Her Bosom Enemy

I never read Little Women as a child. I was both an avid reader and one of four daughters, so I had every reason to fall for a novel I wound up tossing aside after the first chapter. My nine-year-old self flatly rejected the notion that all four girls would readily forgo Christmas presents for a game of Pilgrim's Progress.

Some five years later, I gave Little Women another try. This time it was Jo's anguish over her role in Amy's near drowning-while-skating that made me quit reading. Although Amy's behavior during the days leading up to the accident struck me as reprehensible, Jo is the one who shoulders the blame, bewails her own conduct, and makes the necessary conciliatory gesture. The chapter closes with a silent hug and "hearty kiss" between the two girls that this eldest sister found both unconvincing and dissatisfying (71).

That impression changed when I finally got around to reading the novel in preparation for teaching it. I could see then that this final embrace fails to fully resolve the sisterly and narrative tensions triggered by the series of sibling squabbles that culminates out on the ice. Whether begging to accompany her older sisters to the theater, burning Jo's precious manuscript, or skating uninvited after Jo and Laurie, Amy is consistently cast as the obstacle preventing Jo from "enjoy[ing] herself"—and it is when Jo enjoys herself, I believe, that Little Women offers the most readerly pleasure (63). Plus, for all that Alcott ultimately places the onus on the elder sister, she also reliably portrays Amy throughout the chapter as "fidgety," "spoilt," "aggravating" (63), "naughty" (66), and "exasperating" (65). Her choice in language suggests that the blame is more evenly distributed than I originally supposed.

The two sisters' arguments are also described in the hyperbolic language of war: we hear about their "many lively skirmishes" and "semi-occasional explosions" (63); we learn that Jo is "deeply injured" (65), not only emotionally by Amy's rash actions but also physically ("cut and bruised" [68]) after aiding in the rescue. Both sisters' tempers are depicted as "violent," though Jo is both quicker to "fury" and slower to relinquish it (63). She violently shakes Amy after discovering the fate of her book "till [Amy's] teeth chattered in her head," delivering a "parting box on her sister's ear" before retreating to the garret to finish "her fight alone" (64). There is a violence and ferocity in the two girls' interactions that recalls the Civil War responsible for Mr. March's absence, lingers after the chapter ends, and doesn't square with my childhood take on the novel I couldn't finish as preachy, saccharine, and old-fashioned.

I haven't been able to ascertain whether any of the spats in this semiautobiographical novel are based on real events. I do wonder, though, about Alcott's decision to include four illustrations drawn by her youngest sister, May, the real-life inspiration for Amy, in the first edition. Those illustrations were panned by critics. Could this decision on the author's part be considered an example of revenge tasting best served cold?