An Exploration of Autonomy and Production Through Little Women


by Safreen Afsal Channaneth
3454 words



Abstract


Introduction


Little Women and Cultural Production


Adaptations and the Shifting Form of Little Women


Conclusion


References
            Little Women, first published in 1868, is a novel by the 19th-century American writer Louisa May Alcott. The novel follows the lives of the March family, documenting the journey from adolescence to adulthood through the lens of four sisters who grow up during the American Civil War. Despite its setting, Little Women retains its popularity, and as Anne Boyd Rioux puts it, continues to evoke deep feelings of identification, especially in female readers (2019, p. 7). This essay explores Little Women, through the lens of the novel’s evolving relationship to the author, the audience, culture, and society across time.

            Louisa May Alcott’s yearning to write literature that would do something important in the world was always at war with her desire to make money from it. Her father made barely any money, and the circumstances of her life made it impossible for her writing to be a purely artistic affair. Her first novel, Moods, was a book about a young woman who marries and later regrets it, and it was full of doubts about the institution of marriage, which is what reviewers at the time found “too free”, resulting in Alcott abandoning any desire to include those ideas in future works. There are other examples of Alcott’s works not being particularly well received because of her ideals, one of the more well-known events being the rejection of her stories by the Atlantic, presumably because of the inclusion of anti-slavery themes (Rioux, 2019, p.20).  As a result, Alcott wrote lurid thrillers and sensation stories for cultural periodicals under a pseudonym, both before and after her career took off.

             Little Women was born out of a request from the publisher Thomas Niles, asking Alcott to write a “girls’ book”, an idea she was not particularly wild about. In fact, she only changed her mind about the novel once she read the first proof and decided that the book was “simple and true”, and that was what was needed for young girls (Rioux, 2019, pp. 11-23). The book was soon published and became extremely popular, with readers writing dozens of letters to Alcott, with demands to know what would happen to the March girls, and to Alcott’s annoyance, who they would marry. Alcott desperately wanted the heroine, Jo, to transcend the norms set for women in society, but she had not considered the immense power an audience can hold, and while remaining adamant that Jo would not marry Laurie, the handsome boy next door, she was compelled by her publishers to marry all the girls off (Rioux, 2019, p.24). Alcott herself wrote in a letter to Alfred Whitman that the “sequel would make you laugh, especially the pairing off part”, indicating an almost smug amusement at her own decision to make Jo marry a forty-year-old German professor (as cited in Campbell, p.124).