#29 - Little Women

First off, the obligatory explanation as to my delays in posting. After finishing Anna Karenina, I was well into the final exam season of my first year at Western, and so I laid off on starting Pygmalion until later. Later stretched to the distant future when I registered for Children's Literature for the summer term, giving me a whole new list to deal with before I could return to the challenge. The list itself is quite a good one, ranging from fairy tales and nonsense verse to boys' adventure novels to the "domestic novel" for young ladies to the more modern fantasy genre. However, only a single book was to be found on both lists, and that is this bastion of women's literature, Little Women.

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women as a favour to a publisher friend of hers, and its success was soon followed by a second part, Good Wives, and two sequels, Little Men and Jo's Boys. However the original two-volume set is the part that everyone gads on about, and it is not immediately evident why. Alcott was not predisposed to write a novel about the domestic life, as she herself lived a surprisingly modern and urban life. She moans in her diaries about how she plods away, mirroring my thoughts exactly. The book is SLOW, in a way I haven't found before. Usually when a book reads slowly its because it is interminably thick and I need a large block of time to get into it. Little Women managed to come along when I had nothing but reading time, but its bland, repetitive language made me want to fall asleep at all hours of the day. I'm putting this in front of the actual analysis of the plot and book itself because regardless of the book's qualities, the ability of this novel to cause narcolepsy should be noted as a warning label at all times.

Little Women is based on the lives of Louisa and her three sisters, captured in the book as Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. It follows them through their late childhood and budding womanhood, showing the different paths that each of them took. Meg is the model of a submissive housewife figure, and she marries early and raises twins through the second part. Beth is a sickly child who is entirely selfless and honest, and passes on at the age of 18 through an unknown ailment. Jo is the headstrong tomboy of the family (and Alcott's avatar in the story), refusing the neighbour Laurie's proposal, and realizing a budding writing career before marrying the older German professor Bhaer in the close of the second part. After Laurie's rejection he goes off to brood in Europe where he encounters a newly flowering Amy, now the shining star of the family, and the two come home married after some predictable angst through the second part.

The majority of the action happens after the original Little Women ends. If read as only the first part, the majority is taken up by a repetitive looping moralizing in which one precocious daughter longs for some frivolity or trinket, seeks to obtain it or act the part to some failure, returns crying to mother, who gives consolation tied in with Biblical commands which the daughters thank her most genuinely for. This comprises most of the first 20 chapters, and had me pulling at my lymph nodes. But the plot did pick up in the second half, the characters were extremely well-formed (because they were based on her own family) and the concept of free-thinking women choosing between careers and husbands was actually a marked leap forward for young women's literature. However, narcolepsy.

5/10