The umpteenth remake of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s witty 1868 girls’ novel about growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, during the Civil War, is directed by Greta Gerwig and stars her alter ego, the lovely Irish lass Saoirse Ronan, as Jo March.
As with the five sisters of Jane Austen’s 1813 book Pride and Prejudice, Little Women features four sisters, ages 12 to 16 at the beginning, living in genteel poverty, respectable enough to be invited to all the dances, but too broke to be the belles of the ball.
This reflected the remarkable upbringing of Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888). Back before Mark Twain, American literature was kind of a who-you-know business, and the Alcotts knew everybody who was anybody in the author industry. Ralph Waldo Emerson lent her family the money to buy their house in Concord, Henry David Thoreau told them it was haunted, and they eventually sold it to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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Considered a genius by America’s leading intellectuals, Louisa’s improvident father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a figure out of a Mencius Moldbug essay about how WASPs are the real communists.
As Louisa recounted in her satire Transcendental Wild Oats, in the summer of 1841 her father founded a utopian commune called Fruitlands whose inmates were required to eat a vegan diet and not wear cotton (because it was picked by slaves), leather, or wool (because dumb brutes could not consent to be exploited). They could only wear linen, which was pleasant in summer, but not, as it turned out, in winter.
Louisa was a more sensible soul than her father and enjoyed making money off her writing. So she eventually gave in when her publisher asked her to write a book for girls, even though she complained that she only identified with boys. In her semiautobiographical Little Women, the girls’ father is much improved upon by being rewritten as a beloved paterfamilias who is far away serving as a chaplain in the Union Army.
In the new movie adaptation, the one reference to the true nature of Mr. Alcott is that when Papa finally comes home, he is played by the comic actor Bob Odenkirk of the absurdist Mr. Show. Personally, I’d pay to see Odenkirk portray Mr. Alcott in a biopic entitled Consecrated Crank.
Interestingly, when Little Women was first made into a talkie in 1933 during the culturally conservative Depression, it was seen not as a product of its radical milieu but as a return to traditional American family values after the Charleston-dancing ’20s.
