"Wake up, and be a man": Little Women, Laurie, and the Ethic of Submission

Justice has never been done to the sweetest and most attractive side of her nature—her real love for boys, which sprang from the boy nature that was hers in so marked a degree.

—Alfred Whitman

During the past twenty-five years, Little Women has been at the center of the feminist project of reading texts by nineteenth-century American women. A primary reason for the extensive interest in Alcott's novel is its discussion of the cultural spaces women occupied, or were excluded from, during the mid and late nineteenth century. Although critics have disagreed about whether the novel "seeks a new vision of women's subjectivity and space" or argues for a "repressive domesticity," it nevertheless offers us a complicated and compelling picture of Alcott and her culture's understanding of girls and women (Murphy 564). Yet an important story within Little Women remains largely untreated in recent criticism, one that will affect our understanding of the novel's exploration of gender: that of the male protagonist, Laurie. Although critics have done important work by drawing our attention to Alcott's exploration of patriarchal structures and their effect on girls and women, they have not looked in any detail at her concurrent examination of their effect on boys and men.

In many ways, Laurie's story is similar to that of many mid- and late-nineteenth-century middle-class young men. Like the struggles of the March girls, his struggle and ultimate submission to cultural expectations for young men narrate a typical confrontation with the limitations of gender roles. Throughout Little Women, Laurie is subjected to aversion of what critics often describe as the "ethic of submission," an ethic usually deemed relevant only to girls' and women's lives because only they were expected to submit to patriarchal authority: "American women," Jane Tompkins argues, "simply could not. . . [rebel] against the conditions of their lives for they lacked the material means of escape or opposition. They had to stay put and submit" (Designs 161). For Tompkins and many critics after her, this ethic meant that girls and women were expected to conform to very narrow roles (dutiful daughter, caring mother, obedient wife), in contrast to boys and men, who were free from such limitations.¹

In Alcott scholarship, the view of submission as a gendered phenomenon goes back to critics such as Nina Auerbach, Judith Fetterley, and Patricia Spacks, who, in her landmark work The Female Imagination, takes Jo at her word when she says "Boys always have a capital time," forgetting that the narrator and even Jo herself realize that this is often not the case (100).² Although critics have begun to question this gendered understanding of submission as it applies to men's and boys' lives, in Alcott studies it still remains a prevalent assumption; Jo's story is seen as a paradigmatic example of this ethic, while the ways in which Laurie's story parallels hers are neglected. Only Elizabeth Keyser and Anne Dalke have noted that Little Women dramatizes Laurie's struggle with patriarchal expectations. Keyser observes that Laurie "exemplifies . . . the masculine plight," yet she does not explore at any length what "the masculine plight" is, how Laurie represents this plight, and what cultural beliefs shape it (Whispers 66-67).³ Dalke mentions that Laurie's narrative parallels the girls', but she does not examine this similarity or discuss its significance (573).⁴ Critics need to see that Laurie's experience, like those of the March girls, is at every point conditioned by the kinds of patriarchal and materialist pressures that affected girls' lives. As Rita Felski has pointed out, the ideologies that animate culture should "be understood as a complex formation of beliefs, structures, and representations which shapes and permeates the subjective sense of self of both men and women" (27). The specific ideologies are, of course, historically contingent and differ based on factors such as race, class, and gender; Laurie, for example, is allowed and encouraged to attend college, but Jo is not. For boys, though, the pressure to live up to...