Reconsidering Amy March

WARNING: If you are a student who has stumbled across this blog, I hope you have enjoyed my ramblings, but please remember that this is an unsubstantiated opinion piece, and not something to quote from. If you are searching for a reference, I recommend that you look for a proper peer-reviewed academic article. Try, for instance, a keyword search at Literature Online. And remember kids, if you can find this with Google, so can your profs. They’re better at research and the internet than you!

Louisa May Alcott 1832-1888

The other week I reread Little Women for the first time in ages, for academic purposes. No really, enjoyable though the process was, it was actually for academic purposes. But from a very non-academic perspective, I was struck by how my reception of Louisa May Alcott’s novel has changed over the years.

When I was 16, like when lots of little women are 16 or 12, 19 or whenever they first read it, it’s all about Jo and Laurie, and the tragedy of Beth. Many a tear has been shed for Beth, and many a frustrated reader has puzzled not only at Jo rejecting Laurie, but Laurie then going off and marrying Amy. It's not that I didn't understand why Jo and Laurie weren't suited to each other, but Amy? Not to mention the uncomfortable reaction to Jo marrying Friedrich Bhaer. I mean, I kind of got that being a poor academic is cool in theory, but he must be 40 if he’s a day!

This is hardly an original response, as evident from a quick Google search, as well as a 2011 book called Little Women and Me. Written by Lauren Baratz-Logsted, it’s about a 14-year-old girl who finds herself transported back to the 1860s March household and goes about trying to right literary “wrongs” - namely Amy ending up with Laurie, and Beth dying. No, I haven’t read it, because I don’t really go in for that sort of put-yourself-in-a-classic-novel thing. Also, it suggests a reading of the book far too influenced by the 1994 film adaptation starring Winona Ryder, Christian Bale, and Claire Danes. I enjoyed the movie, but it’s very much Jo with supporting player sisters, and although it does a great job with the young Amy, the screenplay denies her any agency as an adult. She’s an ornament without depth, so with the inevitable movie plot truncation her marriage to Laurie is not only sudden, but really rather perplexing. Another issue I have with the movie, which I will elaborate in another blog post is how they’ve conflated Josephine March the character with Louisa May Alcott the historical figure by making Jo the author of a book called “Little Women.” Isn’t in the novel. Didn’t happen. Stop changing the story.

Anyway, now that I am much closer to 40 than 16, a lot of those things that I didn’t like about the novel just seem so very right now.

For one thing, Meg and her marital-maternal muddles are significantly more interesting. First time round I barely paid her any attention. Meg - BORING! Drank some champagne at a party, got a bit flirty, married Laurie’s teacher, and then had twins. -Ah, young Erin, you bad proto-critic, that’s pretty much the film plot. Clearly I was skipping bits as I read and ignored the chapters where she’s a stressed out young mother and not especially doting wife for a year after the twins were born. - DIDN’T CARE!

These days I’m decidedly more sympathetic to the pragmatic homeliness of the novel, and quite approve of Marmie’s advice to get someone else to watch the kids and go out with your husband.

However, the most surprising thing was how invested I was in Amy and Laurie, not to mention how completely bleeding obvious their marriage is from the very beginning of the book. I mean, 16-year-old Laurie doesn’t fancy 12-year-old Amy, or anything like that, but Alcott makes it quite clear that Amy is the March girl for him. And vice versa. It’s not just that Laurie saves Amy when she falls through the ice, but he does that wonderful thing many of us wanted from slightly older boys when we were 12 or 13: He teases Amy, protects her, AND pays proper attention to her. He essentially treats her like a grown-up and takes her concerns seriously, which is more than can be said of her sisters. Laurie takes the trouble to visit Amy when she’s in exile/quarantine at Aunt March’s house, and signs her laughably earnest will. Furthermore, when he lets slip about things not looking good for Beth, he doesn’t then dismiss it, but straightforwardly answers her questions.

And how did I possibly miss that it is Laurie whom Amy clings to just as she heads off to Europe? Just as she realises that “a whole ocean was soon to roll between her and those who loved her best...”

“[...] and if anything happens, I’ll come and comfort you,” whispered Laurie, little dreaming how soon he would be called upon to keep his word.”

But Laurie is being big brother Laurie here, and in my Jo/Beth focussed reading, I could only see the dread of Beth’s eventual death in this chapter. Laurie loves Jo after all, and surely this will follow the standard L.M. Montgomery-type plot where the heroine thinks she’s just pals with the hero until she suddenly realises that such jolly friendship is actually love.

Alcott more or less invented the “girls” novel, so she didn’t have to follow any such plot patterns. Jo is quite resolute that she doesn’t see her boy Teddy in that way, and why should she? She’s his friend, she knows they’d make each other miserable, and more to the point, she doesn’t love him that way. Alcott is stridently warning against the tendency to force a romance out of a good friendship. Tis better to be alone than to settle for love.

I’m digressing somewhat (incidentally, if you’re at all concerned, this is not the style of my academic writing).

So where was I? Laurie. He’s a very well constructed character and no mere dreamy teen love interest. In particular, he struggles with the slowly dawning realisation that he loves Amy. He really has to reconcile himself to the notion that the two sisters are swapping places in his affection. It’s not just a matter of showing up one day in Nice, seeing Amy, and thinking, “Oh well, Jo won’t have me, this March girl will do.” Alcott also lets Amy figure out a few quandaries of her own before admitting that it was Laurie all along. And that’s the thing, it’s all along for both of them.

More importantly, the surprise for me as an adult reader was my sudden interest in Amy as a character. I had totally written her off as the slightly bitchy, kind-of accomplished one. All style, no substance. Perhaps a bit Samantha Mathis working with an sparse script. But let me tell you, Amy has substance. Sure, she likes to dress well and knows that she can easily play the ornament of society, but Amy is still a March girl, and heir to her mother’s principles. She sorts Laurie’s indolence out as no one else can, and lectures him admirably on living up to the opportunities you have been given: “But I did really well at Harvard! Wah!” - “You’re a rich boy from Concord, Massachusetts, anything less would have been appalling, so snap out of it.” (I paraphrase of course.)

More importantly, Amy is an artist, and a proper one to boot. Somehow that slipped me by. Arguably a better painter than Jo is a writer. She’s in Europe not to dabble, but to learn art, and she doesn’t give it up to get married; she realises that no amount of talent and energy will create genius: “I want to be great or nothing. I won’t be a common-place dauber [...].” Laurie recognises the same thing with his music.

There are so many interesting discussions to be made about the domestic trajectory of Little Women. Why did Jo have to marry at all? Alcott never married, but it was 1869 and guess what lovies, we still want our heroines to settle down in 2013. There is also a sense of resignation in the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence returning from artistic Europe to sensible hard-working American life in Massachusetts. Much has been made, for instance, of the narrative implication that they will only have one child: young Bess who may be as sickly as her Aunt Beth. You can perhaps imagine the academic ponderings about this great marriage of beauty, talent, and wealth resulting in some sterility and decay. Jo and Friedrich after all go on to run their school and have two fine healthy boys of their own. Robust American Transcendentalism for the win!

Or maybe Alcott just didn’t want to give Amy everything. Because life doesn’t give you everything. Or maybe it’s a story and sentimental plots need some contrived balance.

Now this domesticity doesn’t mean that Laurie and Amy stop their music and art altogether. In fact, we last see Amy perfecting sculpture so she can be certain of a physical reminder of her infant daughter - God, that choked me up so much. I actually had to excuse myself from the living room while reading and run to double check what happens to Bess. [Plot spoiler: she’s still alive in Jo’s Boys. Phew. Struggle in vain to stop tears over fictional potential for fictional character.]

To paraphrase Hugh Haweis, a 19th-century music writer, we take from art that which we are capable of receiving. At 16, Jo was the character most like me, lack of musicianship notwithstanding - and I had no intention of being like Beth! I notice Meg now, because I too am managing children and husband and life. And perhaps I care about Amy this time around because I have found myself with a blond, artistic daughter who worries about her curls and may one day be dreadfully concerned about the shape of her nose. And I know those superficial foibles have little bearing on her talents, her firm sense of self and her place in this world.

I’m also at a point with my music where I’m not satisfied by amateurism, but I know my abilities have slipped. I might be scribbling here, but I can’t force genius from my choral squawkings.

Most importantly, my biases and wants as a reader shape my analysis, but they can’t change a plot. For my part as a critic, I argue that we have to accept the Transcendentalist philosophy of the novel: Jo is no sentimental heroine to be married off to the good American boy, despite all of Laurie’s wild Italian roots. Instead, Alcott has created in Bhaer the solid-hearted, plain-living, and intellectual Romantic-with-a-capital-R hero worthy of her Jo.

If you don’t like that, then I strongly suggest you reconsider Amy.  

I wear yoga pants. Just like my mom.

Women and girls of suburban North American, quit it with the yoga pants as pants trend. Not just because it’s ugly - oh, it is ugly, and the Fug Girls have been telling you so since 2008, but you clearly never got the memo that Tights are not Pants, or you just thought it was a cute ironic thing to laugh at with the girls. You need to stop wearing them because it’s weird.

Sure it’s weird that you want to be seen in the oddest mix of provocative lack of clothing, and completely sexless unsexy, oh my god, I can’t even be bothered dressing college student anti-chic. Seriously, you match them with hoodies. Typically college hoodies. And don’t even get me started on the ugg boots (Someone in ugg marketing did something brilliant to change that charming specimen of woolly footwear from cheap Australasian bogan attire to $150+ upmarket North American department store fare).

But, I’m not here to accuse you of your sartorial crimes. We all make bad fashion choices at some stage or another, and there’s no accounting for taste. Girls, I want to know why you’re suddenly dressing like your mothers.

No, no, no, they’re not dressing like you, my young friends heading off to Tim Hortons for your second Iced Capp and third Honey Crüller of the day. Women in their 30s and 40s (and even 50s) have been rocking the tragic leggings as pants look for years now. It’s the very embodiment of 21st-century conspicuous consumerism for the leisure classes: Look at me and my wealth. Not only is the school run a saunter for me, as I drop the kids off, freshly brewed coffee in my KeepCup, I can then casually head off to the gym, or maybe even a special hot yoga class at Lululemon, and spend my morning being all healthy and glowy. While you plebs have to go work or clean your house. I even have plenty of time for school volunteering, because I’m THAT sort of mother.

Or alternatively, it suggests a contrived air of sporty casualness: Oh, I don’t need to bother with the restrictions of street wear, I just live in my yoga pants.

You just worked out in those things. Go change.  

Anyway, what sort of homogenous suburban hell have I found myself in, where 14 and 15 year olds want to dress like their mothers? Or if not their specific mother, a TV sitcom version of a MILF? Seriously, who are you trying to impress? Because the easy extrapolation to that question is an uncomfortable, your Dad?

At this point we can easily point to the infantilising of Generation X and Y. If my generation actually dressed like grown-ups, the youth might have a chance to wear their own clothes.

But that’s a lousy excuse. Reject our choices! I can tell you’re not, because my husband and I don’t especially try on the fashion front, and my husband has been wearing roughly the same thing since university, and we still look vaguely hipster. We were in Ann Arbor the other day and conceivably passed for slightly older students. In Ann-freakin’-hipster-Arbor. We’re 35! We should look like losers.

You’re too easy on us! Crikey, when I was at university, my friends and I dressed noticeably different from my elder sister and her friends, and she was only four years older than us. FOUR. Not 17 years older.

So quit it with the identikit yoga pants you bought on a shopping trip with your mom. She’s made a bad clothing choice, but you’re a teenager, you can choose something entirely different. Hopefully something I think is vaguely shocking.

P.S. Part of me wants to stop and congratulate any high school student I see wearing something interesting, but it feels counterproductive that they should need to receive their sartorial encouragement from a 35-year-old suburban mother. 

P.P.S. I've worn legging as pants before. I was on holiday. Note that the children are in their pyjamas. 

Careers begin at 40. Or 35. Or whenever you can make it happen.

Unrealistically assuming the baby in her belly wouldn't inhibit the grand plans in the head behind that large tam.

When you have young children and feel like you can’t get anything done, that any attempt at creative industriousness is thwarted by the cries of babes, it is good to remind yourself that many successful women got very little done when their children were small. For writers, musicians, artists, and scholars, it’s often impossible to even think about such things until the children are older.

A few weeks ago, my friend, known online as @chirpingnorton, and who is also going through the thankless struggle of establishing an academic career with two small children in tow, tagged me into a tweet: “Look girls - Claire Tomalin only started her career at 35 after having kids and is still writing at 79” [Anthony Gardner, "Claire Tomalin: An encounter with the acclaimed biographer of Samuel Pepys" (2003)]

Claire Tomalin. The great biographer of our age. She was once “crying into a washbasin of baby clothes,” despairing that her ambitions and capabilities “were going down the plughole with the soapsuds.”

See, there’s time, my bluestockinged sisters!

In that vein of mutual encouragement, I will quote two paragraphs from The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. For those, who don’t know Kate Chopin, she is best known for her fin-de-siècle New Orleans novel The Awakening (1899). You should look her up, she’s really interesting.

Anyway, this is a little lesson in not always believing the outward performance. Successful artists who say they just write, perform, create spontaneously are usually fudging the truth.

She also created a public image for herself, long before women routinely did that. Her friend Sue V. Moore called Chopin ‘the exact opposite of the typical bluestocking’, without ‘literary affectations’, ‘fads’, or ‘serious purpose in life’. Chopin herself claimed to be entirely spontaneous, ‘completely at the mercy of unconscious selection’ and without much self-discipline. She had no writing studio, she said, and preferred to write in the common living room, her children swarming around her. She portrayed herself as a mother who wrote as an unserious hobby. 

But her surviving manuscripts show that Chopin was a meticulous reviser who made many changes before sending a story out. Moreover, she did have her own writing room, with a Morris chair and a naked Venus on  the shelf, and her children were young adults, much too large to be swarming rug rats. When Bayou Folk appeared, her daughter Lélia was nearly fifteen and her eldest son Jean was twenty-three.

                                    

Emily Toth, "What we do and don’t know about Kate Chopin’s life," The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin, ed. Janet Beer (Cambridge UP, 2008) 21.

Kate Chopin didn't even start writing until her children were well on the way to being grown up. Her household may well have been chaotic, but she, like women before her and after, was bound by social convention to over-emphasis the performance of motherhood, at the expense of the work that really mattered to her. Even as she was writing about that social bind in her own fiction.

Few people can write successfully with small children pulling at their apron strings/laptop cord, and those that say they can aren’t giving the full story.

Hint: someone is paying handsomely for childcare.

Fortunately, if you haven’t achieved what you’re trying to do by your fortieth birthday, there are decades ahead of you with older children who will gladly leave you alone to get it done.

“Oh, who are the people in your neighbourhood?”

Small child off on a Canadian suburban adventure

In the three years we lived in Kingsland (central Auckland), we got to kind-of-know only a handful of our neighbours. The people across the street were very friendly, and we were chatting acquaintances with the people on either side of us. But they were both rental properties, and the tenants periodically changed.

The strange thing was that there were plenty of kids on our street, but they were phantoms who got in and out of cars, then ferried into houses. Between parents’ busy lives and children’s busy day-care schedules, and no school in safe walking distance, I sometimes felt like the only person at home during the day on our entire street. Peaceful, but disconcerting.

Maybe we were as distant as our neighbours, but during the eight months we lived on a lovely street in the seaside Auckland suburb of St Heliers, we hardly even met a soul - and I was at home with a brand new baby to coo over, going for walks, out and about prime for some interaction.

New Zealanders always like to go on about how friendly they are, but I’ve found this claim a bit disingenuous. We’re definitely keen to tell people about New Zealand, and to ask people how much they like the country, but that doesn’t really count. We always talk about how we all muck in together, but by the time you get into your 30s, I think it’s quite hard to break into a group to muck in with.

Once, when I was living in the UK, I read this joke article - I think in the Metro of all places - about patriotism amongst ex-pats. It was in list form, and clearly written by a knowing antipodean. I recall the Top 3, and another country down at no. 20. Went something like this:

1. Australia - AUSSIE! AUSSIE! AUSSIE!

2. Sweden - Well, we do have the best society.

3. Canada - I’ve got a maple leaf on my backpack too, eh!

...

20. New Zealand - Do I know you? Well, fuck off then.

I laughed so hard on the train; it’s funny cos it’s true. Aside from the two-year OE types who congregate together in London, a lot of New Zealanders abroad have a ambivalent process of catch-up and avoidance. When you met another New Zealander in Edinburgh, there was this almost apologetic sense of stepping on each other’s turf. Pretend you don’t hear the accent, so you don’t discover that you have friends in common and then, cringe, social obligation ensues. Someone will be asking you to sleep on your couch for a week/month.

But Canadians are definitely, most genuinely friendly. In the last five weeks, we have actually got to know our neighbours. They keep introducing themselves, and inviting us to stuff. Random people from down the street will note that we’re the new family on the corner and welcome us to the neighbourhood. There are kids everywhere, riding bikes, walking to the park, catching buses to various activities. We had a spontaneous hour-long chat in the garden with a couple from down the road, while their kids entertained ours. Another young mum down the road has told me to knock on the door if I’m free in the mornings, because she’s usually home. I’ve gone to the movies with our next-door neighbour and her friends, and another couple a few doors down have told us to come over for a swim whenever it suits. A family we met at the park have invited us over to their house.

And our next-door neighbours have an open door policy with the kids. You can tell it’s genuine, because they’re happy to just tell the kids to go home if they’re busy. Tell them off, if need be. They even took it upon themselves to babysit the other night, and ordered us to go out.

It would be easy to write this off as the habits of a Pollyanna-like suburb, but we actually live in a municipality of 300,000 people contiguous with the city of Toronto. This is no small town, and to put it into an Auckland context, it’s got parts that make Remuera look a little middling, shall we say.  

There will always be neighbourhoods anywhere in the world, anywhere in Auckland, that get on well. My parents’ street in Mt Eden has a lovely camaraderie, and friends who live further out in Auckland definitely have something of a community spirit, but it’s often centred around school, or an extracurricular activity, or church. It usually takes a good couple of years to develop.

Over the course of my 12 years growing up in Howick, I knew many of our neighbours very well, but I keep recalling that the really welcoming people on the street were the English ex-pats. The people who understood what it was like to move to a new place. And before someone says, oh, that’s just an Auckland thing, the only open door policies I was able to get as a four-year-old in small-town Kawerau were at the houses of an English family and a Canadian family. Families we still count as our dearest, if not nearest, because they returned back to their home countries after a few years. 

For all of the faults of North American society, there is a touching lack of cynicism when it comes to interpersonal relations. When someone is friendly to you, you can pretty much guarantee that there’s nothing in it for them beyond the desire to say hello and meet someone new. It makes you feel very welcome.