Little Women's Literary Lessons Sari Edelstein While I was growing up in downtown Chicago in the fallout of my parents' hostile, seemingly endless divorce, Little Women offered a fantasy of the warm-and-fuzzy family I craved, along with pastoral visions of unsupervised play, Christmas celebrations (even without presents!), and an iconic figure of the girl-writer. As a child, I longed for the snugness, the safety, and the New England propriety of the March family—all the things absent from my own messy Jewish upbringing. And so it is perhaps no surprise that Little Women has now come to occupy a vaunted place on my syllabi and in my scholarship. Over the years, my relationship with Alcott's novel has shifted from an unfettered embrace to a critical engagement with questions that have been at the core of my intellectual life for the past decade: How do women writers imagine their work in relation to mainstream journalism? Under what terms can women enter the public sphere? How do ideas about age—and age propriety—serve to discipline women and girls? These questions are at the fore of the chapter "Literary Lessons," in which aspiring author Jo March encounters the work of S. L. A. N. G. Northbury, a thinly veiled reference to the prolific story-paper author E. D. E. N. Southworth. Inspired by the popularity and profitability of Northbury's stories, Jo enters and wins a story contest, planning to use the prize money to send Beth to the seaside to convalesce. But when she proudly announces her victory to her family, the reaction is deflating: her father responds, "never mind the money" (214). What Jo learns here are not merely "literary lessons"; she is also receiving instruction in how to appropriately inhabit the role of the female author, a lesson later reiterated by Professor Bhaer. In short, women should not write for publicity and profit; to do so is to be "S. L. A. N. G.," deviant, and outside of normative values. Though her family and love interest chastise her, Jo later returns once more to writing sensation fiction. In a subsequent chapter she seeks out inspiration from newspapers, studies faces in the street, and goes to the public library, but this impressive research agenda is ultimately linked to the desecration of her "womanliest attributes" (275). Here we are introduced more fully to the notion [End Page 113] that intellectual and imaginative pursuits can corrupt a woman and speed up her maturation; Jo "was fast brushing the innocent bloom from her nature by a premature acquaintance with the darker side of life, which comes soon enough to all of us" (275). It seems that even imaginatively leaving the sanctuary of the home accelerates Jo's decline, so she returns to the cloistered domestic sphere, forgoing the personal expansion and professional success she so eagerly sought. In Alcott's world there is no way to become a big woman, as the development of such a being is rigorously guarded against, under threat of expulsion from the idealized family unit. Of course Alcott herself wrote Little Women for money and also published sensation fiction under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard; thus, Jo's forays into the story-paper world suggest Alcott's own vexed relationship to the category of woman writer. Little Women marks the space of literature and authorship as contraband even while recognizing the potential for the literary realm to foster connections and meaning beyond the hallowed domestic space. These scenes capture the novel's double-voicedness, its palpable disdain for the very structures it celebrates, and it is these ambivalences that make it eminently teachable and readable. When I return to Little Women as an adult, the coziness I initially found so appealing strikes me now as claustrophobic and fraught, and I am thankful that, unlike Jo March, I have been able to forge a life devoted to literature. Indeed, in spite of its ostensible lessons about the impropriety of female authorship, the book has given me a point of entry into the robust critical and writerly communities that Legacy so importantly facilitates. [End Page 114] Sari Edelstein University of Massachusetts Boston Copyright © 2019 University...
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