Little Women, Made Small

I've never been a huge fan of Alcott. Looking back, I blame the children's version of Little Women that I read when I was nine. Yes, it was a children's version—gratuitous though that sounds—of a novel famously published for girls.

The Little Women that I first read was part of a series of "Illustrated Classic Editions" published in the late 1970s by Moby Books.² Printed on cheap pulp pages of four by five and a quarter inches—neatly sized for a child's hand—with brightly colored cover illustrations, these paperbacks epitomized accessibility and ease in their form, price, and content. They were about 250 pages long, with a simple, expressive, black-and-white illustration facing every page of text. Modestly priced—my copy of Little Women bears a cover price of $2.50—they could be found in grocery stores. A few were even included in McDonald's Happy Meals, which seems fitting: in their simplifying and sweetening of long, old stories weighed down by that hefty term, "classics," they were the literary equivalent of kid-friendly fast food, steaks and potatoes turned into burgers and fries.

I loved the Moby Books as both stories and objects. They litter my memories of early reading, fitting somewhere between Nancy Drew mysteries and the problem novels of Paul Zindel, S. E. Hinton, and Judy Blume. For so many literary scenes—Queequeg's coffin, Tom Sawyer's fence—the image sealed in my mind is the picture I pored over in these books. Having been given charge of the children's section of the used bookstore my mother opened when I was nine, I granted these volumes their own shelf, where I lovingly arranged and rearranged them, sometimes stacking them like the toy blocks I was sure I had outgrown.

Here's the rub, though: while I loved the Moby Books, I did not like the Moby version of Little Women. It was boring. It is easy now to see why: the abridgments worked beautifully for novels featuring adventure. One could cut out more discursive sections, like Crusoe's religious agonies or Ishmael's musings on whiteness, and end up with a nice, crisp narrative about surviving on an island or hunting a whale. Little Women's story is about emotions, relationships, maturation, desire. Such a story's impact on the reader inheres in its verbal texture. In the Moby version, gone is the tense complexity of Amy's and Jo's reciprocal rage. Amy feels left out, she burns Jo's book, Jo shakes her, Amy falls through the ice, and Jo feels bad. Who cares? my younger self asked, before I turned to more exciting fare like The Three Musketeers. Gone is this chapter's sensitive portrayal of female fury, including Marmee's confession of her daily anger. Gone is the dense tangle of feelings that bind siblings together. Gone is Alcott's story.

Finding the unabridged Little Women later in life felt like uncovering a scandal. How had this story been taken from me? The answer is that condensing it erased its pleasures. How does women's writing disappear, how is it dismissed? If Alcott provides any example, perhaps problems first arise when a woman's writing is made too small.