Reading Little Women for a book group and hating it so far

[FatherFintanFay]

I've read an awful lot of things in my lifetime - I'm a big reader, love the classics generally, but for some reason I've never read Little Women. I don't know why, but now I've been obliged to read it for a book group I'm in, and - my god, the preachiness! The saccharine! I usually manage about two chapters before I have to put it aside in disgust.

It's just that each chapter is like a little sermon about proper womanly behaviour. Nobody seems to grow or develop very much overall, but they always learn something over the course of the chapter and vow to mend their unladylike ways by the end. So far, Meg has been slut-shamed for wanting to look nice at a ball, and Jo has had to forgive Amy for burning the book she spent years writing because SHE MIGHT DIE AND THEN YOU'D WISH YOU HADN'T BEEN SO ANGRY! Not to mention all the talk of Marmee having to squash down her unseemly anger when she gets given a particular look by her as-yet unseen husband.

It is awful, isn't it? It is regressive even for the time in which it was written? Does it get any better? I know vaguely what happens by the end because I saw the adaptation on TV last Christmas, so I'm all ready for meek little Beth to stop existing. I only wonder how long it will be before anyone else notices she's no longer there.

I read Susan Coolidge's 'Katy Did' books. I remember when Katy had an awful fall and had to be looked after upstairs while she healed. They used to get up to all sorts of larks too. Set in Canada from what I remember.

Was it Cousin Helen who was the saintly pain-in-the-neck.

Yes thought I didn't see her in that way, I thought she was lovely. As was Aunt Izzie.

'though' not 'thought'

The thing is, there are other books written around the same time that AREN'T preachy and sickly in the same way as this, so I'm not buying that as the whole explanation.

Children's books? The ones I can think of which don't have some preachiness (eg Nesbitt's) are somewhat later (and english).

Set in Canada from what I remember.

Ohio, and then the school was New Hampshire.

The Katy books are set in the USA - the early books were set in Ohio, the last two (which focus on Katy's sister, Clover) are set mainly in Colorado.

Alcott was actually really feminist/radical for her time. Little women and the others in the series did not typify her views - have a look at a book called Alternative Alcott to see what she really thought.

Erroll
And references - which are now hideously dated - to the progressiveness of Jo and the professor's school in having a pupil who was a 'quadroon' or 'octaroon' despite naysayers telling them this would be calamitous or suchlike.

I don't remember these at all and have read the books several times - must have gone completely over my head.

I read it as a child - I don’t remember particularly liking it hating it.

A couple of years ago it was in the school reading list, so we got it along with some others DC HATED IT (very unusual as she’s a bookworm and reads quite a wide variety of stuff) so I suggested we try reading it together...I couldn’t stomach it!! God awful. In Every Way!

As you say it’s not just ‘of it’s time’ it’s just DIRE.

I think if like young read it first the first time now I'd hate it but I read it as a child and loved it.

I still.like the family life portrayal and skip over the really sickly sweet stuff. But it was quite progressive in its views at the time and actually if you read it in context I think that for young women of that era maybe gave them hope that they didn't have to conform to society's norms. I bet many a girl was as frustrated as Jo in her youth about the restrictive options available to her.

I haven't reread it but loved it as a child. Really enjoyed all the different illnesses (sorry, but found it fascinating) and the different fabrics and descriptions of making do with clothes. And I always desperately wanted to be Little Beth, and my mother told me I was just like Amy! Me and my sister both adore it and quote 'Birds in their little nests agree' fairly often.

I probably will reread it someday. Just have great fondness for all the books I read as a child and loved.

keiratwiceknightly
Alcott was actually really feminist/radical for her time. Little women and the others in the series did not typify her views - have a look at a book called Alternative Alcott to see what she really thought.
.........
That she was and quite an intellectual.

Alternative Alcott is a very interesting, fascinating book:
books.google.co.uk/books/about/Alternative_Alcott.html?id=PfOjRvcWHrQC&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y

This is about her father:
archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/alcott/

Jo is very much not a ' little woman'. It is a lot about her spirit, though in the end she ' capitulates' like all the others but in a way she can live with. There is a new film of it out where, from what I can make out, is about the the author who is strongly encouraged to make her heroine 'get married in the end' despite her wanting it to be a book about how women can want more than just ' love' in their lives.

I read LW as a child (maybe 9 or 10?) and a lot of it gave me the absolute rage then. Bloody awful Amy, downtrodden Marmie and pathetic Beth. Jo should have sacked off the lot of them and broken free.

I definitely wouldn't appreciate it now

Fridgegrazer - when I first read the books I had no idea what quadroon/octaroon could possibly mean - any more than I knew what 'sassafras' was, in those pre-google times.

The character in the whole series who maybe shows where Alcott's true sympathies lie is, IMO, Nan - who rejects devoted Tommy and sticks to her ambition of becoming a doctor.
She's set on this path in Little Men, published 1871 - the first woman doctor in the US qualified in 1849, only 22 years earlier.

It's part of my childhood and I am very fond of Little Women, as well as What Katy Did.

The preachy vibes about things like the Pilgrim's Progress and ladylike behaviour did annoy me at the time, because I couldn't relate to that, but I could very much relate to Jo because she was a writer. I was aghast at the idea of a sister burning your stories!

I wrote my stories by hand and then on a typewriter as a kid - I wonder if today's generation wouldn't understand the horror of somebody destroying them, because probably most young writers are on computers backing everything up like pros these days.

probably most young writers are on computers backing everything up like pros these days

A couple of recent incidents on another thread suggests some might back them up to a memory stick which they then manage to physically destroy.

You need to read it as a product of its time and maybe even look into culture then. Thats the beauty of books. The story goes beyond the page.

I think it wasn’t so much “slut-shaming” of Meg at the party, but rather the fact she was pretending to be something she wasn’t, and acting like she was ashamed of her family’s poverty that caused the outcry.

While I don’t disagree, OP, I think it’s still perfectly possible to deplore the reactionary gender politics of a novel, and nostalgically enjoy elements of it at the same time.

There’s some value in the wildness and ambition of young Jo, her impatience with how girls are meant to behave, as there is in the fact that she eventually rejects marriage to Laurie the ‘romantic lead’, and the fact that it is her inheritance of Plumfield that enables her marriage, and means she combines work and family.

Jo is the reason the novel keeps being adapted — even though the plot eventually tames her into fairly conventional ‘womanliness’ and sets at least some of her writing ambitions against ‘purity of mind’ (and it’s her future husband who takes her to task over this, too!) Often the main plotlines of Victorian novels are conventional, punishing ‘bad’ women and rewarding ‘good’ ones, but subplots and minor characters, or the adolescence of main characters, are more radical.

Because what readers remember about Jo isn’t that she marries Professor Bhaer, it’s her energy, cutting off her hair for money, writing melodramas in the attic, and having to spend an entire party with her back to the wall because she’s scorched the ass area of her dress!

@ErrolTheDragon was that Nan in Jo's Boys? I think I liked that one better. I read this as a kid and the bit about The Look stuck with me, and years later I realised how bloody awful it was. The only other things I recall are that I was outraged Laurie didn't pick Jo and I couldn't believe she ate so many apples all at once. And the bit where a book gets burned had me outraged. No way I was forgiving Meg or whoever did that, the shit. I hope Jo's Boys has aged better. I never read any of the rest (there were original hardbacks at my Nana's house, don't think they had any more). Also read the Katy books and Deenie, and some Stephen King stuff, from those shelves. All gone now I reckon.

Obvs I misremembered the Laurie bit! Maybe I just wanted him to not shrug and pick another sister. I'd forgotten about the scorched dress!!

Nan was a Jo-like girl in Little Men, a medical student in Jo's Boys.

Yes, it did feel a bit Mr Collins-ish. Jo won’t have me? Grand, I’ll mope tempestuously around Europe and then pick the only other available March. Who is also helpfully grieving, has just discovered she isn’t going to be an artist, and is hanging about prettily in a rose garden in Europe, looking receptive.

The March sisters were very emancipated young women for their time, they had lots of freedom (their mother trusted them), and fun and were allowed to enjoy Laurie's company unchaparoned.

I think we sometimes forget that, in an era before film and television, a lot of what we now know as classical literature was never intended to be highbrow, but was entertainment, something you read or had read aloud for pleasure: Louisa May Alcott (and plenty of other authors) was, to some extent, the “chick lit” of her day.

You don’t have to love canonical literature. I agree, I think Little Women is dreadful. It all has its place, but it doesn’t make you a Philistine to find it twee or superficial: in many cases, it really wasn’t meant to be studied and evaluated.