LOUISA MAY ALCOTT’S LITTLE WOMEN: HUMANISING DISEASE AND DECAY

Abstract

Whenever a disease is widespread like an epidemic or pandemic its apocalyptic nature fails to escape the creative imagination of literary writers. Beginning from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man are some of the precursors of the literary fiction in English which captures apocalyptic events and their impact on the society. A pandemic affects not only elders but also children, not only rich but also poor, not only upper class but also the workers. A lot of literature focuses on the affliction of the first and their response to the pandemic. In addition to the epidemics like cholera and plague which recurred from time to time and afflicted a large section of the population, there was the pandemic scarlet fever which rarely made the adult population suffer as it primarily struck the children aged between five and fifteen. The number of works which focus on scarlet fever are few and one of the prominent ones which this paper intends to look at is by an American novelist. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-69) captures influences that shape the lives of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March from childhood into womanhood. One such influence, scarlet fever which is said to have spread across Europe and America during the 19th and early 20th century victimising and causing death of several infants and young children affect the March family too. The paper attempts to capture the pandemic and tries to humanise disease and decay and its impact on the lives of the March sisters.