The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature by M. O. Grenby & Andrea Immel

Author:M. O. Grenby & Andrea Immel [Grenby, M. O. & Immel, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009-07-24T23:00:00+00:00

Just as The Mill on the Floss depicts a heroine’s struggle with prevailing concepts of female intellectual frailty, so Ethel has to be reminded by Margaret that: ‘we all know that men have more power than women, and I suppose the time has come for Norman to pass beyond you’. As Margaret says, ‘if you could get all the honours in the University – what would it come to? You can’t take a first class.’ In a society where women were barred from graduation, Ethel must buckle down and accept that her prime responsibilities should be domestic and that to be ‘a useful, steady daughter at home . . . and a comfort to papa’ should be the pinnacle of her ambition.15 By the novel’s end, Ethel has succeeded to Margaret’s place as her father’s most trusted daughter and has learned how to administer effectively a school for local poor children. And she has the satisfaction of having found that service to others is a more than adequate compensation for the sacrifice of her intellectual ambitions. Ultimately, the kind of challenge to orthodox gender roles that Ethel represents may be defeated in The Daisy Chain, but her resistance wins her the respect and affections of readers, regardless of Yonge’s personal views on feminine behaviour.

Both fifteen years old, Ethel and Alcott’s Jo clearly share many characteristics, but the differences between Little Women and The Daisy Chain are critical. Part of the originality of Alcott’s narrative is that it was aimed quite specifically at a young female readership rather than at the whole family, unlike The Daisy Chain. Overcoming her initial reluctance to undertake the task of writing ‘a girls’ story’, Alcott created a fictional world that celebrates female culture and values. With all the able-bodied adult males away at war, the women are left to cope on their own, and in the liberated society of New England, in striking contrast to the hidebound English class system, they are furthermore allowed to earn their own living without shame. As Little Women takes the four sisters and their flawless mother, Marmee, through a calendar year, the story becomes a battle against the odds, with each of the four girls having to wrestle with her own personal demons in order to achieve a standard of behaviour that might meet with their absent father’s approval. Above all, as each of the March sisters tries to improve herself, together Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy form a group that validates girlhood. The values of their domestic world are markedly differentiated from those of their neighbours, the wealthy Lawrences. In that all-male household, the crotchety grandfather, the lonely boy and the reserved tutor, John Brooke, live in a world of material affluence but spiritual deprivation. The March sisters may be poor but their lives have an emotional richness that is transformative. Their artistic talents provide them with an inner sustenance that Laurie can only envy. In Little Women, femininity performs the traditional civilising function assigned to it in a number of nineteenth-century mainstream fictions.

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