Resentful Little Women: gender and class feeling in Louisa May Alcott.(Critical Essay)

In one of the most dramatic and emotionally charged scenes in Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel Little Women, Amy retaliates against her sister Jo for a perceived slight. Jo refuses to let Amy accompany her on a rare outing to the theater, and Amy, resenting her exclusion, burns the only copy of Jo's handwritten collection of original stories. The manuscript of "half-a-dozen" fairy tales is the result of "the loving work of several years" (1993, 68) and for Jo its destruction is catastrophic. (1) For their part, Jo's mother and sisters understand the significance of "Amy's bonfire," but they cannot quite understand the intensity of Jo's response. Jo's vow that she will never forgive Amy forcefully expresses her sense of injustice and injury, but it also disrupts the "sweet home-peace" of all of their lives (68). Despite some anxiety over Jo's behavior, the March family does not speak of the "great trouble" of Jo's anger, trusting that Jo's own "generous nature" will eventually dissolve "her resentment" (68).

Up to this point, the novel has paid close attention to Jo's ambition to be a writer, as well as to Amy's myriad personal faults, and it's therefore surprising that the novel spends almost no narrative effort to affirm that Jo has indeed been wronged. Even though the novel believes that her work is valuable and that Amy has done a terrible thing in destroying it, it is less interested in the objective justice of Jo's feelings than it is in the subjective way that she handles her anger. Accordingly, Amy's destruction of Jo's manuscript and Jo's subsequent rage are the prelude to an even more dramatic incident. Jo, unable to forgive Amy, fails to keep a close eye on her sister when Amy tags along to go skating, even though Jo knows that some of the ice is still too thin to skate over. Amy does indeed fall through thin ice into the freezing water, and after her melodramatic rescue, Jo is overcome by an access of self-recrimination. She tells her mother: "It seems as if I could do anything when I'm in a passion; I get so savage, I could hurt anyone and enjoy it. I'm afraid I shall do something dreadful some day and spoil my life and make everybody hate me" (Alcott 1993, 71). Her confession elicits a famous and much-critiqued response from her mother that she too is angry nearly every day. Yet Jo's mother, unlike her quick-tempered daughter, is no longer tormented by her anger. She has learned to repress her anger, and she consoles Jo by telling her that the events of the day will help Jo school herself in a similar lesson of repression. The chapter closes with a weakened Amy and a chastened Jo "wordlessly" embracing in the newly restored "home-peace"; the drama of Jo's lost stories is all but forgotten, even by Jo, for the remainder of the novel.

But what, in the logic of the novel, is Jo to feel about her sister's destructive act? What is the reader to make of the absence of anything that we might call the recognition of injustice, either by Jo's family, or by the narrator? Why, that is to say, is Jo's critical response to her injury unrecognized unless it can be read as an emotional response? Why does her family rely on Jo's "generous" emotions, the very source of her trouble, to save her from her own anger? How, in other words, does the narrative incorporate and make use of negative and destructive emotions? The novel appears to mend Jo and Amy's contretemps quite neatly, yet its answers to the questions that underwrite such episodes of anger and recrimination are evasive at best. For example, while it is true that Amy's skating accident prompts Jo to say that she fears she will do something terrible, it is also true that Amy has already gotten into a "passion" in which she enjoyed hurting Jo, and in which she did something genuinely dreadful. But it is Jo, not Amy, who has run the risk of "making everybody hate" her, and it is Amy, not Jo, who is the final victim in this scenario.

I open with this anecdote for two reasons. First, it frames the incident that has received perhaps the most elaboration from feminist critics interested in the lessons that Little Women teaches to its readers and to its characters about gender, anger, and repression. Yet it is significant that this rich scene is almost never critiqued in its entirety; the events leading up to Jo and her mother's discussion of anger and repression are generally ignored. As I shall suggest, we miss something when we ignore such scenes in order to focus on how the novel seems to tell its readers that women must not have, much less act on, negative emotions. Specifically, we lose the opportunity to inquire into the novel's larger figuration of the productivity of negative emotional responses, responses that include but are not limited to anger, resentment, and self-recrimination, in order to understand its construction of a particular kind of "little woman."

Feminist critics have discussed the ways that sentimental or women's novels from the mid nineteenth century elevate female characters' positive emotional responses--sympathy, for example, or compassion--as antidotes to the harshness of the external social world. They have argued that such textual counterings of the demands of the competitive public sphere let women's fiction construct the home as a refuge from that world, as well as helping to imagine the possibilities for human interaction that might be considered more ethical because more familial. I would like to open up this general inquiry into emotion and affect in women's fiction by looking at the ways that destructive or dangerous emotions are figured in an enduringly popular text that appears to be devoted to a sentimental strategy of understanding the world. I shall argue that emotions like anger, resentment or envy signal that the home, rather than being the refuge from the social, or the template for a better version of the social, is a testing ground for the pressures of the outside world, especially for the pressures of an always-evolving regime of class and status distinctions.

I shall concentrate especially on selected moments in the text (selected, for there are many such moments) in which the March girls, who live something of an insular life in their rambling home, are confronted and addressed by the dense social and economic world of their surrounding community. Although the novel tends to present scenes in which facsimiles of the world are assimilated into the March household--the girls create their own post office, their own newspaper, and stage their own private theatricals, for example--they nonetheless participate with other people in more public spaces. They go to house parties, they have jobs, and they attend school. They find, though, that their contact with the greater world emphasizes their material poverty, and they often find themselves involved in scenes of social humiliation that provoke them to feel a sort of objectless resentment intimately related to their gender but also to their somewhat uncertain class status. Bluntly, gender and class are inseparable as we look at the kinds of negative feelings that the novel discusses. This lesson may seem too obvious--gender and class, after all, are now part of an established mantra of subject positions--but it bears repeating. Literary critics are skilled at understanding gender and class as historical positions, yet they are less skilled at seeing that they are also affective positions, and that affect and emotion themselves are historically produced and historically specific. (2)

Class is not merely about how much money one has, it is more finely about the kinds of feelings subjects experience as dangerous or natural or powerful. Class and status, as Pierre Bourdieu tells us, are matters of feeling, not merely matters of objective economic measurement. Not simply about social effects, class and status are also always about emotional affect, for class and status, although deeply structural, are first experienced as deeply personal. Class and status are therefore narrated as dispositions toward one's place in the world, as competitive relationships with others, even if those others are members of one's own family. This last is particularly salient in the world of women's fiction, for the kinds of distinctions produced by social competition are often narratively at odds with the palliative function of the sentimental home, and with the figuration of women as private, emotional centers who keep the world of economic distinction at bay. (3) A complex balance of social desire and a naturalized belief in taste and personal values, class and status play themselves out locally through a series of difficult negotiations with one's "real" and one's desired position next to others.

My analysis, I should say at the outset, is not meant to reveal the "real" logic of the novel by demonstrating that all along it has been about class and not gender. Although much of my argument will show that Little Women is replete with scenes of various kinds of emotional crises centered on dissonant understandings of class and status, I focus on such negative scenes to look at what Little Women shows us about how negative emotions in fact actively produce the specific forms of gender the book elaborates. It should be obvious that my concentration on gender's relationship to class is indebted to early feminist work on Little Women, for it is that work that first understood the novel as expressing historically complex ideas about gender. Feminist discussions of Little Women, generated in part by a desire to recover forgotten women's writing more generally, changed the parameters of literary history and made it possible to look at Alcott's text (which had not been forgotten, but which had certainly been critically ignored) as an important critique of the domestic sphere and women's place within it. Within the very broad parameters of an emerging feminist field of literary…