Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Music
In Little Women, music has an interesting
relationship to a character’s degree of conformity. For the March
girls, the more musically inclined a sister is, the more traditionally
feminine and adherent to feminine duty she is. Marmee sings to the
girls all the time, and she embodies the ideal dutiful and domestic
mother. Beth, similarly, is both very musical and very passive.
In contrast, Amy has a bad voice and Jo has the worst voice of all;
both girls are independent and impatient with the limitations placed
on women. Interestingly, Laurie also likes music and wants to be
a professional musician, but this interest makes him ill-adapted
to the role expected of him as a man.
Teaching
Many of the characters in Little Women are
teachers, reinforcing the idea that the novel is didactic and that
we are supposed to learn from the novel’s lessons. Mr. March, for
example, is a minister, and he instructs his congregation. Marmee,
a good transcendentalist mother, reinforces the teaching
of her husband. Mr. Brooke and Professor Bhaer, two men whom March
girls marry, are teachers by profession. In the end, Jo inherits
Plumfield, Aunt March’s house, and she and Bhaer turn it into a
school for boys. The frequent interaction that the novel’s characters
have with teaching—both giving and learning lessons—reflects the
structured society in which they live.
Differing Uses of Language
Language appears throughout the novel in an interesting
inverse relationship with creativity: the more proper the language
one of the March girls uses, the less creative and independent she
is. Beth does not talk much, for example, and Meg uses proper language;
both are typically feminine women, and their relationship to language reflects
their alignment with what society expects of them. In contrast, Jo
swears and Amy mispronounces words. These two, the independent artists
of the family, resist conforming to the behavior that society expects
of them, including the use of proper and delicate speech.
