My 5 star review of
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott :-
Spoiler:
Little Women is a puzzling and interesting book to read and to think about afterwards. This book was very good. Paradoxically, I rated it more on this reread upon noticing flaws that my adoring eyes had not upon the first read. The book has power. It has the power to enchant us. E.g. I began and completed reading it during the month of March. That cannot be a coincidence. There is an untarnished sweetness in the book that is not nauseating for most. For those who dislike the book, I cannot disagree with them. But this book is very special.
The first volume is above reproach, to me. It is so lifelike, it takes your breath away. The book format works much better with this material than any adaptations onscreen, including the latest one (2019). There is a certain voyeurism in the first book which is the only sinful thing about it. The March family has been captured perfectly and regurgitated with pen on paper. You feel the chirpy voices in your ears. You see the knotted fingers and the weary shoulders of the girls, who are poor and happy. Marmee, the mother, is like a bookend, with the other piece of the bookend, Mr March, a distant trifle that does not and should not intrude in his own home when he returns from war.
The March little women are a collective force of eruption of colour, whether in their decent language or their untidiness. They toil under the yoke of boredom so much that you feel you are cheating them by having modern amenities that they will never have. Yet they are lucky enough. They have each other. They have their youth, which they retain up till the last page of volume two. Jo, the ringleader and amateur poet, playwright, and writer of the family, goes down on one knee under the force of time, at the early age of 30 years, yet it feels as titanic an act as Thor's feat. Jo is my favourite character in the book.
There is a failing in health from Beth, the penultimate child. And one feels sadness for her and solace for oneself. Who is to say how long a lifetime should be. Beth is the kindest of the four girls. She takes care of her dolls with happiness and patience. One of her dolls is disabled, which perhaps foreshadows her own fate in a grim and sanguine way. Meg, the eldest, and Amy, the youngest, have upbeat and delightful fates, and perhaps these are what prevents them from making their mark in the book. Meg is the most mature and the silliest, being precocious without the gift of experience. Amy, well, she shines most in volume two.
The unlikely neighbours in the form of the two Lawrences, rich, honest duo of grandfather and grandson, are plot movers in name and in game. Laurie, like a certain Mr Darcy, has always been played by actors far older than what the books tell you. Laurie is very young, and, in the hands of Louisa May Alcott, becomes the type of character that shows all that women write men better than the opposite. Laurie lives his late teens in a state of paradisiac bliss. Having made best friends with Jo, he is flushed with the naivety of youth, which is also his innocence.
The book cannot escape the merriment infused in its characters by the authoress. The fixation on education and culture is unmistakably feminine. This could have been a blemish, but here is not. In their conversations the March girls display a longing for the future, which they will not reach till after the first part. It is hinted that they know French, and that they are steeped in the type of customs that seem stuffy to most people now. The book is clever in its depiction of the various short and pertinent adventures of the girls. If only things could remain the same forever. It was not to be.
Alcott should have been more in tune with her own creation when writing further adventures of her fictional family. She commits the mistake of believing that her work is an example of morality selling fast. In fact, it sold despite the moralising, not because of it. There is a strange power play that occurs in the book. The author saddles her women with back breaking moral rigmaroles. And we see that the life of the characters begin to feel independent of the author's meddling. The latter cannot comprehend the minds of her creatures. They rebel in a way, then accept with fake joy their fates that Alcott prefers for them.
The constant pontification made me laugh rather than groan. This was quite true of Professor Bhaer's defence of Christianity in the face of a couple of heathen zealots. Never mind that Bhaer has a zealotry of his own to keep his dull mind busy. It is proper for a book of this type to be rooted in a sort of vulgar realism by marrying its lively girls to older and crusty, pompous nonentities. But in trying to stay true, Alcott forgoes verisimilitude. It is the classic case of overcompensation. None of the male characters do things that come even close to the female ones' acts. This is okay, except that, seeing her little women maturing, the authoress abandons herself to a matchmaking mood.
Alcott tries to be daring in her own small ways. She longs for her characters to be colourful and carefree, yet she herself probably bought into the patriarchy 'wisdom'. This is displayed in the unflattering presentation of two women discussing female emancipation. It is displayed in the stated dependence of the woman on the father-like husband. The sheep with its shepherd if you will. Alcott is also daring in one glaring way. She creates a quadroon child for the purpose of fleshing out the future of Jo March. That was as far as she could reasonably have gone.
Little Women is not the most popular of classics. It is also not the most revealing. Not the most clever, neither the funniest. But her characters not only are more than the sum of themselves. The characters are autonomous, and cannot be controlled. They will speak to the reader in their own voices and authorship be damned. The writer had captured something in this book that not only she could never replicate in sequels, but also that no author I have read could or would replicate. This is why I will pick up this book next year, probably during March, if I'm not being careful.