Little Women and Behind a Mask, or A Woman’s Power - October CC Book Club Selection

Parent Cafe
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Speaking of accents, I would have like Professor Bhaer a lot better without his annoying accent - which is a reasonable approximate of a German accent.

I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of how accents were depicted in 19th century novels. There’s also just the issue of educated vs. less educated.

I did find it funny that the too poor for Christmas present Marches still had a full-time servant. The Alcotts, from what I gathered did not, and one biographer speculates that it was mostly so that the girls would have more time to be out doing things and not just doing housework. (Though I do think the chapters about housework are quite funny.)

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For me, it was Jo and Meg. The domestic life appealed to me…and I ended up marrying a poor teacher and having a passel of children, so I guess I’ll give Louisa May Alcott some credit for that. Been quite happy with my John Brooke.

Even as a child, I was aware the story was, as @VeryHappy put it, a “fantasy of perfection.” But therein lay its appeal, at least for me. However, it wasn’t entirely perfect! I am one of the masses who never got over Jo’s rejection of Laurie. Even re-reading the book as an adult, I can’t warm up to Amy or convince myself that she was the better mate. I refuse to be mature about this. I’m still mad at her for burning Jo’s book.

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We should be so poor, right? But apparently back in those days, it was more about class structure:

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Since I can’t like @Mary13’s post more than once, I decided to just quote her and emphatically agree.

I’ve had one of those months so haven’t finished either Little Women or Behind a Mask, or A Woman’s Power. I do intend to do so.

I did reread Little Women a few years ago, so feel comfortable with that part of the discussion. In fact, I considered just coasting as it wasn’t all that long ago that I read it. It probably would have been a smarter move to put it on the back burner and read the other one first.

Anyway, a few years ago I reread Anne of Green Gables right before picking up Little Women again. I remember being somewhat surprised at the “preachiness” of Little Women compared to Anne of Green Gables. I’m enjoying it more this time around, now that Anne (with an e) and Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy have some distance between them. If forced to choose, I’d go with Anne - at least, she ends up with Gilbert. I’m with Mary - Jo made a mistake in my humble opinion and so does Laurie when he marries Amy.

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I’m not sure that Amy and Laurie aren’t also too much alike to be a bad match. But Amy had grown up enough to decide not to marry Ned, even though he’s apparently even richer than Laurie.

@ignatius Behind the Mask is a really quick read, more novella than novel. I read another one of Alcott’s stories (this one was only 9 pages in the collected stories) “Perilous Play” - it’s about smoking hashish - and again, it has an ending where you go “Woah! This is Louisa May writing?!!!” Professor Bhaer would definitely not have approved.

I’m going to disagree that Little Women is a fantasy of perfection. Marmee and Beth are, but the rest of the cast is wonderfully flawed.

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^ Oh yes, the characters are flawed–the story wouldn’t have endured if it was just a collection of Marmees and Beths. The “perfection” piece for me is that everyone is able to work out their differences, forgive transgressions, and support one another with loving kindness. The Marches are a “Corinthians” family if ever there was one, i.e., where, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

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@ignatius, another rather striking difference between Anne of Green Gables and Little Women can be seen in the parent/guardian figures. What a contrast there is between the Marmee and Mr. March style vs. the Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert style! (Matthew being my favorite of the four)

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For a change I was able to finish both this month! It had been a long tie since I had read Little Women. The changes in society and my own perspective have been pretty significant in the interim years. But it felt like wrapping an old comfy blanket. Familiar and cozy. I realized I don’t often re-read books but i might re-read some of my old favorites and see if they also age differently.

I liked the Behind the Mask. Jean Muir’s playing the expectations of society and using them to her own advantage was interesting. In both books, the characters were constrained by society’s expectations of the proper female. In Little Women, they succumb, but in Behind the Mask I feel Louisa Alcott lets her character design her escape, even if within the confines of the time.

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I finished Little Women and will read Behind a Mask. or A Woman’s Power today or tomorrow. I had never read Little Women before and was prepared to love it. I didn’t. I had to force myself to finish. With all the love for this book, I feel like I must have missed something.

I’ll read all the comments once I finish Behind a Mask. or A Woman’s Power and ckeck back in after.

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I think Little Women worked better when I read it - both before age 10 and before the feminist movement had really taken off. At the time Meg and Jo and even Amy seemed very modern - working to help pay the bills, ambitious as artists, questioning the need for marriage. In the end they succumb to a more domesticated feminism à la Catharine Beecher (https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/catharine-esther-beecher) rather than what we think of feminism of today. This was the era when (some) women got out of the house by working with settlement houses and working behind the scenes to get conditions improved for laborers - especially child laborers.

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^ Agree on all counts!

@Caraid, as @mathmom points out, maybe the age of the first-time read makes a difference. For me, Little Women is @Singersmom07’s “old comfy blanket,” but perhaps that’s because it brought me back to happy childhood days.

It’s also possible you didn’t care for simply because you didn’t care for it! There are certain children’s classics that made me fall over from sheer boredom, e.g., The Water Babies and The Wind in the Willows. (Hmmm, maybe that accounts for my “meh” feeling about magical realism and fantasy books as an adult.)

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The Wind in the Willows is the book that turned one brother into a reader. He got tired of waiting till bedtime. I never really understood its appeal. But both it and The Water Babies had gorgeous illustrations! It definitely has aspects of a comfort read, but the children’s books I go back to most often are Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books which I also first read at about age nine.

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Reading “Little Women” for the first time and thoroughly enjoying it. I have seen the Winona Ryder movie version, so I vaguely remember the plot, and actively erasing Winona as Jo, as I visualize the characters. ( not a big Winona Ryder fan )

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@SouthJerseyChessMom, an early film version had a young Katharine Hepburn as Jo. I think that was truer to Alcott’s depiction. (I grew up on the June Allyson version myself.)

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Here’s where Jean Muir is unmasked, at least in the physical sense, when she is alone in her room:

I really enjoyed that description — partly because of the “thirty at least” line (I should warn my 29 year old) and partly because of the classic trope employed — the beautiful enchantress who is, in fact, an old hag. We’ve seen her in fairy tales and fantasies from the Queen in Snow White to Ursula in The Little Mermaid to the Red Woman in Game of Thrones.

The “pearly teeth” reference sent me in search of articles on 19th century false teeth. All I have to say is thank goodness for modern dentistry: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33085031

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Yes I got a laugh at the “thirty at least” line too. Alcott was 24 when she wrote it.

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Well, I’ve had a really hard time finishing the books in time. I finally finished and am now ready to join the discussion. I had spent most of the summer not reading very much or if at all then only lightweight nonsense. So, as soon as I was back to my regular reading routine, I overloaded on the books and just didn’t judge right the time I would need to do justice to both the books for our book club. Enough about that as I have a lot to say about the books.

The novella was very interesting, I liked the length and the fact that a strong woman was at the center of it. I’m not sure I can agree with her way of getting results - the slyness and deceit makes it distasteful. I think that to mitigate that, LMA decided to let her have success in her plans but with the uncle rather than the arrogant older nephew. She’s 30 and a ‘hag’ according to her own estimation, therefore it would be cruel to succeed and then reveal the truth to the younger man. I liked the idea that she promised to give her sincere, best effort to her husband in the years after but can’t help but think that it would have been better if she had told Sir J the truth first.

Now as to * Little Women*, oh wow! It isn’t the book that I fondly remembered reading and rereading in my childhood. It was a good book for the time in which it was written and a great look into the past. I was captivated by Jo and Laurie and their antics, advised Meg in vain to not fall in love with Mr. Brooke, cried over poor Beth and quite detested Amy.
This time around, some things were different - but I still identified the most with Jo and completely disagreed with her about Laurie and Mr. Bhaer. She was quite wrong to reject Laurie and I think Amy doesn’t deserve her luck. But I think Meg made the right decision even if it was precipitated by Aunt March’s rejection of Mr. Brooke as a suitable husband. Laurie, before his marriage and while Jo remains my favorite I had a new appreciation for Beth. She did inspire Jo to be better version of herself.
I read The Invincible Louisa a few weeks ago and because of that I see how this book is almost a fictionalization of LMA’s own life. She had a real life Mr. B in her life (I’m not so sure if it was romantic since she destroyed her dairy entries about him), she knew firsthand the loss of a sibling (lost 2 sisters, one while she was in her teens and one as a young woman), and like Jo, she wrote the sensational stories that she secretly despised (IMO) to earn money. She also had a bit of a rivalry with her sister Abigail May (Amy is also May, and yam like one senator recently said ?) which is seen in Jo’s interactions with Amy.
But she had to dispose of Jo in a way so that she fulfilled the commonly expected ambition of every woman in her station of life. How better to do that than by giving her to Mr. B and Laurie to Amy and killing 2 birds with one stone? Though, I do wonder why it was so hard for her to have Jo end up with Laurie? To me, they seemed perfect - sure they would fight but they would also be passionate about each other. What was depicted of Laurie with Amy was just lukewarm. I wonder if LMA unconsciously felt it was a mistake because she gave Jo her 2 boys and Amy the worry of a delicate daughter.

The tone of the book was much more preachy and pious and not the full of fun tale of a family of girls of my memory. However, I’m glad to have reread it. LMA’s writing style is mostly enjoyable. She and Jo are both strong women. LMA, worked so hard at her writing with only the thought of improving her family’s situation motivating her. She became the man of the family and took care of her family the way her father should have but didn’t.

Unlike most of you I came to ‘Anne of Green Gables’ much later in life - I read the series as a young woman so it may not be a fair comparison. I loved Anne, the books and LMM’s writing so much more than I did Jo and LMA’s books.

I have read all the posts that came before mine and am enjoying this discussion. I’m glad to find that other people agreed with me about the book. I was afraid I would be only one desecrating a beloved classic with my criticism.

I’m off to catch up on my list of my books to finish: Currently reading * The Weight of Ink* so I can catch up on all the posts from August’s book discussion.

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Interestingly the day before I finished Little Women someone posted one of those interesting mini-biographies that appear on facebook. (The Jon S. Randal Peace Page) According to him (no footnotes) she wrote to someone, “Little Women was written when I was ill, & to prove that I could not write books for girls. The publisher thought it flat, so did I, & neither hoped much for or from it. We found out our mistake, & since then, though I do not enjoy writing ‘moral tales’ for the young, I do it because it pays well.”

I also did not read Anne of Green Gables until I was an adult. I enjoyed it, but I never felt particularly compelled to read the whole series. It was written almost 50 years later. FWIW

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I really did not enjoy “Little Women”. It was too sugary and preachy for me. However, I can understand why it was so popular, especially at the time. It came out 3 years after the Civil War ended. I am certain that helped with its popularity. The book succeeded because it was such a departure from what was then available to young girls.

I really enjoyed “Beyond the Mask”. I am glad that Jean got her man. It is always good to shake up the neighbors, so to speak.

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Jo really gets under Amy’s skin. As girls, the tension is obvious and volatile; as young adults, it’s more subtle. Those letters Amy writes from Europe have one or two little digs… “Jo would turn up her naughty nose at some of the finest, because she has no soul for art, but I have…”

If I really wanted to think unkindly of Amy, I’d say that she chose Laurie because he was Jo’s most precious possession. She wanted the prize before Jo came to her senses. (In fact, Jo would have accepted Laurie later in the book, in her loneliness after Beth’s death.)

I remember as a young girl being so surprised that Laurie and Amy ended up together. Re-reading as an adult, though, I found a lot of foreshadowing.

Anyway, Jo aka Louisa May Alcott got the last laugh: She wrote a book that had readers wanting to throttle Amy for the next century and beyond.

I was scarcely aware of the preachiness as a child – I was in it for the story. I must have ignored all the moral lessons the same way I ignored my own mother’s lectures :slight_smile: . As a grownup, I see that the March parents are really too much; still, it doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of the book. There’s always some new little detail to be found and reflected upon that I missed before.