Alcott and Tocqueville: Toward a Textual Conjugation

In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) published Volume One of his Democracy in America in France; Volume Two followed in 1840. Translated into English, the work received critical acclaim in the States, and substantial passages were printed in American schoolbooks of the period. In 1868, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) published Little Women, a sentimental novel exploring feminist dimensions of both subject and citizen identity in light of family relationships and gender roles as each of the four March daughters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—strives, in her own way, to meet parental and societal expectations regarding the duties of mothers, sisters, wives, and citizens. The récit centers around Jo (Josephine) March, a bold, frank, and passionate tomboy, whose ardor for writing situates her at troublesome odds with the constraints that nineteenth-century American society placed on women. Excluded from fighting as a soldier (during the Civil War) and attending college, Jo tenaciously rebels against familial and societal pressures to find a suitable husband and settle down. After refusing a proposal of marriage from her neighbor and cherished family friend, Laurie, she moves to New York city where she meets, and ultimately marries, a fatherly German Professor, Fritz (Friedrich) Bhaer. The two establish a family of their own—and, as the fairy-tale cliché would have it, all live happily everafter.

While the two works bear little resemblance to each other in terms of their narrative intent, Little Women, in significant ways, reads often as a gloss on Tocqueville's Democracy—particularly the later chapters of the second volume. Indeed, certain thematic elaborations suggest that Alcott knew her Tocqueville well—either from her schoolbooks, where he was generously quoted, or from her own extracurricular readings—and had whole-heartedly assimilated his thinking. Indeed, in one particular passage, with which I'll conclude my argument, it appears that she had literally "memorized" him by heart.

To begin, Tocqueville generally contends that "morals are the work of woman," and while "the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, (…) I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, (…) to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women" (DA 484, 501). Arguably, this constitutes the principal theme of Little Women where, in the end, buttressed by the Cult of True Womanhood, the feminine—whose "natural instinct" sides with what is "honest, brave and strong" (LW 350)—emerges from consumer economics to figure as a moral agency that might reform not only the nation, but all mankind as well: "Women work a good many miracles (…) even that of raising the standard of manhood" (LW 423). This sisterhood of motherhood, ultimately speaks, through Jo, its figurehead, "in a maternal way of all mankind" (LW 489). Granted, other writers had advanced a similar view regarding women's work and morality; yet Alcott seems especially intent on developing Tocqueville's proclamation of American "superiority" by way of inexorable contrast with European culture. Let me emphasize, this relentless "contrast" leads me to suspect that Tocqueville provides Alcott with a specific textual "provocation" which both informs and drives the narrative throughout.

Regarding woman's "loftier position," for instance, Tocqueville observes that, "in Europe a certain degree of contempt lurks even in the flattery which men lavish upon women; although a European frequently affects to be the slave of woman, (…) he never sincerely thinks her his equal. In the United States men seldom compliment women, but they daily show how much they esteem them. (…) [T]hey have decided that her mind is just as fitted as that of man to discover the plain truth" (DA 499). Witness, in Little Women, for example, the "respect" afforded women as a rule—as well as Laurie's "chivalrous reluctance to speak ill of womankind" in general (LW 327). Tocqueville further observes that, in Europe, women are considered "as seductive but imperfect beings, and (what may well provoke...