AFTERWORD
Like many girls, I grew up loving Little Women. Louisa May Alcott was my favorite author, and I read all her books many times over. My interest continued into adulthood, when I began to see Little Women as an inspiring feminist novel by a fascinating 19th Century woman of letters. Louisa May Alcott had a gypsy childhood as daughter of an improvident Transcendentalist philosopher and a long-suffering, high-minded mother; the adult Louisa worked hard to support her parents and sisters, trying her hand at everything from acting to Civil War nursing before she won fame and fortune as a writer. The more I studied Alcott, the more I felt as though I had insight into her imaginative process and even into her ambitions and dreams, especially those that had been thwarted. In my doctoral dissertation, I argued that Louisa May Alcott’s novels, beginning with Little Women and its stormy protagonist Jo March, had originated a potent theme of self-transformation that would empower girl readers for generations afterwards.
As I was drawn to literary criticism through love of literature, so I found that my creative writing entered the worlds of beloved books—especially those whose plots had left me dissatisfied. The first was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Her genius pulled me into the novel’s mesmerizing maze of characters, multiple narrators, families, houses, and layers of meaning. But there was a lacuna at the center—the three years during which Heathcliff was absent from Wuthering Heights; he came back with an education and a fortune, but how did he get them? Musing about what he might have done during that time to bring about such a transformation, I started to write the tale, immersing myself in the Brontë sisters’ writings and their constrained but imaginatively rich shared lives in rural Yorkshire. The result was my first novel H.— The Story of Heathcliff’s Journey Back to Wuthering Heights.
The present book, JO—Beyond Little Women, had a similar genesis. Little Women, too, contained a lacuna, at least as far as I was concerned. Like many readers, I was dissatisfied with the ending: Jo ended up marrying Professor Friedrich Bhaer, who condescendingly disapproved of the blood-and-thunder stories featuring transgressive heroines that Jo was able to sell for much-needed money. Alcott had not wanted Jo to marry at all, and had invented the Professor at the insistence of her publisher. The invention struck a discordant note for me. The high-spirited, contentious relationship between Laurie and Jo in Little Women follows a pattern of erotic attraction well-proved in story tradition, and often in real life. More importantly, where Laurie encouraged Jo to take chances that led toward growth, Bhaer pulled Jo back toward a static respectability. Was there another story hidden beneath the pages of the published one? I thought so.
The best evidence for a parallel, hidden story of Jo March is her pervasive desire to be a boy. It is the character note established in the opening chapter’s sisters-on-the-hearthrug scene, when each sister reveals her predominant trait. Tellingly, proper Meg scolds Jo to “leave off boyish tricks,” and Jo declares that she won’t. Throughout the book Jo acts like a high-spirited boy, even to cutting off her abundant hair, her “one beauty” and a primary sign of her female gender, to get money for a family emergency. In today’s world, she would be halfway to a sex change.
A few chapters after the hair-cutting episode, Laurie tempts Jo with the suggestion that they run off together to Washington. She regretfully turns down that lark for home duties. “If I was a boy, we’d run away together, and have a capital time, but as I’m a miserable girl, I must be proper, and stop at home.”
What if? I formed a novelistic project based on that tempting question. What if Jo had said yes to Laurie? What if she had run off with him to visit Father March in Washington? What might have happened, given Jo’s desire for the freedom of a boy, and the constrictive, merciless mores of the time concerning transgressive females?
I built up my characterization of Jo March both from Alcott’s semiautobiographical character in Little Women and from what I knew of Louisa May Alcott’s own life and psychology—particularly the difficult, directive bond between Louisa and her father Bronson Alcott. I saw Louisa May Alcott’s creation of Professor Bhaer as a kind of embodiment of the critical male voices in her life, those who disapproved of her stories about unconventional women, and those who censured her desires for male freedom and action. I wanted to set up a polarity between the limiting, censorious Bhaer and the free-and-easy Laurie Laurence, who stands for fun, daring, and the possibility of an equal though contentious relationship. And—what of Jo’s beloved sister Beth? Might she have had a different fate if her older, more brilliant sister Jo had been removed from the home environment, thereby giving her growing room to inhabit a different space from the one she’d been assigned?
These are the questions I took as my starting point to writing the Jo novel. As I progressed, I found that my characters started to speak for themselves most decidedly, sometimes in surprising ways. I also found that the polarized gender roles of Nineteenth-Century America asserted a persuasive control over what could happen to rebels against the system in that environment, ultimately giving a darker turn to the story than I had imagined when I set out.
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