Rioux - Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: the story of Little Women and why it still matters

ALSO BY ANNE BOYD RIOUX

Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist

Miss Grief and Other Stories (editor)

Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of
High Literary Culture in America

Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by
American Women of the Nineteenth Century (editor)

MEG, JO,
BETH, AMY

THE STORY OF
LITTLE WOMEN

AND WHY
IT STILL MATTERS

ANNE BOYD RIOUX

W. W. Norton & Company

INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923
NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright 2018 by Anne Boyd Rioux

All rights reserved
First Edition

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Book design by Brooke Koven
Production manager: Anna Oler
JACKET DESIGN BY KIMBERLY GLYDER
JACKET ART LEBRECHT MUSIC AND ARTS PHOTO LIBRARY / ALAMY
STOCK PHOTO

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Rioux, Anne Boyd, author.
Title: Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy : the story of Little Women
and why it still matters / Anne Boyd Rioux.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018006602 | ISBN 9780393254730 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Alcott, Louisa May, 18321888. Little women.
Classification: LCC PS1017.L53 R58 2018 | DDC 813/.4dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006602

ISBN 9780393254747 (eBook)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
EMMA AND HER FRIENDS,
TODAYS LITTLE WOMEN.

Contents

Pegging away: The Road to Little Women

We really lived most of it: Making Up Little Women

Fresh, sparkling,... full of soul: The Phenomenon of Little Women

See her... living... the immortal Jo!: Little Women on Stage and Screen

The mother of us all:
Little Womens Cultural and Literary Influence

A divided house of a book: Reading Little Women

A private book for girls: Can Boys Read Little Women?

Being someone: Growing Up Female with Little Women

Wanting to be Rory, but better: Little Women and Girls Stories Today

Our Book

I FIRST READ L ITTLE WOMEN in my early twenties, in a graduate course on American Literary Realism. I missed out on the formative experience of reading the novel as a child. As it turned out, though, it can have just as much impact on a young woman in her twenties who is still trying to figure out who she will be and whether she will find a way to have a family and a career. Jo inspired me not only because she had ambitions to be a writer but because she found a way to grow into adulthood without leaving those ambitions entirely behind. She was still on my mind ten years later when my daughter was born and I gave her the middle name Josephine.

As I worked on this book, I encountered numerous women who wanted to tell me their Little Women stories. They showed me nineteenth-century editions that had been passed down in their families like heirlooms, or they told me about the copy their grandmothers had given them and they had in turn given to their daughters. They recited passages to me from memory. They described their favorite scenes from the films. They told me, I wanted to be Jo or

Something about Little Women has made it the paradigmatic book about growing up, especially for the female half of the population. Although it is set in Massachusetts in the years following the Civil War, it has transcended its time and place and been translated into over fifty languages. Writers from England, Chile, Pakistan, and Korea have invented their own March sisters and rewritten the story in new contexts. And Little Women has been adapted for television in many countriesfrom Mexico to Turkey to Japan. In its original form, it has inspired the devotion of readers of all ages. Countless readers report having pored over Little Women repeatedly, not content with just one read. And many speak of coming back to the book again as adults, sometimes yearly, as a ritual that centers them and returns them to their memories and dreams of childhood. What is it that has spoken to readers and audiences of all ages for the past 150 years and made Little Women the most widely beloved story of girlhood?

Perhaps it is the books portrait of home. Images of the Marches nestled around the fire or the sisters performing plays for their neighbors make us yearn for quiet, candle-lit homes where pies are baking for dinner. The family bonds the Marches sharestrong enough to survive war, marriage, overseas travel, and even deathmake us nostalgic for a time before fragmented families became the norm. And the scenes of sisters curling each others hair before a dance or fighting over who gets to go to the play with the cute boy next door remind us of our own siblings or make us wish that we had them.

More than cozy memories, though, Little Women evokes deep feelings of identification, especially in female readers. The March sisters are highly individualistic, lifelike characters in which girls can see themselves reflected. None is idealized. Meg, the dutiful oldest sister, is eager to make Marmee proud but also resents the familys She was the girl inside of so many of us, the one who rebelled against convention and donned her glory cloak while genius burned in the garret yet wanted very much to love and be loved by her family.

While researching the history of how Alcott wrote Little Women, how generations of readers have thought about it and argued over it, as well as how others have adapted the story for new generations, I have discovered that Alcotts novel is not what it at first appears to be. What seems like a tale from a simpler time turns out to be the product of a difficult and sometimes troubled life. What appears to be a sweet, light story of four girls growing up is also very much about how hard it was (and is) to come of age in a culture that prizes a womans appearance over her substance. And what may seem an idealized portrait of an intact home and family is also the story of a family in danger of being torn apart.

Once we look past the nostalgic glow on the surface of our memories of Alcotts classic, we can see that reading the novel raises questions still relevant today. What does it mean that this venerated story of girlhood centers on a girl who doesnt want to be one at all? How can we aspire to independence and also find love and support in the context of home? And is Little Women really a story only for female readers, or is it just as much about how we all have to make compromises as we grow into adulthood? Why have so many male readers, from Teddy Roosevelt to John Green, fallen in love with Little Women too, yet felt they had to hide or make excuses for it? And what are the implications of telling boys that the book is not for them, as happens with almost all books that center on girls?