How Little Women followed me into adulthood
My earliest memory of Little Women features an ailing swallow, a cardboard box, and my ultra-earnest seven-year-old self.
We found the bird limping in our yard and placed her in a makeshift cardboard nest. I padded it with grass that still lodged some ants (in case she got peckish).
I dragged out my Little Women tome and set up vigil, ready to comfort my newfound friend. The last thing I remember is the swallow chirping softly at measured intervals as I read her the adventures of the March girls.
This companionable moment remains one of my most wholesome childhood memories. Little Women would come to play a quiet but influential role in my hungry young attempts to make sense of my world. Alcott captured the lived experience of tween and teen girls with a gravity that could only come from the deepest empathy and respect.
Little Women marks a unique historical point when childhood had only recently been delineated as a protected period of innocence and play (which is still is not the case in many parts of the world).
Alcott pulls the reader in to contemplate the wide-ranging emotions of female adolescence — the creativity, the hope, the quickness to rage at betrayal and the equal swiftness of teenage forgiveness and affection.
It has been years since I read Little Women. During my decades’ hiatus from the book, I feared revisiting the book, almost certain that fond memories would be deflated. I suspected Alcott would strike my adult self as peppy, moralizing, and sentimental.
I picked it up again recently, moved by nostalgia from the trailer for the most recent adaptation. I was surprised to find it has the power to soothe even my cynical Millennial soul.
How is this book so timeless?
For one thing, the moniker Little Women is completely apt. While the March girls exemplify the shared interiority of girlhood, they also show that adult problems are often encountered at young ages.
Jo and Meg are already wage-earning at monotonous, unsatisfying positions at the ages of fifteen and sixteen. Amy struggles with the bleak disciplinarity of her highschool classroom. Beth, the homemaker, is deeply affected by suffering and death around her. She in turn is fast-tracked into physical decline and death before she even leaves the house.
Alcott’s preoccupation with class also proved deeply appealing. In an era of increasing inequality, it was an unexpected comfort to see the March girls struggle with their apparent relative poverty and come to define themselves independently of their social calculus. While Amy, Jo, and Meg dealt with issues of self-esteem and carving their own places in the world, they each find reserves of personal strength and character to make the most of their respective lives.
Above all, Little Women has reminded me of the invaluable gift of self-love and respect in facing the often bewildering challenges of life as a woman today. Many of the issues Alcott’s troupe faced 160 years ago remain startlingly fresh and relevant now. Alcott’s confidence in the magnificence of women and their resourcefulness in overcoming daunting odds is not only timeless, it is — more importantly — catching.
