Serious Literature

When I was thirteen years old, my dad expressed concern that, although I was a voracious reader, I wasn't interested in what he considered serious literature. We agreed upon a challenge: I would read Moby-Dick (his candidate for indispensable novel) if he would read Little Women (mine). When I tell this story to friends, I laugh about these incommensurate choices. Though Little Women clocks in at more than five hundred pages, it doesn't approach the physical heft of Moby-Dick—let alone its allegorical or philosophical ambitions. While Melville's leviathan may be an acquired taste, Little Women is compulsively readable; sentimental attachments fuel compelling plots about returning fathers, dying sisters, spurned suitors, and the like. By most lights, my father had the easy half of the bargain. I painstakingly chiseled my way through the marble immensity of Moby-Dick, while he sliced butter to enjoy with bread and tea in the company of the March sisters.

Little did I realize then that by selecting Little Women as my literary classic I was setting a course that would define my scholarship and teaching. When I proudly claimed the March sisters and Louisa May Alcott over the homosocial crew of the Pequod and the abstruse and canonical Herman Melville, I was insisting on the significance of work considered too feminine, too domestic, too sentimental, too appealing to the child reader to be highbrow. Years before I read Janice Radway and Jane Tompkins, I registered instinctively that that way of defining canonicity and cultural value was derogating the experiences, narratives, and styles that spoke to me so intimately and compellingly. My choice reflected my nascent recognition that the stakes of criticism are political and that women—as authors and as literary characters—have often been exiled from the hallowed halls of seriousness while they cling to humor and hearth.

Alcott takes up the question of seriousness in Little Women. The most memorable reflection on literary genres and their cultural worth comes when Professor Bhaer condemns the publication of "sensation stories," declaring that its moral effects are as deleterious as to "put poison in the sugar-plum, and let the small ones eat it" (280). Jo bends to his literary and moral judgment, concluding that "I'd better burn the house down . . . than let other people blow themselves up with my gunpowder" (280–81). These violent metaphors bode ill for the prospect of women writers in the popular press. Less memorable but equally important in my view are Jo's subsequent attempts to reform her work. She decides to write "a tale which might have been more properly called an essay or a sermon, so intensely moral was it" (281). When she takes on this didactic voice, Jo feels physically constrained: "her lively fancy and girlish romance felt as ill at ease in the new style as she would have done masquerading in the stiff and cumbrous costume of the last century" (281).

While on a superficial reading, it appears that Alcott agrees with Professor Bhaer's dire verdict, closer attention to Jo's subsequent experiments in seriousness reveals Alcott's investment in wit—in "lively fancy" and "girlish romance"—as a versatile and contemporary mode of expression. By contrast, moral seriousness, the "costume of the last century," would effectively corset Jo. Though the novel ends without Jo having yet written the book of her dreams, she speculates that the antics of "lively lads" (379) will enhance her work, much as their language infuses her style: "living among boys, I can't help using their expressions now and then" (380). Alcott claims boyish femininity (or feminine boyishness), humor, and childhood as tone and subject. Traditionally, each of these categories has been understood as a stage that must be outgrown. Feminist criticism questions the yardstick of seriousness as an arbiter of worth, just as Alcott embraces childishness as a form of creativity and generativity—one that escapes, if only in fleeting moments of pleasure, the didactic trajectories of normativity.