For 150 years, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women has been a touchstone for understanding American girlhood. This course explores key contexts, including Transcendentalism and the American Civil War; the novel’s transgressive themes of gender and domesticity; and its many adaptations to see how notions of girlhood have developed through time.
We will begin with a discussion of Little Women’s place in 19th-century American literature, exploring the novel’s relationship to popular genres including the sentimental novel and the domestic novel. We will also spend time understanding the historical development of childhood. Modern ideas about childhood (such as the child’s natural innocence and childhood as a time of play and discovery) were established in the 19th century; previously, given high rates of child mortality and the need for children to contribute to the family, children were rarely treated differently than adults. Little Women charts a moment of transition in the idea of what children are, and it particularly theorises the role of the girl in society.
We will then move forward to think about different themes present in the novel, including religion, war and authorship. We will situate the novel’s religious views within the Alcott family’s relationship with Transcendentalism and 19th-century religious revivalism. The novel can also be considered an immediate reaction to the American Civil War, in which Alcott served as a nurse. The war provides an important context for understanding the role of Mr March within his family and the shift in gender roles that took place across the 19th century. Finally, we will consider Jo, Amy and Alcott as woman artists seeking to find a place for themselves within an aesthetic world that devalued their work.
The course concludes with a broad look at Little Women’s popularity today, surveying its many film and television adaptations (including the most recent film by Greta Gerwig) and an Indian web series. These adaptations allow us to ask how Little Women continues to entertain, challenge and affect us today.
Learning outcomes
- An appreciation of the continuities and distinctions in the thematic content of this work;
- An understanding of the relationship between form and content in literary texts;
- An ability to articulate a critical analysis that includes close reading of texts.