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In Our Time
Little Women
00:48:16
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Louisa May Alcott's influential story of the March sisters
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- [00:00]
Melvin Bragg
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
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Erin Forbes
BBC Sounds Music.
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Melvin Bragg
Radio Podcasts this is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello When Louisa May Alcott wrote little women in 1868, she only did so at the urging of her publisher and father, who hoped it would make money for all three of them. And it did. This coming of age story of Meg Jo, Beth and Amy March has delighted generations of readers and is credited with starting a new genre of fiction for young adults, especially girls. Alcott wrote the second part of it in 1869 and further sequels and spin offs, and her works inspired countless directors, composers and authors to make a myriad of reimagined versions ever since. With me to discuss Louisa May Alcott's Little Women are Tom Wright, reader in Rhetoric and head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Sussex Erin Forbes, senior Lecturer in African American and U.S. literature at the University of Bristol, and Bridget Bennett, professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds. Bridget Alcott's childhood was unconventional, to say the least. What would you pick out?
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Bridget Bennett
The major thing I'd pick out about her childhood was that she was born to parents who were committed to social justice and reform and who were very unafraid of living an eccentric style of life according perhaps to today's standards. So her mother, Abigail May Alcott, known as Abby, would frequently give away some of her clothing to people who were poorer than herself. She was working as a social worker, and Alcott used to say, my mother often looked a little bit decrepit. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, known as Bronson, was an educator, a pedagogue who ran experimental schools whose methods were eccentric according to the standards of the day, but today perhaps have a longevity and we might be much more sympathetic towards them. They were intellectuals, they were interested in working, they were interested in educating their daughters to perform labor in the world. And according to Their intellectual beliefs and their social beliefs, they formed the ways in which their children were raised. She had three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth and Abigail.
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Melvin Bragg
They were very broke.
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Bridget Bennett
They were very broke. They might not seem so broke to us because they were well off enough to have well off neighbours who supported them, including influential intellectual figures of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. So they weren't at the levels of poverty that really poor people were experiencing, but they were genteel and poor in that way. As I said before, the parents would often give their clothing away. They were generous towards others. They lost money repeatedly. Bronson was famously useless with money. He wasn't a good financial support for his family. When he was very young, he went off to try and support his parents by working as a peddler and ended up having to be bailed out by them. And this story was the characteristic of his life. He was always being bailed out by others. So he was a loving father who contributed to his family in all kinds of caring ways, but financially he was not a prudent figure.
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Melvin Bragg
Did that leave the children with the notion they had to make the money?
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Bridget Bennett
They did, and they actually did have to make the money. So they sewed. Alcott, for instance, she sewed to make her living. She, while she was sewing, she was thinking about her writing. She was writing too. Even as a young, very young person. She was also teaching others. And her sisters were also working in order to make the money that perhaps their father should have been making for them and wasn't. And he was often away from home at crucial times.
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Melvin Bragg
The idea of Transcendentalism makes an entrance here. Tom, can you tell the listeners about that idea and why it was important?
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Tom Wright
Yeah. The Transcendentalist movement was a group of writers and artists in New England from the 1830s to the 1860s, a group of people who had three ideas basically in common. The first idea was the fact that all living things, nature, is a unity. The second idea is that mankind is innately good. The third idea is that reason, rationality, is less important than insight and revelation.
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Melvin Bragg
Not unlike Wordsworth.
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Tom Wright
Well, I was going to say, Melvin, lots of your listeners might be thinking, hang on, this sounds like what in Europe, here in Germany and England might have been called Romanticism a generation earlier, Schlegel or Wordsworth. But it has a very American twist. In New England, it's got a kind of cultural nationalism. It's supposed to be pushing back against Europe. It's got a new world energy and it's got a kind of religiosity and as Bridget has said, it became associated with this ex priest called Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in the 1830s published a book called Nature, Influenced a lot by Bronson's writings. And he amassed a circle of thinkers around him that used these ideas that I mentioned, took them in really interesting directions. So Margaret Fuller used these ideas to think about the place of women in society. Henry David Thoreau, about the harmony of how you live in harmony with nature, and Walt Whitman, how you might revolutionize poetry. And they were quite marginal figures, but you couldn't ignore them in American culture. And some people hated them. Now, I know you've done a program on Edgar Allan Poe before. He hated them. He thought they were pretentious hippies. They were full of it, and they were charlatans. But you couldn't ignore these people. They really put American literature on the map. Bronson was. Was one of these people, and he lived these ideas. And as Brigitte had already said, you know, in some ways, Louisa May Alcott's life, she was the beneficiary of these ideas. But in other ways, they lived on a commune that didn't work. She may have felt, when she was starving in the winter because these ideals weren't working, that she was the victim of Transcendentalist ideas. And in her writing throughout her life, she criticized and was quite scornful about her dad's excesses. Yet I think she. Those ideas are still there in Little Women. And we can see that work as a transcendental work.
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Melvin Bragg
Can you pull out one or two of the specific cultural processes that she had that she went through as a child?
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Tom Wright
Yeah, so she grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. And in Boston, and this is a place that's really iconic in the American historical imagination, first of all, because it's, you know, Boston and Concord, it's where the revolution breaks out. The Boston Tea Party, 1773, and the American War of Independence breaks out in 1775 in Concord. But 50 years later, when Louise is growing up, it's suddenly the center of an American cultural and intellectual flowering. And it's got these three dimensions to it. It's literary. She could go to the end of her street in Concord and see lectures each week. Politicians, explorers, intellectuals of the day. She also knew some of the great intellectuals of the day. Emerson and Thoreau were her friends. They took her on walks, taught her about nature, let her run free in their library, in their house. And she was also surrounded by activists then. So social reform is the other part of the culture, temperance reform, trying to free Women from drunken husbands and that kind of thing. Abolition, trying to fight against slavery. And her father was, you know, helping fugitive slaves escape to Canada. And he was an educator as well, and he had very progressive ideas about education. The kind of thing that today in education you might call oracy, you know, dialogue between pupils rather than filling them with facts. And the final thing is it's a really spiritual culture. This is really unconventional Christianity. Lots of people who are pushing back against Calvinism and trying to create new sects and new forms of Christianity. So she was nearly on the poverty line a lot. She moved 30 times when she was growing up. But despite all of that, she was really well connected and had this immensely rich cultural life.
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Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much, Erin. Erin Forbes. We've heard that she was reluctant to write Little Women at the start. And as we know, she wrote 200 books, which I'm still trying to absorb. I don't mean the books, I mean the fact of it. What did she. What was, what did she written up to? Little Women?
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Erin Forbes
Yeah, she was an extremely prolific writer, as you say. We know over 200 works of hers and we are still discovering more and more works. There are still works of Ruth Malcolm's to be uncovered because she didn't only write under her own name, she also wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, including Flora Fairfield. Under the name of Flora Fairfield, she liked to write poetry, the sort of naturally inspired poetry, poetry inspired by the natural world that Tom has been talking about. She served as a Civil War nurse before writing Little Women. And she had an autobiographical account of her experiences as a Civil War nurse that she published again under a pseudonym. This time the pseudonym was Tribulation, Periwinkle. So a bit playful. But what she loved to write most of all in the period leading up to her writing of Little Women were sensation stories, thrillers. Sensations, yes. So thrillers, mysteries, Gothic tales, themes of betrayal, revenge, forbidden romance. And given the elite high flying society that she was surrounded with and Concord, she published this either anonymously or pseudonymously. Most of these works were published under the name of a.m. barnard. And Louisa May Alcott was somebody who was known in her time. She had many correspondence, she journaled copiously. So it's not the case that nobody had any idea that she wrote works like this.
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Melvin Bragg
Could you give listeners a brief idea outline of the plot of Little Women?
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Erin Forbes
Yes. Oh, yes. Okay. So the novel is published in two separate parts. The first part is published in 1868. The second part is published in 1869. And the first part of the Novel takes place over the course of one year where the father is absent. He's gone off to serve the Union army as a Civil War chaplain, leaving this very female centered space with four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, and their mother, Marmee, and a servant who's living in the house with them and helping them keep everything together, named Hannah. It's modeled after Pilgrim's Progress. And the sisters, each, in the first part of the novel, identify a key flaw that they have and work to try to overcome it over the course of the novel. Meg's, for example, is vanity. Jo has a terrible temper. Beth, she's extremely good, but she's very shy, so she's working to maybe overcome some of that shyness. And Amy, the youngest sister, is selfish and also vain. The second part picks up in their adulthood over the course of 15 years. We learn who the little women marry, what their relationships are like, how they grow up, and I'm sorry there are spoilers, but Beth dies in the second half of the novel.
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Melvin Bragg
We all know where we are. Thank you, Bridget. We've talked about her war experience. Can you develop this a little and say how it turned into writing?
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Bridget Bennett
Yes. So, thinking of the novel first, the very opening line of the novel, christmas won't be Christmas without any presents, reveals to us immediately as readers that something has happened. And we soon discover that the reason why the girls don't have presents is because Marmy thinks it would be inappropriate for them to spend money on pleasure while men were fighting in the war. So right from the opening of the novel, we can see that the Civil War is the kind of absent present, like the father, that's always there, that's spoken about peripherally, but is always present throughout the novel. It's the thing that allows the novel to happen. It's what allows the father, at least in the first part, to be absent from the novel. And the novel is absolutely kind of saturated by it in that way, though it's also. It doesn't have to be spoken about it, because everybody knows this. If we just have a few dates about the war itself, because it might be useful just to situate it in that way. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United states. And on the 1st of January, 1863, the emancipation proclamation was passed, which meant that enslaved people, enslaved states were no longer enslaved. The Civil War itself ran from 1861 to 1865. So immediately before the novel was written. And Alcott, a keen Unionist, was desperate to enlist. But as a woman, she couldn't she couldn't fight in the war, so instead she waited till her 30th birthday, which was the earliest time at which a woman could become a nurse. And as we've already heard, she became a nurse. And she traveled down to Georgetown, where she worked for. She. She signed up for three months, but actually she quickly got typhoid fever, so after six weeks, she had to stop. And she did write this extraordinary work called Hospital Sketches, which, though it's lighthearted in some ways, when you actually read the detail of what she's saying, it's profoundly shocking. She was obviously extremely shocked by the kind of physical work she had to do by washing men's bodies, by seeing the deep, deep trauma of war, and then also seeing the ways that diseases unrelated to the war then swept through the hospital, killing people. And one thing she says that's very notable to anyway, is that the hospital was formerly a hotel, and the signs from the hotel were still up around her. And she says the ballroom was still a ballroom because it was full of men whose bodies had been shot through with bullets. So it's both kind of lighthearted and really profoundly shocking.
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Melvin Bragg
Tom, had you to be persuaded to write this novel. If so, by whom?
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Tom Wright
Yeah, this is part of the myth of the novel, the myth of Little Women, and I'll try and do justice to the story. It's quite a famous story. So it's the late 1860s, as Bridget and Erin have told us. Louisa May Alcott is gaining a name for herself as a writer of quite serious works about the Civil War. She's also making money, often using pseudonyms, through writing what she sometimes called her rubbish.
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Melvin Bragg
They have to have money and she's the big money earner.
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Tom Wright
Yeah.
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Melvin Bragg
So making stuff that gets money back is good.
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Tom Wright
So she considered writing the sensation stuff, her rubbish, but she knew it paid really well. But then a publisher called Thomas Niles approached her. He spotted a gap in the market. He saw that there were lots of books for teenage boys, and he saw that there were none for teenage girls. He thought, this is a shrewd gap. I know how to fill it. I'm going to ask Louisa May Olcott to do that. She was having none of it. She was making far more money doing sensation fiction and gaining a serious life for herself. And also she said, I don't know nothing of anything about girls. I don't like girls and know nothing of them. And she had to be persuaded. Now, Thomas Niles did this in quite an underhand way. He said, look, if you write this story, I will publish your dad's book of philosophical fantasies and speculations. Look, this book was never going to get published in any other way. And she was manipulated then into writing to save her dad's career and to save her family's fortunes because her mum was quite sick. So she began work on Little Women. And you'll remember in Little Women, there's one of the most famous scenes in that when Jo falls into what she calls a vortex when she's in this kind of flow state of writing, which anyone who's one of the four children. Jo is one of the four children, kind of the main. The tomboy, the main one. And she becomes a writer. And a bit like Jo, Louisa May Alcott falls into this vortex and she writes little women in 12 weeks, 400 pages, sends it to the publisher, she thinks it's rubbish. The publisher reads it and thinks, yeah, I kind of agree. I don't like this at all. But his two girl children read it and say, dad, we love this. This is exactly what people want. So he publishes it. Reviewers agree. Reviewers spot that it's immediately something totally new. It's a kind of young adult fiction that's not speaking down to its audience and it's fresh and all that kind of thing. And then she's leant on to provide a sequel. As Erin was telling us, everyone's saying, who are they going to marry? And someone was joking. Will it be called Wedding Marches, the second volume of the book. And she said, it really afflicts me the way that publishers are urging me to marry them off. So she has quite contrary solutions to that. But she delivers this second book again, writes it really quick. Published in 1869. This is really where it becomes a cultural phenomenon. It sells 20,000 copies in the first few weeks. And a family friend in New York and Boston talks about how it, you know, he was there. And merchants and clerks and people across all walks of life and genders were saying, have you read Little Women? Have you read Little Women? It became a cultural phenomenon. People started going to Louise's house in Concord, knocking on the door, Geo worshippers flocking to her. So this book that she didn't want to write suddenly became one of the late 19th century's key cultural and literary.
- [18:01]
Melvin Bragg
Phenomena and has remained so ever since. Erin, can you give us a sketch of these four sisters, starting with Meg, the oldest?
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Erin Forbes
Yeah. So at the beginning of the novel, Meg is 16 years old. Meg is a rule follower. She's very pretty and she is very, very attracted, this is her fault, to beautiful Things, beautiful material objects. She wants to have nice things, the nicer things that the richer girls around her have. And her struggle is to try to overcome that. Then she ends about to be married till Mary, three years after that first part of the novel. Jo is 15. At the start of the novel, she's described as being very much like a cult. She loved to run, she loved to play boys, games. She had what's described in several places in the novel as a gentlemanly manner. And she's also a writer. She is passionate about her writing. As Tom said, she'll fall into her vortex. She's got a special pinafore that she wears to absorb the ink stains as she's writing. And that's her passion. Beth is 13 years old when the novel begins. And she is goodness itself. Tranquility. She's a dear and nothing else. Her sister says she has kittens that she likes to play with, dolls that she's constantly dressing. And she takes care of the housework because she's too shy to go to school. Amy, the littlest sister, is the golden child. She's got curly hair, everybody's fussing over her all the time. And she's got a sense of her own importance. And she is an artist. She's drawn to the art world. Beth, I should say, is a musician as well. She plays the piano quite beautifully.
- [19:48]
Melvin Bragg
Action.
- [19:51]
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- [20:23]
Melvin Bragg
Bridget. There's a strong work ethic, one of the things on display, that you have to work to live properly. Where did that come from?
- [20:31]
Bridget Bennett
It came from Protestantism. Fundamentally. Absolutely. Work is highly valorized throughout this novel. Work is a form of virtue. It's seen more as a form of virtue than a form of money making. So working for capitalist profit is not lauded. Working for self improvement, to help others to develop the mind, to develop personal qualities is lauded. And this is evident right the way through the novel. Very early on, there's a chapter called Experiments where the girls decide they want to have a holiday and the mother indulges them. This epitomizes the kind of pedagogical moment that the real Alcott parents specialized in. So the Mother indulges them. She allows them not to do any labour, not to do their household chores, not to do anything. And over a period of time, they become fractious, bored. They argue, they hate each other, they hate themselves. And they learn, of course they learn, because it's little women that actually work is a form of valor. And they go back to their work happy because they've learned this next door to them. We haven't really talked about him yet, is a really key figure in the novel. He's a kind of extra little woman, except he's a boy called Laurie. Although actually he's a kind of quite effeminate boy. I mean, she's very interested in playing around with gender roles in this novel. And Laurie is a wealthy young boy. He's bored, he's lonely, and he's lazy, and he's always lazy. And this is critiqued right the way through the novel such that there's one chapter simply called Lazy Lawrence, where he's traveling in Europe with Amy, who he will eventually marry, and she turns on him and says, you lead a life of luxury. You've never applied yourself to anything. I can have no sympathy with anyone who behaves in the way that you behave. You better get yourself sorted out. And in the novel's terms, he does. And he applies himself not really to business, though we know he's making money kind of somehow in the background, but we never see him going out to work in that way. But actually the work he applies himself to is the work of being a loving man, a good husband and a good father. So we can see the feminism in this novel that actually the work for men of being loving heterosexual partners, going into the nursery and helping with child rearing is as important, if not more important, than going out to work in the world of labor. So this is really interesting in a novel of this kind, where 19th century novels, mid century novels often valorize a domestic ideology which places women at the center of the home, but sends men off to work outside of it. This novel doesn't do that.
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Melvin Bragg
Yeah. Thank you, Tom. Just to follow up, there are very few men there in the book. Largely absent. Why does that matter?
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Tom Wright
Well, especially in the first part, you know, Bridget introduced. She said that the introductory paragraphs of the book introduces the four characters and says that they're all bound together with this darkness because the dad is away. He's. He's serving in. In the army. And it's supposed to be this source of. Yeah, he's supposed to be the source of great sorrow. But what's interesting is actually in that first part of the book, it's really quite giddy. It's quite freeing. This lack of men, women take center stage. There's no male figures of authority that you'd usually find in a book of this kind. And it's women's concerns that are at the center. Women's development spiritually, emotionally, intellectually. That's right at the heart. And there's a contemporary American writer called Alison Bechdel, and she has this idea about the Bechdel Test, where you can work out whether a work of fiction takes women seriously. And listeners may know this, that the test is, do two women in a narrative speak to each other seriously about something that isn't a man? And at various points in the first part of Little Women, that test is definitely passed in fascinating ways. So why is the dad not there? Is an interesting question. Why is Bronson not there? You know, in some ways, Louisa May Alcott may have thought my dad is just too weird to put into a book like this. She may have been trying to take revenge on him because he was not really much of a dad. She wanted to get him out of the way. She described people like him and his Transcendentalist friends as like a balloon that the women around were trying to pull back down to earth using strings. And so in the novel, she just gets rid of him. And it maybe sums up the way in which she conceived and managed to achieve a life that didn't revolve around. Meant she earned money for herself. And she's making this broader point, I think, in. Especially in the early. The first part of Little Women that is critiquing gender roles. And it's. And it's saying that you can reconstruct American society from a female point of view, like happened in the home front during the Civil War. And that's why I think, you know, people like us critics, when looking at books like this, we use this phrase, the cultural work of a book. That is to say, the influence of it isn't just about the artistic value. It's about the ripples it has through culture. And the cultural work of this is to raise the expectations of female agency. Underneath this very placid surface, domestic surface, young girls are being encouraged to see female agency, female independence. And that's the cultural work.
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Bridget Bennett
Yet. Yet the fans of the novel wanted Jo to get married. And she does get married. And for many. For many of us, this is. This is the novel's great failure. She says. Alcott says, I had to do this. My fans wanted me to do this. So I made a funny match for her, she says, in marrying Jo to an older, bearded, rather overweight, not very handsome German professor. So she thinks of this as a funny match. So she. Yes, on the one hand, she creates agency for women, but Jo can never be the thing she wants to be. On the other hand, again, spoiler alert. Beth, who is somehow too good for this world, literally is too good for this world, and she dies. And for some, it's.
- [26:33]
Melvin Bragg
She has a bad attack of scarlet.
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Bridget Bennett
Fever because she's being dutiful, Because. Because she's being dutiful because she's going to visit the poor Hummel family. It is not her job to do that. But her sisters are kind of messing around and don't really want to do it. She, of course, does it because she is the good girl. Of course, she's also a weaker girl. She gets scarlet fever, never really gets over this and eventually dies. And for some of us, not a moment too soon. But that's maybe just me. I find her insufferable. All that goodness. All that goodness.
- [27:02]
Melvin Bragg
Have you ever met anybody who's too good?
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Bridget Bennett
No, not that I have liked.
- [27:09]
Melvin Bragg
That might be the answer. Well, it is the answer, isn't it? Emeryn what about this? We've sort of skipped over it. Her preference for earlier than Little Women, for lurid gothic life and slush it away with deceptions and terrible stuff. So, like hotcakes. Thank you very much.
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Bridget Bennett
Yes.
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Melvin Bragg
It seems so far away from Little Women, doesn't it?
- [27:29]
Erin Forbes
Oh, yes, very much so. So when we think of Little Women, we think of this novel as being sort of full of sunshine and teas and picnics and adventures and a handsome neighbor next door and girls, one of whom is terribly good, just working to make themselves better and better. And that is certainly what the novel is about. But at the same time, I think when we realize that Alcott was an author drawn to the lurid style, which he calls the lurid style and these blood and thunder tales, and we take those glasses and we look back at Little Women, we can see quite clearly, actually, a darker ribbon running through. So some of the scenes that we've already talked about, for example, Bridget mentioned the chapter experiments where the girls give up work for a period of time. One of the things that happens, quite easy to gloss past, is that Beth's canary dies because nobody remembers to feed it. So they have to have this very sad bird funeral, which it is presented as somewhat humorous, but it builds quite clearly as a Foreshadowing of. In the chapter where Beth goes to see the Hummels because her sisters are shirking this duty, a baby dies in her arms. She's a 13 year old girl. She comes home, she locks herself up in a room, her sister comes. What's the matter? It turns out that while she was at the Hummels, this infant child died in her arms. And she sat there holding it for what sounds like quite a long period of time. I don't think that ever shows up in any of the film versions. It's a little too dark. It quite clearly is foreshadowed by the canary scene and then leads into the scene in which Beth ultimately herself dies and becomes this sort of ghost in the garden.
- [29:17]
Melvin Bragg
There are dark patches. That's one of them. But there are several come and go, don't they? They go quite quickly, but they also come along.
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Erin Forbes
Yes, I mean, and even at the very end of the novel, we have this Happy birthday. Marmee's 60th birthday. Her family is gathered around her. These little women have grown so beautifully into such wonderful older women. And we have the sweet ghost of Beth haunting the house. But two things. Amy's daughter, little Beth, is described as being very frail and probably not long to live. And Jo has opened this wonderful school for boys with a Professor Baer. And he's very happy and it's a very lively place. But there's every chance, Joe says, that it's going to be burned down one night by a reckless boy who can't stop playing with fire. So this sort of grim thread running throughout right to the very end of the novel.
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Melvin Bragg
Bridget. There's a lot of wealth which comes along in great big bundles. There's a lot of what we can call poverty, not genteel poverty, poverty, poverty. What do you make of the way she dealt with that?
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Bridget Bennett
Well, you see the real poverty right at the beginning of the novel when, having given up their Christmas presents, the girls go along with their mother to visit a poor German family. And there's no hiding just how terrible their poverty is. This is the German family whose baby will eventually die. As we've just heard, this will kill Beth. They have no fire, they have no food, there's no man in the house to provide. There's no way of making money. And the family go there and they have to spend their time stuffing rags into the cracks in the windows to try and keep the house a little bit warm. And there's no kind of glossing over the fact that this is very Grim. And throughout the novel, that family, though it's not invoked all the time, it's always there as a kind of backdrop. That is, there is great poverty going on side by side, very close to where this family live and experience their lesser version of poverty. That's nonetheless difficult because although the March family isn't poor in the way that the Hummel family is poor, the girls all have to go out to work. There's no choice about that. And their financial. The money that they bring in is absolutely fundamental to the economic basis of the household in which they live. So there's no choice about it at all. And they are just very young girls. They're not adults.
- [31:40]
Melvin Bragg
We are giving a darker view. I mean, he's regarded as a happy. On the whole, happy, contented book. Can you give us a taste of that?
- [31:48]
Bridget Bennett
No, indeed. And like I said earlier, this work is regarded as virtuous. It's a form of contribution to the family. And the family is extraordinarily discursive conversation. Sensational, supportive, joyous. Tom mentioned earlier a little about the kind of physical activity. This is something that both Bronson. Sorry, both Alcott parents really encouraged in their daughters. Alcott herself would say, you know, I do my 20 miles in four hours or five hours, and then go to a party in the evening. She was very physically fit and active. You see this in the family all the time. The girls are always running around outside. They put on plays, they perform plays, they read a great deal, they talk to each other all the time. And though the family is poor, when they do go out to social occasions, and this is often depicted in extremely funny ways, Jo went goes out to a social occasion. Joe's the tomboy, Jo's the tomboy. Of course, she has burnt her dress. Of course everything is a mess. Of course, nothing is tidy. But she goes out to a party with her vain older sister, Meg, who wishes to impress everyone. Meg wears a pair of high heels that she then hurts her foot in. And Jo has. Yeah, because she can't walk in them. Some of us know about these things still. And Jo has to kind of hang around, lurk around by the wall all evening because half her dress is burnt and she doesn't want it to show up. So it's all done. It's very humorous. I mean, it is actually a funny novel. There are laugh out loud moments. And Jo is slangy, she is unconventional. She's a tomboy, much like Alcott herself. Alcott herself said, when I was a child, I'd only be friends with boys if I could beat them running a race, and I'd only be friends with girls if they'd climb a tree with me or jump over a fence. They were the only types of people I liked spending time with. So she's funny.
- [33:47]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah.
- [33:47]
Bridget Bennett
Alcott herself was very funny, very blunt, very to the point.
- [33:51]
Melvin Bragg
Can we, can we switch to something that was on the horizon, but also in the middle of the book? And that's a civil war with the father being away, chaplain in danger, and one of the husbands comes back, sisters comes back wounded and so on? They are abolitionists. Do we hear a great deal about that in the book?
- [34:10]
Tom Wright
We don't. It's really surprising, especially if you think about OT as a. As someone who's so steeped in abolition. Her dad was an abolitionist, her mum was an abolitionist. She knew this issue inside out, but it's not there. This war is presented like it could be about anything. And you could make clever arguments for why that is. You could say that she's just trying to like focus on the domestic so that she can trace moral progress within the home. But really I think the answer is clear. She's a hard headed businesswoman. It's 1868. She knows that her audience, white middle class women in the north, didn't want to read about the war and its causes that are still dividing the country and why their brothers and uncles have come back with wooden legs or died. And she just makes a conscious decision to not mention slavery throughout the book.
- [34:54]
Melvin Bragg
Is this a commercial decision?
- [34:55]
Tom Wright
I think it is. And it's of a piece with her business minded pursuit of her career. Now you can see that just like Bridget was saying, the second part of book in particular, lots of that. What I was trying to say was a latent feminism is drained out of it by the plot and the marriage plot. And you might say that the same critique is there because it avoids these issues of racial justice and it's symptomatic maybe of how transcendentalist ideas about moral, interior, moral progress ignore some social factors. But, and this is a big but, at the end of the book, you get a glimpse of what Louis de Med Alcott was really thinking about these issues. Jo sets up a school with a Professor Baer, and just like her father in Boston, she accepts a black child, you know, a quadroon, 19th century language for a mixed race and pupil. A merry little quadroon joined the school. And it says in the book, even though that might spell ruin now, our dad had allowed black kids into his school in Boston and the white kids with the white parents withdrew their children and it ruined his career. But he stood up for his beliefs about racial justice and that kind of thing. And so you see right at the end of the novel, Jo's character seems like she's going to inherit this anti racist sentiment that comes from the Olcott family. Even if slavery is not there, you get one little glimmer, if you know where to look for it, that their hearts are in the right place.
- [36:19]
Bridget Bennett
And there's another moment in the novel, and this is really a complicated one, where a fair is put on to make to raise money for the freedmen, as they're called, so emancipated, formerly enslaved people. Now, actually, what you might expect is that this would be supported in the novel, but actually what you see is it's largely run by a group of rather vain, wealthy upper class women. And it's critiqued because it's simply silly, even though it's not wholly critiqued, but it's kind of critiqued for being a bit silly and a bit. It's used to teach a certain kind of lesson about vanity, but in real terms, in the fight against enslavement, these anti slavery fairs were actually incredibly important in raising money. So she raises it. But she's also kind of showing the ways in which, in some people's hands, social justice is being used as a way to create social cachet for themselves, and she doesn't like that.
- [37:19]
Melvin Bragg
Erin, what changed in fiction because of this book?
- [37:23]
Erin Forbes
Well, this is a book that's written at the dawn of what you could say is the age of the modern age of children's literature. Of course, there had been fairy tales and all sorts of works written for children, oriented toward children previously. But growing out of these ideas of romanticism and transcendentalism, we have a different idea of childhood as a particular state of life with particular types of literary content that would be appropriate to it. So shortly before Little Women, Alice in Wonderland appears, so it's right around the same time as that. But it's not until much later in the 19th century that we get other novels that we might put alongside little women in our heads, like Heidi or Anne of Green Gables or Secret Garden. So this idea of a novel that takes very seriously the lives of highly individual girls, young women, and focuses simply on their domestic adventures and their development of their characters is something that's new with Little Women and that influences a whole range of children's literature that comes afterward through to our time. Really.
- [38:31]
Melvin Bragg
Tom, what about his afterlife yeah.
- [38:34]
Tom Wright
So there's an incredible number of quite unexpected people who are inspired by the book. You know, like Patti Smith, Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks. All of these people who claim it quite unexpectedly as having transformed their life. But I think the afterlife of the book isn't just about the book. It's about how it's. How it has a life for itself on stage and in particular on screen. Yeah. And unlike other 19th century books, fiction like Dickens or Uncle Tom's Cabin that go to the stage immediately, it doesn't do that because the Olcott family won't let it. They won't let it be adapted. So it's not until the 1910s that it goes to Broadway. It's a big hit on Broadway. By that time it's already been made into films. Now the first film of Little Women is made here in Britain, 1917. The silent film, this one, made in America in 1918. Then every decade there's a new version of Little Women that has the hallmarks of what each generation wants to see in it. And I think there's just three that I think are really interesting. 1933, okay. Kathryn Hepburn plays Jo. It's a really famous version, really goes for the tomboy aspect. If anyone's seen it. You know, she's sliding down the banister, she's having fencing matches with Laurie. And it's really going for the gender role kind of theme. There is a 1949 version with Elizabeth Taylor as Amy that isn't that great.
- [39:47]
Melvin Bragg
I saw that.
- [39:49]
Tom Wright
Well, I mean, she was far too beautiful to play Jo. But then again, that happens again in 1994. Which is the next version I'm going to talk about. Winona Ryder plays Jo. Potentially miscast, I'm not sure, but the Australian director Gillian Armstrong sets it with a star studded cast. Christian Bale plays Laurie and Susan Sarandon plays Marmy. And they do two things in the 90s. They introduce new dialogue that makes it more progressive. They put suffragette kind of speeches in the mouth of Joe, which is not there in the book. But they also do this thing that becomes really influential. They start to conflate Louisa May Alcott with Joe. They start to conflate the two characters. And that really comes to its head in the version that most people, most listeners to this will have seen. The most recent version, the film version, Greta Gerwig's 2019 Little Women in which Saoirse Ronan plays Jo. And this is a spoiler for those who haven't seen the film. It plays it so that she ends up being Louisa May Alcott, having written the story that we've just watched. She's written Little Women as a result of that. And I think what that tells us is at this point people are fascinated by this book as much because of this author, because she has this remarkable career and independence as a, as a self funding independent female creator in the 19th century that we respect almost as much as the character of Jo that is at the heart of this.
- [41:10]
Melvin Bragg
What do you think? We're coming to the end now, Aaron. But what do you think most grabs readers? What is the we gotta read?
- [41:17]
Erin Forbes
Because for me, what's so interesting about Little Women is the way that these four sisters and indeed their mother, who confesses at one point to Jo that she's angry nearly every day of her life, are very realistic characters with struggles, struggles and strengths, struggles and strengths that anybody can identify with. So it's very common for readers of Little Women to say, I'm a Joe. Oh, I'm Amy. Not so many people will identify with Beth because of course she's so good. And only the really boring amongst us, such as myself, might identify with Meg. But this idea of these girls providing different sorts of prototypes for white femininity that various readers, even indeed across races at times can look to, to think about their own struggles with the world of work and womanhood and patriarchy, masculinity.
- [42:13]
Melvin Bragg
Brigid.
- [42:14]
Bridget Bennett
Yeah, I think it has this legacy of thinking about how complex it's still is to become and be and live as a woman. Also a woman who has ambitions beyond domesticity, but that include domesticity. So I think the negotiation of the complex roles of women's lives, I think that's really important and actually kind of lasting part of this, I find when I teach it as well, that question of students, we always want to know which girl are you, which woman are you? And actually which, which girl are you? Melvin, if you had to be one of the girls. Of course, yeah. Everyone wants, well, everyone perhaps wants to be Joe. Perhaps except Aaron.
- [42:58]
Erin Forbes
I'd like to be Joe.
- [42:59]
Tom Wright
I know I'm a middle aged European academic, so I'm Professor Bear.
- [43:03]
Bridget Bennett
I think in the end.
- [43:05]
Tom Wright
Yeah.
- [43:06]
Melvin Bragg
Well, thank you all very much. Thank you very much. Bridget Bennett in Forbes and Tom Wright. Next week, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. It's the rise and fall of a Venetian empire. Thanks for listening.
- [43:20]
Bridget Bennett
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:27]
Melvin Bragg
Time with you, Bridget, what would you like to have said that you didn't have time to say.
- [43:31]
Bridget Bennett
I would have liked to have said a bit more about Beth's death because I think it's unlike other literary deaths, especially deaths of young girls and women around this. So I was thinking that death that I wanted to think about was the death of little Nell in the old curiosity shop, 1840-41. This is a death that's awaited so with such kind of bated breath in the United States that famously, crowds were at the docks in New York saying, is Nell dead yet? Waiting for the latest editions of this novel to come. And if you read this famously, Oscar Wilde says, you know, you must have had a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little Nell. It's very full of pathos, of sentiment, repeatedly. Here she is dead. She was dead. You hear this again and again and again. So that's one death. The next death after that I was thinking of is the death of little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin. This iconic death of a Christ like white girl who simply cannot live because slavery exists in the world. So she expires. It's too much for her. And it's an iconic death that drives its way through the novel. But when it comes to the death of Beth in Little Women, Alcott, who has seen a number of deaths in this time, who has been a nurse in the Civil War, she simply says, seldom, except in books, do the dying utter memorable words, see visions, or depart with beautified countenances. So she just slips away very gently. And this reveals a set of different things. One is, there's been so much death at this point in the United States. How could you write this another way? But the other is this really important shift that Tom was talking about early on between Calvinism and Transcendentalism, or between Calvinism and Unitarianism, different forms of Protestantism in which there's a belief in the innate goodness of people. So the deathbed scene doesn't have to be the moment at which you reveal whether you are one of the elect, whether you're going to go to heaven or whether you're like the rest of us and you're going to go to hell. Within Calvinism, the deathbed scene is really important for determining or for speaking about which way you're going up or down. It doesn't have to happen. So I think that's really important in this novel.
- [45:51]
Melvin Bragg
Amy, is there anything you'd like to add?
- [45:53]
Erin Forbes
Well, we didn't talk as much as we might have about Jo and what we're talking about. As her tomboy nature. That's something that contemporary scholars have dug into a little bit deeper. And even in terms of adaptations, there's been an adaptation where Jo is represented as a lesbian. There are questions about Jo's sort of gender dysphoria that we haven't discussed that are quite interesting. So in the very first chapter of the novel, she says that she can't get over her disappointment in not being a boy, which feels like a very sort of tomboy type of moment. But when we pair that with some of Alcott's own statements about her own struggle with her gender identity, there are questions that open up about really what was the nature of Jo and by extension, Alcott's own struggles with gender and gender identity and fitting into these paradigms.
- [46:47]
Melvin Bragg
Tom?
- [46:48]
Tom Wright
Yeah, it's a fascinating discussion. I think there's two things. One is it fits into this tradition of so many American masterpieces that are aimed or could be mistaken for being children's books. Huckleberry Finn, even Moby Dick at various points in their.
- [47:03]
Melvin Bragg
Moby Dick couldn't be a children's book.
- [47:05]
Tom Wright
But it's been marketed as such. It's something you're supposed to read.
- [47:07]
Melvin Bragg
Marketing. I don't. Well, never mind. It's merely a.
- [47:10]
Tom Wright
Exactly. It's a deeply philosophical work, and you might say that the same is true of Little Women. But the other thing about the book is the gendered readership. So many times when you hear people discussing. And when I've discussed this book, if I discuss it with female friends, it changed their life. If I discuss it with male friends, they say, I haven't read it, actually. And it's that use of that word, actually that fascinates me, because they know they should have done, and they know the importance of the book, but they don't know the book. And I wonder whether that gender divide still persists.
- [47:39]
Erin Forbes
Interesting. Tom, when you were speaking about the Bechdel test earlier, I was thinking about that as well, as I've been reading Little Women recently. And I think that one interesting thing about the novel. And tell me if you guys think this is correct. I don't think it passes a reverse Bechdel test. I don't think there are ever two male characters who have a conversation with each other that's not about a woman. Laurie and his grandfather have a conversation after Beth has. I'm sorry. After Jo has rejected Laurie's proposal. And that's, I think, the only conversation I can think of that's depicted on page between two male characters at all. Professor Baer and Jo March's father are depicted as really liking to have conversations, but we don't hear any of them. So in terms of the feminism of the novel, I think that's an interesting.
- [48:25]
Bridget Bennett
I think you're right. I think that's right.
- [48:28]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you all very much. Thank you.
- [48:30]
Bridget Bennett
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.
- [48:37]
F
Hi, everyone.
- [48:38]
Bridget Bennett
Hey.
- [48:38]
G
That's Marianna Spring. I'm Sarah Smith and we are a couple of the hosts of America.
- [48:43]
F
And right now, as you might imagine, it's not very quiet over in Podcast hq. We've been keeping ourselves very busy.
- [48:49]
G
Yeah. Because the two of us, along with Justin Webb and Anthony Zircher, are now getting together a few times a week as we chat through trying to untangle all the twists and turns and developments in the US Presidential election.
- [49:01]
F
And it'd be fair to say there have been quite a lot of twists and turns already. We've also been chatting a lot about what happens on social media. My favorite topic, if you're interested in US politics, you want to understand what is going on, then I think you might really like our podcast, which is simply called America. You can listen to it on BBC Sounds.
- [49:18]
G
Until then, we'll see you later.