On Louisa May Alcott’s birthday, revisit Joan Acocella on the feminist legacy of “Little Women”: “The book’s fans didn’t merely like it; it gave them a life.”
Soon, Jo gets the news that Beth is seriously ill. This was Beth’s secret: not that she was in love with Laurie but that she was dying. Jo rushes home and nurses her sister for the short time that remains to her. Beth dies without much protest, whereupon the book sinks for a while into a rather boring peacefulness. The world of the Marches becomes gentle, kind—beige, as it were—as if nothing could bring back the hour of real happiness, so we’re all just going to get used to half measures.
Ravishing as this is, it still disappointed many of Alcott’s contemporaries, because Jo didn’t marry Laurie. And it has disappointed many of our contemporaries, too, because why did Jo, our hero, have to marry at all, not to speak of marrying a man who told her to stop writing? The problem is made worse by the fact that Alcott herself appeared to vacillate.
There are other clues that Bhaer is a character very close to Alcott’s heart. When Jo, on her second day in New York, hears the professor singing in the next room, Alcott tells us what the song is. It was originally sung by a strange little character, Mignon, in Goethe’s 1795 novel, “.” Mignon is a girl dressed as a boy, who, having been kidnapped in her native Italy by a gang of ruffians, is travelling with a troupe of actors. They treat her badly. She appeals to Wilhelm Meister to rescue her.
When Bhaer arrives to visit the Marches, Jo asks him to sing “Kennst Du das Land” again. The first line, Alcott writes, was once Bhaer’s favorite, because, before, “das Land” to him meant Germany, his homeland.
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