The Progress of the Pilgrims in Little Women

THE PROGRESS OF THE PILGRIMS IN LITTLE WOMEN John Bunyan's The Pilgrim' s Progress may well be the first book in English literature to celebrate the family as we know it today. One sees the picnics that Christiana and her sons and daughters-in-law conduct on the plains of heaven as family gatherings of a unique sort, in spite of Christian's absence, for it is his absence, due to his prior commitment in heaven, that brings them together and unites them in purpose of this pilgrimage . Throughout the Progress , Bunyan emphasizes the duties of family members in Christian commitment to each other; in the second part of the Progress, the record of Christiana's journey, Gauis the inkeeper lists the virtues of womanhood, on behalf of Mercy, the bride of Matthew. Says Gauis, . When the Saviour was come, Women rejoiced in him before either Man or Angel . I read not that ever any Man did give unto Christ so much as one Groat, but the Women followed him and ministered to him of their Substance. 'Twas a woman that washed his Feet with Tears , and a Woman that anointed his Body to the Burial . They were Women that wept when he was going to the Cross, and Women that followed him from the Cross, and that sat by his Sepulchre when he was buried. They were Women that were first with him at his Resurrection-morn, and Women that brought tidings first to his Disciples that he was risen from the Dead. Women therefore are highly favoured and show by these things that they are sharers with us in the Grace of life. Given the emphasis on family living and the prominent role assigned to women in the Progress , the book quite naturally became a great influence on American girls' literature, in general, and on Little Women, in particular. The Progress was a more influential book in the United States than it was in its homeland. Obviously, the Puritan domination of the New England colonies provided a welcome home for this eminently Puritan work with its emphasis on election, grace, and the family as a strong moral influence. It was also interesting and exciting reading with its motifs from fairy tale and romance interwoven into Christian's journey, especially when it is juxtaposed with the long-winded sermons and dry exegesis that composed the larger part of Puritan popular reading. The book, however, maintained its best-seller status long after the Puritans lost their grip on American thinking and in places other than New England. In the Victorian period the book was kept current by the American Sunday School Union and the American Tract Society as part of their evangelical library designed to help missionaries convert immigrant heathens; these two organizations translated the Progress into at least twelve different languages, including Cree, Dakotan, Dutch, Hawaiian, and Hungarian. Of course, the English-reading public still had the book available, so it remained a part of the popular American imagination and, as such, became a book frequently read by American girls and the girls they read about in their fiction. Almost every fictional girl read it, from Alice Humphreys in The Wide Wide World, to Elsie Dinsmore, to Rebecca Rowen Randall of Sunnybrook Farm. The March sisters were not alone in their fervor for Christian's journey. There are two primary reasons why The Pilgrim' s Progress was so influential in American girls' books. The first is the obvious emphasis on spirituality, which appealed to the Victorians' imagination about the way women should behave. Women were the keepers of morality; while the menfolk were out performing heroically but perhaps immorally in the arenas of business, politics, and war, the women were to stay home and provide moral models to their children and servants and moral refuge to their men. Christian and Christiana were these kinds of moral models, for they leave worldly pursuits behind in the City of Destruction and cast off the worldly types they meet along the way to the Celestial City. The second reason for the influence of the Progress is the emphasis on the subjection of the will to the greater will of God. Everytime...