A Portrait of the Artist as a Little Woman

Abstract

A Portrait of the Artist as a Little Woman Beverly Lyon Clark (bio) Alcott as submissive, Alcott as subversive, Alcott as ambivalent—these are dominant themes in recent reflections on Louisa May Alcott.1 The same themes appear in Alcott's own writing about writing, when she writes about Jo March. Though Alcott gives some play to subversive ideas of self-expression, her overt message is that girls should subordinate themselves and their language to others. A little woman should channel her creativity into shaping the domestic space or shaping her soul. She can enact Pilgrim's Progress and learn to live as a Christian—to live by God's Word, or by John Bunyan's word, not by her own.2 Nineteenth-century male authors send a very different message to their readers. Jan B. Gordon notes that in works as diverse as the Alice books, Mill's Autobiography, and David Copperfield, the child "must reverse or otherwise overturn a prescriptive text that had kept him in a figurative prison" (179). The opposite is true for the girls in Little Women. Laurie may complain that "a fellow can't live on books" (62), rebelling against prescribed texts as other males do, but Jo must learn to stifle her rebelliousness and to forgive Amy for burning the only manuscript of her book, Jo's attempt to find her own voice. In her other works Alcott shows a similar reluctance to rebel. Her adult novel Work may in effect rebel against its predecessor Jane Eyre, but only in the service of a higher submission. The heroine, Christie, objects to Charlotte Brontë's portrayal of Rochester: "I like Jane, but never can forgive her marrying that man, as I haven't much faith in the saints such sinners make" (80). Then Christie enacts her objection to Jane Eyre by marrying not the Rochester-like Mr. Fletcher but David Sterling, a type of St. John Rivers, with whom she undertakes missionary work at home; and a symbolic bedroom fire is caused not by the madwoman in the attic but by Christie's dangerous penchant for books. Alcott rebels against the romance of Jane Eyre not so much to find her own voice as to submit [End Page 81] herself to the divine and masculine allegory of Pilgrim's Progress. Christie's very name recalls those of Christian and Christiana, and in her progress through temptations she eventually achieves a state of grace, with the help of a character compared to Mr. Greatheart. Thus Alcott's rebellion against a predecessor text is not so rebellious after all: it is a reworking of the secular Jane Eyre in order to submit to the higher truths of Pilgrim's Progress, a reworking that underscores the searing dangers of books to women. She rebels not to find her own voice but to modulate it in the heavenly chorus.3 In Work Alcott stifles her predilection for the lurid and sensational, much as she has suppressed her blood-and-thunder tales (first by publishing them anonymously or under a pseudonym and then by turning instead to juveniles). In a telling entry in her diary, at age eighteen, she notes, "Reading Miss Bremer and Hawthorne. The 'Scarlet Letter' is my favorite. Mother likes Miss B. better, as more wholesome. I fancy 'lurid' things, if true and strong also" (Cheney 63). Eighteen years later, in her own writing, Alcott has submitted to the preferences of her mother, the arch-representative of the family, giving up the gothic for domestic realism, banishing the "skeleton in the closet." Or hiding "behind a mask," as so many of Alcott's strong gothic heroines do, concealing her passions and longings behind the passionless and virtuous facade of her "marble women."4 Alcott's reworking of Jane Eyre (one of fifteen items in an 1852 list of books she liked) is more a self-chastisement for her sneaking fondness for things gothic, more an act of penitent submission to Christian godliness than a rebellion against a predecessor text.5 In Little Women, too, Alcott stifles the sensational—or at least hides it. In the first volume it still lurks just below the surface. Thomas H...

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