Word: alcott
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...various reviewers who pop up every ten years or so to re-examine Alcott seem to be caught in this disgruntled nostalgia syndrome. In 1924, one disappointed woman on the New Republic wrote that the only reason little girls continued to read Alcott was that it was pap and therefore bad for them: "Could any but pernicious influence hold such a fascination for so long?" she wrote...
...associations with Alcott's works then, strictly in the context of childhood and safety, make a dispassionate return to her work difficult. If you reread them with any other purpose than to find a safe passage back to a neutral world, you are disappointed. A serious re-reading usually finds the plot as soppy as Love Story and the once beloved characters about as interesting as Pollyanna...
Nevertheless, there is something about Alcott ...something about her plots and characters and all-pervasive philosophy that puts her in the ranks of relevant writers. Certainly today she is important as an early feminist -- though hers was more subdued than today's irate campaign...
...very difficult to call Alcott a feminist, for she is hardly outspoken about it. In Jo's Boys, where the grown-up Jo from Little Women runs a school for boys, there is little talk of women's rights in the outside world. In the boys school, the girls are first admitted almost as an afterthought. But as the school develops, the boys and girls compete on an equal level, emotionally and socially. And the girls are trained both for their lives as mothers and as professionals. It is true that most marry...
...ROSE IN BLOOM, Alcott describes the societal pressures on a woman to be ornamental. Rose, an orphaned young heiress, is pressured by her aunts to join society and to use her wealth to attract suitors. Instead, with the aid of a sensible uncle, she learns to manage her money wisely and to devote herself to philanthropic affairs -- not by conducting bazaars or charity balls, but by constructing and maintaining low-income housing in the poorer sections of town. She marries in the end, of course, but she marries the professor who respects her, not the handsome dandy who admires...