Louisa May Alcott was born on
November 29, 1832, the second daughter of
Amos Bronson and Abigail “Abba” May Alcott. She was raised in Concord,
Massachusetts, a small town to the north of Boston that was home
to many great writers of the day. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau were neighbors to the Alcotts.
All of these writers were part of the transcendentalist movement
during the New England Renaissance. Transcendentalists believed
that one could find spirituality through nature and reason. They
were an optimistic group who believed humans were capable of great
thoughts, and they advocated nonconformity and being true to one’s
inner self.
Amos Bronson Alcott was not a particularly responsible
father or husband, although he was an enthusiastic transcendentalist
philosopher, abolitionist, and teacher. He failed to provide enough money
to support his family, and their poverty was so dire that in twenty
years, they moved twenty times. Louisa’s mother acted as head of
the household, and when Louisa grew older, she also took on much
of the burden.
Louisa May Alcott had an older sister, Anna, and two
younger sisters, Lizzie and Abba May. These names are noticeably
similar to the names Alcott gives her characters in Little
Women (Meg, Beth, and Amy). Her sister Lizzie died at age
twenty-two after a bout of scarlet fever. Alcott also had a brother,
Dapper, who died in infancy.
Alcott was educated at home by her father. She loved
to read and write and enjoyed borrowing books from Emerson’s large
library. As a child, Alcott struggled with the ladylike behavior
that was expected of girls in the nineteenth century. Though she
was required to be calm and stay at home, Alcott was a tomboy whose
favorite childhood activity was running wild through the fields
of Concord. She had an unladylike temper that she struggled to control.
Like Jo March in Little Women, Alcott
could not get over her disappointment in not being a boy, since
opportunities for women were limited. When the Civil War broke out
in 1861, Alcott had an urge to go and fight in it. Like most transcendentalists,
she supported the Northern side of the conflict because she was
against slavery. But since she was female and thus could not join
the military, she signed up to be a Union nurse and was stationed
in Washington, D.C. Later in life, Alcott
became active in the women’s suffrage movement in the United States,
whose supporters sought to extend the right to vote to women. Alcott’s
feminist sympathies are expressed through the character of Jo March
in Little Women.
Though she never married or had a family of her own,
Alcott was devoted to her parents and her sisters. She understood
that for women, having a family meant professional loss, and having
a profession meant personal loss. Little Women dramatizes
this struggle between the desire to help one’s family and the desire
to help oneself.
Alcott caught pneumonia while working as a nurse in the
Civil War. She was treated with calomel, a mercury compound, and
this treatment gave her mercury poisoning. For twenty years Alcott
was weak, suffered intense pain, and was plagued by hallucinations
that could only be controlled with opium. Her right hand hurt her
so badly that she had to learn how to write with her left hand.
She also lost her hair because of the illness. Alcott died on March
6, 1888, and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts,
alongside her father, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau.
Alcott is most famous for her domestic tales for children,
which brought her fame and fortune during her lifetime. Alcott also
wrote sensationalist gothic novels, such as A Long Fatal
Love Chase, and serious adult novels, such as Moods and Work, which
received middling reviews. Little Women and Alcott’s
other domestic novels have enjoyed more popularity than her novels
of other genres. Alcott did not particularly like Little
Women; she wrote it at the request of her publisher, and
upon its great success, worried that she was doing nothing more
than writing “moral pap” fit for children.
Little Women possesses many qualities
of the didactic genre, a class of works that have a moral lesson. Little
Women does not preach directly to the reader, however,
as did much didactic fiction of its time. The narrator refrains
from too much explicit moralizing, allowing us to draw our own lessons
from the outcome of the story.
Because Jo learns to behave and becomes a lady at the
end of the novel, it is possible to assume that Alcott wants to
teach her readers that conformity is good. Interestingly, however, Little
Women has been championed by feminists for more than a
century because untamed Jo is so compellingly portrayed. Also, in
the novel’s characterization of the March sisters, rebellion is
often valued over conformity. So while Little Women can
be called a didactic novel, the question of what it teaches remains
open.
