Pulling together
Radical notions of marriage in Little Women, and the one thing Greta Gerwig got wrong? Also, South African firefighters, Ordinary Time playlist & more
Friends, I started an essay for you at the end of last week, but it is still a bit half-baked. I did a close re-read of Little Women to mark for footnotes for my project for Owl’s Nest publishers, and here is a little bit of what has been swirling in my mind around how Alcott depicts marriage in the book, alongside Greta Gerwig’s ideas about marriage at the time.
“ (Marriage is ) Very sweet and pretty; but I would rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.” - Louisa May Alcott.
“Publishers won’t let authors finish up as they like but insist on having people married off in a wholesale manner which much afflicts me…I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one.” - Louisa May Alcott.
My husband and I celebrated our 11th anniversary last month. This, along with reading Eight Dates by the Gottman Institute (what? a marriage book I can actually recommend? yes, it’s true!) has me thinking about marriage lately, and how progressive Alcott’s depiction of marriage was for her time. In real life, getting married was often an economic proposition, especially for middle-class women who were trying to keep their status. On the other hand, this economic security also often meant a loss of freedom for women. And Louisa loved her liberty. “Liberty is a better husband than love,” as she wrote in a letter shortly after her older sister’s marriage (which was the inspiration for Meg and John),
“Annie is making us a visit and is as blithe a bride as one need wish to see. The world is composed of John and John is composed of all the virtues ever known, which amiable delusion I admire and wonder at from the darkness of my benighted spinsterhood. Abby lives for her crayons and dancing, father for his garden, mother for the world in general and I for my pens and ink.” (Thanks to this article for all these handy quotes in one place)
Louisa lives for her pen and ink. She wants to make money for her family (working as a teacher, taking in sewing, and eventually writing), but she won’t give up her liberty in a match with rich person who doesn’t support her writing. To be a “spinster” was often to be both poor and lonely during this time. Yet, it seems to Louisa, that internal authenticity is more important than convention1.
That’s why Greta Gerwig’s ending in Little Women doesn’t sit exactly right2. In a mixing of Louisa and Jo’s realities, Gerwig’s Jo is shown in the middle of a book contract negotiation. As in real life, the publisher wants the character Jo to be married. Gerwig’s Jo/Louisa agrees because “marriage is always an economic proposition, even in fiction”3. Louisa, it’s true, was irritated by the letters from tween girls asking if Jo marries Laurie as if marriage was the chief end of a woman’s life. So she says that she goes and gives Jo a “funny match” out of “perversity.”
Alright. Alright. But here’s the thing. Marmee doesn’t think so. As preachy as Marmee sometimes sounds to modern ears, I believe Louisa was too authentic to put words in Marmee’s mouth that she actually disagreed with. Especially because Marmee is not parroting the conventional wisdom of the day.
“I want my daughters to be beautiful, accomplished, and good; to be admired loved, and respected. To have a happy youth, to be well and wisely married, to live useful and pleasant lives…to be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman; and I sincerely hope my girls may know this beatuiful experience… My dear girls, I am ambitious for you, but not to have you make a dash in the world,— marry rich men merely because they are rich, or have splendid houses, which are not homes, because love is wanting. Money is a needful and precious thing,—and when well used, a noble thing,— but I never want you to think it is the first or only prize to strive for. I’d rather see you poor men’s wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones without self-respect and peace… better be happy old maids than unhappy wives…” — Marmee, Little Women.
In other words: Marmee (and, by inference, Louisa), dismissed the idea of treating marriage as just an economic proposition. It’s interesting to analyze the proposal scenes for Meg, Amy, and Jo. If Louisa “caved” to public pressure in marrying off her characters just for the money she’d get in publishing the sequel, she doesn’t give a single one of them a hero sweeping them off their feet and dashing into the sunset. Not even a grand ball. Proposals happen by accident: in the living room in the midst of an argument with someone else, in the midst of a sweaty paddle on a lake, covered in mud in the rain. The very real stuff of the earth is in these scenes, not just idealised Romances. The girls take Marmee’s advice. None of them marry for money. In fact, it’s the opposite:
“I’m glad you are poor; I couldn’t bear a rich husband!” said Jo decidedly, adding in a softer tone, “Don’t fear poverty; I’ve known it long enough to lose my dread, and be happy working for those I love…” — Jo, when Professor Bhaer proposes.
“My John wouldn’t marry for money, any more than I would! We are willing to work, and we mean to wait. I’m not afraid of being poor, for I’ve been happy so far, and I know I shall be with him, because he loves me and I—” Meg, on discovering she does, in fact, love Mr. John Brooke.
Furthermore, whether it is Meg’s sudden use of “we” when talking about John, or Amy and Laurie’s discovery that they like to work together, the sisters may not be paddling their own canoes. But they are rowing together with an equal partner.
“How well we pull together, don’t we?” said Amy, who objected to silence just then.
“So well that I wish we might always pull in the same boat. Will you Amy?” very tenderly.
“Yes Laurie,” very low.
- Amy’s proposal
“The Professor found that [that Jo doesn’t mind poverty] so touching that he would have been glad of his handkerchief, if he could have got at it. As he couldn’t, Jo wiped his eyes for him, and said, laughing, as she took away a bundle or two...
“I may be strong-minded, but no one can say I’m out of my sphere now, for woman’s special mission is supposed to be drying tears and bearing burdens. I’m to carry my share, Friedrich, and help to earn the home. Make up your mind to that, or I’ll never go,” she added resolutely, as he tried to reclaim his load.” — Jo’s proposal
The subsequent marriages depicted show the joy of that equal partnership. Meg’s marriage problems actually pop up when she falls into fulfilling stereotypical ideas about how a woman should be the little angel in the house. Ideals of cute jam pots and a fresh wife to welcome her husband from work with a friend at any time are replaced with the realization that good communication and teamwork are better. When she stops cutting John out of the nursery and lets him step up with the childcare, it greatly improves her domestic bliss.
Amy and Laurie’s great delight in marriage is plotting together how to spend their money. Our “last shot” of Amy isn’t her sitting and painting like a princess in the lap of luxury, but she and Laurie working together to dream up scholarships to support struggling musicians and artists. And let’s not forget Jo, and how her frolicksome nature and love of “mothering boys” will combine excellently with Mr. Bhaer’s background in education to let them open a school together. Marriage in Little Women is not like Laurie’s attempted passionate romantic operas but equally it isn’t a cold-hearted calculation of finances.
And then, of course, there is the actual moment when the Professor and Jo get engaged. Modern readers are perhaps unsatisfied. It feels like we have so much more of an emotional connection to the Laurie of Jo’s childhood than we do with this “random” professor. (FALSE!4 Read the scene in footnote and tell me if that doesn’t ring true, but anyway!).
Louisa never met anyone in real life who matched her brain. It is maybe more realistic to keep Jo a free literary spinster.5
But this is fiction. I stand by the fact that Alcott writes what she wants. And the reason readers have kept reading it, for years and year and years, is because when we stop to think about it, it is what we want, too. What we really want in life is someone who will consider us, ‘the most beautiful woman living’ when we’re in “a deplorable state”, with our bonnets “in ruin”. We need people who see our rumpled hair but call it “Jove-like” and don’t mind how much money we make, as long as we’re together. We need people who bring us coffee in the morning before we brush our teeth, who see all our real, strange, oddities and call them endearing.
Some of life is sunsets and ballgowns. But as much as we long for escapist fantasies, most of life is doing shopping in the mud when you’ve forgotten your umbrella and can’t find your omnibus.
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