Abstract
West begins her exploration of childhood in the works of Louisa May Alcott by examining critical approaches to childhood in which it is often categorized as self-evident or too ‘pure’ to be touched. This chapter establishes the legacy of Alcott’s seminal novel, Little Women, but questions the lack of ongoing popular and critical response to Alcott’s other novels and short stories for children via an analysis of canonicity in its approach to sentimental, domestic, and female-authored literature. Further, West establishes an approach to Alcott’s work in which the term ‘child’ is destabilized, not simply to establish it as something other or to restore Alcott’s children’s works to wider audience, but to consider what is at stake in reading childhood, both within and outside of the text.
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Notes
- 1.
Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (2002) ‘Holiday House: Grist to The Mill on the Floss, or Childhood as Text’, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 32, Children in Literature, pp. 77–94, 78.
- 2.
Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley, eds. (2003) The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), p. 3.
- 3.
Charles Strickland (1985) Victorian Domesticity: Families in the Life and Art of Louisa May Alcott (University of Alabama Press).
- 4.
Levander and Singley, p. 4.
- 5.
Judith Butler (2011) Bodies That Matter (London and New York: Routledge Classics), p. 6.
- 6.
Despite my status as a British writer, I will be retaining American spellings throughout my text as most of the critical texts I will be quoting and, I suspect, most readers of this text will be American. However, I will consider differences in British publications and readings at what I feel to be relevant points.
- 7.
Anne Scott MacLeod (1992) ‘From Rational to Romantic: The Children of Children’s Literature in the Nineteenth Century’, Poetics Today, Vol. 13, No. 1, Children’s Literature, pp. 141–153, 141.
- 8.
MacLeod, ‘From Rational to Romantic’, p. 147.
- 9.
In the UK, Little Women came in at number 20 in The Guardian’s 2014 top 100 books: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/03/100-best-novels-little-women-louisa-may-alcott; it also made the top 21 in the BBC’s ‘Big Read’: https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/br_reading_grp_pck.pdf; in the US, Little Women is in the top 100 of The Great American Read; votes were not in for its final position at the time of writing: https://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/books/#/ [all accessed 8/8/18].
- 10.
Little Women 150 https://lw150.wordpress.com/.
- 11.
https://louisamayalcottismypassion.com/2018/06/14/official-trailer-for-little-women-a-modern-movie/ [accessed 8/8/18]; Alcott, Little Women: 150th Anniversary Edition, ed. Anne Boyd Rioux (New York: Penguin, 2018).
- 12.
Anne Boyd Rioux (2018) Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why it Still Matters (New York: W.W. Norton & Co), pp. 161–163.
- 13.
Anne Scott MacLeod (1994) American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Athens: University of Georgia Press), p. 15.
- 14.
Rioux, p. 204.
- 15.
John Matteson, ed. (2016) The Annotated Little Women (New York: W.W. Norton & Co), p. xxiii.
- 16.
Samantha Ellis (2017) ‘The Big Trouble with Little Women’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/22/little-women-bbc-version [accessed 9/8/18].
- 17.
In her ‘Introduction to Little Women’, for example, Ann Douglas describes ‘the matrimonial mill’ of the text and equates Meg’s marriage with Jo’s ‘abandonment of her career’: Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark, eds. (1999) Little Women and the Feminist Imagination (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 43–62, 55.
- 18.
Alberghene and Clark, ‘Introduction’, Little Women and the Feminist Imagination, p. xix.
- 19.
Rioux, p. 76.
- 20.
Alcott (1989) The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, Madeleine B. Stern (Boston: Little, Brown and Company), p. 204.
- 21.
Alberghene and Clark, p. xxviii.
- 22.
Alberghene and Clark, pp. xxxiv–xxxv.
- 23.
Alcott (1995) Selected Letters, ed. Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, Madeleine B. Stern (Athens: The University of Georgia Press).
- 24.
Alcott, Journals, p. 158. Merry’s Museum was a children’s magazine, which Alcott edited from 1868 to 1870; Journals, p. 160n.
- 25.
Alcott, Journals, p. 166.
- 26.
Alcott, Journals, p. 166: note added by Alcott in 1885, reading: ‘An honest publisher and a lucky author, for the copyright made her fortune, and the “dull book” was the first golden egg of the ugly duckling.’
- 27.
Alcott (1854) Flower Fables (Bedford: Applewood Books, 1898).
- 28.
Alcott papers 1847–1887 Folder 1, first manuscript of Flower Fables, Concord Free Public Library Archive Collection [accessed 14 July 2017].
- 29.
Alcott, Letters, p. 11.
- 30.
A bibliography of Alcott’s children’s works is available at the end of this work.
- 31.
Madeleine B. Stern (1954) ‘Louisa’s Wonder Book: A Newly Discovered Alcott Juvenile’, American Literature, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 384–390.
- 32.
See Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (1990) ‘The Sales of Louisa May Alcott’s Books’, Harvard Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 47–86, for further details on Alcott’s sales.
- 33.
With thanks to Daniel Shealy’s 1992 edited collection, Louisa May Alcott’s Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press) for information on Alcott’s career as a fantasy writer. Shealy also notes that The Rose Family was first published in December 1863, despite its copyright date of 1864; p. xxvii.
- 34.
Jacqueline Rose (1984) The Case of Peter Pan , or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
- 35.
As time went on, men might read it but would do so with some embarrassment: Theodore Roosevelt admitted his liking of Alcott’s works ‘[a]t the cost of being deemed effeminate’: Alberghene and Clark, p. xv.
- 36.
Alcott, Little Women (1868) Norton Critical edition, ed. Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), p. ix. All Little Women references are to this edition unless otherwise stated.
- 37.
Joel Myerson, conference paper, Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House Summer Conversational Series 2018.
- 38.
MacLeod, p. 19.
- 39.
Alcott, Little Women, p. 327; (1869) An Old-Fashioned Girl (New York: Dover Evergreen Classics, 2007), p. 7; (1875) Eight Cousins, or The Aunt-Hill (New York: Dover Evergreen Classics, 2007), pp. 4, 8, 14; (1888) ‘May Flowers’, A Garland for Girls (Boston: Roberts Brothers), p. 3.
- 40.
Viviana A. Zelizer (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 3.
- 41.
Alcott, Little Women, pp. 294, 327; An Old-Fashioned Girl, pp. 8, 30.
- 42.
Levander and Singley, p. 5.
- 43.
MacLeod, p. 23.
- 44.
Niles to Alcott, 16 June 1868: ‘What do you say to this for a title Little Women. Meg. Jo Beth, and Amy’, Alcott, Little Women, p. 417.
- 45.
Writing in 1842, Emerson described ‘these new times’ as a split at almost the mid-century point: Emerson (1842) ‘The Transcendentalist’, Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004); William Wordsworth (1804) ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth (London: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1995), p. 701.
- 46.
Kelly Hager, ‘Betsy and the Canon’, in Levander and Singley, pp. 106–127.
- 47.
Beverly Lyon Clark (2003) Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press).
- 48.
Clark, p. ix.
- 49.
Clark, p. 2.
- 50.
Clark, p. 5.
- 51.
Catherine R. Stimpson, ‘Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March’, Little Women (Norton Critical Edition), pp. 584–599, 585.
- 52.
Stimpson, p. 593.
- 53.
Stimpson, pp. 594, 598.
- 54.
I will expand on this reading in Chap. 5 of this work.
- 55.
Alcott, Eight Cousins, p. 19.
- 56.
Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, p. 7.
- 57.
Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, p. 3.
- 58.
Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, p. 7.
- 59.
Charles Dickens (1853) Bleak House (London: Penguin Classics, 1996), p. 332.
- 60.
Alcott (1880) Jack and Jill: A Village Story (Carlisle, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1905), pp. 201–202.
- 61.
Alcott, Jack and Jill, p. 57.
- 62.
Levander and Singley, p. 5.
- 63.
Alcott, ‘May Flowers’, pp. 14–15.
- 64.
Alcott, ‘May Flowers’, p. 32.
- 65.
Alcott, ‘May Flowers’, p. 20.
- 66.
Strickland, p. 98.
- 67.
Strickland, pp. 100–101.
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West, K. (2020). Reading Alcott’s Textual Childhood. In: Louisa May Alcott and the Textual Child. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9_1
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