Little Modern Women

...With her husband, Jo founds "a good, happy, home-like school" that will use "the Socratic method of education on modern youth...

...Little Modern Women Louisa May Alcott's unrecognizable heroines By JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Of all the benighted customs of the past, none is viewed with more condescension in these enlightened days than the practice of purging offensive passages from literary classics...

...But she does...

...Marmee tells her to watch, to pray, never to tire of trying, and never to think the task impossible...

...Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel about the March sisters remains a favorite with serious young readers, but a far wider audience knows it only through a succession of movies...

...If one obstacle is old Mr...

...March (whom the girls call "Marmee") reminds her daughters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, how as little girls they used to play a game they called "Pilgrim's Progress...

...The sole reference to Bunyan in any of the movies pops up in the earliest of them, directed by the great George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn as Jo...

...What shall we do about that...

...Hollywood's handling of Little Women is a case in point...

...A single, vague Bunyan allusion survives in the 1994 script, when Jo tells Laurie she wants to fight "the lions of injustice...

...The girls will refer to their "little books," directly and indirectly, throughout the story...

...The girls reminisce and confess their shortcomings, one after the other, and Marmee reminds them: "We are never too old for this, my dear, because it is a play we are playing all the time in one way or another...

...Such themes are present in Alcott—who was, after all, Bronson Alcott's daughter—but in the Armstrong movie they dominate the narrative...

...To appreciate the extent of the revision, it is necessary to see the central place Alcott gave to explicitly Christian ethics...

...Where Bowdler merely left the racy bits out of his otherwise intact Shakespeare, the movies rip the heart out of Alcott's work—which is her moral message...

...When she finally starts writing about the familiar—her family and the "simple beautiful things I know and under-stand"—she gains not only a career but a spouse in the learned emigre, Professor Bhaer...

...As America enters the twenty-first century, the Bunyanesque framework of Alcott's book has ceased to have meaning for the general audience...

...Along the way, he nearly sinks in the Slough of Despond, weighed down by the Burden on his back...

...Bunyan's exciting story was part of the air Louisa May Alcott breathed...

...Whereas Bunyan's allegory always gestures to something beyond itself, Little Women brings the quest down to earth, as the rich neighbor's mansion becomes Palace Beautiful...

...Brooke marry, their vows are solemnized "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," with "life everlasting" beckoning down the road...

...Jo is more winsome and fragile in appearance, and far less tomboyish, than her predecessors...

...And it was part of the air her readers breathed...

...Laurence, another is the March family's poverty, which makes the girls "shy of accepting favors which they could not return...

...Laurence...

...By 1994, with a female director, Gillian Armstrong, Little Women has acquired a feminist gloss...

...The 1994 film is altogether innocent of any Puritan notion of duty or self-denial...

...For Little Women is constructed almost as a commentary Jean Bethke Elshtain is the author of Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy...

...Marmee says vaguely spiritual things...

...what shall I do...

...Needless to say, she rues the visit nearly as soon as she has tarried...

...In the first chapter of Little Women—entitled "Playing Pilgrims"—Mrs...

...But Bunyan's metaphysical lions—the temptations that would turn a pilgrim away from the path of faith—are reduced to practical obstacles, to social conditions blocking the road to earthly justice...

...rests at House Beautiful, which is guarded by two lions...

...he resists the blandishments of Mr...

...Laurence's attractive grandson Laurie...

...It is unsurprising, then, that her fictional March sisters should be taught to think of themselves as pilgrims...

...She tells Jo (Winona Ryder), for example, to go forth and "embrace your liberty," a piece of pop-sentimentality that Alcott would have found unintelligible...

...And all these cinematic retellings shortchange Alcott...

...If Alcott somewhat domesticates Bunyan, Hollywood handles him in the three film versions of Little Women, made in 1933, 1949, and 1994, by simply dropping the pilgrimage theme...

...Jo is appropriately mannish— "I'm the man of the family now Pop is away"—but inappropriately garish...

...and that maybe the house over there, full of splendid things, is going to be our Palace Beautiful...

...And these verses, it says, are "Adapted from John Bunyan...

...Given to him by Evangelist, this roll contains instructions for his journey...

...Worldly Wiseman...

...Now, my little pilgrims, suppose you begin again, not in play, but in earnest, and see how far on you can get before father comes home...

...The doomed Beth, whose early death is the novel's unfolding tragedy, remarks to Jo (in Chapter 5, "Being Neighborly"), "I was thinking about our 'Pilgrim's Progress,' . . . How we got out of the Slough and through the Wicket Gate by resolving to be good, and up the steep hill, by trying...

...The "roll of directions" to which Jo refers is the "Parchment Roll" that Bunyan's pilgrim carries...

...The old world bends its knee to the new...

...Jo, more complex and boyish, yearns to leave home, to write, and to do many shocking things, but is enfolded back into domesticity at the end of the book when she marries and takes up what we might now call progressive education (another enthusiasm of Bronson Alcott's...

...Marmee tells them: "Look under your pillows, Christmas morning, and you will find your guidebook...

...When her novel— Little Women in this version, rather than My Beth, as in Alcott and the other films—is complete, Jo ties it with twine, then tucks a long-stemmed flower under the string...

...Yet the truth is that we have developed our own ways of pushing out of sight and out of mind messages in old works that don't comport with our comfortable assumptions...

...Bunyan's bracing allegory of salvation by faith in Christ has been domesticated...

...No bowdlerizer is needed...

...on the most famous and influen tial evangelical literary work ever written in English, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress...

...Chapter 9 finds Meg in Vanity Fair, spending a fortnight with some frivolous, worldly friends who frizz her hair and give her champagne to drink...

...Society is primarily a repressive force, stuffy and stultifying, in part because it encourages vain matches for money rather than marrying for love...

...Later, we see Jo and Meg bargaining with God not to take "Bethie," or at least not to take her too soon...

...and "Oh, bilge...

...the other the girls' father's greeting to the faithful cook and housekeeper, "God bless you, Hannah," when he comes home wounded from the Civil War...

...and finally, with his new companion Hopeful, enters the Celestial City...

...Alcott suggests that, in doing her duty, each of the March girls becomes her best self, though each sees her way toward the twin goals of goodness and happiness differently...

...First published in 1678, The Pilgrim's Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come was an immediate success and remained hugely popular for two centuries, shaping the sensibilities and moral formation of generations of Protestant boys and girls in Britain and America...

...Jo wails to Marmee, "Oh mother...

...Our burdens are here, our road is before us, and the longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many troubles and mistakes to the peace which is a true Celestial City...

...What fun it was, especially going by the lions, fighting Apollyon, and passing through the Valley where the hobgoblins were," says Jo...

...They do look, and what each girl finds is a small leatherbound book— one crimson, one green, one blue, and one dove-colored...

...We ought to have our roll of directions, like Christian...

...Unlike the courageous Jo, Beth finds it "very hard to get pass the lions...

...The house in question is the magnificent Laurence mansion next door, heretofore closed to the March girls, but shimmering with possibility since the arrival of fearful Mr...

...finds his way to the Cross, where he sheds his Burden of sin...

...Thus, by Chapter 2 the stage is set for a narrative that recounts not only the domestic adventures of four high-spirited sisters but also the everyday moral education of a Christian household...

...At one point, the hymn "Abide with Me" is sung...

...One could argue, of course, that the director had no choice...

...Ordinary Christian piety has not been excised altogether...

...Lacking memory of either the text or the sensibility of Pilgrim's Progress, we are by now so thoroughly separated from Alcott's literary and religious heritage that few can speak her language any more...

...By 1949, the fifteen-year-old Jo is played by the much-too-old June Allyson, who romps and bellows her way through the story, shouting "Christopher Columbus...

...A bit of melodramatic and overdrawn moralizing creeps into the scene, but the prayers and invocations seem heartfelt enough...

...Beth yearns for access partly because of the house's fine piano, but she is afraid of Mr...

...The work of an English tinker and lay preacher who was imprisoned more than twelve years for his nonconformist preaching, it is a powerful religious allegory and potent tale of spiritual heroism, alive with vivid imagery and written in a quaint and colorful style...

...What Marmee gives to her daughters as their life guide is the life of Christ...

...Chapter 4, "Burdens," opens with Meg's lament: "Oh dear, how hard it does seem to take up our packs and go on...

...is caught by the Giant Despair and locked in Doubting Castle...

...We get the word "bowdlerize" from the English physician Thomas Bowdler, whose 1818 edition of Shakespeare omitted "those words and expressions . . . which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family...

...June Allyson's Jo rails against the stiff formalities of society...

...Where will the March girls find their instructions...

...Bhaer is an experienced, mature man, not a headstrong romantic youth like Laurie, compared with whom Jo is a tough-minded realist...

...In fact, she is a quintessential tomboy, a way of being female that did not become commonplace in America until the mid-twentieth century...

...gets arrested with his companion, Faithful, at Vanity Fair (for refusing to buy anything...

...When Meg and Mr...

...Louisa Alcott picked up her love of Bunyan from her redoubtable, eccentric father Bronson Alcott, a philosopher, educator, and friend of the Tran-scendentalists...

...It simply could not survive the decay of cultural literacy and the entertainment agenda of the Hollywood dream factory...

...They state that the purpose of her book is to inspire its readers to be Pilgrims, that they may prize / The world which is to come, and so be wise...

...To be sure, these deliberately Dickensian turns of phrase belong to Jo in the book— which contains in Chapter 10 references to the enormous popularity of Dickens's Pickwick Papers—but they grate in the film because so much of the text's Dickensian texture is missing...

...Even so, Alcott made her use of Bunyan explicit...

...But they are only "playing" pilgrims...

...God gets two nods—one a mordant comment by Beth that she will die if God, presumably cruel and capricious, wants her to, as "nothing will stop Him...

...watches Faithful, sentenced to be burned at the stake, carried up into heaven...

...The characters are not so much developed as hinted at...

...she does less galumphing and leaping over fences, and utters many fewer Christopher Columbus's, than in 1933 or 1949...

...Open a copy of Little Women and right after the title page you will find (unless yours is one of the current editions that omits it) Alcott's "Preface," twelve lines of verse...

...goes through the Valley of Humiliation, where he meets the foul fiend Apollyon...

...God is conspicuous by His absence throughout...

...passes through the Delectable Mountains...

...The one truly Bun-yanesque pilgrim in the March family, Beth, is the least adventurous and is made to die young—in a death scene loaded with references to Pilgrim's Progress...

...While this wording may mystify some modern readers, Alcott's contemporaries did not need it spelled out that the best life ever lived was that of Jesus, and the books that recount it are the four Gospels...

...For little tripping maids may follow God / Along the ways which saintly feet have trod...

...Through the story, the reader suffers the travails of the protagonist, Christian, as he journeys from his birthplace, the City of Destruction, to the Celestial City...

...The book is "that beautiful old story of the best life ever lived, and Jo felt that it was a true guidebook for any pilgrim going on a long journey...

...They would have needed no prompting to register the allusions to Pilgrim's Progress in such chapter headings as "Burdens," "Beth finds the Place Beautiful," "Amy's Valley of Humiliation," "Jo meets Apollyon," "Meg goes to Vanity Fair," "Little Faithful," and "Pleasant Meadows...

...Marmee (played by Susan Saran-don) carries the ideological burden, proclaiming the need for young girls to have physical exercise, to engage the world, to chafe against convention, to stop injustice, and so on...

...Nothing delighted you more," Marmee says, "than to have me tie my piece-bags on your backs for burdens, give you hats and sticks, and rolls of paper, and let you travel through the house from the cellar, which was the City of Destruction, up, up, to the house-top, where you had all the lovely things you could collect to make a Celestial City...

...The March girls' lives, far from being a Christian pilgrimage, are a search for happiness and identity stripped of faithfulness to any person save self and any group save family...

...Jo's ardor about writing is laced with feminine finesse...

...A modern film version of Little Women can bear only a thin, sentimental resemblance to Alcott's classic...

...Other challenges are inward...

...Bunyan's classic similarly begins with an "Author's Apology for his Book," a statement of purpose in verse...

...Jo reads her little book, resolves not to let the sun set on her anger, and goes to apologize to the one she has hurt...

...In an opening scene that is close to the spirit of Alcott's first chapter, each of the March sisters recites her weaknesses (in a tight close-up shot), as Marmee reminds the girls of their Pilgrim's Progress game, adding, "You have real burdens now...

...at every turn...

...The moral dimension of Little Women, far from being purged as offensive, is simply ignored—discounted, as if it weren't there or were only incidental...

...In Chapter 8, "Jo Meets Apollyon," the monster is no longer Bunyan's Destroyer (much less the beastly angel of the bottomless pit from the Book of Revelation), but Jo's hot temper, which helps her to attain mastery over others but also dominates Jo herself...

...As Jo summarizes it: "We were in the Slough of Despond to-night, and mother came and pulled us out as Help did in the book...

...Jo vows she will "never marry...