On its surface, there's nothing exceptional about Louisa May Alcott's masterpiece "Little Women." From the opening chapter, the four March girls are stuck in middle-class life celebrating a Christmas that isn't all that frivolous. To some, it would be a moment to cry. For others, it's where the magic of the book begins to take hold. Together, the girls get together and find a way to make the most of this familial holiday. With an exploration of core common values, the story is an exploration of growing up and discovering the person that you're meant to be. With each of the four girls embodying a different archetype, the story shows how one grows and changes while finding ways to cohabitate with others. While some see it as a radical take on the feminism of the 19th century, it's easier to see it as the ultimate story of growing up, reflecting the childlike creativity that blooms into more mature themes. It's a simple story, but it only helps every reader to find themselves somewhere in the text. We are all young once, and few books embrace it with such joyful earnestness as this.
While Alcott would go on to publish multiple sequels, the original text of "Little Women" was broken up into two portions. For lack of a better analogy, Part One focuses on being "little" while Part Two explores how each becomes a "woman." Depending on where the reader is in their life will determine which part of the novel packs the most emotion. With that said, Alcott has a keen eye on what fascinates a child, especially one who challenges their curiosities. The March girls love to perform, discuss theater and do extensive quoting of "The Pilgrim's Progress" novel. In one of the more noteworthy exchanges, they even do a parodic take on "The Pickwick Papers" where they release a zine under different literary character names. Alcott's world exists in nonfiction, constantly feeling contemporary in how much it embraces the arts. If it existed today, there's no doubt it would reference pop music and film stars that lead to their own creative blossoming.
It's maybe what makes the novel timeless. While it's likely that most readers will never buy a copy of "The Pilgrim's Progress," the rest of the experiences will still seem familiar. Girls will still get into trouble, finding their personal emotions getting the best of them. They will find themselves drawn to the glitz of their peers, longing for something that their personal means could never achieve. At the center is their mother, turning the chapters in Part One into small parables on how to resist temptation. It's a world that exists in Christian ideology, but one that only grounds their independent personalities along the way. There is a power in the text that makes things such as sitting outside looking at clouds into a pivotal moment in youth. In one sense it helps to ground the characters and give them depth in their individuality, proving that while they're all sisters, they are all individuals too.
This individuality is what makes Part Two a lot more effective. Alcott wrote the second half after the success of her first, having to grapple with people who believed that bookworm Jo was supposed to marry bad boy Laurie. When she refused, she presented one of the many forms of rebellion that comes with "Little Women." The book already suggested a radical idea that not all women are alike, and instead pursue different facets of society. Now it was presenting bittersweet adulthood that would go into more tragic directions. By the end, one of the sisters will have died, another frustrated by the world of publishing novels, and another coming to terms with a marriage that is unsatisfactory. It's given the same honesty of the previous sections, though each of the March girls gets more personal time to understand how their youth influenced their modern decisions.
By the end, it's a story of life in a family and what it means to grow up with those different from you. Even as things become tragic, there's this sense of optimism that family and values will always be there, that no matter how much of an individual you become in life, your family will be there to support you. As much as the story revels in individuality, it paints a picture of how complicated and full a woman's life is from youth to adulthood. The journey unto itself is full of an awe-inspiring emotion, as Alcott's characters all have a shared joy for life. It's the type of world you want to never end. It's likely why she wrote many more novels about these characters. Even then, none compared to how straightforward a story of finding what matters in life had on her youthful audience who consumed entertainment and helped find their own interests inside it. In a way, it's a manual for how to grow up and not become jaded with Alcott serving just as much as the mother presenting parables as she most clearly is Jo.
"Little Women" remains a powerful book because of how impenetrable its emotional center is. While the references may be outdated and the cultural means have changed, the March girls remain an eternal vision of life. Everyone is or knows someone who is one of these four girls. They all have fantasies that aren't too far from any of the novel's endless chapters full of personal achievements and blunders, finding humor in the process. It's an encouragement to those who struggle in youth to feel like they matter, discovering within the prose how people can mature or change over time. We're not all doomed to live perpetually as one type if we don't want. We're capable of growing into our own individual. It's among the most endearing traits in a novel that has hundreds of them. It may not seem like an exemplary novel, but then again our lives rarely feel that way until looking back. Alcott had the smarts to make it into the best possible book she could.
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