"Little Women" and the Marmee Problem
by Sarah Blackwood
Marmee rarely figures in the most pleasurable contemporary discussions or interpretations of “Little Women.” She’s not usually featured in the personality quizzes. There’s no essay devoted to her in “March Sisters,” the wonderful recent essay collection about the novel. It has only been relatively recently that the real-life Marmee’s sharp wit and insight have received sustained critical attention at all (namely in Eve LaPlante’s groundbreaking work on Abigail Alcott’s journals and letters). Yet Marmee is central to the story that Louisa May Alcott wanted to tell. “Little Women” is about four sisters trying to make the leap from girlhood to womanhood. The plot is theirs. But the ending, Alcott was clear, is Marmee’s, because her girls, each in her own way, both love and despise what’s waiting for them at the end. The prospect of becoming a Marmee, “Little Women” tells us, is simultaneously an aspiration and a threat. Marmee is at once far more interesting than many readers may recognize and also a major narrative problem.
Gerwig has said that she found inspiration in Marmee’s shocking confession of anger to Jo. “I am angry nearly every day of my life,” she declares, after Jo has almost let her sister Amy drown in an icy pond. Gerwig’s is only the second adaptation ever to commit the incredible line to film (the first was Vanessa Caswill’s BBC version, from 2017). And the new film’s main innovation—its deconstructed chronology—is well-suited to reveal what Marmee and the girls might be angry about. When Gerwig cuts directly from Beth’s funeral to Meg’s wedding day (in the novel, these events do not occur in this order), the film makes a very broad point: marriage is a kind of death. The point is humorously underscored in smaller moments, too, in multiple scenes of sharp-witted middle-aged women barely suffering their foolish husbands. Laura Dern’s Marmee responds archly to various idiocies offered by her husband (the brilliantly cast Bob Odenkirk). But the satisfactions of archness are short-lived, and I left the movie feeling like Marmee got short shrift once again.
What’s missing is what the novel takes pains to reveal: a subtle account of the damages that Marmee has accrued across a lifetime of becoming and being a Marmee. In the novel, but not in Gerwig’s film, Marmee clarifies why her anger might come as a surprise to her daughters: “I’ve learned to check the hasty words that rise to my lips, and when I feel that they mean to break out against my will, I just go away for a minute, and give myself a little shake for being so weak and wicked.” The scene is not just about the expression, or existence, of righteous anger; it’s about the depressing processes through which mothers suppress that anger.
Once you tune into this wavelength, you can’t unhear it. Take, for example, the famous scene in which Jo returns home after selling her hair for money. The sisters are, as usual, center stage, clucking and exclaiming over Jo’s violation of her “one beauty.” But when the narration turns to Marmee, it marks for readers the extent to which we—like the girls—are not invited in to whatever is really going on inside of her: “Mrs. March folded the wavy chestnut lock, and laid it away with a short grey one in her desk. She only said, ‘Thank you, deary,’ but something in her face made the girls change the subject.”
What did it feel like for Marmee to hold that hair in her hands? Did Jo’s youth and bravery remind Marmee of her own, now distant? How proud she must have felt, but also how failed: unable to change a world in which her daughters were forced to sell themselves in exchange for a modicum of power. Marmee, it is clear here, probably most hours of most days, wanted to ball up her fists and scream.
Marmee’s drama takes shape in a sort of narrative negative space: unspoken, skimmed over. But it is there, even if it’s hard to learn how to notice. Compared to the soft, knowing wryness of the contemporary Marmees (Susan Sarandon, Emily Watson, Laura Dern), or the prim, angelic ones of the mid-twentieth-century adaptations, Alcott’s representation of maternal anger feels like a miracle of insight. It comes out of nowhere and seeps in everywhere. Marmee is central but unknowable, cherished yet easy to ignore. She can’t be figured out because her experience of subjectivity does not dovetail with what the social world expects or wants from her, and she knows it.
Our culture’s sentimental attachment to stories of young women about to bloom is strong. Jo’s anger—at her own powerlessness, at her culture’s obsession with marriage, at others’ assumptions about what shape her life should take—is legible; Marmee’s is not. A subtext of “Little Women” is that the explosive potential of these four girls is not, and will not be, realized; this is why Marmee belongs at the heart of the story. Gerwig’s adaptation is too committed to the idea of Jo as a transformative feminist hero to plumb these depths. The story that Gerwig’s film wants us to own—the story that so many redemptive, individualist readings of the novel push us toward—is the one where there are survivors, singular women who somehow escape. I don’t think this was the story Alcott was telling.
“I am almost suffocated in this atmosphere of restriction and form,” Abigail May Alcott wrote in her journal in 1842. Her husband, Bronson Alcott, was home in Concord after a more than six-month trip to England. He had left Abigail alone with four girls under the age of twelve, in deep debt, and with no income. She struggled. Yet things did not get better when he returned with two friends, Charles Lane and Henry Wright, in tow. The three men were in the early days of planning what would come to be the nominally egalitarian, vegetarian commune Fruitlands, but their condescension toward women was keenly felt by Abigail. She describes how they silenced her inside her own home: “I seem frowned down into stiff quiet and peace-less order.”
It’s possible that Louisa’s most feminist act was not only the invention of the indelible Jo but rather the insistence that Marmee’s anger—both expressed and suppressed—should be a central part of this story about creativity, love, home, and world-making. When she was seventeen, Louisa wrote in her journal about finding a note from Abigail: “[Her letters] always encourage me; and I wish someone would write as helpfully to her, for she needs cheering up with all the care she has. I often think what a hard life she has had since she married—so full of wandering and all sorts of worry!”
Louisa never did become a Marmee. She was not wrong that writing and Marmee-dom were at difficult odds in the eighteen-sixties and seventies, and she’d spent a lifetime painfully observing her own mother’s struggle with anger, misrecognition, and powerlessness, in her marriage and in motherhood. Louisa made her choice, and I’ve always cheered her radical vision of womanly independence. Still, her novel remains as good a reminder as any that one of the central problems of human life—motherhood—is, has been, and always will be a creative wellspring, not only a story to overcome or leave behind. It makes me angry that this fact is still so hard to see.
Sarah Blackwood is an associate professor of English at Pace University. Her book “The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States” is forthcoming.
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