double- ness of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Women. As masculinist critics, however, neither seems capable of sufficiently disengaging him-

The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 103

self from the prejudices of his culture to understand or elucidate the complexities of the two novels. For it is true that both novels mask secret crimes and enact hidden violence, and the more open- minded reader must inevitably ask herself why Alcott and Stowe resort to hidden abuses to resolve the conflicts their novels present. And also, if Little Women has "much in common" with Uncle Tom's Cabin; if Alcott's novel is, in Baldwin's terms, replete with a "dishon- esty" that masks some "secret and violent inhumanity," some act of "cruelty," then the reader must ask the nature and source of the novel's "dishonesty," she must discover the act of "inhumanity" and "cruelty" the novel perpetrates.4

The answers to these questions begin to surface only when we dis- inter the protagonist oÃ- Little Women, Jo March, from the text of the novel. Forjo is an experimental heroine through whom Alcott can explore the tensions of female experience in nineteenth-century America: between being a dutiful member of woman's sphere and being an independent, self-reliant woman. In the surface narra- tive oÃ- Little Women, the story suitable for Alcott's young readers, Jo March begins as an unruly, self-assertive girl and gradually learns to become a proper "little woman." But when Leslie Fiedler asserts that Little Eva is the "model for all the protagonists of a literature at once juvenile and genteelly gothic" (114), he again inadvertently points by implication to the true design of Little Women, revealed in the novel's disguised text. For the experimental transformation of Jo March into a proper "little woman"—performed and delin- eated in a textual laboratory which masquerades as an informative and supportive guidebook for children—turns out to be, in fact, a "gothic" study in horror, the very kind of story Alcott so longed to write but which she renounced, or tried to, for the sake of her young, impressionable readers.

In order for Jo to live fictionally, to maintain her position within the narrative framework Alcott has constructed, Alcott must mur- der Jo spiritually. Given Jo's lust for independence, her devotion to her own power and development, Alcott could never have allowed her to marry for love—in other words, to love and marry Laurie— for, as the novel demonstrates with Meg's marriage to John Brooke, marriage for love reduces woman to "submission" (Little Women 209). Alcott was vehement in her refusal to allow this to happen to Jo. In a letter to Thomas Niles (1869), she deplores the numerous "pairing[s] off" in Little Women, asserting "I don't approve" (Myer-

104 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

son and Shealy 119), and in a letter to Samuel Joseph May (1869), she bitterly complains that "publishers are very perwerse & wont let authors have their way so my little women must grow up & be married off in a very stupid style" (Myerson and Shealy 121—22).

Tragically, Alcott's reluctance to sacrifice Jo to convention through marriage ultimately results in Alcott's violence against this very character. In a letter to Elizabeth Powell, Alcott is quite clear on her own desires for Jo and on the conflicting demands she feels from her readers. Alcott's solution is to subject Jo to certain vio- lent narrative abuses: " 'Jo' should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously de- manding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn't dare to refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her. I expect vials of wrath to be poured out upon my head, but rather enjoy the prospect" (Myerson and Shealy 125).

Like Cassy, the horribly abused slave woman of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and like Sethe, the equally besieged black woman of Toni Mor- rison's Beloved, Alcott chooses to murder her dearest child rather than force that child to live in a world hostile to her. Alcott's mur- der of Jo, then, is the secret violence at the center οι Little Women. Alcott's response to her fiction seems characteristic of the woman or the woman writer beset by irreconcilable conflicts and demands: Jo finds herself among the good who must die young. In order that she not be corrupted by the adult world of heterosexuality, Jo must be killed while at her zenith of eager and fiery independence.

Ill

From the beginning oÃ- Little Women, fifteen-year-old Jo March rebels and refuses to be a "young lady": "Tm not! And if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty,' cried Jo, pulling off her net and shaking down a chestnut mane" (5). Jo's behavior is entirely inappropriate for a proper young female. Her "quick temper, sharp tongue, and restless spirit" are "always getting her into scrapes" (36). And although Jo is devoted to and loves the female community she shares with her mother and sisters—Meg, Beth, and Amy—she acts "in a gentlemanly manner," uses "slang words," and constantly defies her sisters' attempts to admonish and reform her:

The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 105

"Don't Jo; it's so boyish!" "That's why I do it." "I detest rude, unladylike girls!" "I hate affected, niminy-piminy chits!" [4-5]

In her arrogation of masculine mannerisms, language, and roles, Jo instinctively and correctly identifies the opportunities for inde- pendence, self-reliance, adventure, and assertion as those conven- tionally reserved for men. Jo realizes, in fact, the awful dichotomy between her own impulses and the expectations held out to her: "I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy" (5).

Jo March is, thus, a nineteenth-century female caught between the requisite role of the domesticated "little woman," represented by her given, imposed name, Josephine, and her own self-guided impulses, represented by her "masculine" chosen name, Jo. Her conflict is so intense that she has renamed, redefined herself. In spite of Jo's self-reliant acts, however—"I'm the man of the family now Papa is away" (6)—she receives continual reminders from her sisters of her inevitable fate: "you must try to be contented with making your name boyish and playing brother to us girls" (5). But for a brief moment at the beginning of Little Women, Jo March re- sides in an idyllic female community of which she is the "male" head. She is a heroic figure—a young woman intent on maintain- ing the female community of "woman's sphere" while still acting in accordance with her own self-reliant impulses.

And Jo's heroic balancing act works as long as this "woman's sphere," the matriarchal community of Jo's family, remains entirely self-contained and entirely female. But once a male character—the young boy next door, Laurie, who has been longing to enter this female utopia—successfully penetrates the female community, the plot oÃ- Little Women and the destiny of Jo are immutably altered.

Laurie, a rich but orphaned young boy, is warmly welcomed into the March family, and at first—with the children still inhabiting a prelapsarian Eden—life appears to go on as before. Because the children are presexual in the early parts of the novel, Laurie (as his name suggests) becomes in effect "one of the girls." He is accepted into the female community and poses no threat to Jo or to the female world she loves. Nevertheless, planted in this female garden now, with the arrival of a male, are the seeds of its own destruc- tion. But before these seeds sprout and take root, Alcott seizes the

106 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

opportunity provided by this idyllic lull in sexual development; she begins, in a subtext, to reveal the causes of both the disintegration of this female community and Jo's fall from self-reliance.

By using Laurie, a male, as a foil for Jo, Alcott underscores the nature of the conflicts which Jo, as a female, must experience and the fate to which she—unlike Laurie—must ultimately acquiesce. In many ways Jo and Laurie are twins: they are the same age, they are both characterized as untamed animals—Jo as a horse (5, 6, 25) and Laurie as a centaur (59)—and both, hating their given names, have renamed themselves. Even Jo's mother remarks that Jo and Laurie would not be "suited" to each other for marriage because they are "too much alike" (299). And Laurie's grandfather, seeing the influence of Jo on Laurie, thinks how Jo "seemed to under- stand the boy almost as well as if she had been one herself" (50). So identical are Jo and Laurie, in fact, that in their presexual relation- ship, even as Laurie becomes "one of the girls," so Jo becomes with Laurie just "one of the boys."

Despite the masculine similarities between Jo and Laurie, how- ever, Alcott emphatically reveals that Jo's fate in life—because Jo is, inescapably, female—will be different from Laurie's. Our recogni- tion of the similar natures, attitudes, and feelings that Jo and Laurie share serves, moreover, only to intensify our awareness of the con- flicts Jo must endure. Although both Laurie and Jo hate their given names and rename themselves, only Laurie can actively "thrash" and challenge those who would force a false name and thus a false role on him. Jo must passively "bear it":

"My first name is Theodore but I don't like it, for the fellows called me Dora, so I made them say Laurie instead."

"I hate my name, too—so sentimental! I wish everyone would say Jo instead of Josephine. How did you make the boys stop calling you Dora?"

"I thrashed 'em." "I can't thrash Aunt March, so I suppose I shall have to bear

it"; and Jo resigned herself with a sigh. [27] Not only can Laurie, because he is male, actively alter reality in ac- cordance with his own will, but he can also, should his self-reliant acts fail, simply leave those situations which limit him; as Huck Finn, the archetypal masculine hero of nineteenth-century Ameri- can literature, puts it, he can "light out for the Territory." But when

The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 107

Laurie, angry at his grandfather, proposes to Jo that they run away from home together, Jo, although filled with the same impulses of flight and freedom, must resign herself to captivity:

For a moment Jo looked as if she would agree, for wild as the plan was, it just suited her. She was tired of care and confine- ment, longed for change. . . . Her eyes kindled as they turned wistfully toward the window, but they fell on the old house opposite and she shook her head with sorrowful decision.

"If I was a boy, we'd run away together and have a capital time; but as I'm a miserable girl, I must be proper and stop at home. Don't tempt me, Teddy, it's a crazy plan."

"That's the fun of it," began Laurie, who had got a willful fit on him and was possessed to break out of bounds in some way.

"Hold your tongue!" cried Jo, covering her ears. " 'Prunes and prisms' are my doom, and I may as well make up my mind to it." [191]

Interestingly, Jo's frustrations and lack of freedom are charac- terized specifically in terms of her femaleness and in terms of her relationship as a female to language. Jo, the writer, longs to con- trol language, to make herself independent and her family secure with her use of language. But as a woman, "prunes and prisms" are her lot: her relationship to language should be characterized by her desire for beauty. As Nancy Baker points out in The Beauty Trap, her study of the American woman's obsession with appear- ance, women of the nineteenth century, reluctant to wear too much makeup, "pinched their cheeks to make them pinker and . . . prac- ticed repeating sequences of words beginning with the letter ϕ— prunes, peas, potatoes, papa, prisms—in order to effect the small, puckered mouth that was so popular" (Baker 21).

Even within the presexual Eden of childhood, then, Jo's stream of impulses is dammed and divided. Were Little Women one of Alcott's short stories for children, this is how we would remember Jo: a young female destined sooner or later to come to terms with being a proper "little woman," but a young female alive with rebellion and wildness, intent on having her own way. Because Little Women is a novel, though, an extended fiction, the children—including Jo —do grow up, they do (at least offstage) become sexual. And each sexual coming-of-age is a blow to the foundations of the female community which has become essential to Jo's self-assertion and

108 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

sense of self-worth. Only as the reigning "patriarch" and caretaker of this female family—"if anything is amiss at home, I'm your man" (292)—does Jo enjoy any power: that power of self-reliantly pro- tecting and providing for one's family, traditionally reserved for the family's highest-ranking male. Jo's solution to the problems her sis- ters face in finding worthy husbands is a simple one—"Then we'll be old maids" (90)—and as her sisters are drawn closer and closer to marriage, Jo vehemently protests the usurpation of her power and the fall of her female domain: "I think it's dreadful to break up families so" (225).

Jo's power begins to dwindle as a result of the first sexual coming- of-age in Little Women—Meg's attraction and marriage to John Brooke. Jo immediately perceives that her weakened position is a direct result of being female and that this challenge to her terri- tory and power is the inevitable manifestation of male privilege: " 'She'll go and fall in love, and there's an end of peace and fun, and cosy times together. I see it all! They'll go lovering around the house, and we shall have to dodge; Meg will be absorbed and no good to me any more; Brooke will scratch up a fortune somehow, carry her off, and make a hole in the family; and I shall break my heart, and everything will be abominably uncomfortable. Oh, dear me! Why weren't we all boys; then there wouldn't be any bother'" (183). As Meg's attraction to John Brooke becomes more certain, Jo grows increasingly anxious, lamenting her feminine powerlessness and asserting a desire to usurp masculine sexual as well as social privilege: "I knew there was mischief brewing; I felt it; and now it's worse than I imagined. I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family" (182). Finally, when Jo unexpect- edly encounters the "spectacle" of the just-engaged lovers in the parlor, she is overcome with revulsion: "Oh, do somebody go down quick; John Brooke is acting dreadfully, and Meg likes it!" (209). The scene of the "strong-minded sister," whom Jo had hoped would reject her suitor, now "enthroned" upon the knee of Jo's "enemy" and wearing "an expression of the most abject submission" (209) is intolerable for Jo.

Jo's "shock" (209) and horror at her sister's transformation sug- gest that Amy, Beth, and Meg function for Jo as more than mere sisters.5 They embody experimental alter egos of Jo; they repre- sent the versions of female experience—the ways of reconciling a woman's dual impulses—possible for Jo herself. Meg, in her com-

The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 109

pletely acquiescent marriage and motherhood, manifests the total repression of self-reliant impulses. Through her marriage to John Brooke she learns "that a woman's happiest kingdom is home, her highest honor the art of ruling it not as a queen, but as a wise wife and mother" (361). Meg thus represents forjo the successful, duti- ful member of woman's sphere. But as this first sister departs from Jo's female realm, Jo vehemently rejects the example of submission and marriage which Meg offers: "I'm not one of the agreeable sort. . . . There should always be one old maid in a family" (224). Jo insists that she will never marry—"Td like to see anyone try it,' cried Jo fiercely" (138)—and is, in fact, "alarmed at the thought" (203).

At this point in the novel, Jo is still defiantly independent and assertive. She proudly claims that she belongs to the "new" set and that she admires "reformers": "and I shall be one if I can" (269). Thus, when Jo and Amy visit their Aunt March and Aunt Carrol, unaware that her aunt is considering taking her on a trip to Europe, Jo boasts, "I don't like favors; they oppress and make me feel like a slave. I'd rather do everything for myself and be perfectly indepen- dent" (270). But the consequences of self-reliant behavior continue to impose themselves on Jo, for her "revolutionary" (269) outburst costs her the trip. Jo is deprived because she has a "too indepen- dent spirit" rather than an acquiescent and "docile" (280) nature like that of Amy, who is chosen to accompany her aunt to Europe.

Jo gradually adjusts to her misfortune, to Amy's departure, and to the first assault upon her female community, Meg's marriage, only to be confronted with what forjo is one of the ultimate hor- rors in the novel: Laurie reveals to Jo that he loves her—as a lover, not as a buddy. When it is first hinted to Jo that Laurie loves her, she rejects the possibility: she "wouldn't hear a word upon the sub- ject and scolded violently if anyone dared to suggest it" (293). And when Laurie does confess his love, Jo decidedly rejects him and all potential suitors: "I haven't the least idea of loving him or anybody else. ... I don't believe I shall every marry. I'm happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in any hurry to give it up for any mortal man" (329, 330).

Alcott's nineteenth-century readers, who clamored for Jo to marry Laurie, found Jo's rejection—and outright horror and dis- missal—of marriage to the handsome and wealthy Laurie incon- ceivable. Jo's revulsion from marriage to Laurie is not so puzzling,

110 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

however, if we remember that throughout the novel Jo and Laurie have, in effect, been "brothers," even doubles of the same self. Jo categorically rejects Laurie, then, in part because marriage to Laurie would be tantamount to incest. As Jo confides to Laurie, "I don't believe it's the right sort of love, and I'd rather not try it" (328).

Jo also refuses Laurie because marriage to him would render Jo completely powerless. Jo has already witnessed the self-sacrifice, repression, and submission required of Meg in her marriage to John Brooke, and Jo realizes that she, herself, is eminently unsuited to such a role. Jo's mother, too, astutely observes that Laurie and Jo "would both rebel" in a marriage to each other because both are "too fond of freedom" and both have "hot tempers and strong wills" (299). In other words, a marriage between Laurie and Jo would not work because both are, in conventional terms, masculine. Even more important to Jo, therefore, marrying Laurie would entail the absurd paradox of relinquishing her power to the only male with whom—in her relationship as just "one of the boys"—she has ever had power. To retain any remnant of control over her own life, Jo must refuse to marry Laurie. In an identical act of rebellion and self-assertion Jo's creator, Louisa Alcott, concurs: "Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman's life. I won't marry Jo to Laurie to please any one" (Cheney 201). Despite the repressive and conservative message conveyed in Little Women, Jo's refusal to marry Laurie remains—for both Jo and her author—the one act of self-assertion which neither can quell.

When Laurie eventually falls in love with and marries Jo's sis- ter Amy, the relief of being freed from the possibility of marriage to Laurie attenuates Jo's grief over the loss of a second member of her female community. Amy, in her marriage to Laurie, repre- sents another of Jo's alter egos—an additional way of reconciling a woman's divided impulses toward self-reliance and woman's appro- priate sphere of activity. As Laurie thinks to himself, "Jo's sister was almost the same as Jo's self" (388). Amy is an especially important alter ego for Jo because she, like Jo, wants to be an artist. At the end of the novel Amy as a wife and mother attempts to combine her "artistic hopes" with life in woman's sphere: "I don't relinquish all my artistic hopes or confine myself to helping others fulfill their dreams of duty" (442). Amy's declaration seems to suggest the pos-

The Horror of Louisa May Akott's Little Women 111

sibility of balancing a life of art and a life of appropriate feminine behavior.

Although a wife and mother, Amy has "begun to model" again, but her ability to balance the self-expressive demands of art and the self-repressive demands of marriage and motherhood is under- mined by what she models. For Amy creates not out of a fresh encounter of her own self with the world; rather, she repeats, imi- tates, what is now for her the primary act of creation, biological creation, as she models "a figure of baby." And according to both Amy and Laurie, this "figure of baby" is her ultimate achievement: "Laurie says it is the best thing I've ever done. I think so myself." (442). Amy's ability to balance successfully the demands of art and womanhood becomes even more doubtful when we recall that from

the beginning Amy has resolved to be "an attractive and accom- plished woman, even if she never became a great artist" (233). Amy is interested in her own art, but is more concerned with what peo- ple think of her. By her own admission to Jo, Amy intends to follow "the way of the world": "people who set themselves against it only get laughed at for their pains. I don't like reformers, and I hope you will never try to be one" (269). Thus, although Amy seems to repre- sent a possible alternative for Jo—as both artist and "little woman" —Amy, in fact, follows Meg's example in her willing suppression of self-reliant impulses. But Jo's response to Amy's condemnation of "reformers" is typically undaunted: "We can't agree about that, for you belong to the old set, and I to the new" (269).

Jo's commitment to the "new" has been clear from the novel's beginning; she devotes herself rebelliously to her life-long pas- sion: writing. As she sits in her "favorite refuge" (22)—the "garret" (133)—and writes, Jo embodies a version of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "madwoman in the attic," attempting to empower and define herself by engaging in the forbidden (for women) act of writing. Jo's goal, her "favorite dream," is to do something "splen- did" and "heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead" (129). Her chief desire, in short, is to write: "I think I shall write books and get rich and famous: that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream" (129). Thus, when Jo publishes her first story and receives both the praise of her family and the promise of pay- ment for future stories, she is ecstatically happy: "I shall write more . . . and I am so happy, for in time I may be able to support myself

112 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

and help the girls" (141). Alcott clearly discloses here that writing is the "key" (130) to a successful life forjo: "for to be independent and earn the praise of those she loved were the dearest wishes of her heart, and this seemed to be the first step toward the happy end" (141-42).

Jo herself is aware, however, that there may never be a "happy end," a successful merging of her dual impulses toward indepen- dence and appropriate feminine behavior: " Tve got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen,' observed Jo mysteriously" (130). And in fact, along with Jo's success as a writer comes a warning to Jo of the dangers, even the impossibility, of committing herself entirely to a self-reliant life of writing. For when Jo proudly sends her first novel out to pub- lishers, she finds that she will have to "chop it up to suit purchasers" (245). Consequently, Jo performs a deed that foreshadows the fate —at the hands of her "authoress," Alcott—of her own self-reliant being: "With Spartan firmness, the young authoress laid her first- born on her table and chopped it up as ruthlessly as any ogre" (246). Finally, Jo receives one further indication that writing (now Jo's pri- mary self-assertive act) and duty toward woman's sphere may not be compatible. Absorbed in her writing, Jo lets her sister Beth nurse their sick neighbors, and when Beth contracts scarlet fever, Jo is filled with remorse: "serves me right, selfish pig, to let you go and stay writing rubbish myself!" (160). As a result of Beth's illness— caused by Jo's devotion to her writing—Beth's already frail nature is weakened, and she eventually dies. And with Beth dies the last member of Jo's female community.

Even before Beth's death, however, and despite Jo's success as an author, Jo suffers from the shock of recognition that Laurie's proposal of marriage has forced upon her. His proposal makes Jo realize that she must now confront not only the loss of her female community through the marriage of her sisters but also the assault on her own self-reliant autonomy. In short, Jo is forced into the realization that she is inescapably female. This realization marks a turning point in the novel, after which Jo as we know her mysteri- ously begins to disappear—or to be erased—from the story. Just as Jo finds it necessary to mutilate her works to satisfy her publishers, so Alcott must destroy Jo to appease her audience.

From the time that Beth becomes ill, Jo's vibrant personality begins to fade, to weaken, to undergo some horrifying transforma-

The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 113

tion. Just as Alcott has referred to Jo's book as Jo's own offspring, just as Alcott is aware that—to please her readers—Jo must muti- late that offspring, now Alcott herself begins inexorably to mutilate her own text, her own character—Jo. The comparison between Jo as author/parent to her books and Alcott as author/parent of Little Women (as well as to her other works) becomes convincingly clear in Alcott's correspondence. In a letter to Lucy Larcom, Alcott refers to some lost manuscripts as "waifs of mine" (Myerson and Shealy 119), and to Elizabeth Powell she writes that she herself is the "Ma" of her "stupid 'Little Women'" (Myerson and Shealy 124). Perhaps Alcott—in the very act of mutilating the energetic and irrepressible Jo—felt some kinship with Jo as Jo bowdlerized her own book.

Jo's growing awareness of what it means to be female is confirmed when her sister Beth dies. Through Beth's death, Alcott depicts a further possible response from another of Jo's alter egos to the female predicament. Beth, who has not even sufficient self-reliant impulses to stay alive, becomes forjo—and by extension for Alcott —the example of what all women are required by custom to be, the completely perfect woman—passive, acquiescent, dead.6 Ironi- cally, however, Beth's death is also the sole way to maintain Jo's idyllic female community, for only in death can Beth remain in- violably Jo's. When Beth dies, she is "well at last" (379), and her death discloses one sure way of curing a woman's problems. In con- trast to Leslie Fiedler's contention that the "pre-pubescent corpse" functions to provide the "titillations of the sadist," it seems much more likely that for a nineteenth-century woman writer and her audience, a "dead woman" would indeed be the only "safe woman" (Fiedler 114). Fiedler asserts that at the death of Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, "death becomes the supreme rapist" (114). But in Little Women, death is the only thing, at least in Jo's eyes, that can save a female from the psychological rape—the violation of self-direction and the disintegration of female community—that await her if she grows up and takes her proper feminine place in the heterosexual world. For Jo, then, and for Alcott as well, the dead woman and the perfect woman become synonymous.

From this point in the novel, Jo's response to her own femaleness in many ways parallels Beth's. But because of the intensity of her self-assertive impulses, Jo cannot simply die. Rather, she is forced to be an accomplice to a crime, to participate actively in her own demise. From its beginning, the text of Little Women thoroughly

114 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

documents the enormous influence that Beth—as an alter ego em- bodying devotion to woman's sphere—exerts over Jo: "by some strange attraction of opposites, Jo was gentle Beth's. . . . Over her big harum-scarum sister, Beth unconsciously exercised more influ- ence than anyone in the family" (38). Indeed it is through Beth that Jo learns the virtues of woman's sphere:7 "Then it was that Jo, living in the darkened room with that suffering little sister always before her eyes and that pathetic voice sounding in her ears, learned to see the beauty and the sweetness of Beth's nature, to feel how deep and tender a place she filled in all hearts, and to acknowledge the worth of Beth's unselfish ambition to live for others and make home happy by the exercise of those simple virtues which all may possess and which all should love and value more than talent, wealth, or beauty" (164-65). Beth, in fact, increasingly appears to become a part of Jo as her "submissive spirit" seems "to enter into Jo" (167). And in her sickbed, Beth constantly keeps Jo's cast-off "invalid" (56) doll, "Joanna"—symbolic of Jo's divided and therefore crippled self —at "her side" (165). Even independent Jo finally becomes aware of her affinity with Beth: "Beth is my conscience, and I can't give her up. I can't! I can't!" (166).

As Beth grows closer to death, her influence over Jo intensifies, and Jo increasingly identifies with Beth: '"More than anyone in the world, Beth. I used to think I couldn't let you go, but I'm learning to feel that I don't lose you; that you'll be more to me than ever, and death can't part us, though it seems to'" (378). Just before her death, Beth's influence over Jo and her affinity with Jo are so powerful, in fact, that Beth tells Jo that she must replace her: "You must take my place, Jo" (378). And sure enough, on the morning after Beth finally dies, Jo is gone: "Jo's place was empty" (379). Unlike selfless Beth, strong-willed and defiant Jo must go on living, but—in a children's novel—not as Jo.

IV

Through Beth's death, Alcott performs a literary feat of escape rivaling the marvels of Houdini. By this point in the novel, the character of Jo March has become intensely problematic for Alcott. Because Jo inhabits a fictional environment inhospitable to a fully liberated woman, she can have no radically independent life of her own, but because of the spirited self-reliant nature given to her

The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 115

by her creator, she will not submit to repression. Since the per- fect woman, the "true woman" is—as Alcott's experiment reveals —a dead woman, and since Alcott's novel demands the showcasing of a "true woman," Alcott can develop the character of Jo, that in- tractably independent and alive female, no further. Jo can only be replaced. In other words, Alcott discovers through the character of Jo March what, according to Ann Douglas, many other women writers toward the end of the nineteenth century were realizing: that there was no place for a self-aware woman to go, that women were "strangely superannuated as a sex" ("Impoverishment" 17). Thus, having stretched the character of Jo March as far as she can on a rack fastened at one end by Jo's independent impulses and secured at the other end by her need to be a proper member of the female community of "little women," Alcott witnesses the final snap of her experimental creation. But by a fascinating sleight of hand, Alcott hides the failed experimental corpse of Jo and switches the identity of her victim.

In Little Women, Alcott (with the help of Jo and her writing) kills Beth and then forces Jo to assume a kind of death in life, to imper- sonate the dead Beth. And this is why Jo, after the death of Beth, displays none of her former willful and self-reliant behavior and all the selflessness of a zombie. Ultimately, then, deep in the macabre subtext oÃ- Little Women, Alcott's true victim is Jo; Alcott has, in fact, killed the self-celebratory Jo and replaced her with the self-effacing Beth. And the horror of this corpse switching, this premature burial of the living and impersonation of the dead, is accentuated by the fact that not a scream or moan is uttered. All is executed in this novel for children under the pleasant guise of a young girl's gently guided growth into a "little woman."

Alcott's creation of the new zombielike Jo also helps to explain the incredible change in Jo's character following Beth's death. For Jo's transformation in the final chapters of Little Women into the blush- ing, halting maiden and the dutiful wife and mother are other- wise completely implausible. In hiding the evidence of her fictional crime, the longer form of the novel actually works in Alcott's favor. The length of Little Women indeed helps to obscure the reader's memory of the youthful Jo, the girl who vehemently proclaimed that she was "not one of the agreeable sort" and preferred therefore to be an "old maid" (224), the Jo who was "alarmed at the thought" (203) of marriage. Because the reader's memory of young Jo who

116 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

"carried her love of liberty and hate of conventionalities to such an unlimited extent" (235) is apt to have dimmed towards the end of the novel, that reader may be more likely to accept the authen- ticity of the new Jo, who is "thrilled" by the possibility of a "ten- der invitation" to "joyfully depart" with her suitor, the much older Professor Bhaer, "whenever he liked" (410). Confronted with such schizophrenic behavior, however, the reader with a good memory is incredulous.

V

The alert reader's sense of discontinuity results from Alcott's delib- erate and somewhat desperate mutilation of both her protagonist and her text. Not only has Jo been dismembered and then re- formed as a less threatening version of herself, but the text also has been dismantled, reshaped, and disguised. What was originally a story of Jo's refusal to accede to a repressive feminine role now becomes a story of courtship and marriage. But this courtship and marriage mask the horror tale that lies at the center of the novel— the murder of Jo. At this point Jo, like the speaker in Emily Dickin- son's poem, has been forced to abdicate herself. Banished from her own consciousness, Jo finds herself alienated and alone.

The kind old German professor thus shines "like a midnight sun" on Jo in her "darkness" (406), and Jo desperately reaches out to him: "'Oh Mr. Bhaer, I am so glad to see you!' cried Jo, with a clutch, as if she feared the night would swallow him up before she could get him in" (406). Through the power of love—Alcott's useful tool for altering her stubborn heroines—Jo is required to embrace the accomplice to her own murder. Although Jo's figurative death is alluded to by Laurie—when he transfers his love from Jo to Amy, he feels "as if there had been a funeral" (383) and later responds to Jo out of the "grave" of his "boyish passion" (402)—the subtext discloses that it is Professor Bhaer who is instrumental in effecting Alcott's scheme. For while Professor Bhaer and Jo covertly admire each other from across the room, Bhaer is discussing "the burial customs of the ancients" (408), and he impulsively moves toward Jo, the text tells us, "just in the act of setting fire to a funeral pile" (409). It is significant, then, that Alcott presents Professor Bhaer as a "birthday gift" (406) to the murdered Jo, for out of the death of her old self, Jo must now enact a new birth, a grisly resurrection.

The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 117

Since the beginning of Beth's illness, Alcott has stealthily but in- exorably erased the authentic Jo from the text. Jo first begins to "take lessons" (308) from Professor Bhaer and then, in an act of self-abdication, forgoes even her own intellectual and moral vision: "Now she seemed to have got on the Professor's mental or moral spectacles also" (322). Through Professor Bhaer, Alcott systemati- cally strips Jo of all vestiges of self until she is indeed "Bhaer," or bare—ready to be clothed and defined by someone else, her hus- band. When Jo finally agrees to marry Professor Bhaer, the profes- sor looks "as if he had conquered a kingdom" and tells Jo, "be sure that thou givest me all. I haf waited so long, I am grown selfish, as thou wilt find, Professorin" (429). Even the feminized German title chosen for Jo by the professor reveals the extent to which Jo has acquiesced to her proper role and become a female version of the professor himself. Most important, Professor Bhaer—in preparing Jo for her resurrection as Beth—has succeeded in destroying Jo's one authentic means of self-assertion—her writing.

We recall that for the young Jo, writing seemed the key to her independence, success, and happiness, the "first step toward the happy end" (142). And when Jo realized that she could write and sell "sensation" stories (243), she "began to feel herself a power in the house" (244), to regain some of the ascendancy she lost as her female kingdom was destroyed. But the surface narrative clearly indicates that a "sensation" story, the melodramatic but authentic inscription of her autonomous female self, is in opposition to the virtues of woman's sphere: "Unconsciously, she was beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a woman's charac- ter" (316). Professor Bhaer, therefore—the upholder of social pro- prieties and agent of Alcott's surface narrative—disapproves of Jo's writing, insists that she stop writing sensation stories, and thereby takes away Jo's power, ensuring that there will be no "happy end" to her story: " Ί wish these papers did not come in the house; they are not for children to see nor young people to read. It is not well, and I haf no patience with those who make this harm.... They haf no right to put poison in the sugarplum and let the small ones eat it. No, they should think a little, and sweep mud in the street be- fore they do this thing'" (321—22). Jo, now internalizing Professor Bhaer's "shortsighted" (322) moral vision, watches Bhaer burn one of the newspapers which publish sensation stories and moments later imitates his act, destroying all of her writing:

118 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

"They are trash, and will soon be worse trash if I go on, for each is more sensational than the last. ... I know it's so, for I can't read this stuff in sober earnest without being horribly ashamed of it; and what should I do if they were seen at home or Mr. Bhaer got hold of them?"

Jo turned hot at the bare idea and stuffed the whole bundle into her stove, nearly setting the chimney afire with the blaze. [322]

Blazing up the chimney along with Jo's writings go the remnants of Jo's independent self. Jo burns her stories to please Professor Bhaer, and henceforth not even a memory of the early self-reliant Jo exists.

Ironically, Jo's last self-assertive act is the burning of her writings, the destroying of her own self—her self-reliant, self-expressive, and self-authenticating being. This ultimate act of self-annihilation comes as no surprise, however, to the reader who has been alert to the subtext of the novel. For this alternate text has foreshadowed the enforced self-mutilation that is Jo's fate. One of Jo's first acts of self-effacement in order to become a proper "little woman" occurs early in the novel when Jo cuts off her cherished long hair, selling it to obtain money for her mother to visit her sick father in the army. Jo's comments about her sacrifice reveal that it is much more than a noble act of charity. For the shearing of her hair is Jo's attempt to atone for her selfish acts—"I felt wicked" (147)—and to curb her self-assertive behavior: "It will be good for my vanity" (146). The subtext reveals, however, the destructive consequences of the at- tempt to suppress a woman's self-reliant impulses, as Jo relates her feelings after cutting off her hair: "It almost seemed as if I'd an arm or leg off" (148).

Jo is repeatedly associated in the novel, in fact, with self-mutila- tion. Throughout the novel, Beth cares for Jo's cast-off "invalid" doll—appropriately named "Joanna" (56)—a lobotomized amputee symbolic of the fate of the "tempestuous" Jo herself: "One forlorn fragment of dollanity had belonged to Jo, and having led a tem- pestuous life, was left a wreck in the ragbag, from which dreary poorhouse it was rescued by Beth and taken to her refuge. Having no top to its head, she tied on a neat little cap, and as both arms and legs were gone, she hid diese deficiencies by folding it in a blan- ket and devoting her best bed to this chronic invalid" (36). Here

The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 119

Beth hides the "deficiencies" of "Joanna" even as Alcott later uses the persona of Beth to "hide" the "deficiencies" of the incorrigible Jo. And twice in the novel Jo must mutilate her writing—the sole means she has to express her true self—in order to conform to the demands of others. First she mutilates her works, her "children," to please her editors, "feeling as a tender parent might on being asked to cut off her baby's legs in order that it might fit into a new cradle" (314). Then she completely destroys her works for Professor Bhaer.

Forced to efface and divorce herself from herself, Jo tries now to write moral children's stories. These products of an imperson- ating self, however, these "masquerading" (323) stories fail. Since Jo no longer writes her beloved thrillers ("Jo corked up her ink- stand," 323), she has finally passed the "test" set up for her by the surface narrative's assistant, Professor Bhaer: "He did it so quietly that Jo never knew he was watching to see if she would accept and profit by his reproof; but she stood the test and he was satisfied; for, though no words passed between them, he knew that she had given up writing" (324). Jo now refrains from writing until after Beth's death when—at her mother's suggestion—she attempts a "simple little story" to relieve her depression and to please her family. Jo creates a surprisingly successful and moving work but a work which is more the result of compliance than creativity. By her own ad- mission, certain aspects of the story—for all its "truth . . . humor and pathos"—are not hers: "If there ¿5 anything good or true in what I write, it isn't mine; I owe it all to you and Mother and to Beth" (394). Even in her act of creativity, Jo has, to a certain extent, internalized the values of those around her.

By the end of the novel Jo has no rebellion, no self, left. Jo's mind, earlier filled with divided but vital and authentic impulses, is now—like the doll Joanna's head—vacuumed out and replaced with Beth's one-dimensional, selfless personality. Alcott can finally resolve the problems and conflicts engendered by the clash of Jo's independent personality with her required role in woman's sphere only by excising and replacing Jo's character.

Careful to leave no trace of blood in this children's novel, Alcott quietly substitutes for Jo an impersonation of the perfect "little woman," the dead and selfless Beth. And when Jo agrees to marry Professor Bhaer, her words affirm the success of Alcott's endeavor: "I may be strong-minded, but no one can say I'm out of my sphere now" (433—34). Jo has indeed been forced into her proper "sphere,"

120 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

but to do so, Alcott has had to perform a lobotomy on her. While in the surface narrative Jo seems to learn the lessons of little woman- hood, the subtext of the novel reveals Alcott's Procrustean intent: Jo may begin life as a young "madwoman in the attic," but Alcott kills off this madwoman, leaving only the "angel in the house" (217).

Early in the novel, when Jo writes to her absent mother to re- port on the progress of the children, Jo writes of herself, "I—well, I'm Jo, and never shall be anything else" (154). The horror oÃ- Little Women is that Jo does stop being Jo. She has been replaced by a false Jo, a broken doll, a compliant Beth. This, then, is the act of "cru- elty," of "secret and violent inhumanity," which according to James Baldwin lurks behind the "sentimentality" of Little Women. In re- working Stowe's "prototype"—as Leslie Fiedler suggests Alcott does —Alcott has transformed "the pre-pubescent corpse as heroine" into the pubescent heroine as corpse.

Thus, Little Women hides a secret crime. And like many crimes against women, this one is frequently ignored, overlooked, or dis- missed as irrelevant. Even readers respectful of Alcott's novel—as Fiedler and Baldwin are not—disregard the horror perpetrated on Jo, insisting that Jo grows smoothly into the woman she was des- tined to become; in this way, Anne Hollander can observe: "A satis- fying continuity informs all the lives in Little Women. Alcott creates a world where a deep 'natural piety' indeed effortlessly binds the child to the woman she becomes. The novel shows that as a young girl grows up, she may rely with comfort on being the same person, whatever mysterious and difficult changes must be undergone in order to become an older and wiser one. Readers can turn again and again to Alcott's book solely for a gratifying taste of her sim- ple, stable vision of feminine completeness" (28). The tragedy of Little Women is, of course, that Jo is no longer Jo when she reaches maturity, for the real Jo never could reach maturity.

Torn between her personal loyalty to the original Jo—a lovely, vibrant, lively "New Woman" (as Janeway calls her, 44)—and her commitment to those readers who demanded a sufficiently tradi- tional or comfortable narrative pattern, Alcott faced irreconcilable demands. The crime in Little Women is Alcott's brutal resolution of this conflict, and its real horrors emerge when we become aware of Alcott's willingness to finish Jo off (in Jo's Boys) as "a literary nursery-maid providing moral pap for the young" (42).8 Alcott has, at this moment, lost even her own fervid joy in the young woman

The Horror of Louisa May Akott's Little Women 121

who promised so much, who shone so brightly for so many readers young and old, but who could not grow into adulthood as herself, as Jo.

Notes

Epigraph reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cam- bridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright 1951, © 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. By permission also of Litde, Brown and Company, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H.Johnson, copyright 1929 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; copyright © renewed 1957 by Mary L. Hampson.

1. Alcott's adult thrillers were discovered by Madeleine Stern and Leona Rosten- berg and published by Stern in Behind a Mask ( 1975) and Plots and Counterplots ( 1976).

2. Little Women has been both assaulted and acclaimed by contemporary critics. Eugenia Kaledin writes that Alcott's "acceptance of the creed of womanly self-denial as much as her willingness to buy success by catering to middle class ideals aborted the promise of her art and led her to betray her most deeply felt values" (251).

Most recent critics οι Little Women, however, have found more to admire in Alcott's fiction. Their critical responses to Little Women have generally been of two kinds. Some emphasize the independence, autonomy, and rebelliousness of Jo March (Janeway, Russ), while others perceive in the novel a matriarchal "reigning feminist sisterhood" (Auerbach). Historian Sarah Elbert finds Jo's development in the novel to be "the only fully complete one" and views Jo's marriage to Professor Bhaer as a "democratic domestic union" (207).

Other critics focus on the tensions and conflicts inherent in the novel. Alma Payne, for example, views Jo as an embodiment of the struggle between "a sense of duty" and "a strong self" (261). Ann Douglas finds that Little Women embodies the conflicts which Alcott inherited from her mother's and father's opposing natures ("Mysteries"). And Elizabeth Keyser argues that in Little Women Alcott undercuts the domestic values she seems to assert. Finally, Judith Fetterley, perhaps the most insightful critic of Alcott, finds a conflict within the text of Little Women between overt and covert messages "which provide evidence of Alcott's ambivalence" on "the subject of what it means to be a little woman" (370-71, 382).

In contrast to these critics, we argue here that in Little Women there is not only evidence of ambivalence but also covert manipulation of the text by Alcott in order to disguise the fate of her experimental, self-reliant heroine.

3. In her study of Alcott's short stories Joy Marsella observes that Alcott acknowl- edged the socializing effect stories had upon children and that she wrote her own in a way that "formed minds, prepared hearts, and molded characters" in a manner fully acceptable to the conservative editors of children's periodicals (xxi).

4. For a discussion of the "crime" hidden at the center of Uncle Tom's Cabin, see Kathleen Margaret Lant's "The Unsung Hero of Uncle Tom's Cabin."

5. For other discussions of Jo's sisters and their responses to the demands and conflicts of becoming "litde women," see Nina Auerbach, Sarah Elbert, Judith Fetter- ley, Anne Hollander, Elizabeth Keyser, and Patricia Meyer Spacks. Several of these essays and other critical works on Alcott have been collected by Madeleine Stern in Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott.

6. Fetterley thoroughly delineates this point in "Alcott's Civil War": "Beth's history carries out the implication of being a little woman to its logical conclusion: to be a little woman is to be dead" (380).

122 Angela M. Estes and Kathleen M. Lant

7. Fetterley supports this reading of Beth's role in the novel: "One can say that Beth's primary function in Little Women is to be a lesson tojo" (381). In contrast to our thesis here, however, Fetterley argues for Jo's "ultimate acceptance of the doctrines οι Little Women" (382).

8. See Elizabeth Keyser's "Women and Girls in Louisa May Alcott's Jo's Boys" for an illuminating discussion of the adult Jo's continuing frustration and resentment arising from her conflicts between "self-assertion and self-sacrifice" (463). Keyser delineates "the broken fragments of Jo's inconsistent ideology" in the "first layer" of the text of Jo's Boys and brilliantly suggests how Alcott's "disposing of her characters —most of them in conventional 'happy' marriages" approximates the "act of vio- lence" Alcott contemplated in her temptation to "engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it" (469-70).

Works Cited

Alcott, Louisa May. "Behind a Mask, or A Woman's Power." In Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Madeleine Stern. New York: William Morrow, 1975. 1-104.

---------.Jo's Boys: A Sequel to "Little Men." New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1949. ---------.Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Boston: Litde, Brown, 1968. ---------. "Patty's Patchwork." In Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag. Vol. 1. Boston: Roberts, 1872.

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Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978.

Baker, Nancy C. The Beauty Trap: Exploring Woman's Greatest Obsession. New York: Franklin Watts, 1984.

Baldwin, James. "Everybody's Protest Novel." In Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. 92-97.

Cheney, Ednah D. Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals. Boston: Roberts, 1889.

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H.Johnson. Cambridge: Belknap, 1955.

Douglas (Wood), Ann. "The Literature of Impoverishment: The Women Local CoI- orists in America, 1865-1914." Women's Studies 1 (1972): 3-45.

---------. "Mysteries of Louisa May Alcott." Review of Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott, by Martha Saxton, and Work: A Story of Experience, by Louisa May Alcott. The New York Review of Books 28 Sept. 1978: 60-63.

Elbert, Sarah. A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Akott's Place in American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987.

Fetterley, Judith. "Little Women: Alcott's Civil War." Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 369-83. Fiedler, Leslie. "Harriet Beecher Stowe's Novel of Sentimental Protest." In Critical

Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. 112-16.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979.

Hollander, Anne. "Reflections on Litde Women." Children's Literature 9 (1981): 28- 39.

Janeway, Elizabeth. "Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy and Louisa." New York Times Book Review 29 Sept. 1968:42-46.

Kaledin, Eugenia. "Louisa May Alcott: Success and the Sorrow of Self-Denial." Women's Studies 5 (1978): 251-63.

The Horror of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women 123

Keyser, Elizabeth. "Alcott's Portraits of the Artist as Little Woman." International Journal of Women's Studies 5 (1982): 445-59.

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