Recent reading
Dec. 8th, 2021 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRead Jo's Boys by Louisa May Alcott, and enjoyed it more than Little Men, if only out of a sense of novelty. I hadn't read it before, and it definitely cranks up the drama compared to the earlier March family books, featuring shipwrecks and prison riots and collapsing mines alongside its more expectedly domestic storylines— Jo's niece wants to be an actress! Young love is in the air! A few of the Plumfield boys went to Harvard and have become total jerks!
I have to admit, I found it more interesting as a historical artifact than a story, if that makes sense? Especially after learning more about Alcott as a person and a writer through Anne Boyd Rioux's Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, I was interested to see how much of it felt like a response to Little Women— there's an amusing chapter about Jo, now the famous author of a book that is clearly Little Women, dealing with her adoring and very persistent public. There were also a few storylines that felt like Alcott taking paths she'd been pressured away from in Little Women: namely, her decision to allow Little Men's tomboyish Nan to reject the persistent suit of her childhood friend AND end up as a "busy, cheerful, independent spinster" rather than marry someone else, as well as Jo's namesake niece's passion for theater— a trait of Alcott's sister Anna that she toned down in Meg / swapped for the more respectable goals of marriage and motherhood. (Josie Brooke was a delight and the highlight of this book, imo.)
It was also an intriguing snapshot of its moment in time— the book's discussion of women's rights felt like looking at the middle picture on an Animorphs cover, because it had young female students asserting their right to education and pursue careers (Nan was in med school!) while, for example, taking as unquestioned fact that women's brains are smaller than men's. Interestingly, from a conversation about women's suffrage and some quick follow-up googling, it appears that women in Massachusetts could vote in local elections as of 1879— and our Louisa was the first woman to register to vote in Concord!
I'm not sure how much Laurence College reflected an ideal rather than a kind of institution that actually existed circa 1886, being co-ed and integrated - it's mentioned in passing that it accepted students of "all sexes, colors, creeds, and ranks," including "the freedman and woman from the South" - but that was cool. Sympathetic, although not exactly respectful, references to Native Americans, as one of Jo's boys' career plans is to help a tribe that's being screwed over by the U.S. government. Had a bit of a mental record scratch over just how completely everyone - the narrative, Jo, Dan himself - dismissed Dan's love for Bess Laurence as not having a snowball's chance in hell at being a conceivable match, let alone reciprocated, given their difference in social status— if this had been historical fiction written now, it's inconceivable that a wealthy, sheltered, aspiring artist could nurse a rugged, wounded outdoorsman - a convict who redeemed himself through a heroic act, no less! - back to health and the two of them not end up together.
Lots of allusions to Dickens, as well as a conversation about the respective merits of George Eliot and "little Charlotte Bronte," which I was tickled by.
I have to admit, I found it more interesting as a historical artifact than a story, if that makes sense? Especially after learning more about Alcott as a person and a writer through Anne Boyd Rioux's Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, I was interested to see how much of it felt like a response to Little Women— there's an amusing chapter about Jo, now the famous author of a book that is clearly Little Women, dealing with her adoring and very persistent public. There were also a few storylines that felt like Alcott taking paths she'd been pressured away from in Little Women: namely, her decision to allow Little Men's tomboyish Nan to reject the persistent suit of her childhood friend AND end up as a "busy, cheerful, independent spinster" rather than marry someone else, as well as Jo's namesake niece's passion for theater— a trait of Alcott's sister Anna that she toned down in Meg / swapped for the more respectable goals of marriage and motherhood. (Josie Brooke was a delight and the highlight of this book, imo.)
It was also an intriguing snapshot of its moment in time— the book's discussion of women's rights felt like looking at the middle picture on an Animorphs cover, because it had young female students asserting their right to education and pursue careers (Nan was in med school!) while, for example, taking as unquestioned fact that women's brains are smaller than men's. Interestingly, from a conversation about women's suffrage and some quick follow-up googling, it appears that women in Massachusetts could vote in local elections as of 1879— and our Louisa was the first woman to register to vote in Concord!
I'm not sure how much Laurence College reflected an ideal rather than a kind of institution that actually existed circa 1886, being co-ed and integrated - it's mentioned in passing that it accepted students of "all sexes, colors, creeds, and ranks," including "the freedman and woman from the South" - but that was cool. Sympathetic, although not exactly respectful, references to Native Americans, as one of Jo's boys' career plans is to help a tribe that's being screwed over by the U.S. government. Had a bit of a mental record scratch over just how completely everyone - the narrative, Jo, Dan himself - dismissed Dan's love for Bess Laurence as not having a snowball's chance in hell at being a conceivable match, let alone reciprocated, given their difference in social status— if this had been historical fiction written now, it's inconceivable that a wealthy, sheltered, aspiring artist could nurse a rugged, wounded outdoorsman - a convict who redeemed himself through a heroic act, no less! - back to health and the two of them not end up together.
Lots of allusions to Dickens, as well as a conversation about the respective merits of George Eliot and "little Charlotte Bronte," which I was tickled by.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 06:02 pm (UTC)I think Laurence College is still more an idealized version of Bronson's (ugh) educational ideas than anything else, but it does sound closer to more liberal colleges of the period.
I honestly get the books after LW kind of mixed up, I reread them so often and continuously as a kid. They just all collapse into one big Alcottverse.
The bit about Nat not being Good Enough for Daisy also kind of gave me the heebie-jeebies, since I was raised by boho artistic types and part of the fun of being a musician is the parties! Jeez. Alcott is often so forward-thinking in some aspects it's always kind of a shock to run up against her granite NE work ethic, or idolization of self-sacrifice.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 06:17 pm (UTC)Alcott is often so forward-thinking in some aspects it's always kind of a shock to run up against her granite NE work ethic, or idolization of self-sacrifice.
It is! That's kind of what I was getting at with it feeling like freeze-frame of a midpoint in the cultural shift towards women's rights— reading it 140+ years later, her progressive takes are like, yeah, duh, so her now-outdated-but-mainstream-at-the-time takes are all the more gobsmacking in comparison.
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Date: 2021-12-08 06:28 pm (UTC)It's a really interesting reminder that progress doesn't happen all at once and all in the same directions -- that people who had radical ideas in one area were often of their time or even reactionary sometimes in another. In Louisa's case, altho she was a total daddy's girl, I like to think we can REALLY see the effect of her mother's training. (Abba is like the hidden molten core of so much of LW, even tho Mrs March is a rather watered-down version of her. And Louisa took her role right up -- working herself nearly to death so her family wouldn't starve in the streets.)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 06:49 pm (UTC)Have you read Anne Boyd Rioux's Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: the Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters? This was what got me on my current Alcott kick— you'll probably know all the biographical stuff already, but I found it really interesting to learn about the context of her family, etc., that I didn't know before. As I texted to a friend while reading it, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott are *clasped hands meme* about idealizing their fathers in their fictionalizations of their childhood experiences. (It's rather bleakly funny that Bronson Alcott was just so much that to do so, Alcott basically wrote him out of Little Women altogether...)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-08 08:16 pm (UTC)Laura's father wasn't too good at making a living, but he was clearly very good at making his children feel seen and loved. Bronson Alcott, OTOH, was so awful at everything that Louisa had to write him out of the book (IIRC, even in part 2 when he's technically at home, we don't see very much of him?) and concentrated her Idealizing Powers on Marmee.