"Experiments"; or, "Housekeeping ain't no joke"

Little Women's chapter 11 begins deliciously in June, as do many summer reveries, full of potential for leisure-time pleasures. As an academic I share the March girls' dream of liberation: no meetings, no grading, no work. "I shall lie abed late, and do nothing," declares Meg, drained by "working for other people," and I sympathize with her inward turn (92). The idea that faculty "work for other people" may seem odd to non-academics: we appear to be independent producers who design courses, teach, engage in the unproductive labor of scholarship—and we have summers off! Yet we do work for other people, year-round, often in large bureaucracies. This fact underscores my response to chapter 11, because some of the material and moral forces that shape the March girls' world also shape ours.

Tensions in this chapter emerge from the novel's representation of work as the basis for pleasure, and, simultaneously, of work as that which leaves Jo "in an unusual state of exhaustion" (92). Jo's and Meg's labor "for other people" depletes them, yet their summer plan of relaxation at home becomes neither pleasurable nor sustainable. At the end of the first week's "experiment," Marmee and Hannah withdraw from the household and the girls must fend for themselves (92). The ensuing disasters teach the girls that "all play, and no work" lead to "pleasure, fretting, and ennui" (94). Even Beth, an exemplary physical and emotional laborer, forgets her canary, and poor Pip starves.

Death, discontent, disorder, and boredom erupt in a chapter that begins with high hopes and liberatory dreams. While "working for other people" obviously depletes their energies, the March girls' emotionally compelled household labor is meant to be personally, even spiritually, fulfilling. This differentiation of work for others or for the family presages the material and moral compulsions structuring the modern academy, where bureaucratic mandates masquerade as sentimentalized exhortations. For example, in my university we "put the student at the center of all we do" and rely on four "pillars" in our "vision," one of which is "a focus on relationships" ("Vision 2028"). Our rates of compensation depend on proof that we support the "vision." This dreary, vacuous language—at first glance a nod to contemporary marketing discourse—harkens back to the Marches' domestic discipline, grounded in empathy and sacrifice. Marmee's words enact the tricky discursive gesture where labor is shifted from its basis in the material world—sewing, cooking, cleaning, grading, meeting—to the ideological terrain of morality: "Don't you feel that it is pleasanter to help one another, to have daily duties which make leisure sweeter when it comes, and to bear or forbear, that home may be comfortable and lovely to us all?" (99).

Marmee's rhetorical question might be read as a call to collective action, to make a space "lovely to us all," and she does warn the girls not to "delve like slaves" (100). Yet the experiment resonates deeply with the language both of nineteenth-century capitalism and of twenty-first-century bourgeois professionalism in their demands for self-sacrifice and the deferred, infinitely deferred, pleasure of not exploiting ourselves "for other people."