I’m gonna say it: reading Good Wives ruined Little Women for me. It’s been a while since I did, I know, but I couldn’t place my discomfort right then – so here it is now.
What I don’t like, I suppose, is how the end result for the March sisters was marriage, and little more. The title itself is objectionable, really – there is no such thing as a good wife and a bad wife, and there is no compulsion on anybody to be a ‘good’ spouse unless they want to.
Meg married Brooke – and Good Wives was replete with descriptions of married life – the incident of Meg buying an expensive silk, and not knowing how to fulfil her ‘wifely’ and ‘motherly’ duties both (I apologise profusely for this choice of words) – occupy the forefront of my mind. Why does Brooke have to be the wise one, anyway? Why does he have to be the one, in the words of Marmee March, the one with a “white-hot temper”, than once aroused, is extremely difficult to contain? And if Meg is so babyish and naive, should she be having children anyway?
Jo getting married broke my heart, really. This was like The Taming of the Shrew. Unruly, hands-in-her-pockets, whistling, ‘tomboyish’ Jo is tamed – brilliant. She rejects Laurie and kisses a German professor in the rain. And she loves boys, so she opens a school. What irks me is the knowledge that Alcott originally planned for Jo to remain an unmarried “literary spinster” like herself. And while she does seem to be the type to fall for a poor, foreign man – just the act of her marrying doesn’t sit well with me.
The reason that Amy and Laurie felt off to me was because they knew each other at an age when Laurie was mature, but Amy was literally a child. Plus, the tension mainly lay in the fact that Amy thought she was Laurie’s second choice after Jo – the Jo who had eclipsed her her whole life. I failed to understand how this conflict was resolved – because to me, it was a strong, strong point. And Amy’s conclusion – especially the quote “talent isn’t genius”, which I remember years after reading the book, struck me as cruel, whatever anybody may say. So she didn’t become an artist after all. Personally, I make little distinction between talent and genius – because talent can be turned into genius.
Beth died. It was hard for me to believe that she was really gone – and she’s just a character, but I’ll let you know I didn’t cope well. It was cruel, but people do die, and we need to accept that at some point. I wonder what her life would’ve looked like ahead. Still, what I didn’t like wasn’t the death itself, but the fact how it seemed pre-eminent, and how Beth herself gradually came to accept she was dying, and soon. I felt very close to Jo in Beth’s last moments – which still doesn’t change the fact how it was hinted, time and again, from the first book, even, that Beth was not going to live long. I’m not saying, “Hey, shock us with an unforeseen death!” All I’m saying is, and maybe this is my inner Jo speaking – but please, please don’t be so hopeless. Fight a little.
Obviously, the ideas of those times, especially those regarding feminine identity, don’t sit well with me. I’m probably just not good at change, and some part of me didn’t want these little women to grow up so suddenly – and it’s unfair of me to expect radicality from a book already radical in its time, and to judge it according to today’s standards – but this is all I have for now.
