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Little Women (Questions)

Little Women (Questions)

Little Women (Questions)

1. In the first two chapters, the girls use 's The Pilgrim's Progress as a model for their own journey to becoming "." What was Alcott trying to say by using such a strongly philosophical piece of literature as the girls' model?

2. What purpose does Beth's death serve? Was Alcott simply making a sentimental novel even more so, or was this a play on morality and philosophy? Do you think Beth was intended to be a Christ figure?

3. Consider the fact that Beth will never reach sexual maturity or marry. What do you think this says about the institution of marriage and, more important, about womanhood?

4. Consider Jo's writing: While we are treated to citations from "The Pickwick Portfolio" and the family's letters to one another, we are never presented with an excerpt from Jo's many literary works, though the text tells us they are quite successful. Why is this?

5. Do you find it surprising that once Laurie is rejected by Jo, he falls in love with Amy? Do you feel his characterization is complete and he is acting within the "norm" of the personality Alcott has created for him, or does Alcott simply dispose of him once our heroine rejects him?

6. Some critics argue that the characters are masochistic. Meg is the perfect little wife, Amy is the social gold digger, and Beth is the eternally loving and patient woman. Do you believe these characterizations are masochistic? If so, do you think Alcott could have characterized them any other way while maintaining the realism of the society she lived in? And if this is true, what of Jo's character?

7. The last two chapters find Jo setting aside her budding literary career to run a school with her husband. Why do you think Alcott made her strongest feminine figure sacrifice her own life plans for her husband's?

8. Alcott was a student of transcendentalism. How and where does this philosophy affect Alcott's writing, plot, and characterization?

9. Do you believe this is a feminine or a feminist piece of work? (Questions issued for the Random House edition.)

https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/634-little-women-alcott?start=3

Little Women (About the Author)

Author Bio • Birth—November 29, 1832 • Where—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA • Reared—Concord, • Died— 6, 1888 • Where—, Massachusetts • Education—tutored by father Bronson Alcott and by

Alcott was a daughter of noted Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. Louisa's father started the Temple School; her uncle, Samuel Joseph May, was a noted abolitionist. Though of New England parentage and residence, she was born in Germantown, which is currently part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She had three sisters: one elder () and two younger ( and Abigail May Alcott Nieriker). The family moved to Boston in 1834 or 1835, where her father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with and Henry David Thoreau.

During her childhood and early adulthood, she shared her family's poverty and Transcendentalist ideals. In 1840, after several setbacks with the school, her family moved to a cottage on two acres along the Sudbury River in Concord, Massachusetts.

The Alcott family moved to the Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in 1843-1844 and then, after its collapse, to rented rooms and finally to a house in Concord purchased with her mother's inheritance and help from Emerson. Alcott's early education had included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau but had chiefly been in the hands of her father. She also received some

instruction from writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, , and , who were all family friends.

She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats," afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the experiences of her family during their experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands.

As she grew older, she became both an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1847, the family housed a fugitive slave for one week. In 1848 Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights.

Early Writings Due to the family's poverty, she began work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer — her first book was (1854), tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1860, Alcott began writing for Monthly. She was nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C., for six weeks in 1862-1863. Her letters home, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as (1863, republished with additions in 1869), garnered her first critical recognition for her observations and humor. Her novel Moods (1864), based on her own experience, was also promising.

A lesser-known part of her work are the passionate, fiery novels and stories she wrote, usually under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. These works, such as and Pauline's Passion and Punishment, were known in the Victorian Era as "potboilers" or "blood-and-thunder tales." Her character Jo in Little Women publishes several such stories but ultimately rejects them after being told that "good young girls should [not] see such things." Their protagonists are willful and relentless in their pursuit of their own aims, which often include revenge on those who have humiliated or thwarted them. These works achieved immediate commercial success and remain highly readable today.

Alcott also produced moralistic and wholesome stories for children, and, with the exceptions of the semi-autobiographical tale Work (1873), and the anonymous

novelette A Modern Mephistopheles (1875), which attracted suspicion that it was written by , she did not return to creating works for adults.

Success 's overwhelming success dated from the appearance of the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, (1868) a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood years with her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. Part two, or Part Second, also known as Good Wives, (1869) followed the March sisters into adulthood and their respective marriages. (1871) detailed Jo's life at the Plumfield School that she founded with her husband Professor Bhaer at the conclusion of Part Two of Little Women. Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga."

Most of her later volumes, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1871–1879), and its sequel (1876), and others, followed in the line of Little Women, remaining popular with her large and loyal public.

Although the Jo character in Little Women was based on Louisa May Alcott, she, unlike Jo, never married. Alcott explained her "spinsterhood" in an interview with Louise Chandler Moulton, "... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."

In 1879 her younger sister, May, died. Alcott took in May's daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), who was two years old. The baby was named after her aunt, and was given the same nickname.

In her later life, Alcott became an advocate of women's suffrage and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election.

Alcott, along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, were part of a group of female authors during the U.S. Gilded Age to address women’s issues in a modern and candid manner. Their works were, as one newspaper columnist of the period commented, "among the decided 'signs of the times'" (“Review 2 – No Title” from The Radical, May 1868, see References below).

Despite worsening health, Alcott wrote through the rest of her life, finally succumbing to the after-effects of mercury poisoning contracted during her service: she had received calomel treatments for the effects of typhoid. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888 at age 55, two days after visiting her father on his deathbed. Her last words were "Is it not meningitis?" (Author bio from Wikipedia.)

https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/634-little-women-alcott?start=1

Little Women (Reviews)

Four sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, are part of a poor but loving family. With their father off to war they have only their mother left to encourage them to be the best version of themselves at all times. As they go through love and loss they truly do learn to become 'little women'.

I found myself, after reading the last line twice over just to check, satisfied yet in want of more. It was a refreshing read that made me care for the sisters and left me wanting to know what led Alcott to write this simple masterpiece. As all well- known books do, it had a fair few morals that, although made the characters seem a bit too perfect to be real, were reasonable and made me want to make up for my faults (of which there are many).

Alcott's writing was elegant yet poignant and haunting at moments, and perfect for the era it was set in, whilst the sister's personalities were intricately described throughout the whole book. It gave you a sense of what it was like to be a normal family in the 1800's and subtly showed the feelings of each character.

However, I have a few complaints. I found myself scanning the book and not actually reading it at times and reading other books because of its slow plot. There aren't many exciting events to keep the reader hooked throughout. I also at times found the characters annoyingly perfect and would have liked just a couple more arguments.

All in all though, I felt rather lonely after the March sisters had gone as I loved their spirit and felt as if I was almost one of them, which is a clear sign of this book's greatness. I know I will remember this book for years to come and it will always feel as if it were almost yesterday that I read it, as it is a book to treasure and keep on a dusty bookshelf to pass on for generations.

https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/jun/18/review-little-women-louisa-may-alcott

Little Women (Enhancement)

‘Jo Was Everything I Wanted to Be’: 5 Writers on ‘Little Women’

Julia Alvarez, Virginia Kantra, Anna Quindlen, Sonia Sanchez and Jennifer Weiner talk about how the book, now a hit movie, inspired them. By Concepción de León Dec. 31, 2019

While the latest film adaptation of “Little Women,” which opened on Christmas Day, has been getting all the attention lately, Louisa May Alcott’s 19th-century classic has influenced women writers for generations. Five of them told us what the novel means to them. These are edited excerpts from their responses.

Julia Alvarez “Little Women” was our favorite book in English. My sisters and I discovered it soon after arriving in this country. It was the only book we had ever read about an all-girl family of four sisters, just like ours. I don’t know how many times we read and reread that book. We couldn’t get enough of these strong, lively, resilient March girls. Wow, what an accurate portrayal of sisterhood and all its complexities. What a critical story for us at this juncture in our lives, when we, too, were facing so many changes, losses, challenges to the certainties we had known. Check, check, check. The March girls were white New Englanders, and we were newly arrived immigrants from a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, but there the differences stopped and the uncanny similarities began — down to our very names. The first letter of each sister’s name was the same as each of ours, in the same birth order: Margaret-Meg/Maury; Jo/Julia; Elizabeth-Beth/Estela; Amy/Ana. Our personalities and passions matched our twin character. (I, Julia/Jo, wanted to be a writer.)

Long before “multicultural literature,” before we would find our faces or traditions or histories in American literature, we found our reflection here. The novel beamed me a powerful message that stories were about what we shared with other people, families, sisters — even a story that wasn’t overtly about us. Conversely, it meant that someday, if Jo/Julia wrote about the Mirabal sisters or the García girls, readers from other backgrounds might find themselves in my stories, too. Louisa May Alcott was one of my first muses. (A for Alvarez, check again!)

Julia Alvarez is the author of “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In the Time of the Butterflies.” Her forthcoming book is “Afterlife.”

Virginia Kantra My grandmother gave my sister and me a copy of “Little Women” when I was about 10. I grew up with the story, and it grew with me, each of the sisters — unique, flawed, relatable — offering a different path and a distinct perspective at various points in my life. There’s a warmth and kindness that breathes from the book, a story of family supporting each other through tough times. When I was younger, I wanted to go live with the March sisters — and in a way I did, because they inspired my journey in so many ways, as a writer and a woman. It’s as if a piece of each of them lives on inside me. Virginia Kantra is the best-selling writer of nearly 30 novels. Her most recent book is “Meg & Jo.”

Anna Quindlen It’s simple: Jo wants to be a writer. Her entire family assumes she will become a writer. And we understand, by virtue of the book we hold in our hands, that she has become a writer. As a girl, that made my own highly improbable professional dreams seem possible. “Little Women” is the first sign I ever had that I might someday become who I am today.

Anna Quindlen is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose most recent book is “Nanaville: Adventures in Grandparenting.”

Sonia Sanchez I identified with Jo, the main character in “Little Women,” because not only was she independent but she also wanted to be a writer. She was situated in the middle of a large family but she was always alone, I thought, with her words in the midst of everything — just as I was alone in a small family with one sister. She preferred her room of books, pens and papers where the morning and evening air circulated, and I preferred my small, shared room with my sister in Harlem, facing a blank wall where no air moved. But I knew and shared her spirit, and I laughed and smiled always when she spoke her words of independence and rebellion.

Sonia Sanchez, the author of “Homecoming,” is a professor emeritus of English at Temple University.

Jennifer Weiner It’s hard for me to imagine any woman writer who did not see herself in Jo March. Jo was a smart, headstrong, clumsy misfit; a loving sister and daughter who knew her own heart and could be brave, not just in service of her family but also in service of her own ambitions, a poor girl who turns down the rich, handsome dreamboat next door to pursue her ambitions. When I was 10 years old, Jo was everything I wanted to be when I grew up. At least, Part One Jo was. Part Two Jo, as many a brokenhearted reader learned, goes to New York City to work as a governess. Living in a boardinghouse, working part time as a governess, earning a dollar a column for her “‘rubbish,’ as she called it, Jo felt herself a woman of means, and spun her little romances diligently.”

But Jo’s ink-stained fingertips betray her as an author to her fellow lodger, one Prof. Friedrich Bhaer. A reader, a scholar, rumpled and stout, Professor Bhaer is perfect for Jo, except for the part where he — how to put it? — tells her that her life’s work is crap, and that he would rather give children “gunpowder to play with than this bad trash.”

Instead of telling him where he can stick his judgments, Jo agrees with him and consigns her literary output to the flames (No!). Instead of asking him to support her while she hones her craft, she stops writing (JO!). And then, in a betrayal for which I still have not entirely forgiven Louisa May Alcott, Jo marries her critic, puts down her pen, presumably forever, and resigns herself to a life of noble poverty at his side (AFSKLJGFHGHGH). It felt like an enormous betrayal as a reader. At least I can count myself lucky, insofar as it prepared me for what happened after I myself became a writer of popular fiction. Swap “chick lit” for “sensation stories” and Bhaer’s critique — this is silly, pandering, dangerous; this is not real literature — could have been cut from the 19th century and pasted into the 21st. For every successful female writer, in any era, it seems, a Professor Bhaer is likely somewhere nearby, waiting to explain to her what qualifies as literature and why her work does not. Understanding the circumstances of Alcott’s own life and times help me make sense of Jo’s capitulation. Alcott, the daughter of a starry-eyed Transcendentalist father whose utopian community was a noble failure and who was content to let his wife and daughters support the family, wrote her share of “sensation stories,” with titles like “A Long Fatal Love Chase” and “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment.” She never married — “I’d rather be a free spinster, and paddle my own canoe,” she said. She had no interest in writing for or about girls, and wrote “Little Women” at a publisher’s behest, for money. After Part One was complete, she told a friend that she would have preferred Jo to remain a “literary spinster,” “but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her.”

Which means that the man telling the woman, “You should be ashamed to write popular stories for money” appears in a book written by a woman, for money; and that a book extolling the unmatched bliss of marriage and children was written by an unmarried woman who never had children. Like life, it’s complicated, but complicated in a way that invites endless interpretation and reinventions. Jo March was one of the inspirations for the heroine of my most recent novel, “Mrs. Everything.” I’m not the only woman writer to have written a Jo of her own, and I imagine there will be other Jos to follow. Whatever we make of the grown-up Jo’s marriage, the headstrong, ambitious girl will live on, to inspire generations of girls to come. Jennifer Weiner is a best-selling author and contributing Op-Ed writer for The Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/books/little-women-book-writers.html

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