In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 4 “wAke uP, And Be A mAn” Little Women, Shame, and the Ethic of Submission “Now be a man.” How often have we heard the above sentence uttered to a boy. —“Now Be a Man.” The majority of young men . . . hop[e] . . . to become a good citizen, husband, and father . . . [and go] into business. —Rebecca Harding Davis Justice has never been done to the sweetest and most attractive side of her nature—her real love for boys, which sprang from the boy nature that was hers in so marked a degree. —Alfred Whitman During the past twenty-five years, Little Women has been at the heart of the feminist project of reading texts by nineteenth-century American women. A primary reason for the extensive interest in Alcott’s novel is its discussion of the cultural spaces women occupied, or were excluded from, during the midand late-nineteenth century. Although critics have disagreed about the novel’s pedagogical content—whether it “seeks a new vision of women’s subjectivity and space” or argues for a “repressive domesticity” (Murphy 564)—it nevertheless offers us a complicated and compelling picture of Alcott and her culture’s understanding of girls and women. Yet an important story within Little Women remains largely untreated in criticism, one that will affect our understanding of the novel’s exploration of gender: that of the male protagonist, Laurie. Although critics have done important work by drawing our attention to Alcott’s exploration of patriarchal structures and their disciplinary effect on girls and women, they have not looked in any detail at her concurrent examination of their effect on boys and men. 62 “Wake Up, and Be a Man” In many ways, Laurie’s story resembles the narratives of numerous mid- and late-nineteenth-century middle-class young men as well as the descriptions of such boys’ lives found in advice and conduct manuals. Like the struggles of the March girls, Laurie’s struggle and ultimate submission to cultural expectations for young men recount a typical confrontation with the limitations of gender roles. Throughout Little Women, Laurie is subjected to a version of what critics have often described as the “ethic of submission,” a pedagogical ethic usually deemed relevant only to girls’ and women’s lives because only they were expected to submit to patriarchal authority: “American women,” Tompkins has famously argued, “simply could not . . . [rebel] against the conditions of their lives for they lacked the material means of escape or opposition. They had to stay put and submit” (Designs 161). For Tompkins and many critics after her, this ethic meant that girls and women were expected to conform to narrow roles (dutiful daughter, caring mother, obedient wife), in contrast to boys and men, who were free from such limitations.1 In Alcott scholarship, the view of submission as a gendered phenomenon goes back to critics such as Nina Auerbach, Judith Fetterley, and Patricia Spacks, who, in her landmark work The Female Imagination, takes Little Women’s heroine Jo at her word when she says “Boys always have a capital time,” forgetting that the narrator and even Jo herself realize that this is often not the case (100).2 Ann Murphy’s “The Borders of Ethical, Erotic, and Artistic Possibilities in Little Women” represents an influential example of scholars’ claims about gender and the novel. Her discussion of “female subjectivity” and “sisters’ pilgrimage ” are based on the assumption that male subjectivity and male pilgrimage always have a fundamentally different structure than those of women. This assumption, however, does not take into account Laurie’s life as the novel portrays it. Murphy’s argument that the text is about the “cultural limitations imposed on female development” (565), though certainly true in one sense, seems incomplete because it erases the ways in which Laurie’s development is impeded by similar limitations. The text repeatedly shows how his tutor, grandfather , and the March girls seek to control his development through a pedagogy of shame. Indeed, the novel stages numerous conversations between Laurie and other characters in which his disciplining is the subject. The girls, for example, frequently “lecture” him (150, 408, 420), talk about how and why they will “manage” him (211, 296, 342, 407, 456), and stress that he not be a “disappointment” to those who care about him (409). Such conversations occur dozens of times, but typically go unmentioned in scholarship even though they shed considerable light on the novel’s approach to discipline. Given the presence of these conversations...

Share