Falling in Love with Dead Authors: Louisa May Alcott

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Louisa May Alcott

I was given a copy of Little Men by Louisa M. Alcott when I was about 10 or 11.  I can't remember the occasion; perhaps it was a birthday.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but I took it as a "school story", and could not quite understand the central position Jo Bhaer occupied in the story, because in all the school stories I had read, it was the kids who were central to the story and never the adults.  Still, I began to understand Jo's affection for all the children in her school, gradually working my way past the slight sentimentality that occasionally got in the way.

A few months later --or perhaps years-- we were taken to see the movie of Little Women, the version starring June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor.  I was instantly in love with all the girls, but most especially Jo.  I was furious at Rossano Brazzi, who played Professor Bhaer, but I was by then accustomed to falling in love with older women, only to have them snapped up by older guys, some of them with outrageous sideburns.  Anyway, of course I had to go home and read the book.  (At this time Dad was away at Yale, and did not have the money to come visiting during the breaks.  Everybody was glad that I was reading Alcott, and not James Bond, etc ...)

Reading Civil War era novels is heavy going.  But through it all, Louisa May Alcott's storytelling shines through.  My mother observed my progress through the book (I think I had gotten sick with something serious, but I kept reading), and explained how autobiographical the book was.  Looking back, I think I was impressed at how open-hearted Jo March was, a very likely genuine portrayal of the character of the author, Louisa Alcott herself.  It was certainly in the spirit of the times for women to be overly sentimental about children and poverty, but there was just enough of a touch of restraint to give Alcott's characters the weight of authenticity.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

At times, the author makes her characters just a little too perfect.  When they have faults, even the faults are perfect, and there is a veiled glamor over even the humblest of personalities in Alcott's account.  After a while, you forget the sentimentality.  Unfortunately, some of those tricks of writing have attached themselves to me, and the observant reader will know just how much I have been influenced by L. M. Alcott.

It is interesting to read just how engaged the middle-class was in national affairs, to the extent that they were able to obtain news of current events.  The Alcotts in Boston were far better informed of the events of the war than folks further west must have been.  I'm still trying to get a clear idea of what gave solidity to Alcott's boundless enthusiasm.  Even in the Little Women, Little Men series, she is already half in jest about her enthusiasm, but she is beginning to see her attitudes about education and the new society she was envisaging, and presumably the vision of whoever inspired the character of Friedrich Bhaer, taking shape.  All the way up unto that time, the idealists who were the successors to the founding fathers of America were keeping alive the idealism of those founders, even if some of that manic idealism must have been fueled by the cheap labor provided by slaves and former slaves, and the leisure it brought the propertied classes.  Labor was no longer cheap, but the open Western frontier was enough to keep driving the vision of a good society that lay just beyond the horizon.  This is the most attractive thing about Louisa M. Alcott: her belief in the boundless potential of young people.  This is attractive to me in anybody.

Charles Dickens

The almost contemporary books of Laura Ingalls Wilder are set just after the War, and refer to it rather distantly if at all.  Wilder is more concerned with the details of life in the West than with the personalities of those beyond her immediate family.  Gifted with equal charm, Laura Ingalls makes her very restraint lend her the glamor that Louisa Alcott must craft with Dickensian deliberation.  (I don't know that Dickens was all that deliberate about anything; I only mean that Alcott admired Dickens greatly, and seems to have set out to emulate him in depth of feeling.  And she certainly succeeded.)

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