TN Read-Along #8: Little Women Discussion Thread
Touched to the heart, Mrs. March could only stretch out her arms as if to gather children and grandchildren to herself, and say, with face and voice full of motherly love, gratitude, and humility:
“O my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!”
Than…what, Marmee? Your surviving daughters’ children not dying of hoof-and-mouth disease? I know it’s the 1870s and I don’t mean that nobody can possibly find child-rearing fulfilling, but what a comedown for Jo loyalists, seriously. She cut all her hair off and sold a story, but only because she had to, folks! Don’t worry, she’s not one of those…bluestockings!
…So! I could have given folks the usual 2-3 weeks to buy and read the book, but I have a feeling that anyone who wants to participate in this one already owns it, or has read it enough times to punt — and avoiding spoilers is a fool’s errand at this point. (Beth dies. It’s sad. Amy doesn’t; also sad.)
We’ve already done some crabbing about the Marches here, but that mostly focused on Amy. Now’s your chance to kvetch about Jo getting saddled with Bhaer; Meg’s near-constant whining; Beth still playing with dolls at the age of 14; the incessant poor-mouthing when the Marches employ a full-time servant (and Alcott falls rather flat with the rendition of said servant’s dialect); and, if you feel very strongly, any of the other Alcott books concerning Clan March (i.e., Little Men and Jo’s Boys). You can say good things, too, don’t get me wrong. (Free Laurie’s grandfather!)
You may also discuss the movie adaptations (my hunt for a DVD copy of the BBC adaptation from the late ’70s continues), biographical and/or scholarly insights into Alcott, why on earth anyone would make a big deal over pickled limes or lobster salad, or whatever ancillary materials you like.
In the meantime, I leave you with this horseshit:
As Jo received her good-night kiss, Mrs. March whispered gently: “My dear, don’t let the sun go down upon your anger. Forgive each other, help each other, and begin again tomorrow.”
This is Marmee’s purpose in the text, I realize, but as aggrieved as I felt daily by my own, er, “Amos,” Mr. Stupidhead, I knew our mother would never have sold me out like that if he’d burned up my stuff. If anything, she’d have asked me nicely not to kill Mr. S until my dad got home and could say goodbye, but then again, Mr. S would never have done anything that dicky.
Tags: books Louisa May Alcott Mr. Stupidhead parenting gone horribly awry shut up Amy March shut up Marmee The TN Read-Along
I’m going to hell. I hated prissy little Beth and was secretly glad when she died so we could get on with the rest of the damned story. And I kinda liked Amy–she was a self centered little bitch but she owned it! I did keep these opinions to myself when I was 7 but 43 years later I’m glad to have a place to share!
I wonder, if Alcott wrote this today, if people would wear “Team Laurie” or “Team Professor” t-shirts.
And is it wrong that I sort of like Amy? I mean, the story burning was a dick move, but I liked that her attitude was “I’m young and gorgeous, I hate being poor, so I’m going to land a rich dude and leave the slums behind.” Not a liberated attitude, but at least she knew what she wanted.
I haven’t progressed yet in the re-readalong to the part where Professor Bhaer shows up, but I don’t recall that my younger self found him to be any kind of letdown for Jo. If anything, my reaction then was more like “Oh, so she didn’t get Laurie because her REAL true love was still in her future”. Also, marrying Laurie would have been kind of like marrying a brother or a close cousin. Not that Alcott would have skipped it, see Eight Cousins, also she had Amy get him, but still. Marrying the proverbial “boy next door” seems way ickier to me than getting the cool foreign intellectual.
Starring Nancy “Livia Soprano” Marchand?! http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Little_Women_Meg_s_Story/70023659?trkid=2361637#height1258
I just absolutely delighted in reading through that I Hate Amy March thread. I hated her every time I read the book, and I absolutely loathe Kirsten Dunst, so I hated her even more in the movie.
Winona was perfect for Jo, and I honestly cried when she refused Laurie in that scene, even though I knew it was coming.
Tangent: it seems 1994 was the year that Winona played girls with unfathomably hot male best friends kissing her in movies only to have her foolishly leave them for lesser paramours (who on Earth chooses Ben Stiller when Ethan Hawke is making out with you?) (true she chose Ethan in the end, but at first she was all, “no no, I couldn’t possibly, there’s this simian yuppie who needs my attention…”) (Gabriel Byrne was better than Stiller in terms of looks, but he was still, as someone said in that other thread, a boring old egghead. I still DIE that she ended up married to that guy. GUH-ROSS.)
I have gone off course. To bring it back about, the Marches were the worst kind of self-congratulatory liberal types. They probably thought they were such hot shit for bringing their breakfast to the poor family, who needs food when you could live on the self-satisfaction for daaaays?
I remember being Team Professor. He’s a professor! Come on. Laurie was the stupid boy next door who was jerky enough to run off and marry Amy. I think I’m just skipping ahead to Little Men, which I far preferred when I was a kid. (I don’t think I ever read Jo’s Boys.)
I’m a bit reassured to read – after the Amy thread, and a disturbing amount of Jo/Laurie ‘shipping – that I wasn’t the only kid who read Little Women/Good Wives (they were published as two separate books in the UK) and liked Prof. Bhaer far more than Laurie! I always thought he was awesome. Probably partly because he was like my awesome grandfather (who was Dutch, not German, and specifically a Professor of Physics, while we never knew whether Fritz Bhaer had any speciality or anything as far as I can tell), while Laurie was just a pain, and totally unsuitable for Jo! He wanted to wrap her in a luxurious cage she’d have found immensely chafing!
I liked Eight Cousins more than I liked Little Women, though, as a kid – even though I identified with Jo far more than with Rose – and I was delighted, when I finally laid hands on a copy of A Rose In Bloom, to find Rose ended up with what I always found the most satisfying incestuous solution.
Heh, already the vitriol is flying. I’m going to love this one for the snark alone.
I find it interesting that this book is so beloved, and yet its plots and characters are so reviled once you hit the details. Such a contradiction.
So it’s just LW with the other books as a buffet of smugness, right?
I’ve said earlier that I’ve never gotten through Little Women, but I’ll pick it up today and gulp it down so I can join in. But I have gotten up to Beth’s going to the Soft Spoken Better’n You Martyr’s Home in the sky, so I can say a few things (hold back until I finish? You don’t know me at all, do you?)
First, Amy may have been a bitch, but one thing Alcott did well (and I suspect inadvertently, which may explain that a bit) was the heirarchy of “who gets what talent/trait” that shows up in large families. The whole Meg is motherly, Jo is talented, Beth is saintly and Amy is shallow thing gets reinforced a lot in this group.
Jo is talented, and she’s encouraged in that talent in a way many women were not, both as a soul-nourishing and a practical enterprise. Everyone encourages her to write but doesn’t turn down the money she can make in doing so–hooray! Support for women’s talents and money making abilities! It’s so progressive.
But the thing is, Amy has a talent too. She’s an artist, and from what I recall, a good one. But because she’s a) the youngest, b)pretty and c) the one most interested in popularity and, for lack of a better term, “pop culture”, she’s never encouraged the same way Jo is.
Plenty of women drew or painted–it was considered a ladylike accomplishment, much like playing a few tunes on the piano or embroidering something. So she’s never encouraged to think of her art as a way to either express her creative side or earn any money for the family. She just gets told “how nice dear, now come rehearse Jo’s latest play!”
But you can be “shallow” and love your family, want to eat a trendy treat at school and be recognized for something you love to do. If all people ever seem to want you to be is a pretty and eventually vendictive blonde bimbo, well, that’s probably how you’re going to turn out.
As a kid I was a Jo fan and furious with Amy for burning Jo’s book.
But over the years I’ve warmed to Amy. As a child she’s the spoilt pet of the family. She’s sent away to Aunt March because she’d just clutter up the house when Beth is sick (the first time). She’s the youngest, the tag-along, never treated as an equal by her grown up sisters.
She finally does grow up and in the scene where she pays social calls and Jo behaves atrociously I feel for her. Yes, Jo’s funny – but she’s letting the side down by romping with boys she likes and being rude to the old ladies. Amy deserved that trip to Europe and she used it to her advantage.
She could have married for money and turned the man down. She could have insisted on being an artist but she had enough talent to realise she didn’t have enough. (That takes character.) She didn’t marry Laurie for money, she married him because he was a mixture of the familiar boy next door and the glamourous beautiful man. (And she scolded him for being a waste of space before she fell for him.)
I think Alcott doesn’t like Amy much and finds her fake and frivolous. But Amy’s a lot more admirable to me than Meg. What does Meg contribute except to waste money on fripperies she can’t afford, marry a poor man and berate him for his lack of wealth and then produce the abysmal twins and end up a cap-wearing Marmee #2 at age 35?
@Nanc — My 9 year old just read Little Women for the first time and felt the same way about Beth. Her exact words were “she’s a ninny.” She confessed this to me in a whisper, like she was doing something really shameful. She also said Meg was prissy.
And while I do feel Jo should have married Laurie, I do enjoy that Alcott basically invented Bhaer to screw with her fangirls. It would be like Stephanie Meyer having Bella go to college, meet some philosophy major with a crap band, and forget all about Edward and Jacob. :)
Team Professor, all the way. I like Laurie and think he could have done far better than Amy March. I hate hate hate hate hate John Brooke, mostly for being kind of a doormat, and not at all a fleshed-out character at all. The Meg/Brooke romance kind of came out of the blue (to me), and there was a whole lot more we were TOLD instead of SHOWN. That bugs.
I think Bhaer is a good dude and a good match for Jo. He’s described as being so freaking old, but then again, they married folks off rather early back then. But for Jo, who would have been better off in all ways if she were just a lesbian, Bhaer is a good call.
I always find myself comparing this book to Gone With The Wind since they are dealing with the same era (am I right? LW is Civil War, yes?) and I would love to have Scarlett O’Hara give Meg a piece of her mind.
ALSO – why doesn’t MEG go out and get a damn job like Jo does? I’m sure Aunt March pays dick but at least she’s doing something. Meg could sew or some shit, right? Ugh. I really do hate the Little Women.
Buh-bye, Beth. I think you might have been a little slooooooow, and you always bugged, and I wasn’t sad when you died (nice Jesus edit there, Louisa). Then the whiplash with Laurie: “I LURVE JO, OMG” and Amy: “Beth died.” Laurie: “Oh, we has a sad, let’s get married.”
Um? Ick!
The only time Jo ending up with Bhaer didn’t piss me off was when Bhaer was Gabriel Byrne.
Turning briefly to the film adaptations, I remember being wigged out by Christian Bale’s performance as Laurie. I’m thinking specifically when he goes off to Europe and lolls around half drunk all day, acting stalkerish and leering over Amy all, “I WILL have a March sister for my very OWN!” My cousins and I called him “Creepy Laurie,” as in, “Oh, you mean the movie version with Creepy Laurie? Yes, I remember that scene now.” Ack! I wasn’t sure to blame the director or Bale or both or what, but it was unsettling.
I forgot to include a request in my earlier post: Has anyone seen the 1978 production starring Susan Dey (Laurie Partridge!) as Jo and William Shatner as Friedrich Bhaer? My local library has it and I’m wondering if it’s good, a giggle or just painful to watch.
@Rachel — Meg did have a job, she was a governess. It’s only mentioned in passing, so it’s easy to miss. Laurie’s snobby British friends look down on Meg for working.
“I wonder, if Alcott wrote this today, if people would wear “Team Laurie” or “Team Professor” t-shirts.”
I absolutely cannot make it through Little Women, but that comment is gold.
I’d watch the Laurie Partridge and Professor Kirk version in a heartbeat. I found a couple of clips of it on YouTube and it looks like a riot!
(I search for “Little Women Susan Dey”)
FYI, all (I think) of Alcott’s books are available free on iBooks; certainly all of those discussed above.
Good Lord, the Winona Ryder “Little Women” is almost 17 years old?!?! Fuckkkk.
Anyway, count me in as an Amy fan. This was my first feature-length book I read when I was a little girl, and I used to drive my mom crazy, as every day I would pick a Little Woman to “be” that day, and refused to respond to any name but the character du jour. I was Amy as often as possible. Probably because I had fine, pin-straight hair and was very shy; I wanted some curls and sass! And I thought Kirsten Dunst was the PERFECT Amy. It still pisses me off that effing Samantha Mathis comes in and replaces her. But it’s fitting, because in the book I always felt Amy’s transformation was very Stepford Wife and didn’t like it one bit.
Also, Amy had so much drama! Falling in the lake, burning Jo’s manuscript, lime woes. She was such a refreshing change of pace from irritating Meg’s hand obsession and Beth’s goody-goody boringness. Sorry, Beth.
Does anyone else here remember a version of the book that had a glossy picture of Jo sitting in a tree, or next to a tree, reading, and eating an apple? I always loved that picture, and wished I could do the same thing, only I lived in an apartment building with no trees, and all the apples my family got looked like crap.
Truly the only way I am able to deal with Amy stealing Jo’s Europe trip and hunky rich Laurie is to imagine that Jo and Laurie have some hook-ups in their later years. They spend a TON of time together in Little Men and Jo’s Boys so maybe…just maybe…Jo got to experience a little Laurie-loving. And my cold black heart would like it if Amy was getting her perfect life screwed with in some way. I understand that this thinking may put some people off (endorsed cheating!) but I truly just dislike the Amy character that much. How can you write someone that is pretty, gets to be marry the rich guy, has the perfect child, perfect home, talented at art, blecgh! It would be palatable if they were setting her up for a fall at the end to mitigate all the goodness thrown Amy’s way.
@Rachel – Meg does have a job. She’s the governess for the King children.
As for Amy/Laurie/Jo/Bhaer I didn’t love Jo ending up with the professor when I first read the book (many moons ago) but I think that ultimately Jo/Laurie would have been a disaster and I do LIKE the professor.
Overall, I think there are a lot of good points tot he book. For example, Meg/Brooke, her parents make them wait until she is older, because when the romance starts, she is “too young to be engaged” so even though she is a young bride, to us, her parents tried to keep her from getting married too young.
As for the book burning…yeah, I would have let Amy drown, even if I do eventually start liking her.
Although I would agree that it lacks the depth of character of Little Women and is probably not as good a book, my favorite of the trilogy has always been Little Men. This is probably because it’s about the children at Jo’s school so there’s less sisterly conflict and more Victorian-style kids’ horseplay (functional coal-fired child’s stove! THAT would never get on shelves these days). Jo’s Boys lost it for me when Jo discovers that Dan, the Outsiders-style former juvenile delinquent (but who has the most intelligence and character of the lot) and the two of them agree that he can never aspire to the hand of Amy’s daughter, because, well, he’s poor and from a bad family.
“Starring William Shatner as Friedrich Bhaer” means I will endure any amount of pain to watch it.
I always liked the Amy/Jo dichotomy – Amy was spoiled and kind of a brat but she knew how to get things done in society (including making nice to the rich old lady in a reasonably sincere way), while Jo had the good heart and strong character but really took forever to learn how to function as a general adult person. And that’s why I like the scenes where they are together because it seems like if you combined them, they would be an UberWoman of kickass proportions but separately they both had real strengths and real failings.
I sympathized with Meg’s jam-related problems. I have no idea how anyone could make homemade jam without addiitonal pectin sold in a box at Safeway.
In all, my favorite relationship was Beth and Laurie’s grandpa. When she was young and super-shy and would go play the piano and he would listen? That was just so dang sweet. Go old Mr. Laurence.
Has anyone besides me ever seen the Little Women anime? I stumbled upon it on some religious station a few times while channel surfing, and it it so ridiculously bad it’s hilarious!
Can I just say that I think the best thing about “Little Women” is the movies that came from it? First of all because I love Katharine Hepburn from the classic and Ryder, Sarandon, Bale from the re-make. Just how many versions of this film are there?! Will have to head over to Netflix after work.
BTW my fav line is still from the t-shirt thread (and I give full credit to the person who said it – sorry I forgot who it was!)
“…if my sister Europed me out of a Laurie.” BEST. LINE. EVER.
I read a biography of Lousia May Alcott recently – this one, to be specific – and it puts a really interesting spin on Little Women in some ways.
It’s particularly interesting to know that she wrote it (and its sequels) from purely mercenary motivations – she disdained writing “moral pap for children” but saw that there was a market for it. Similarly she hadn’t originally wanted to pair Jo off at all, but faced a lot of popular/publisher pressure to do so, so she came up with Prof Bhaer as the most perverse match she could get away with.
You see her reacting against the norms du jour of kiddie-lit all over the place, too – she makes several asides about how things would have gone if this was a typical “moral” novel and how this is different because the March girl in question is a human being. Seems there was just only so far she could push, given her goals for the book.
You know what’s interesting, speaking as someone who couldn’t read LW, attempted to listen to it in audiobook (try craftlit.com’s archives for that) and couldn’t finish it there either?
I thought everyone our age LOVED Little Women. Like it seemed MANDATORY that you adore Jo and Laurie and cry over Beth and uh, whatever for Amy. Instead, there’s hate! Hooray!
Why I hate Prof Bhaer:
Jo writes trashy thrillers and earns money (go, Jo!), and when Prof Bhaer realizes that she’s publishing sensational stories under a pseudonym, he decides to make it his business to instruct her and let her know the error of her ways…
First of all, a 19th-century woman earning money for writing trashy stories is awesome! Shut up, Prof Bhaer. Plus he is all passive aggressive about it. He pretends that he doesn’t know she is writing the stories, and just casually picks one up and makes a big speech about how terrible they are and how much he dislikes them. Then he crumbles up the paper and throws it into the fire. And poor Jo blushes and blushes… and then marries the self-righteous bastard and lets him instruct and guide her for the rest of her days. Puke.
I know it’s beyond cliched for me to be annoyed that Jo doesn’t end up with Laurie (and yes, “my sister Europed me out of a Laurie” is a phenomenal phrase). But I think what’s most irritating is the reasoning — they’re both too temperamental/have anger issues, and so it’s better if they end up with more sedate people who complement them. Because it brings me painfully back to reality. Yes, it’s true — they would have crazy fights and it would have been an unhappy marriage. But I don’t read fiction for a reality check. C’mon! Let the bookish awkward girl get the hot, rich guy! Let me have my fantasy, please!
Professor Bhaer is ok, and not really so very old by modern standards — in his 40s, I think? But I always felt that Jo and Laurie had much better chemistry. Even/especially when he comes back from Europe with Amy as his wife.
Re: Beth, wouldn’t you think a child that’s too shy to go to the store by herself in her early teens needed some therapy?
The movies have been mish-mashed in my memory on purpose so that Katherine Hepburn’s Jo gets Gabriel Byrne’s Professor. :)
Ugh, yeah.
Amy when she grows up doesn’t bug me: if you’re a girl in the 1870s, there are worse things to aspire to than marrying a rich guy, and Jo had already turned Laurie down. (Because…shut up, Alcott.) Amy as a kid, oh my God. STRANGULATION.
My mom read the original thread, and we had a whole discussion comparing the Marches to the Bennets. (Yeah, five Bennets, but whatever: Kitty is Diet Lydia and everyone in the damn story knows it, even.) In both cases, the protagonist-ish person is the snarky intellectual second-oldest sister, with the others as Proper/Motherly, Pious/Saintly, and Flirty in descending age. Only Jane Bennet is way the hell less irritating than Meg, and Mary Bennet way more slappable than Beth. Possibly because we’re not supposed to learn Dated Moral Lessons from Jane* or being prepped to feel sorry when Mary dies.
I mentioned this in the other thread, but I’m always halfway between liking Alcott’s works and being thrown out by the bits where you suck if you don’t believe in this particular strand of 1880s American Christianity. Historical context and all, sure, but I’m not reading for college, and screw you, Louisa. I like my silk and my sensational novels. Pfft.
*Oh my God, the Moffats’ party. Shut up, Laurie. Shut up, Alcott. LET THE GIRL HAVE A GOOD TIME FOR ONE GODDAMN NIGHT, MY GOD.
“It would be like Stephanie Meyer having Bella go to college, meet some philosophy major with a crap band, and forget all about Edward and Jacob.”
Now that’s a book I’d read, just to see how Edward would hilariously self-destruct before committing suicide.
I have to chime in, as one of those people that *loved* this book when I was younger, but now I very much agree with the snark about it too–I always got confused by the drawn-out descriptions of the plays. How many people were in the play? We know Beth was too shy to be in it, and I maybe remember something about either Meg or Amy being too fussy to be in it…so…who plays all the characters, and how? Most confusing kid-play ever, I’m sure. And, who was in the audience, then? Even when I was young, this upset and confused me.
OMG. As much as I generally liked this book as a little girl, I never got over Amy marrying Laurie and referring to him as, “My Lord.”
NO. NO. NO. And? NO.
Worst ever film adaptation – well, I think they all sucked. But the impossibly bland Samantha Mathis as grown up Amy, Claire Danes as dying Beth (I just really can’t stand Claire Danes – she always strikes me, in those red carpet photos, as if she’s transmitting the message, “I am SO MUCH BETTER THAN YOU”; even more so than Gwyneth Paltrow), Winona Ryder as Jo (REALLY?), and someone forgettable as Meg – not to mention Saintly Sister Susan Sarandon as – ACK – “Marmee”?
I can’t stop shuddering.
“Starring William Shatner as Friedrich Bhaer”
THIS. THIS. WHY is this not available?!! WHY??!
Seriously, on a reread, I’m more struck by your point, @Alli – Bhaer really is passive-aggressive and preachy. I guess I was sold on it for so long because I thought Gabriel Byrne was smokin’ hot. :P And then the Lucy/Prof. Jean-Paul relationship from ‘Villette’ (so much more tormented! so much more sado-masochism! woo!) edged Jo/Bhaer out in my mind.
Also, is anyone else kind of annoyed that, at the end, Amy only has the one v. v. frail child? It’s like some icky, icky “well, she was pretty & now she’s rich and has the husband ALL THE FANGIRLS wanted, but at least her kid is precarious!” pseudo-balance that I don’t like one bit. Why not go the whole hog and have her kid be adorable?
Finally, @Allison – yes! It would be like some unholy mash-up of “The Graduate” and “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” With a truckload of glitter.
Little Men had a couple of fantastic parts to it, with violin playing Nat, the fighter Dan, dreamer Demi, dainty Daisy and the fantastic Nan who just wanted to do everything the boys did. (heh, that would have been me)
Although, my favorite Alcott book is still An Old Fashioned Girl. I read an old first print book i bought at used bookstore when I was a little gir at least twice a year. In fact, just thinking about the book makes me smile. Is it a great work of fiction? Eh, probably not, but the lead character, Polly, just reminds me so much of the person I always aspire to be.
“To be strong, and beautiful, and go round making music all the time.” Maybe it’s just because I’m a singer and that’s exactly what I wish I could do, or then again, maybe it’s just because I’m a big ol’ sap. :)
Does anyone remember the episode of Friend where Joey reads Little Women? I think the only other book he had ever read was The Shining, and he asks if the women are “like, scary little?”.
Oh I am totally Team Professor. He’s a sweet good person who wants her to write from her heart, takes care of his nephews, and reads Goethe. Laurie’s a spoiled drunken playboy with more money than sense who MARRIES AMY. And he grew up with them so he should totally know better.
Consider me Team Professor. Laurie was just so colorless, he belonged with Amy so they could be handsome and colorless together.
Agreed that Marmee March is insufferable in the book–so solemn, so saintly, everything a Christian parable. That’s why I adore the 90s movie so much. Susan Sarandon! Perfect! She can be preachy and still be awesome!
Because (a) I’m a guy and (b) I read Little Men first (because my clueless grandmother thought the title made it a suitable gift for a boy), I just took Jo being married to Prof. Bhaer as a given. It was decades before I bothered to take a look at its “prequel.” Now that I’ve read enough to place Little Men in its context, I find it kind of fun to read, often for the details around the edges, like Plumfield having indoor plumbing (multiple tubs to bathe a bunch of boys at once), or what the schedule of meals was then (the big midday meal being “dinner” with lunch just a snack beforehand to tide you over, and the less formal evening meal being “tea” as in England), and how to prepare potatoes and squash as side dishes for steak. The tone is less heavily moralizing than in LW too, and more humorous.
Jo’s Boys has its interest, seeing what happens with the third generation and all, but I concur that the book
And a jailbird! (Though the killing for which he served time was in self-defense, which makes the whole “disgrace” of it dubious to me.) But yes; Alcott at times will seem to have a surprisingly modern outlook, and then one runs into a situation like this, where the class-consciousness is so unavoidable and so impossible to empathize with. In the end, after two books, Dan still isn’t worthy to mingle with the family that took him in. Yuck.
I don’t think Alcott was writing her characters to be likable, I think she was writing them to be realistic, multi-dimensional people. Which was revolutionary in Victorian literature (Charles Dickens, I’m looking at you). So I don’t mind, or rather, I don’t think it detracts from the story that they all have their weaknesses.
And you haven’t lived untill you’ve seen The Shat as Prof. Bhaer. Awesome!
I didn’t read the books until college, and the reason I read them at all was because of the Shatner version. Susan Dey was pretty decent, and poor little Jan Brady died so well as Beth. Really, I was on Team Professor from the start! The June Allyson version was too overwrought, never liked Winnie’s version, and can’t quite get into the Katherine Hepburn camp first version.
The story made me a bit teary eyed, but I knew Laurie would end up with Amy anyway, so never had the angst over Jo’s beautiful boy that my sisters did. Frankly, he seemed a bit too shallow – none of the deeper feelings one would expect Jo to have.
I just loved kiddie lit – easily my favorite class!
Just finished my eleventyhundredth reading of Jean Webster’s “Daddy Long Legs”, and this passage cracked me up, in light of recent conversations on this site:
“One book isn’t enough. I have four going at once. Just now, they’re Tennyson’s poems and Vanity Fair and Kipling’s Plain Tales and–don’t laugh–Little Women.
I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn’t brought up on Little Women. I haven’t told anybody though (that WOULD stamp me as queer). I just quietly went and bought it with $1.12 of my last month’s allowance; and the next time somebody mentions pickled limes, I’ll know what she is talking about!”
Suzanne: In Little Men and subsequently, we see Amy’s daughter Bess grow into an impossibly angelic, lovely creature adored by all. Pretty hard to take.]
Vicky: YES! The best thing in Little Men is the portrayal of Nan: someone who doesn’t quite fit in at first, who wants to be one of the boys but also accepted by the girls, and then (while still very young) discovers an aptitude for medicine. And Jo is absolutely on her side and tells her husband, “Fritz, I see what we can do for that child. She wants something to live for even now, and will be one of the sharp, strong, discontented women if she does not have it. Don’t let us snub her restless little nature, but do our best to give her the work she likes, and by and by persuade her father to let her study medicine. She will make a capital doctor.” And that is just what Nan does in the third book. And even though she has suitors and could have chosen otherwise, she decides not to marry. Alcott is at her best with Nan’s story.
@Rinaldo: And at her laziest with Stuffy’s. Not that anyone was begging for more Stuffy, but he basically eats a stick of butter and dies. (I believe the exact wording is “fit of apoplexy,” but now I’m going to have to look it up…okay, I was close: “Stuffy became an alderman, and died suddenly of apoplexy after a public dinner.”)
For some reason, LW is the book I go back to time and time again. I think I’ve managed to utterly destroy about four copies in my 30+ years. Like most above, I love Jo…mostly because I identify with her temper. I know she sort of, maybe, eventually gets it somewhat under control, but I love knowing that it’s there and that she has to struggle.
Oh, Amy. My irritation with her was immense, even as a kid. I clearly remember scientifically testing time I could endure a clothespin-on-my-nose, to see if it would be possible to sleep that way. NOPE.
I grew up watching the June Allyson version (thanks for mentioning it, funtime42–thought I was the only one who’d seen it!), although I think of it as the Elizabeth Taylor version. She definitely played Amy as a smarmy, breathy, brat. One of my proudest moments was talking to my dad about this movie, having seen it at a friend’s house, and saying something about Elizabeth Taylor as Amy. My brilliant literary father insisted she couldn’t have been Amy, because “Liz Taylor is famous for dark hair!”. I was adamant enough that he called his sister up (she was the only one he’d trust over himself) and smugly asked her who played Amy in that version. I could taste sweet victory when he said “huh. Guess…I …I was…wrong”. Mm, victory. Tastes like limes!
I am firmly in the Team Amy camp, but I’m surprised by the number of defenders she has here. Yes she was a brat as a child, but like LizzieKath said, I always found the Jo/Amy dichotomy the most interesting part of the books.
I think my problem with Jo was that I never truly understood her. I wanted to, but was always puzzled by the “Well, of course, every girl wants to be Jo March” type statements. I just couldn’t see why she was often held up to me as a children’s lit feminist icon. I thought Nan was a much better example. I enjoyed reading about Jo, found her struggles for money and independence interesting, but I certainly didn’t want to be like her. She always went about things in exactly the wrong way and it was so frustrating. At least Amy figured out how to work the system and accomplished her goals with a lot less drama.
Years ago when doing my masters in children’s lit I came across an essay that was basically In Defense of Amy March, but as it wasn’t connected to my thesis topic I didn’t keep a copy. I don’t remember much except it took every intense, unspoken, shameful feeling I had about Amy and Jo (ie liked the former, not the latter) and turned it into an academic essay. Until then it hadn’t occured to me other people might feel the way I did about them.