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.
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Date: 2021-12-08 07:02 pm (UTC)