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Johns Hopkins University Press
Johns Hopkins University Press
Resentful "Little Women": Gender and Class Feeling in Louisa May Alcott
Author(s): Stephanie Foote
Source: College Literature, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter, 2005), pp. 63-85
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115246
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ResentfulLittleWomen:
GenderandClassFeelingin
LouisaMayAlcott
Stephanie Foote
In one of the most dramatic and emotional Stephanie Foote teaches at the
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64 CollegeLiterature
32.1 [Winter
2005]
the "great trouble" of Jo's anger, trusting that Jo's own "generous nature" will
eventually dissolve "her resentment" (68).
Up to this point, the novel has paid close attention to Jo's ambition to be
a writer, as well as to Amy's myriad and it's therefore
personal faults, surpris
ing that the novel spends almost no narrative effort to affirm that Jo has
indeed been wronged. Even though the novel believes that her work is valu
able and that Amy has done a terrible thing in destroying it, it is less inter
ested in the objective justice of Jo's feelings than it is in the subjective way
that she handles her anger. Accordingly, Amy's destruction of Jo's manuscript
and Jo's subsequent rage are the prelude to an even more dramatic incident.
Jo, unable to forgive Amy, fails to keep a close eye on her sister when Amy
tags along to go skating, even though Jo knows that some of the ice is still
too thin to skate over. Amy does indeed fall through thin ice into the freez
episodes of anger and recrimination are evasive at best. For example, while it
is true that Amy's skating accident prompts Jo to say that she fears she will
do something terrible, it is also true that Amy has already gotten into a "pas
sion" in which she enjoyed hurting Jo, and in which she did something gen
uinelydreadful. But it is Jo, not Amy, who has run the risk of "making every
body hate" her, and it isAmy, not Jo, who is the final victim in this scenario.
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StephanieFoote 65
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66 32.1 [Winter
CollegeLiterature 2005]
mately related to their gender but also to their somewhat uncertain class sta
tus. Bluntly, gender and class are inseparable as we look at the kinds of neg
ative feelings that the novel discusses. This lesson may seem too
obvious?gender and class, after all, are now part of an established mantra of
subject positions?but it bears repeating. Literary critics are skilled at under
standing gender and class as historical positions, yet they are less skilled at see
ing that they are also affective positions, and that affect and emotion them
selves are historically and 2
produced historically specific.
Class is not merely about how much money one has, it is more finely
about the kinds of feelings subjects experience as dangerous or natural or
powerful. Class and status, as Pierre Bourdieu tells us, are matters of feeling,
not merely matters of objective economic measurement. Not simply about
social effects, class and status are also about emotional affect, for class
always
and status, although deeply structural, are first experienced as deeply person
al. Class and status are therefore narrated as dispositions toward one's place in
the world, as competitive relationships with others, even if those others are
members of one's own family. This last is particularly salient in the world of
women's fiction, for the kinds of distinctions
produced by social competition
are often narratively at odds with
the palliative function of the sentimental
home, and with the figuration of women as private, emotional centers who
the world of economic distinction at 3A balance of social
keep bay. complex
desire and a naturalized belief in taste and personal values, class and status play
themselves out locally through a series of difficult negotiations with one's
"real" and one's desired next to others.
position
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StephanieFoote 67
repression. Alcott s novel, in this reading, finally tells its readers that women
must learn to repress or redirect their anger, even if their anger is, in the
world of the novel, just and reasonable.4
It is hard to overestimate the debt
contemporary criticism of the novel
owes to such feminist analyses. Readings of Little Women s lessons about gen
der have informed evaluations of its critical position in nineteenth-century
American literature, most specifically in recent attempts to reevaluate its rela
tionship to established genres. Does the novel index the invention of a genre
of didactic literature for young girls? Does it demonstrate the thorough
imbrication of children's literature with contemporary conversations about
romantic love, personal morality, familial duty, and civic participation?5 Even
more recently, critics have begun to illuminate the role of Alcott and her
work in a mid-century world that extended possibilities
changing for social
mobility to women. Such critical work attends
carefully to Alcott s figuration
of the world of commodities, and to her meditations on the author's status as
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68 College
Literature
32.1[Winter
2005]
II
standing novel also called Little Women), the girls' father is away from home,
serving as chaplain to Union troops during the Civil War. Virtually the only
masculine influence with which the girls come into contact is that of their
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StephanieFoote 69
neighbors, the Laurences. In the Laurence household are the elder Mr.
Laurence, his grandson Laurie, and Laurie's tutor John Brooke. In the second
half of the novel, originally published as a sequel to Little Women, the March
girls are married off, one by one, in a procession only occasionally broken up
by Jo's trip to New York, Amy's stay in Europe, and Beth's melodramatic
death. Each of the two sections of the novel was very successful, enabling
Louisa May Alcott to help her own family financially, and enjoy the social
and economic benefits of a successful authorial career.8
The narrative of Little Women brings success and contentment to the sur
viving members of the March family, and by the end of the novel, Jo, Amy
and Meg are happily married and are laboring in the fields best suited to the
strengths as well as the weaknesses of their personalities. The novel may end
well, but at its beginning, the young March girls struggle continually with a
sense of dissatisfaction and unhappiness.The novel, for example, opens with
a scene of resentment and injury. On Christmas Eve, the March girls, await
ing the return of their mother, lament their poverty. After Meg and Jo grum
ble over it, their youngest sister, Amy remarks with "an injured sniff" that it
isn't "fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls noth
ing at all" (Alcott 1993, 3). Here, a vague sense of class injury and gender
injury are entwined; for Amy it isn't just that there isn't enough money, it's
that there isn't enough money to be like other girls.
The social exclusionAmy feels is attached to a more general scene of
economic decline. The March family inhabits an ambiguous class position in
the novel.The text suggests that the family was once wealthy; indeed it is one
of the ongoing trials of at least two of the daughters to reconcile themselves
to their economic fall. Amy, for example, "had a plaintive way of saying,
'When papa was rich we did so-and-so,' which was very touching" (Alcott
1993, 37), and Meg finds her poverty especially onerous "because she could
remember a time when home was beautiful, life full of ease and pleasure, and
want of any kind unknown." She "seldom complained, but a sense of injus
tice made her feel bitter toward every one sometimes" (34).The Marches do
have wealthy friends and relatives, and they occupy a social position that is
strikingly incommensurate with their economic position; in the chapter
"Calls," for example, Amy and Jo appear to be calling socially upon the King
family, for whom the novel has earlier indicated Meg works as a governess.
A similar tension between their social and economic status is foregrounded
in the first chapter when we learn that Mrs. March, in whose absence the
girls complain about their poverty, is out helping a less fortunate family9
The tension between their economic and their social status is also
schematized in the relationship of their house to that of their neighbors, the
fantastically wealthy Laurence family.
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70 CollegeLiterature
32.1 [Winter
2005]
The garden separated the Marches' house from that of Mr. Laurence. Both
stood in a suburb of the was
city, which still country-like, with groves and
The domestic identity of the Marches?the warmth of their home, the inno
cent and wholesome quality of their company, the general nurturing quali
ties of Mrs. March?combined with the fact that all of the girls work sug
gests that the instability of legible class identity is crucial to the novel's under
standing of gender, as well as to its understanding of why the girls feel
injured. Each of the adult March girls works, either as a way of bringing in
an income or as a way of saving expenses (two work outside the home, one
works at home, and the other goes to school), but it is entirely unclear how
they are understood or understand themselves as laborers as well as partici
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StephanieFoote 71
they were kindly people, in spite of the frivolous life they led, and soon put
their guest at her ease. felt, without that
Perhaps Meg understanding why,
were not cultivated or and that all their
they particularly intelligent people,
gilding could not quite conceal the ordinary material of which they were
made. (Alcott 1993,76)
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72 CollegeLiterature
32.1 [Winter
2005]
Although she sees that the other girls feel sorry for her, she proudly wears
her own "dowdy" clothes at her hosts' first formal event. At the second ball
the family gives, Meg becomes of the fact that she has only one
ashamed
good dancing gown, and lets the family dress her up.While she is circulating
around the dance floor, she overhears a group of women discussing her
mother's "plans" for the March girls' marriage to socially prominent men,
including the Laurence heir, and is again ashamed, this time to have been the
subject of such a vulgarly economic discussion. Even though she is ashamed,
she "discovered that there is a charm about fine clothes which attracts a cer
tain class of people, and secures their respect" (Alcott 1993, 82), and revels in
the distinction that she feels is her natural right even if it is procured by use
of artifice. Laurie, who attends the second ball, finds the newly made-up
Meg, now called Daisy by her hosts, to be a somewhat alarming example of
elegant young womanhood, and he cannot approve of her behavior or
appearance. It is perhaps his appearance as judge that first points up the ways
in which her negative emotionsmust eventually resolve themselves in a
domestic vocabulary already shot through with social distinctions, for Meg
feels as much shame that her family's friend will report her to her mother as
she feels anxiety that her mother may be trying to marry her to her "brother."
When Meg returns home
and confesses her shortcomings and her
behavior, Mrs. March says of the Moffats that they are "worldly, ill-bred, and
full of these vulgar ideas about young people. I am more sorry than I can
express for the mischief this visit may have done you" (Alcott 1993, 87). She
then advises Meg to "know and value the praise which isworth having, and
to excite the admiration of excellent people by being modest aswell as pret
ty" (87). But what has truly disturbed Meg is that the gossip about her moth
er's plans to marry her to Laurie "had opened a new world" and "much dis
turbed the peace of the old one, in which, till now, she had lived as happily
as a child. Her innocent friendship with Laurie was spoiled" (79).The dis
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StephanieFoote 73
marry money, but that also conflates the value of money with more con
ventional affective values.
I am ambitious for you, but not to have you make a dash in the world
Her argument is an indirect indictment of the Moffats, who do not have the
ability to see the ways in which money might be valued by people of real
inescapability of signs of social class, like particular kinds and styles of cloth
ing, to signify personal worth. But it also testifies to the sublime belief that
money is not because class?or rather classiness, as we
intrinsically important
now understand that term?is a personal quality. In other words, John
Brooke ought not be a pauper, but he need not have a fortune because Meg
is already in enjoyment of a way of reading distinction that her mother
believes is a natural part of their family's existence.11
Meg is an object lesson in the management of negative emotion, for she
is an object lesson in how the novel reads scenes of class and gender anxiety
in a narrative of family life that has already understood the management of
negative emotion as one of its tasks. Indeed, Meg, the most conventional of
the novel's characters, is the first to leave her family and the first to join
another. Her marriage begins the second half of Little Women, and when the
novel discusses her, it is always in terms of her negotiation of the emotional
difficulties of being a young wife and mother. It is no accident that she fully
realizes that she will marry John Brooke immediately after her wealthy Aunt
has protested that John is not amember of the proper social class. Meg, hav
ing previously enjoyed the power of her gender to cause emotional injury to
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74 CollegeLiterature
32.1 [Winter
2005]
John, decides to marry him in the face of her possible disinheritance. In other
words, she responds to the threat of financial injury by relinquishing her
potential to cause injury in the field of gender. Similarly, the episode in
which Meg is "for the first time in her married life ... afraid of her husband"
because she has overspent her clothing allowance results in her muttered
explanation that she is "tired of being poor" (Alcott 1993,351,352). But the
chapter, and the domestic episode itself, ends when Meg has made financial
amends, "swallowing her pride" to sell dress material to her wealthy friend,
an act that narratively and structurally seems to result in "the deepest expe
rience of a woman's
life"?pregnancy. At this moment, Meg's injury over
being poor is not just displaced, it is structurally compensated by her ascen
sion into the final season of the life of a good woman.
Meg's life, the most obviously domestic, might be the most complete and
finished example of the novel's logic of the interchanges between inchoate,
often negative feelings about class and gender, but it only forecasts the more
problematic lessons of this logic.12 Little Women is often read not as the story
of Meg, but as the story of the boyish, independent, and rebellious Jo.
Historically, Jo has been the idol of girl readers, and biographies of Louisa
May Alcott assert that Jo was also the favorite of her creator, who identified
in herself the traits she had given to her character. But there is another way
to tell the story of Little Women, and that is as the story of Amy, who is, after
all is said and done, triumphant in the arenas of class and gender ambition.
The first half of the novel is largely critical of Amy, who is often the butt
of narrative and the object of familial counsel on account of her per
ridicule
sonal affectations and her grandiose desires for social advancement. Spoiled,
petted, and ignorant, Amy is initially the sign of how easily a woman's desire
for airs and become at turns comic or In her invest
graces might tragic.13
ment in her own gender?her love of clothes and her own beauty?Amy is
Jo's antithesis. Jo's disinvestment in her gender role is perhaps her most pro
nounced personal characteristic, and it is certainly the characteristic that has
most persuaded her fans that she, rather than any of her sisters, is the most
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StephanieFoote 75
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76 CollegeLiterature
32.1 [Winter
2005]
ly independent, falls into despair. But part of what has happened in this sec
tion is that the text has reversed the valences of its characterization. Jo's
independence has resulted in exclusion, not freedom, and Amy's social
manipulation has resulted in recognition.
At the close of the chapter, Amy repeats the desires she has expressed so
often throughout the novel. "You laugh at me when I say Iwant to be a lady,
but Imean a true gentlewoman in mind and manners, and I try to do it as
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StephanieFoote 77
longer than I can help. One of us must marry well; Meg didn't, Jo won't, Beth
can't yet, so I shall, and make everything cosy all round. Iwouldn't marry a
man I hated or despised" (284). Amy's decision not to marry this young man
surprises even herself, but her decision to marry her family's closest friend
most pointedly demonstrates the novel's endorsement of Amy rather than
Jo.14When Meg begins to think of marrying John Brooke, Jo passionately
tells her mother that she wishes she could marry Meg herself and "keep her
in the family." Amy's union to Theodore Laurence not only works to keep her
family together, itworks to raise them in the world. Indeed, Amy and her hus
band become the benefactors of the Marches, and of people like the Marches.
One of the ways to see the development of a home that is the source of
felt or emotional responses to distinction is to look at two scenes that
describe Amy's values in relationship to Laurie's. In the first, Amy, having
encountered Laurie in Europe, finds that he has abandoned himself to lazi
ness in the name of a broken heart. She chides him, telling him that she can
not bear his company because he is squandering his gifts and is tiresome and
unambitious. After she scolds him, Laurie has a kind of awakening; taking her
words to heart, he regains some of his former energy and direction. He also,
therefore, makes himself a suitable mate for Amy, for what she has done in
scolding him is to assert, as her own mother has before her, the sovereign
power to legislate behavior through sentiment; to transform a vague sense of
injustice into a critical emotion and to therefore address and assimilate it into
a more domestically valuable position. Asserting her mastery over Laurie's
wounded and negative feelings, Amy becomes eligible to have a family of her
own, to construct a world in whichdesire, feeling, and injury can be con
verted into something more emotionally productive.
The second scene that reveals Amy's values happens after Amy and Laurie
have married and have moved back to the house next to the Marches. With
no artistic career as a necessity, and no need to become a working girl, Amy
concurs with Laurie in his plan that they become patrons of occupants of the
ambiguous class position the March girls once occupied. Laurie says to Amy:
There's one sort of that I like to Out-and-out
poverty particularly help.
get taken care of, but poor fare because
beggars gentlefolks badly, they
won't ask, and don't dare to offer yet there are a thousand
people charity;
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78 CollegeLiterature
32.1 [Winter
2005]
Jo's rebelliousness, and the text's domestication of her character. But what is
of especial interest to me is the way the domestication of Jo is deeply impli
cated in the lessons of class that she slowly comes to engage with not just
emotionally?angrily, or resentfully, or yearningly?but critically. Jo?in cer
tain ways a deeply democratic heroine in the sense of her character's belief
in the value of
equality and personal
social independence, beliefs she
advances in the very chapter "Calls" in which her aspirations will be tram
pled when she spends her time talking to a solidly middle-class youth instead
of to a wealthy family?learns lessons about the proper social circulation of
even the most democratic of women.
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StephanieFoote 79
Her stay in New York provides some of the richest fodder for an exam
ination of her domestication. In New York she has left home, in New York
she becomes a professional author, and in New York she meets Professor
Bhaer, the unlikely character who will become her husband. But inmy argu
ment, it is in New York that she is schooled in class distinctions and it is here
that she learns to internalize and naturalize class and status distinctions as if
they were natural distinctions. She therefore learns the lesson that Amy and
Meg sphere only when
learn in the domestic she leaves home, but it is only
impending romance with her neighbor Laurie, she also tells her mother that
while she is there she will be able to "see and hear new things, get new ideas,
and . . . bring home quantities of material for my rubbish [her writing]"
(Alcott 1993, 294). Her mission to gather new sensations for her writing is
balanced by the fact that much of the new material
she gathers finds itsway
into a conventionally domestic letter to her family. Many
form?the of her
letters tell her family about the life of the boarding house, in which Jo is
something of a puzzle to her fellow boarders. She reports a conversation in
which two young men pass judgement upon her, saying "handsome head, but
no style" (300). Her own response is amixture of outrage and exasperation.
"A governess is as good
as a clerk," she writes, finishing up by saying, "I hate
ordinary people!" letters are as she says herself, very "Bhaery," and
(300). Her
detail her growing friendship with the Professor, a friendship, it is important
to note, that takes place under the rubric of fair "bargains"?worker to
worker. But what she does not report in the letters is the progress of her
own
writing.
The narrator details Jo's growing independence as awriter, aswell as her
growing success in placing her stories. Much has been made of the fact that
Jo places her stories in an attempt to help her sister Beth by saving enough
money to bring her to the mountains or the shore, and that her previous
publications have been likewise motivated by a desire to provide for her fam
ily. But the conditions under which Jo places her stories are not only domes
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80 College 32.1[Winter
Literature 2005]
The search for information?for experience that will sell?means not only
that Jo is betraying or sullying her "womanly" attributes, but more specifi
cally, that she is sullying them by keeping bad company, by living in "bad
society." It is her circulation in bad society that brings her to the attention of
Professor Bhaer, who responds to her argument that "many respectable peo
ple make an honest living out of what are called sensation stories" by telling
her that "if the respectable people knew what harm they did, they would not
feel that the living was honest" (Alcott 1993, 316).
By conflating the circulation of Jo and Jo's stories, Professor Bhaer
reminds Jo that she has a moral obligation to do things "she was [not]
ashamed to own" at home (Alcott 1993,316). His attempt to remove Jo from
circulation the masses is not a romantic or a moral
dangerous among only
rescue, it is a class intervention couched in standard phrases of morality. He
is himself a powerful example of what it means to labor in obscurity, to
importantly, he severs Jo from labor that has put her, however tentatively, in
the wrong society, and therefore, in the wrong class. Class is a moral orien
tation toward the world, and it is therefore inextricably tied to gender and its
"natural" relationship to the moral. The distinctions to which Jo must adhere
are also the distinctions that as awoman she is uniquely able to make for oth
ers, and it is Professor Bhaer's argument that Jo injures others when she
attempts to join the working class rather than remaining in the class of good
women. In this reading, Jo's reconciliation to domesticity comes when she
discovers that she is the site of an emotional reading by someone else, as well
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StephanieFoote 81
being, as an author, the potential site for the exercise of dangerously nega
tive emotions.
Ill
Little Women shows us that class was an increasingly important area of
concern in the mid nineteenth
century, and it shows us also, that class was an
already fractured and multiply determined idea, encompassing ideas of status,
family name and honor, intellectual and community repute, as well as more
conventional economic markers. I have that in this novel, the charac
argued
ters endure a series of mortifying confrontations with their own social inad
equacies, and that they therefore
experience astonishingly negative emotions
ranging from anger to shame to resentment to injury. Yet the novel is not
about negative emotions; rather it is a novel that resolves negative emotions
without always repressing them. It understands the domestic as a way to
transform emotions
such negative by understanding the home as a place
where can
social distinctions be learned, practiced, and reconfigured as "nat
ural" distinctions. While the characters' conflicts with the external world
often occur in the field of a newly emerging class system, they are also under
stood from the perspective of the family, which governs itsmembers by stan
dards that cannot nor redress serious emotional to
fully recognize responses
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82 College
Literature
32.1[Winter
2005]
key terms of desire in the novel are reserved not for romance but for the
world of social and class ambition, yet in the end, class ambition and the drive
for social recognition have been largely displaced, if not eliminated.
In the final pages of the novel, the remaining March girls and their fam
ilies gather at Plumfield, Jo's school for wayward boys. As they sit at their
mother's feet, they recollect their "Castles in the Air," referring to a similar
gathering at which Meg once confessed her desire for a wealthy husband,
Amy for artistic fame, and Jo for literary success. Though they have each only
achieved a portion of their desires, they profess themselves content with lives
in which ambitions have been subsumed by domestic
their worldly concerns.
Their mother ratifies their happiness by spreading her arms as if to encompass
the entire extended family, saying "Oh, my girls, however long you may live,
I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!" (Alcott 1993, 437).
But if the ending of novel seems to extort from its female characters a
loyalty to the domestic ideal that must always appear to have somehow failed
their former, more ambitious selves, it also tells us, paradoxically, that only by
recreating the family can the injuries produced by structural or economic
inequalitiesbe transcended. Wendy Brown argues that liberalism's failure to
adequately incorporate gender in its social and political analyses ismost fully
felt in the schizophrenia attending definitions of the home and the family.
Women, charged with overcoming market constraints, are figured in the
home and by the home as "non-civil" subjects. But the March girls, whose
relationships to their families are everywhere implicated in markets, class
ambition, social distinctions, and wage-earning, find that their ambitions for
fame and renown, for fortune and comfort, for gentility as well as for free
dom, can all be accommodated in the middle-class households that, in the
world of the novel, are not only the sources, but the balms for their wound
ed and negative emotions.
Notes
1The emotional
genealogy behind feminist critics' rediscovery of this novel is
beyond the scope of this essay, but it is nonetheless salient tomy discussion, for Little
Women is currently a renaissance among historians. Catharine
enjoying literary
for uses Little Women as an of a text. Little
Stimpson, example, example paracanonical
Women, she argues, is because it measures "the gap between love and
paracanonical
for its readers relies on the idea that a text's
power" (1990,967). Stimpson's argument
to generate an emotional response is in its own Indeed, she
ability important right.
tells us that her earlier emotional are critical responses in a
responses phrased language
now unfamiliar or historically illegible to literary-critical discourse. The ability to
sustained emotional across audiences is what thata text
generate responses signals
be paracanonical, for the paracanonical names a category of texts that
might provides
a way to access and assess an of readers and their affective/critical
historiography
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StephanieFoote 83
nomic display for its own sake, arguing that such display is a symptom of a new
ordering of classes that for Alcott sought to obscure an individual's finer qualities.
of fineness relies on a notion of class that is not
Making qualities personal, though,
contrary to the world of social status as worth, but on a notion of class that
approved
and worries the potential of such a conflation.
recognizes injustice
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84 32.1 [Winter
CollegeLiterature 2005]
injury she has experienced all the way through the novel. When Amy returns from
Europe, for Meg is immediately conscious of the difference between their
example,
clothes, and then transforms her personal resentment into a vicarious of
experience
class over the friend to whom she has been forced to sell her own dress
triumph
material. became conscious that her own dress hadn't a Parisian air, that young
"Meg
Mrs. Moffat would be young Mrs. Laurence, and that 'her lady
entirely eclipsed by
was a most and woman" 1993, 398).
ship' altogether elegant graceful (Alcott
the novel takes up Meg's domestic resentment when she feels
Additionally, neglect
ed by her husband, who she feels is working too much and neglecting his fami
ly?she "felt injured because she did not know that she wanted him without being
told" (346). She addresses John s neglect by dressing up and asking to be taken out,
a lesson that the proper stabilization of class and a certain amount of
gender require
labor and display.
12 a scenes
Amy's life provides staggering number of of social humiliation, par
because she is the character most invested in social advancement. She is humil
tially
iated at school when she tries to compete with her wealthier schoolmates by bring
ing in pickled limes. She is humiliated when she tries to throw an "elegant' lunch for
the girls with whom she takes drawing lessons. She is pushed aside at a charity fair
told she is not to occupy the best booth. Any
by being socially prominent enough
one of these scenes be read as emotional responses that produce later
might inspiring
class distinctions, but more important for this essay is how the novel charts Amy's rise
(Alcott 1993,262).
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