Music as Leitmotif in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

Early in the first chapter of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott furnishes a detailed physical portrait of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, purportedly leaving the readers to discover for themselves the character of each. As Nina Auerbach has pointed out, this mystery is "no mystery at all," for Alcott has etched their personalities into their features (59). At the end of the same chapter, Alcott paints another picture of the four sisters. This image is more difficult to read, because the author has encoded the description in musical terms: "No one but Beth could get much music out of the old piano; but she had a way of softly touching the yellow keys and making a pleasant accompaniment to the simple songs they sang. Meg had a voice like a flute, and she and her mother led the little choir. Amy chirped like a cricket, and Jo wandered through the airs at her own sweet will, always coming out at the wrong place with a croak or a quaver that spoilt the most pensive tune" (20-21).

In the following chapters, the reader is introduced to Laurie, the rich boy next door, who is a talented pianist. Accounts of musical performances involving Laurie and the March family appear throughout the book. The incorporation of such scenes does more than add mere color and vivacity to the story. Read carefully, Alcott's discussions of musical ability, or lack thereof, the characters' willingness or unwillingness to perform music, and the occasions when music making occurs offer a rich subtext, full of meaning for the interpretation of the novel and of clues to the emotional journey her characters undertake. It is this subtext that I wish to explore.

Anne Phillips has demonstrated most convincingly that writers of children's books use collaborative music making to "affirm community" (145). The idea that group musical performance could represent a unified community (including its smallest unit, the family) was dear to Alcott and figured in several of her novels, including Eight Cousins and Little Men (Phillips 146, 150; Alcott 458). Alcott exploits the metaphor with great skill in Little Women, strategically placing scenes that depict ensemble performance. In the first pages, Alcott seizes upon the March family's traditional evening sing-along as a means of establishing the close relationship among the sisters and their mother. The health of this community of mother and daughters is indicated by its appealing musical diversity: Beth the pianist accompanies Marmee and Meg, the "flutes," Amy, the "cricket," and Jo, the "croaker" (Phillips 150). The quality of the performance is clearly not an issue; what counts is the participation of all members of the family. When Amy burns up Jo's book in chapter 8, for example, the resulting family discord is revealed in the lack of cohesion at singing time: Beth can only play, Jo will not sing, Amy dissolves in tears, and Meg and Marmee alone cannot find the right harmony (Alcott 74). Nor does the family sing-along that takes place the evening before Mrs. March is to depart for Washington to be with her gravely ill husband go well. The sisters' inability to perform as a group (all except Beth break down in tears) reflects their fears about the possible loss of their father, who, though far away, is a vital member of the family group (Alcott 148).

Mr. March does not die, of course; nonetheless, it is his illness that precipitates the disintegration of the March family community to which the reader was introduced initially. Beth will die (she develops her eventually fatal malady during her mother's absence), and the other March girls will marry (John Brooke asks for Meg's hand in marriage after accompanying Mrs. March to her husband's bedside in Washington). It is significant that Alcott includes no ensemble singing in her descriptions of the March sisters' weddings. It is not until the last chapter of the book, when the living March sisters, their husbands, and their children gather to celebrate Marmee's sixtieth birthday, that choral singing signals the establishment of a new...