Word: alcotts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
Louisa May Alcott's books are useful as later-life panaceas because the initial reaction to Little Women or to Rose In Bloom at age 13 was probably a serene one. In Little Women the circle of four girls--sisters in an impoverished family--is tight; their family protects them from the outside world. Cozily ensconced, they cope with various emotional and moral problems while the Civil War rages in the background, sensed but not really perceived. Anybody can remember her adolescent tears shed at Beth's death and the laughter at Jo's contests with Aunt March...
...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...