Alcott Reading: An American Response to the Writings of Charlotte Brontë

Near the end of her book, Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Brontë: Transatlantic Translations, Christine Doyle reiterates her desire for a more literary approach to Alcott, one that apprehends the significance of Alcott's reading and authorial models and does not exclusively focus on either "feminist" or "cultural contexts" (168). Doyle's approach highlights Alcott's role as a working professional simultaneously concerned with the "adoption" of Brontëan themes, characters, and plots, and their creative "adaptation" (xxiii). Her employment of comparison and contrast also illuminates Alcott's quintessentially American character. Spiritually akin to Brontë, Alcott is a peculiarly New World relation who has absorbed the optimism and social progressiveness of her Transcendentalist milieu.

Overall, Doyle asserts that Charlotte Brontë was a lifelong influence on Louisa May Alcott, that the younger woman, raised in a family much like the Brontës, was preoccupied with many of the same issues. Borrowing freely and fairly literally from Brontë's plots and characterizations early in her career, Alcott's adaptations became increasingly subtle as she gained confidence in her craft. Both writers examined the struggles of independent young women who attempted to combine love and work despite the presence of overbearing men and societal prejudice. Alcott, however, is more sanguine regarding her protagonists' eventual success: where Brontë at her most optimistic sees a socially isolated Jane Eyre sustaining a Rochester who remains her "master," Alcott foresees her women engaging in egalitarian marriages, choosing from a wider range of careers, and actively changing society. In this respect, Alcott, in contrast to a more fatalistic Brontë, displays a thoroughly American belief in individual action's efficacy.

Doyle divides her study into five chapters: two deal with Bronte's "overt" influence on Alcott through both the latter's knowledge of their similar upbringings and her employment of Brontëan plots and characters; three deal with the Englishwoman's more "subtle" impact on the themes of spirituality, familial and societal association, and self and work (xxii). In chapter 1, Doyle chronicles the parallels in the two authors' biographies, similarities that include living with eccentric, moralistic fathers and talented siblings, the death of siblings, engagement in home theatricals, backgrounds as teachers and governesses, the support of their families through writing and the disparagement of that occupation by the wider culture, a preoccupation with "inspiration," and experience publishing anonymously. At the same time, whereas Brontë's mother died young, Abba Alcott cultivated a family environment that was less self-enclosed, more open to engaging in and serving the community. Even though Alcott vacillated more in her ambition to be a serious artist than her predecessor, the American environment generally provided more opportunities for gifted female authors, and Alcott was less discouraged about the possibilities for advancement. Specifically developing a more general point that Robert Weisbuch makes in Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influences in the Age of Emerson, Doyle perceives that Brontë and Alcott are joined by a sense of women's oppression but separated by Alcott's desire to develop her own identity as an American author (22).

In chapter 2, Doyle emphasizes how Alcott "adopts" and then "adapts" Charlotte Brontë's plots and characters (xxiii). In some of Alcott's earliest work the influence is quite transparent: both the governess and her haughty rival in The Inheritance and the Rochester-like antihero, illicit marriage, deception of the bride, and flight from temptation in A Long Fatal Love Chase, mirror elements in Jane Eyre. Later, Moods has a Byronic hero in Adam Warwick and a double marriage reminiscent of Brontë's Shirley, while Work employs orphan and governess motifs from Jane Eyre and theatrical themes from Villette. In "A Nurse's Story," Alcott fuses elements from both Jane Eyre and Villette; in Little Women, she gives Jo March a foreign teacher for her mate just as, in Villette, Brontë matches Lucy Snowe to the schoolmaster, M. Paul. In general, as Alcott matures in her art, her adaptations of...