Little Women

On a research trip to Harvard several years ago, I insisted on tacking on a daylong detour to Concord, Massachusetts. I needed, at least once in my life, to dip my toes into Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond. Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House beckoned as well - the site of my imaginings of life as an Alcott sister, wrapped cozily in a hand-knit blanket, paging through dramatic tales, gazing out the window at swirling snow from the security of my happy home.

Like most historic residences, Orchard House was far closer to the road than I'd imagined, and the vegetation surrounding its deep-brown clapboard exterior more sparse. But the interior - room after room - exactly what I had pictured. It was, in a word, ideal, a three-dimensional rendering of my childhood fantasies.

I'd first read Little Women in middle school, around the same time as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and We Capture the Castle - stories of young women relying on hidden reserves of inner strength to become something more than wives. I returned to it after my trip to Concord, eager to slide back into the warmth of the text, to reconfirm Alcott's genius as a foremother of the American female bildungsroman, and to bask in the prose of the woman who dared to cast a rebellious tomboy as her lead.

But what I found when I returned to Little Women was disappointment. The novel's second half, wherein the little women are married off and set to work as wives, is even more dismal than I'd remembered. It is obsessed with wifely duty - deferential to patriarchy and dismissive of female ambition of any variety other than the maternal. Only Beth never even considers marriage, and she dies of an undisclosed lung condition (or maybe spinsterhood). It's downright strange that intelligent women would call a book that disposes of its protagonists' dreams in order to settle them into lives darning socks "required reading" for young girls today.