Main characters in Little Women as

representatives of real American Women

Literatura Norteamericana S.XIX

Miguel Vizcaíno López

The literature is our realm of thoughts. It reflects our way of life, human advancement,

and even our ideologies, our train of thoughts and forms of thinking. Each bit of writing

which is composed by various writers in various periods has its very own exceptional

thought. For example, the readers can accept that Jane Austen was keen on domestic life

and social habits as they read her work Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. In

addition, the two exemplary books help them to unmistakably picture English society in

the mid nineteenth century for them. Moreover, on the off chance that one looks carefully

into writing, particularly novel type, the person in question will understand that every

novel additionally manages the question of role-gender. A few books unequivocally show

sex generalizations. They demonstrate the possibility of customary men (defensive and

conclusive including prototypical ladies) sustaining and compliant. An example of this

kind is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. When checked over this novel, people can

thoroughly see how typical ladies resembled in that period.

Little Women, a great American work composed during the late 19th century, delineates

the sisters of the March family, who are totally not the same one to each other. Meg, the

most aged sister who assumes maternal liability, is fixated by extravagance. The second

sister in age, Jo, is touchy so she frequently inconveniences individuals. Beth, the

following one, is a quiet young lady who cherishes music, however she is too timid to
even consider socializing. The most youthful one is called Amy. This young lady is very

egotistical, something that is seen as an awful quality.

The work pursues the March sisters in their voyage from adolescence towards maturity.

Even though the young ladies are for the most part essentially benevolent, every sister

has a character’s imperfection that they fight to subdue.

Other than the literary representations in Little Women, the readers can likewise observe

the attributes of the standard ladies in the nineteenth century through the female characters

of the novel. Alcott clearly represents their occupation and reasoning. The public expects

alluring ladies who are accommodating. What's more, little ladies ought to be occupied

with family life to set themselves up for the matrimony: they ought to be great spouses

and respectable mothers. Alcott’s work Little Women likewise reflect different worlds in

each of the sisters.

The most significant trait of the American women in the nineteenth century is

accommodation. Women are instructed that ladies are second rate compared to men

naturally. According to Godey’s Lady’s Book, the fashion magazine of the time:

“The perfection of womanhood… is the wife and mother, the center of the family, that magnet
that draws man to the domestic altar, that makes him a civilized being… The wife is truly the light
of the home.” (Wayne 2007: 1).

Catherine Beecher, in his work A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1842), also highlights

how men and women live in “different worlds”:

In no country has such constant care been taken, as in America, to trace two clearly
distinct lines of action for the two sexes, and to make them keep pace one with the
other, but in two pathways which are always different… If, on the one hand, an
American woman cannot escape from the quiet circle of domestic employments, on
the other hand, she is never forced to go beyond it. (Wayne 2007: 2)

In Little Women, we can see the completely opposite view of this idea reflected in the

character of Jo, the main character of the work. Jo is a funny person, with a wild

personality and strong will, a "not very feminine" character and an ardent ambition to be

a writer. At the beginning of Little Women, Jo is described as a gentlemanly person, which

includes the use of jargon words and whistling with hands in pockets as if he were a child.

She tells her sisters, in unequivocal terms, that she has no desire to stay home doing

domestic tasks but would rather battle in the Civil War alongside her father. Jo openly

regrets having been born a girl, with all the limits and restrictions that this entails: she is

very often being Jo cautioned not to carry on like a man, to employ slang words and even

to state something manly in the light of the fact that such practices are considered very

childish and unfeminine:

If Marmee shook her fist instead of kissing her hand to us, it would serve us right,
for more ungrateful wretches than we are never seen,” cried Jo taking a remorseful
satisfaction in the snowy walk and bitter wind. Don’t use such dreadful expression,
said Meg. (Alcott 2005: page 34)
For the contrary, Meg and Beth appear to exemplify the conventional models of the

American womanliness. Meg is a customary Victorian courageous woman; she

thinks about design and society, and needs to get hitched, keep the house and have

kids. Beth is additionally unbelievably household, as she is a youngster who savors

the experience of cooking, cleaning and helping other people.

These ideals of female righteousness epitomize the broadly acknowledged

standards of Alcott's time. These ladies have a peaceful disposition, resigned habits,

and their issues are not many and sexual orientation explicit: Meg is conceited, and

Beth is timid. Be that as it may, rather than dismissing these young ladies as

impossible, Alcott was compelled to join them into her story since her boss

requested a novel with courageous women to ingrain youthful readers with ethics

and legitimate conduct. These characters speak to the sort of lady Louisa Alcott,

who would never have gone this way, expecting her to forfeit a lot of her singularity

to progress toward becoming as loyal and "ladylike" as these sisters were.

Beth's incredibly good and physic will comparably show that she is a solid

courageous woman with her thoughts regarding independence. Beth is timid to the
point that she seldom adventures in no other place but home; however, she does

inconspicuously impact her family in issues of empathy. She is a typical ladylike

standard-role, unequipped for survival in a reality that Jo needs to enter, yet her

capacity to stick industriously to life is a solid pointer of her inner power. She has

confidence in her sister's capacity to turn into an extraordinary essayist, and her

connection with the more confident sister certifies that ladies of dissimilar

characters can share compassion, charm, and a faith in each other.

Amy is the most spontaneous of the March sisters, and along all the novel she

exemplifies that she does not aspire to elevated aims in life, but she is able of doing

things by herself. In the novel, Amy is depicted as a conceited and timid girl who

follows the role-model of the younger sister of his mother, May. In this sense, this

character is truly feminine in several aspects: she cares for her good-looking and

her clothes to look good to the rest of the people, and certainly she has plans of a

great marrying. Nevertheless, Amy has also aspirations of becoming a good artist.

A basic obligation of accommodating ladies is homelife. They are relied upon to

keep everything clean and to do great culinary work. Obviously, Mrs. March

deliberately accepts all family obligations and shows her youngsters to do as such.

When she remains in bed, she disregards the young ladies to become familiar with

an exercise in womanliness with no direction from her or the old servant. At that

point the young ladies need to cook and clean everything. Subsequently, they

appear to live in a tumultuous house, as it is such an enormous activity that must be

confronted. After all the hard day that has passed by, they understand the

requirement for family life and a feeling of genuine womanliness from their

ongoing background; not just cooking and cleaning are viewed as a must for the

daughters, yet additionally looking after the persons who are sick, especially the
father and the son. The reader can see the matter of caring when Beth is awfully ill,

and the mother is gone; the significant coming of Mrs. March back to her home

returns euphoria to everybody; the ill son additionally improves with the thoughtful

care of his mother.

The purpose for home-based training is to be true women who will later become

good spouses. In this period, women are taught that marriage and the home-life are

women's ideal concern and that they should receive training. They are trained to be

well-formed spouses and mothers. Thus, in the nineteenth century women are

expected to behave in a nice way in both fields. It was the exclusive task of the

mother to maintain the devotion of the "true femininity" from generation to

generation.

In this sense, Marmee, the mother of the March Family, is maybe the most

important character of the family. It is peculiar that Alcott does not picture the

personality of Marmee as the traditional Victorian novelists would do; she is not a

wife who is submissive to the desires of her husband, but a strong woman who can

take on her own the charge of caring of the whole family.

In this story, Marmee struggles in maintaining her daughters in good form and

joyful while her husband is at the war. Marmee shows off that she can manage the

family obligations with the job, and this fact would make her appearance as a role

for her daughters to follow. She is not the prototypical Victorian mother in the sense

that she does not instantiates her daughters to follow the life of marrying and rely

on a man, as she has proved that a woman can perfectly survive without a husband

exactly as she has been doing.

To conclude, Alcott has managed very well to depict the two visions the woman

had in the time: how the role of submission was fiercely impregnated in the

Victorian women mentality and, how the Victorian women confronted this

uncomfortably model of life and proved their real independence. Through the

character of Jo and, in a less scale the character of Marmee, Alcott seems to liberate

her feelings of rebellion and independence from the patriarch society and the

submission of the women.

REFERENCES

Hammerman, R. (2007). Womanhood in Anglophone literary culture. Newcastle:

Cambridge Scholars.
McFadden, D., & Alcott, L. (2005). Little women. New York: Sterling Publishing
Company, Inc., 2005.
Strickland, C. (2015). Victorian Domesticity. Berlin: University of Alabama Press.
Strohmeier, S. (2014). Victorian morality and conduct: Jane Austen's representation.
Hamburg: Anchor Academic Publishing.
Wayne, T. (2007). Women's roles in nineteenth-century America. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press.