The Moral of the Story

When I was young, I did, however, read Little House on the Prairie. The whole series! Combined, Little House is an even longer book about girls. So, why the difference? I suspect it was partly due to the fact that the Little House books are shorter individual volumes and partly that there was an enormously popular TV series about the books.

I think I would have liked Little Women when I was a kid. I enjoyed it as an adult. It’s not the greatest book of all time or anything, but it was a very pleasant read. One way of describing it: when I finished it, I did not immediately plunge into the sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys, but I did think I’ll probably read them on one of those lazy days when it feels like the world has ground to a halt.

I read the book with one of my reading groups where the students picked the books. Talking with them about it was illuminating. A couple of reactions are well worth pondering.

First, one of the students noted the oddity of Laurie’s relationships with the sisters. Laurie grows up next door to the sisters. When he gets to of marriageable age, he decides he wants to marry Jo. But, when Jo refuses, he moves on…to Jo’s younger sister, Amy. It all seems so natural in the book itself. But, the student noted it only seems sweet and natural when you imagine that Laurie’s interest in the sisters is totally Platonic.

An early 20s Laurie interested in an early 20s Jo on a purely Platonic level? That is, to put it mildly, completely foreign to the experience of most college-age women. Imagine a real boy interested in a real girl at that age and you do not immediately think there is precisely zero erotic interest. OK, so Little Women was written in an age before the erotic overtones would need to be put on display. In a way that is nice. We all know why young men are interested in marrying young women, so leaving that all to the side is not really a bad thing.

But, if you allow for the fact that there is an unstated erotic attachment here, when Jo turns Laurie down and he immediately takes up with Jo’s little sister, suddenly it is, well, creepy. Imagine that in real life with some teenagers you know. Insert shudder.

Another interesting note on love. Jo’s interest in Professor Bhaer struck me as the oddest thinking in the whole book. This older German guy shows up and Jo is enamored with him, eventually marrying him. I could not for the life of me figure out why this German Professor was so interesting. One of my students told me the answer. Professor Bhaer is modeled after…Ralph Waldo Emerson! Louisa May Alcott grew up quite near Emerson and was fascinated by him. So, the character in the novel who is obviously Alcott’s avatar gets to marry the character in the novel modeled after Emerson. I guess that is one of the advantages of writing your own book.

The second curious observation made by one of the students was how much she loved the book when she was a kid and how disappointed she was with it now. The difference? When she was a kid, these were all just great stories about growing up. Now? Every story was so obviously designed to have a cute moral lesson at the end.

What fascinated me about that remark was that the transparently obvious cute moral lessons are part of the charm of the book. The girls all get tired of doing chores and start complaining. The always wise mother tells them one week that they don’t have to do any chores at all. A few days later, the house is a total wreck, nobody has clean clothes, and their pet bird died. Sadness ensues. The girls learn it is important to do your chores. Wise mom smiles. End of tale. Charming. It’s the kind of experiment every parent dreams of doing, but honestly, adults’ tolerance of absolute household chaos is much lower than kids’ tolerance of the same. But, maybe a story like this would alarm kids enough that they would be scared straight! If you don’t do your chores, your pet will die!

My student’s comment got me wondering. Can real life be turned into a series of moral tales? Could you take the episodes of your own life and spin them out as short chapters, each of which will end with a nice little moral? As I started to imagine doing that, it was surprisingly easy. Maybe Little Women isn’t so artificial after all. Maybe life really is a series of morality plays and Alcott just noticed that.

Alcott is certainly aware of what she is doing. Towards the very end of the book, we get this marvelous passage about Jo:

Now, if she had been the heroine of a moral storybook, she ought at this period of her life to have become quite saintly, renounced the world, and gone about doing good in a mortified bonnet, with tracts in her pocket. But, you see, Jo wasn’t a heroine, she was only a struggling human girl like hundreds of others, and she just acted out her nature, being sad, cross, listless, or energetic, as the mood suggested. It’s highly virtuous to say we’ll be good, but we can’t do it all at once, and it takes a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together before some of us even get our feet set in the right way.

Starting out denying that Jo is the heroine of a moral storybook, Alcott then proceeds to draw a moral from the fact that she is not one. That is, let’s be honest, incredibly brilliant.

The question I am still pondering: is it worthwhile finding moral lessons in all the stories of your life? Would it be a good use of my time to think back over my life and mentally construe it as a whole bunch of morality tales? Should we all do that? Would it do us any good?

I can’t help wondering if Alcott was doing a bit more than just writing a kid’s book to teach some moral lessons. Maybe she was providing a model for how to think about your own life.