In Defense of Young Balloons

I read Little Women many times as a child. I know this because, when I recently read it again, I found I had large portions memorized. With a few sentences, each chapter opened in my recollection like a familiar room. I anticipated clever phrases, felt emotional reactions in advance. Of course, this is why I reread books so often as a child: everything was safely predictable, satisfactions guaranteed; even Beth's death was an already-mapped sorrow I looked forward to. Everything was known. Little Women lends itself to such uses, delivering cozy always-already truths in every passage. As Martha Saxton put it in her notoriously harsh critique, "Little Women seduces everyone who wants to believe in a sensible universe. Louisa's world works with clocklike moral regularity" (4).

This time through, however, I was disappointed. As an adult and a teacher, I love Alcott for the way she voices received beliefs, then slyly nudges them out of alignment. So many of her narrators wink at us from between the lines—like Jean Muir in "Behind a Mask," exposing the constructedness of their worlds, and ours. Yet Little Women rarely reflects on its own convictions, and this self-certainty attaches not only to chronic moral over-resolution ("every good action is etched in gold leaf and hung in the museum of God's memory" [Saxton 6]) but also to enforcement of gender norms and ethnic stereotypes, the sentimentalization of poverty, and the valorization of wealth.

My disappointment culminated in the chapter "Friend," where Jo and Professor Bhaer attend a posh literary evening and overhear some philosophers discussing metaphysics. Jo enjoys the "intellectual tournament," though it is "miles beyond [her] comprehension" (277), and this requires that she be rescued by the Professor, who "blaze[s] up with honest indignation, and defend[s] religion with all the eloquence of truth" (278). It is, of course, unsurprising that Little Women denounces the proposition that "intellect was to be the only God" (278). What's troubling is how the scene sets up and shoots down Jo's intellectual curiosity, her openness to the unknown.

We are meant to worry when Alcott writes that "a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over [Jo], as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon on a holiday" (278). But I love this evocation of how it feels to encounter new ideas, the giddy pleasure-pain of losing the known path, the known self. It is the opposite of rereading, where old ideas roll out identically in memory and in print. I love it, too, that when the Professor "shook his head, and beckoned her to come away," Jo initially demurs: "fascinated, just then, by the freedom of Speculative Philosophy, [she] kept her seat" (278). This refusal differs, I think, from the childish obstinacy she displays elsewhere. In fact, this may be Jo's most adult moment in the novel—a brief reprieve from correction by others to whom she cedes all epistemological authority.

So it's crushing when, during Professor Bhaer's pious outburst, the narrator intones "the world got right again to Jo. . . . She felt as if she had solid ground under her feet again" (278). I wish I could find Alcott between these lines, secretly relishing Jo's brief flight into uncertainty. Neither seems the type to settle for rereading.