A Heterotopia Divided: Spaces of Labor in Louisa May Alcott’s 'Little Women'

Sinem Yazicioğlu

doi:10.32600/huefd.920078

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the development of industrialization and the surging waves of immigration had drastic effects on the condition of the American working class. Coinciding with the Civil War and the following Reconstruction era, this period saw a stronger and more determined labor movement in organizing trade unions and resolving several work-related problems. Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women (1868) in such a social and economic climate. This essay will explore the novel’s spatial configuration of the existing labor conditions as two different heterotopias by turning to how Louisa May Alcott organized characters and space in Little Women. Drawing from Foucault and Harvey’s approaches to space, the essay will argue that the March family home functions as a labor heterotopia, and Jo March founds a counter-heterotopia against it. In other words, while the March house depicts, confronts and reverses the conditions of American labor in the Civil War era, Jo March attempts to follow the same procedure so as to counteract the order in her family home. Jo’s counteraction is determined by her act of writing, which gives her an individual and independent voice. Yet, more importantly, her authorship that lets her develop her own working conditions has effects beyond the garret she uses for writing. The purpose of this essay is to re-read Jo March’s character in terms of her function in both heterotopias, and to show that she constantly negotiates between these domestic and intellectual labor heterotopias in an attempt to empower her sisters.

Highlights

In her introduction to the 2001 edition Broadview edition of Little Women, Anne Hiebert Alton mentions Louisa May Alcott’s style and the significance of the novel, but imediately adds “[a]t the heart of the story, is Jo. [...] Jo delights readers with her boundless energy, her independence, her stubbornness, and her quirky individuality” (p. 10)
In Little Women, domestic work is unpaid and calls for affective labor as well. It is in this very sense that, unlike the settings in Alcott’s other labor-related works, the March house is a labor heterotopia, because the actual work conditions of the Civil War era are inverted and revised in order to form an alternative space which is not originally a workspace
There is an implication in Little Women that Jo will be made to abandon everything that characterizes her, because she is left without a strong ally in her counter-heterotopia

Summary

Introduction

In her introduction to the 2001 edition Broadview edition of Little Women, Anne Hiebert Alton mentions Louisa May Alcott’s style and the significance of the novel, but imediately adds “[a]t the heart of the story, is Jo. [...] Jo delights readers with her boundless energy, her independence, her stubbornness, and her quirky individuality” (p. 10). Even though the novel starts with her complaint about the family’s recent economic difficulties arising from the father’s absence and wartime conditions, she raises the collective voice of the women in the family and emphasizes the father’s absence as the cause of the family’s collective suffering. At best, in her struggle to develop an independent voice, she might be the subject of her own subplot never realized and gradually hampered in the sequels. Such economic difficulties introduce the concept of work into the March household, and several labor-related issues of the Civil War era enter the novel, albeit in

A Heterotopia Divided

Conclusion