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
Also, forgot to say:
@mel I love Daddy Long Legs with a passion but made the mistake of rereading the sequel Dear Enemy as an adult. All the talk about eugenics and breeding out ‘feeble-mindedness’ was just disturbing. On the other hand,the book makes an interesting counterpoint to Little Women re: the heroine refusing the rich, handsome, shallow suiter and marrying the older, homely, more experienced professor/doctor.
Meredith: I think your daughter is an excellent judge of [fictional] character! Upon reflection, I have to conclude that part of my Beth-hate comes from watching Margaret O’Brien’s portrayal.
Cat: Victory. Tastes like limes. That’s another t-shirt!
Funnily enough when I went to request the 1978 version of LW from my library (Jan Brady is Beth? Thanks for that info Funtime42!) there’s a note that says the DVD is in for repair so they aren’t taking requests. Guess I’ll check out the local small town vid store this weekend.
I started out as Team Jo when I first read LW, but re-reading it recently, I have to say that I’m more Team Amy than Team Jo. I just found Jo’s unwillingness to compromise and terrible manners really hard to stomach after a certain point — ultimately, if you insist on doing things your way, you might not be able rely on the kindness of dowager aunts to take you to Europe etc. As for Laurie, I don’t think he would have worked with Jo, so it doesn’t bother me that Jo didn’t get him. I also wish she had chosen herself, a la Kelly Taylor.
I quite liked the Professor, but what bugged was the idea that, except for Beth (and only because she died)and Amy, all of the women in the book were “taught” to be better, more gentle people by their mens. Marmee credited Absentee Pa for teaching her to curb her temper, John Brooke made Meg less selfish, the Professor made Jo stop writing trashy novels.
Even though Jo gets the credit for being the most independent, with the writing career aspirations and cutting her hair off, I actually think Amy’s the one who matured the most without the help of a wise man to make her heart grow three sizes. In fact, Amy was the one who made Laurie mature by ordering him to stop wallowing and get a job. I raise a pickled lime to you, Amy March, even if your nose isn’t perfect!
Oh, Jo. You were awesome and strong and smart and foolishly loud-mouthed (for the 1800s) and didn’t want to get trapped in a loveless marriage with Laurie. Good for you! It’s too bad that you were portrayed by (blech) Thiefy McThieferton. God, I wish I could have intervened with a casting director on your behalf. Alas.
Mel: As much as I love LW, Daddy Long Legs and Dear Enemy by Jean Webster are twice as treasured and you may be the only person I’ve ever seen mention either!
@Nanc — Thanks :). It was really kind of funny. She finished the book and had this furtive, sort of shamefaced look, then she confessed she didn’t like Beth or Meg, thought Laurie should have married Jo, and thought Amy sounded like the most fun to be around.
And word on the “Prof. must teach wayward Jo a lesson about the dangers of trashy fiction” annoyance. What makes it doubly ironic, at least for me, is that Alcott supported her family with trashy fiction (under a pen name). Since Bronson Alcott was a high-minded idiot, it fell to Louisa to bring in money.
Did anybody have to read Invincible Louisa back in elementary school? It’s an old biography of LMA that won the Newbery award. It works very hard to make the Alcotts into the Marches.
@Charlotte: “She always went about things in exactly the wrong way and it was so frustrating.”
I agree with you about this; I always waffled about whether Jo was being contrary and awkward on purpose or if she just didn’t grasp that she was making things harder on everyone for no reason.
In fact, in retrospect I really didn’t like any of the characters in LW. I wasn’t too upset when Laurie married Amy, because he barely registered as having a personality. I was way more upset about Amy burning the book than Amy stealing the “man”. Put me down as another who preferred Nan and Rose to any of the original-flavor crew.
There’s a bit in either Jo’s Boys or Little Men where the kids are making weird bargains with God e.g. “If you let us get extra dessert for dinner we’ll walk on all fours and bark like a dog for an afternoon.” Does anyone else recall that? Somehow that scene struck me as more real to the way children actually think than anything in LW. Definitely more creative than Jo’s tiresome plays. It’s stuck with me for years even after I forgot most of the rest of the plot.
I have a spotty track record with Alcott in general. I read Eight Cousins first and loved it when I was like 6. I didn’t realize until years later that it was even written by Alcott. I read LW a few years later and hated it, then read LM and Jo’s Boys and loved them.
I remember the 70s version — it was a fairly big deal in Tucson, where I grew up, because Amy was played by Ann Dusenberry, whose mother was a local politician. You may remember Ann Dusenberry from her turn in “Jaws 2” as the girl whose boyfriend gets eaten by the shark while she cowers in the boat — she’s later discovered by Brody and utters the line “sh … sh … SHARK!!”
The 70s version did indeed have a great cast — Meredith Baxter as Meg, and of course Susan Dey and Eve Plumb, with Dorothy Maguire as Marmee and Aunt March played by the woman who played Aunt Zelda in Sigmund & The Sea Monsters, whose name I am blanking on.
(Side note: last year I happened to meet Susan Dey while working on a theater project, and she was lovely, smart and very gracious.)
The hilarious part of the 70s version was that they spun it off into a TV series. Dey did not come back — I think Jessica Harper replaced her. Eve Plumb came back as their cousin, who looked JUST LIKE BETH (whaddya know.)
I do love the various film versions all for different reasons. The Katharine Hepburn version is really only good for Hepburn herself — the Amy is really bad, if I remember correctly (any of them where they make a grown-up Amy play young Amy always put the actress in an impossible position. Dunst morphing into Mathis at least let us have a properly aging Amy.)
I don’t care for June Allyson as Jo, but I am a sap for Margaret O’Brien in anything (I know, I know), and Janet Leigh does fine as Meg, I think.
The Winona Ryder version is really the best — the cast is great — I think they manage to give dimension to even the small roles like John Brook. And who doesn’t want Susan Sarandon as their wise mother?
I used to be so vehemently anti-Bhaer when I first read the book — I’ve changed my stance a bit on that, and I wonder if it has anything to do with being older and having a different perspective on what goes into good relationships? (Even so, I think I’m substituting Byrne in for the book Bhaer.)
I never read the other Alcott books; I think I’ll need to, now.
Did anyone see the Broadway musical version a few years back? It’s too much of a tangent to go into here since this post is so long, but one of my colleagues was one of the writers.
Mel and Katie: I too have a fondness for Daddy Long Legs (Dear Enemy considerably less). For one thing (similar to Little Men in this way), it gives a reader better insight into what a particular time and place were really like than the “great literature” of the period — where else can I get a real picture of a women’s college c. 1900? — the dorm arrangements, what people wore to class (they “dressed” for dinner), the basketball team and student elections, activities between terms, all that.
I’ll also confess that I prefer the pragmatic outlook in DLL to the piousness in LW. When Judy Abbott (late in the book) learns of a struggling family who’d be helped by a monetary gift, she’ll have nothing to do with the mother calling it a blessing from the Lord: “No, it came from Mr. Smith. And the good Lord didn’t put it into his head, I did.”
One thing that can be startling to a present-day reader in the Alcott books is the emphasis on housewifery (serious attention to sewing and cooking as part of education, caring about a well-stocked linen closet) as part of a feminist outlook. It makes more sense when one understands that it was a reaction to well-off women who lived idle lives, leaving everything to the servants and having no idea how to look after themselves or anyone else.
@Claire – I remember that episode of Friends! Rachel and Joey had an argument and yelled spoilers at each other, and when Rachel says, “Beth dies” Joey practically got hysterical and Rachel had to lie to him to calm him down. And later Joey put the book in the freezer because Beth was real sick and it wasn’t looking too good….
ANYway. When I lived near Boston many years ago, an older woman I worked with said Alcott was awful because she wrote “pornography.” I assume she was talking about Alcott’s thrillers.
I like the Winona Ryder movie version best, but I have to say that the audience I saw it with at the theater laughed out loud when Jo rants about being “ugly.” Because Winona, um, isn’t.
I also am full of Jean Webster love. I mean, not so much the eugenics wackiness in the second book, but I can ignore it because the rest of the novel is awesome, and I love the heroine. (And that, while she goes from idle-society-woman to, well, not, she doesn’t start off being useless or end by giving up pretty dresses and good times.)
@Mel: “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”
AHhh… I LOVE “Daddy Long Legs” too.
So – there’s a version of “Little Women” with WILLIAM SHATNER??? How have I not heard of/seen this????????????????????????????????
I truly hated “Little Men” more than “Little Women” because of Amy & Laurie’s daughter – described as a petted, adored little “princess” – and for some reason, this quote from the (gaaahhh) “princess” has been stuck in my brain for years:
“Don’t cry, pretty boy. I will tiss you! I will tiss you all!”
Seriously. “Tiss” this.
As a kid, I intensely disliked Amy, because she had all these advantages, and was still bratty. But now, I think she is the one daughter who has the most personality. Beth is sweet, Jo is reactionary (rebelling for the sake of it, many times – and I think this is a stronger characterization of her than “writer” is) and Meg – I can’t even think of a defining character for Meg. She just bores me. And Marmee is boring too, with no emotion but love and empathy to show. But Amy has dimension, for me.
I agreed that Amy deserved the Europe trip – she had earned it through hanging out with Aunt March. But I never understood Laurie ending up with any of the March girls, once Beth had died. I could have believed Laurie marrying Beth, but not any of the others.
Several years ago, they published Alcott’s first full-length novel, called something like “A long fatal love chase”. It is very entertaining, in its portrait of the characters, so stormy and shallow, all at once.
“*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.”
WORD. I was doing my reread last night and when I got to this chapter I was all “wait, was Laurie really this much of a hypocritical self-righteous little younger-than-Meg-so-stuff-it-youngster prig the whole time?”
I mean, geez! The girl gets to wear a pretty dress and show some bazoom for once in her Pilgrim’s Progress, do some flirting and drink some champagne, and along comes Laurie to piss all over her leg about it! And the fact that he’s two years younger than she is really hackled me up–when I want the opinion of the Alcott equivalent of some eighth grade internet troll, Laurie, I’ll ask for it.
And by the by, did anyone else think it was wierd, back when they read the book as kids, that “Laurie” is considered more masculine than “Dora”? They’re both GIRL NAMES! Why not Theo? No wonder Jo couldn’t take his proposal seriously.
@Emma- I think the “bargains with God” thing is actually from Anne of Ingleside, one of the Anne of Green Gables sequels.
I think one of the things that’s quite endearing about LW is that the girls are all flawed, in ways that I feel are relatable. Meg likes nice things and falls in love with a man who doesn’t have a lot of money, and has to learn to control her impulses. Jo gets some very hard knocks for being ostentatiously independent and unwilling to perform the niceties that grease the social wheels. Even Amy, who I do feel the family supports in her art, comes to a realization that desire and aptitude doesn’t equal talent and genius. That in and of itself is interesting to me, as Jo is perfectly happy to ply her talent for commercial gain and to become independent, while Amy considers her art above the consideration of filthy lucre and would rather marry for money than labor for it, once it becomes clear that she won’t ever be a “master” of art.
That resonates very personally for me, as I am a professional musician and often take gigs for weddings, commercials, dance classes, etc- things that are not “art” but help pay the rent. My brother, who is also a musician, considers this selling out, as he would never play for any reason other than to fill his spiritual need. I think that using my music to be self-supporting is a hell of a lot better than having a soul crushing day job, even if it isn’t always art.
The least realistic of the girls, for my money, is Beth, who is literally too good to live.
Oh, I’m late to this, but when I was a kid, I wrote a sequel in my head where Jo and Laurie end up together after Amy and the professor die. :)
Jo was my favorite, like most people, but I liked all the girls in different ways (in my head they were kind of like the civil war era “Sex and the City” characters, each representing a different type).
I saw the Winona Ryder version of the movie a couple of years ago, and I thought I remembered it being lovely. It wasn’t! They all look the part, but the acting was awful.
@Fiona, I wonder if Alcott planned to kill Beth all along, or was halfway through, had her characters growing up, and realized she’d created a monster–one so perfect and darling and timid that she literally could not function in the adult world? Angelic shy children are revered in classic children’s lit, but angelic shy grownups start to pall–we know you’re bashful and you do do chores and all but how long is the family supposed to carry this person once she’s a full grown adult?
Bring on the consumption and cue the choir, Beth’s off to The Big Perfect in the sky.
“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!”
Netflix has it!
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Little_Women/70078798?trkid=2361637
@Jen S- Beth is actually based on Lizzie, LMA’s sister who died at 23. I would guess that Alcott could mine the stories of Anna (Meg) and May (Amy) and show them warts and all, but really couldn’t portray Lizzie as anything other than a saint, since they had already lost her.
@Profreader- I saw the LW musical on Broadway; I had a mixed reaction to it, but I loved Sutton Foster, who played Jo, and I really liked the portrayal of Beth. It was the first time that Beth seemed like a real person to me, instead of a lovely angelic cutout. In the scene at the beach with Jo and Beth flying the kite and discussing that Beth was going to die soon, I shed my first real, honest tears ever over Beth’s demise.
So something I haven’t seen come up yet in the thread are my favorite parts of both books; they all have SOMEthing in common but I’m not sure how to put it. The…fun? Bits? No moralizing, no character development, just descriptive chapters of the things people do for fun.
In Little Men it’s the chapter of the crops they each raise (Nan and her medicinal herbs, Stuffy and his melons, Dan and all the awesome stuff he collects in the woods) and the chapter where they’re sitting around the fire telling stories, or the chapter about the games they make up (Brops, anyone?) that kinda thing.
In Little Women it’s definitely the chapter about their made-up newspaper and the little notes they leave for each other in the post-office box (“The P.C. and the P.O.” the chapter’s called) the chapter where they go for a picnic on a little island (“Camp Lawrence” which, dumb name, but a fun story) and the chapter where we first meet Daisy and Demi.
I’m not sure WHY I love these bits so much, but even after the umpteen millionth rereading I’m still not tired of them. Probably the lack of sermonizing and the wealth of details I’m sure. SO fun.
Check on the love for Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy!
Also, I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion of Eight Cousins and its creepy assumption essentially from page 1 that Rose is going to marry one of her cousins…she just has to pick which one.
The Susan Dey/William Shatner LW is YouTube-able:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nag2eiC0A6c&feature=related
If you just want to see Shatner-as-Bhaer teach Jo some German…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C69_eidLwlM
Interesting — I’d forgotten that Susan Dey’s Jo was a little more soft-edged than some other portrayals (more like Winona Ryder in that way.)
Rebecca, I tried to do that discussion….
I think Archie/Phebe was the old school equivalent of Ron/Hermione, somehow. Like, I never got why Rose and Archie wouldn’t be interested in each other on some level, it was just there to get Phebe married into the family. Otherwise Rose’s choices were Obviously Wrong Party Cousin and Nerd Cousin.
…Yeah, weird dichotomies there.
Hey, can we put DLL on the list for next time?
@Jennifer: The read-along selections come from books I already have in the house (it began as a flagrant attempt to work through the unread pile instead of, say, watching Ocean’s 13 for the 6th time). Thus all the baseball, true crime, and true baseball crime. (BARTMAN!) (just kidding)
The marrying-her-cousin thing never creeped me that bad. I think I read enough Victorian lit as a kid that I just figured that was normal in books of that type (see: Jane Eyre and St. John; her rationale for not marrying him isn’t that he’s her cousin, but that she doesn’t like him That Way — with good reason, he’s an ass), although I do recall asking my mother with some apprehension if that was something I could expect to have to do.
@ Fiona
‘ I think the “bargains with God” thing is actually from Anne of Ingleside, one of the Anne of Green Gables sequels.’
Actually there is a chapter in ‘Little Men’ which deals with Demi’s invention of the ‘Kitty Mouse’ a fearsome god who demands (says Demi) that the small children sacrifice their favorite toys into a fire.
Although it does appear in Anne of Ingleside as well, so you are correct there, only in that case it was actual God, not ‘pretendy, made up to scare everyone witless, God’
I loved LW, because I could relate to ‘naughty Jo’ but I was never as keen on the sequels. I pretty much feel the same about Jo March as about Katy Carr in Susan Coolidge’s novel series. I liked her better before Cousin Helen worked her magic and turned her into a robot…
Also I loved ‘Daddy Long Legs’ but I had never heard of the sequel and I’m going right now to look up a copy.
I am only in chapter 1 and I can’t stand any of them! They are all pretty irritating and self centered.
I’ve re-read this novel recently and I still love it (and I still cry when Beth dies, because I’m a wuss).
During this recent re-read, I realised that I’m more Team Amy than Team Jo. Amy is a spoiled girl, but she’s also likeable and charming. Jo is neither of those things.
I too am leaning towards Team Amy, if only because she’s the only one who accepts reality, for God’s sake. It’s all well and good to be a writer and independent but if you want any freinds you’ll at least have to pretend to be intrested in them for fifteen minutes at a time.
I will say though, that re-reading that proposal scene with Jo and Laurie I softened a good bit towards her and have to agree that as much as my impetuous “LOVE CONQUERES ALL!” self wanted them together, Jo was right. They really weren’t suited as a married couple. And Alcott really captured that bundle of awful feelings when you have to tell someone you love dearly that it’s just not going to work: the guilt, the desperate wishing to avoid this conversation, the flares of anger that this person who insists that all he wants is your happiness is refusing to listen. And when she’s walking home, feeling as if “she had murdered some innocent thing, and buried it under the leaves”…well, that’s it. Exactly it.
Awww… love the youtube links… William Shatner before he needed a girdle!!!!
This is a point I think has been muddied by all the film versions of LW, but is very clearly drawn in the book:
In the pivotal scene where the Europe trip hangs in the balance between Jo and Amy, Jo behaves horribly and pretty much leaves the aunt with no choice but to invite Amy instead. Bringing and paying for a March girl was an extra thing that Aunt Carroll was doing; she already had her husband and her daughter going. She invited a March in order to do the family a good turn and also to have a companion for her daughter. In her note inviting Amy, she writes, “I planned at first to ask Jo; but as “favors burden her” and she “hates French”, I think I won’t venture to invite her. Amy is more docile, will make a good companion for Flo, and receive gratefully any help the trip may give her.” As Marmee points out to Jo, when someone is doing a favor or making a gift of something, it’s not up to the recipients to dictate the terms.
I say this as someone who loves Jo and who has never forgiven Amy for burning the book, but Jo had it coming.
Coming back again to this thread — I missed replying to Fiona further up the page re the Broadway musical: Yes, a mixed reaction is certainly what the musical inspires (and I say that will all respect to my lyricist friend.) The story of how it even came to be is crazy — the journey of many Broadway shows seems to fall under that “you don’t want to know how laws and sausages are made” saying.
Megan McGinnis, who played Beth, is a really gifted actress (and a nice person) — who just got done playing the lead in a musical version of DADDY LONG LEGS out in California. She can carve out a career in the genre — !
@Fiona – I agree with you, although I can’t say I was ever a huge fan of any of the March girls (although I read the book so many times!). I hated Amy’s burning Jo’s book (although let’s not forget that Jo stayed so angry that she let Amy fall through the ice and was horrified and realized how much she loved Amy; also, Amy was genuinely sorry for what she’d done).
I always thought Jo shot herself through the foot (multiple times) re: the Europe trip. She was rude and shot off her big mouth and did herself out of the trip!
I think I would be more sympathetic to the girls’ claims of poverty if they didn’t have a full-time, live-in housekeeper/cook. I was one of the few poor kids in a relatively wealthy school district, so to some extent I know how it feels when quite a lot of the people around you are from families with more money than yours and are not shy about making sure you know it, but: really.
I found myself kind of “eh” on a lot of the characters. I have the book but haven’t read it in years, so I was a little surprised in some cases by how very eh I was.
– Meg: Like I said, to some extent I sympathize with the girls’ financial issues, and with Meg even more so because she’s old enough to remember when the family DID have money and wants were relatively few. On the other hand, she takes it… pretty far, to the extent of showing her ass after knowingly marrying a poor man. (Which seems like it would be somewhat more understandable if, say, Sallie Moffat, who grew up with more than enough to provide for any desire, had married John Brooke, but still. C’mon, Meg.)
– Jo: I kind of think almost anyone who has a younger sibling (or two or three or…) can probably feel for Jo to some extent, especially considering that Amy is such a little jerk as a kid. It’s also possible that Jo’s writerly aspirations, and the fact that she managed to make a fairly significant amount of money writing (enough to pay some of the family’s bills and take Marked-for-Death Beth on a vacation to the seaside), may get more people on her side than would otherwise be inclined to back her up. And then Amy kind of grows out of being a little jerk, and Jo (for a time, at least), kind of grows INTO it. On the bright side, at least she realizes before TOO long that she kind of lost the trip to Europe all on her own and Amy’s not at fault. However, her status as a feminist icon is kind of endangered by a conversation she has with Prof. Bhaer in Little Men, where she’s saying that her girls shall learn all she can teach them about needlework, even if “they give up the Latin, Algebra, and half-a-dozen ologies it is considered necessary for girls to muddle their poor brains over now-a-days” (page 256, Little Men; page in question viewable here.)Jo, have you ever heard of Ada Lovelace?
– Beth: Ehhh. I know she was based on a little sister of Louisa’s who died, but: ehhh. Her main point in the story is to be too good to live and then to… not live, and after 91,596 renditions of Beth Is Not Long For The Mortal Coil I started to wish she’d shuffle off of it a little faster because MOVE ON WITH THE STORY ALREADY. Also, I have no idea if this was intentional or not, but I frequently had to remind myself that Beth was not, in fact, younger than Amy. (Unrelatedly, my mom had rheumatic fever as a kid, rheumatic fever being what scarlet fever and strep throat can turn into left untreated. While the differences between medicine in 1861 and 1963 were hardly new, it’s always interesting to see illustrations of the fact that what are now fairly treatable if serious illnesses used to be probable death sentences.)
– Amy: Arrrgh. SUCH a little jerk as a kid. “Oh, so you’re going to break the rules at school, get punished for it, and go crying home to Marmee, who only chastises you mildly AFTER soothing all your poor hurt feelings and agreeing you can take a little vacation from school. …And then you’re going to burn Jo’s manuscript because she wouldn’t let you go to a play you weren’t invited to. …And then you’re going to be forgiven everything by falling into a lake during yet another example of snottiness on your part. Great.” Ffff. On the other hand, she grows up into someone altogether more tolerable, so yay for Amy.
– Prof. Bhaer: I basically like Prof. Bhaer, although that scene where he’s passive-aggressively reading Jo the riot act for earning money in one of the few ways open to women at the time: not so much.
– Marmee: For the most part, inoffensive, but basically telling Jo to let it go mere hours after Amy burnt up her manuscript? WTF.
– Laurie: Not super impressed with him giving Meg shit for dressing up when she’s already kind of uncomfortable. Also, the version I read is illustrated and he has a creepy mustache later on. I don’t think he and Jo would have gone well together so I’m glad they didn’t, but I am kind of glad it is, if superficially, addressed that Amy might feel like he settled for her.
Final Verdict: I don’t think I’d necessarily dislike any of the characters if 1) they existed and 2) we were contemporaries, but none of them are people whose company I’d seek out. I will probably read the book again a few years down the road, but I overall enjoyed Eight Cousins a lot more.
Marked-for-Death Beth. Hee!
Oh, if only Meyer were capable of this kind of perspective. If only. I read an interview with Meyer a few years ago where she more or less took the reading public to task for not understanding that Edward was a better character than Romeo, better than Willoughby or Darcy, better than anyone in literature ever, because all of those losers had flaws. And Edward is PERFECT.
And all I could think was, It’s called a sense of proportion, lady.
Also: I plan to use “Eats a stick of butter and dies” often; I’m not sure how yet, but I will.
I totally love Amy…and sorry, but she was always my favourite character! I never totally liked Jo, and it is not because I am shallow but because her character was full of contradictions and at times truly annoying and inmature.
To me, Jo was never a heroine, she had a great heart but she also had lots of issues. I know that Amy was very inmature an shallow, but hey, she was a child, after all! How could you hate a child who has faced what Amy did? Don’t we all remember the way we used to think when were children? Think about those times,after having money and then nothing! She was a dreamer!
If you read the book carefully, without characters’ bias, you will see that LMA was too focused on Jo, Amy’s character was underdeveloped. That happenened because she needed the opposite to make Jo appear nicer than what she actually was. LMA was all about creating the feeling of ‘We- have- to -love-sweet-wild-Jo’.Yet, if you really analyze Jo’s ways, she was not that cool.The competition between Jo and Amy was not gratuitous. Still, Jo was much older than Amy,and had broader life experience so she should have known better and give the right example to Amy…instead she humiliated her.
Honestly, in the modern world, intelligent women, are independent, successful, but still manage to look great, and have fruitful lives.Jo had problems balancing different areas. She was wild and enthusiastic, but not ideal, at least not my ideal! I would hate to be like Jo.
Amy, however, had her flaws and her virtues. She had a nice heart, but she was not as angelic Beth (who honestly, was boring) or as sweet as Meg; still, as a whole, she was a much more interesting character than the others. You can see that when she grows up. Amy is more real that Jo, Meg or Beth…
Nevertheless, Amy of the second half of Little Women (Good wives) is very different from the Amy child. In fact by the end of the novel she was the more mature, emotionally stable, and fun of all the sisters. She was in her own area even more talented than Jo in hers…but Amy is not afraid to acknowledge her own limitations in her chosen area, while Jo, never acknowledged hers. Hence, Amy was more trutful to herself, and had more humility.
Also, I find sad seeing two antagonistic position about ‘if you love Jo you have to hate Amy’ that I see here in this forum. It is surprising that in this century the stereotype ‘beautiful, bimbo,bitch,shallow’ is still around. I am a beautiful girl myself (sorry the honesty, but it is true, and I bet many of you girls here are beautiful) but I have lots of sincere friends,a relaxing personality, my world is filled with adventure, peace and love and I am very successful in the professional area too. I used to be an actress, I am in the academia now. I teach anthropology,sociology and research at universtiy here in Australia, I have two degrees and I am doing my PhD…so I can’t tell that the stereotype is really unfair. I bet many of you girls have the same issue, and feel as frustrated as I do. Pretty does NOT equal Shallow! and I can see that erroneous idea is being used to critize Amy.
Finally, unlike what most of the people here believe, I think Laurie and Jo confused strong friendship, intellectual connection, and complicity with love; or if that was love, it was not the type of love, passionate, rewarding and healthy that you want in a relationship. Loves isnot only because of people’s similarities but also because they complement each other. It is also about lifestyle and maturity. In that area, Amy and Laurie were perfect together.Honestly, can you even imagine Jo and Laurie in the intimacy? being husband and wife? I can’t. On the opposite, Amy and Laurie, hey, that is great!
I can’t understand why everyone raves about Jo. I’ve always disliked her. She’s so awkward, ungainly and unfeminine. She strikes me as a suppressed lesbian until she meets Professor Bhaer who, at least when played by Gabriel Byrne is drop dead gorgeous. I like Amy the best. She develops into a talented beautiful young women who knows how to behave and make the most of her life. I loathe pious, priggish Beth who strikes me as bit retarded and I was glad when she died. And what on earth was wrong with her? She recovered from scarlet fever and then just seemed to fade away from a nameless disease with no medical care at all.
“Unfeminine”? Oh, boy.
Loving all the hilarious comments; they’re making a boring afternoon at work just fly by! I like Little Women fine, but ‘Little Men’ and ‘Jack and Jill’ are my two favorites, the last one in particular. I find that the LW trilogy got sappier and preachier as they went on, and ‘Jo’s Boys’ made me roll my eyes so much I think I strained an eye muscle.
I love how the saintly, sweet, ‘good’ character in any Alcott novel always dies. In LW it’s Beth, in Jack and Jill it’s Ed, in LM it’s John Brooke, in Eight Cousins it’s Charlie (although he didn’t really fit the ‘saintly’ mold), etcetera and so-on. Not sure if this is a Victorian thing, or an Alcott thing.