words, I realize that these small moves of mutiny go far beyond endearing personality traits. In Jo, Louisa unwittingly (or, even better, purposely) unmasks her little outlets, the very things she relied on to drag herself through a life of crushing expectation and ugly, unremitting labor.
In one of my favorite passages of the book, Jo is, at last, “All Alone.” Every other member of the March family is occupied: Meg with her unruly babies, Beth with the angels in a heaven doubtless spackled with kittens and ugly dolls, Amy in Europe on the very cross-continental trip that’s been denied her harum-scarum sister. For the first time in her life, Jo’s at a real loss. She looks around and sees a life of endless toil:
Something like despair came over her when she thought of spending all her life in that quiet house, devoted to humdrum cares, a few poor little pleasures, and the duty that never seemed to grow any easier.
These passages are not-so-shockingly similar to Louisa’s own angsty letter to her sister a few years before:
If I think of my woes I fall into a vortex of debts, dish pans, and despondency awful to see…. All very aggravating to a young woman with one dollar, no bonnet, half a gown, and a discontented mind. It’s a mercy the mountains are everlasting, for it will be a century before
The expression of Louisa’s despair through Jo might seem like a mere narrative device, but there’s that outlet again. It took guts to declare your dissatisfaction with life in the 1860s, in a day and age where women’s wrongs were not just ignored, but actively stifled. And it feels good to see the sloppy, ungovernable emotion beneath Louisa’s self-proclaimed hack job.
Better yet is the delicious vent Louisa gives her own heroine. Like her creator, Jo must act when mired in the slough of despond; like Louisa, she writes her way out of every hole. Discontented with her feeble options and frustrated with her own ennui, she goes up to the attic, readjusts her ridiculous writing cap, and gets to work. Here is the true apex of Louisa’s literary rebellion: unlike her creator, Jo is allowed literary success writing books she loves. Her stint writing pulp has been unprofitable and left her numb; as it was for Louisa, the creative work she performs from a place of insecurity or lack is bound to be unsuccessful. Jo writes for herself, out of her own experience, and the truth that comes from that heroine’s self gives her the success Louisa chased her entire life.
I would rather write that Jo’s literary triumph mirrors her creator’s, but in reality they were different creatures indeed.
Angry with a public who disturbed her privacy and demanded constant access to their favorite literary celebrity, Louisa struggled vainly against her new role. Unable to take herself seriously, the girl her father had called “duty’s faithful child” did the only thing she knew how to do: she worked, hard, cranking out stories of placid childhoods and good little women long after there was a financial need. Her nervous system was so used to deprivation and want that she never really learned how to enjoy her fame or her money. She could not have known that she was already dying. Louisa herself thought that the cure to the typhoid she had contracted during her nursing days had brought mercury poisoning along with it; present-day scholars suspect she suffered from lupus. Either way, the work that plagued her, obsessed her, and even killed her was also her literary gift to us.
It’s hard to imagine a heroine more companionable than Jo March, a young woman whose attitude toward work was somewhat more balanced than her creator’s. In the 1860s, her power was as an alternative to the buttoned-down, boring girl who followed all rules and mastered self-sacrifice. That girl has long since faded from fashion, but Jo remains as a tantalizing option, the opposite of fear and insecurity, inaction and perfection. Jo is an Erin Brockovich in a world of corporate sheep, a Christiane Amanpour in a land of pseudo-journalists, an alternative to mundane, muted reality. When Jo works, she does so from a sense of duty, a knowledge that the bills must be paid while Father is off at the war. But she also eventually works from a place of pleasure, tackling projects that are self-supporting and self-defined. Hardworking Jo never shies away from a challenge, and her success gives us something Louisa May Alcott craved but never attained: the possibility of a life in which ambition firmly occupies its proper place.
A workaholic myself, I have much to learn from a heroine who divides her most tedious sewing into hemispheres and talks about geography as she sews. I could do worse than turn my daily struggles into a Pilgrim’s Progress like the March girls. As heroines, we inherit our foremothers’ less appealing traits and trials: a tendency to overwork, off-kilter time management skills, and the never-ending challenge of bringing our work in line with the rest of our lives. Ambition is a heroine’s trait only when it adds to life instead of detracting from it. Louisa would be proud and happy to see that a modern woman can choose any avenue for her life’s work, that our road is easier than the one she trod so resolutely and so ruefully. But fewer obstacles doesn’t mean fewer obligations. Though we have it relatively easy, we still face the challenges of being taken seriously, of proving that our efforts have some meaning and worth. It takes guts to show up for life, to tackle what we are handed. And it takes even more strength and courage not to confuse self-sacrifice with self-sustenance.
A heroine’s work—growth, self-definition, barrier-smashing—is never really done. Let us heed Louisa’s warning and do as Jo does, taking up the work that’s right for us instead of that which we feel obligated to pursue, work that consistently creates the independence Louisa sought when she wrote, “I think I shall come out right, and prove that though an Alcott I
READ THIS BOOK:
• After a fight with a family member or daughter
• When you’re ready to walk out on your job
• On days when you’d rather sell your hair than get out of bed
JO’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Esther Greenwood in
• Frankie Landau-Banks in
• Lucy Snowe in
Chapter 12
Magic
Mary Lennox in
by Frances Hodgson Burnett
“Somehow, something always happens,” she cried, “just before things get to the very worst. It is as if the Magic did it. If I could only just remember that always. The worst thing never QUITE comes.”
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT,
Frances Hodgson Burnett hadn’t aged well. Gossip had always been her closest companion, but it seemed to finally have taken its toll. Now the worst had come: not only was she a laughingstock, but her florid, romantic writing style, the words that had made her a star, had gone out of vogue. She had tried to stay relevant, penning
