The Death of Pip

Chapter 11, "Experiments," contains some of Alcott's most broad comic writing, crowned by Jo's disastrous dinner party, but at its heart is a minor tragedy: the death of Beth's canary, Pip. Although it isn't my favorite moment in Little Women—the scenes of Jo in the same chapter "reading and crying over 'The Wide, Wide World,' up in the apple-tree" (93) or furiously writing in her "Genius burns!" cap would hold that place—it's the moment that first shows the novel's deeper issues.

The death of Pip occurs at the end of a cluster of chapters in which each March girl nominally gets what she wants before being confronted with the humiliating consequences of her actions, all episodes that occur outside the home: Amy faces her "valley of humiliation" at school through her punishment over the forbidden limes in chapter 7; Meg plays the part of a fashionable young lady at the Moffatts' and learns that it leads to foolish behavior in chapter 9; and Jo, bent on revenge for Amy's burning her manuscript, nearly sees her sister drown in chapter 8. After the palate-cleansing Pickwick Club excursion of chapter 10, "Experiments" brings the March girls home and shows them the consequences of treating living things as material goods. Amy's limes, Meg's dresses, and Jo's manuscript may be precious objects, but their destruction does not kill a living thing. In "Experiments," Beth's neglect of her bird, Pip, does, and as first death of the book, it anticipates all of the others.

That Alcott intended this death as a lesson rather than as a realistic consequence of the experiments is shown by her use of the sentimental tradition rather than comic realism. Beth discovers Pip "with his little claws pathetically extended, as if imploring the food, for want of which he died" (96), a description that through "pathetic" and "imploring" invites the reader to see the gravity of his death. The death itself is a stretch from realism, for Beth, the most conscientious of the sisters, who in the course of the experiments "constantly forget[s] that it was to be all play, and no work," is unlikely to forget to feed and water her pet for an entire week (94). To Amy's serious-to-her, comic-to-us suggestion that Pip be put in the oven "and maybe he will get warm, and revive," Beth replies, "He's been starved, and he shan't be baked, now he's dead" (96), for she realizes that not only that Pip's death is final but that he was her responsibility. After the disastrous dinner party they bury the bird, each contributing a part according to her talents: Laurie digs the grave, Beth makes the shroud, and Jo offers a domino box for a coffin and composes the epitaph: "Here lies Pip March, / Who died the 7th of June, / Loved and lamented sore, / and not forgotten soon" (98). Marmee returns and promises "another bird tomorrow, if you want it" (99), as the lesson concludes.

But despite its questionable realism, Pip's death is essential for Alcott's larger purposes. Beth takes the lesson to heart and, unlike Meg and Jo, does not neglect the poverty-stricken Hummel family. When the Hummels' baby dies, it's a reprise of Pip's death: "I tried to warm its feet, and Lotty gave it some milk, but it didn't stir, and I knew it was dead" (142). The nineteenth-century tradition of using "it" for babies contrasts with the March girls' use of "he" for Pip: the bird has a name and gender, yet the baby does not, a reversal that encourages the reader to equate human and animal. The comic remedy of baking Pip recurs here as the tragedy of a baby that can be neither warmed nor fed, for, as Beth learns from Pip's death, death is final, and the loss of one living thing cannot be consoled by the substitution of another. With Pip's death, Beth becomes the March sister most closely associated with death...