Surprise, Surprise

When I was a bookish girl with unruly hair and unpopular opinions who worried about whether a boy would ever love me, a friend tried to console me by predicting that, like Jo March, I would end up marrying my best friend. At the time, I imagined that best friend as Laurie—the handsome, brooding, androgynous counterpart to my rebellion against conventional femininity—and I did feel comforted.

I didn't return to Little Women until much later, as a professor of nineteenth-century literature, and realized I preferred the relationship between Jo and Professor Bhaer to that of Jo and Laurie. Despite Alcott's claims that she created the "funny match" under pressure from her publishers, and wanted Jo to have remained a "literary spinster," the narrator, and Jo, unequivocally admire the Professor (qtd. in Rioux 4). In the chapter "Surprises," Bhaer arrives at the Marches' door, "tall, bearded" and "beaming . . . like a midnight sun" (350). Jo greets him not only effusively but also "with a clutch, as if she feared the night would swallow him up before she could get him in. . . . [S]he forgot to hide her joy at seeing him" (350). The absence of pretense and directness of feeling between them is like an antidote to the expectations of flirtation and deception that always seemed to me to be required of heterosexual relationships. When Jo introduces Professor Bhaer to her parents, she does so "with irrepressible pride and pleasure" (351). They steal appreciative looks, laugh together, sing a duet (351–53). As an adult reader I knew that Jo had found a match, a companion, and a lover. The inevitable proposal that follows, complete with Jo's insistence that "I have my duty also, and my work. I couldn't enjoy myself if I neglected them even for you" (373) was, to me, an inspiring example of the companionate marriage ideal that nineteenth-century woman's fiction celebrated. Jo does marry her best friend, just not the one I first imagined. (As did I.)

More recently, while editing a collection of Catharine Sedgwick's periodical writings, I was surprised to find that Jo's match might have had a predecessor in her story "Look Before You Leap" (1846). In Sedgwick's tale, a mother tells her daughters of an unlikely romance between a young woman, Kate, and an older gentleman. He is short, "rotund," "ruddy," and balding (17). Like Alcott's Professor Bhaer, he is generous, adored by children, and smitten with the younger woman, although initially she does not return his affection. He decides to go away, and has all of his belongings ready to go, when Kate realizes that she can't part with him and asks him to stay. The girls realize their mother is telling her own story, and one has an epiphany: "A joyous light flashed from her soul as her eye fell on her father, and kissing her mother, she said . . . 'I have had many a dream of love; if I ever have such a reality as yours, I shall be quite content'" (17).