The Real plays of Little Women

December 4, 2010

In the first chapter of Little Women, there was a description of the plays that the March family performed for each other:

“I don’t mean to act any more after this time. I’m getting too old for such things,” observed Meg, who was as much a child as ever about ‘dressing-up’ frolics.

“You won’t stop, I know, as long as you can trail round in a white gown with your hair down, and wear gold-paper jewelry. You are the best actress we’ve got, and there’ll be an end of everything if you quit the boards,” said Jo. “We ought to rehearse tonight. Come here, Amy, and do the fainting scene, for you are as stiff as a poker in that.”

“I can’t help it. I never saw anyone faint, and I don’t choose to make myself all black and blue, tumbling flat as you do. If I can go down easily, I’ll drop. If I can’t, I shall fall into a chair and be graceful. I don’t care if Hugo does come at me with a pistol,” returned Amy, who was not gifted with dramatic power, but was chosen because she was small enough to be borne out shrieking by the villain of the piece.

“Do it this way. Clasp your hands so, and stagger across the room, crying frantically, ‘Roderigo! Save me! Save me!'” and away went Jo, with a melodramatic scream which was truly thrilling.

Amy followed, but she poked her hands out stiffly before her, and jerked herself along as if she went by machinery, and her “Ow!” was more suggestive of pins being run into her than of fear and anguish. Jo gave a despairing groan, and Meg laughed outright, while Beth let her bread burn as she watched the fun with interest. “It’s no use! Do the best you can when the time comes, and if the audience laughs, don’t blame me. Come on, Meg.”

Then things went smoothly, for Don Pedro defied the world in a speech of two pages without a single break. Hagar, the witch, chanted an awful incantation over her kettleful of simmering toads, with weird effect. Roderigo rent his chains asunder manfully, and Hugo died in agonies of remorse and arsenic, with a wild, “Ha! Ha!”

“It’s the best we’ve had yet,” said Meg, as the dead villain sat up and rubbed his elbows.

“I don’t see how you can write and act such splendid things, Jo. You’re a regular Shakespeare!” exclaimed Beth, who firmly believed that her sisters were gifted with wonderful genius in all things.

“Not quite,” replied Jo modestly. “I do think The Witches Curse, an Operatic Tragedy is rather a nice thing, but I’d like to try Macbeth, if we only had a trapdoor for Banquo. I always wanted to do the killing part. ‘Is that a dagger that I see before me?” muttered Jo, rolling her eyes and clutching at the air, as she had seen a famous tragedian do.

If you are interested in learning more about these plays, you can actually read them in Comic Tragedies Written by ‘Jo’ and ‘Meg’ and Acted by The ‘Little Women’. At first, when I was working on the post processing of this book, I thought it was written by Louisa May Alcott after writing Little Women, with her writing the plays in the style as if it were written by “Jo” and “Meg”. Later reading Little Women Letters from the House of Alcott,  I discovered that the plays were really written by Louisa May Alcott and her sister Anna in their youth.

How were the plays? Well, they were interesting, both historically and as works of young women who had yet to really know romance. The term “Tragedies” was probably a misnomer; they were more like romantic melodramas. Still, melodramas can be fun.

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Real “Little Women” Letters

November 20, 2010

For all those who have ever read Little Women and loved it, Little Women Letters from the House of Alcott shows how much of Little Women was based upon Louisa May Alcott’s own family.  What makes this biography special is that it is primarily told in the letters that the Alcott family wrote each other, including a letter from five year old Anna telling her mother that “You have a splendid husband”.

I don’t know if Bronson Alcott was that splendid of a husband (he was a failure as a businessman, and his family lived in poverty most of their childhood), but he definitely was a “splendid” father.

Here is what he wrote Elizabeth on her fifth birthday:

Page of letter to Elizabeth on her 5th birthday

Page of letter to Elizabeth on her 5th birthday

1840

I    I    I    I    I    Years
one two three four five
birth-day
in the
cottage

My very dear little girl,

You make me very happy every time I look at your smiling pleasant face—and you make me very sorry every time I see your face look cross and unpleasant. You are now five years old. You can keep your little face pleasant all the time, if you will try, and be happy yourself, and make everybody else happy too. Father wants to have his little girl happy all the time. He hopes her little friends and her presents and plays will make her happy to-day; and this little note too. Last birthday you were in Beach Street, in the great City, now you are at your little cottage in the country where all is pretty and pleasant, and you have fields and woods, and brooks and flowers to please my little Queen, and keep her eyes, and ears, and hands and tongue and feet, all busy. This little note is from

FATHER,

who loves his little girl very much, and knows that she loves him very dearly.

Play, play,
All the day,
Jump and run
Every one,
Full of fun,
All take
A piece of cake,
For my sake.

Unfortunately, having him as a father had its downside, including the Fruitlands experiment and its failure that was immortalized by Louisa Alcott in her “Transcendental Wild Oats.”

The detail of it is thus described by a friend of the Alcott family, who had the story from Bronson Alcott himself:

The crop failures necessitated the community living on a barley diet, as anything animal was not allowed, not even milk and eggs. Now and then they gave a thought as to what they should do for shoes when those they had were gone; for depriving the cow of her skin was a crime not to be tolerated. The barley crop was injured in harvesting, and before long want was staring them in the face. The Alcotts remained at Fruitlands till mid-winter in dire poverty, all the guests having taken their departure as provisions vanished. Friends came to the rescue, and, Mr. Alcott concluded with pathos in his voice, “We put our little women on an ox-sled and made our way to Concord! So faded one of the dreams of my youth. I have given you the facts as they were; Louisa has given the comic side in ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’; but Mrs. Alcott could give you the tragic side.”

Indeed, it was always Mrs. Alcott who could have given the tragic side, skillfully as she kept her worries hidden. Her own family, indignant because Bronson Alcott could not better provide the material needs for his family, on more than one occasion besought the faithful wife to leave him.

Reading this book, I am struck by how strong an impact the father had on that family. Bronson Alcott was an idealist, with strongly-held views of the world, and he passed those strongly held views to his children with love and tender care.

Strongly-held views taught with love and tender care are not necessarily correct. For instance, I doubt my daughters would agree with the sentiment of a young Louisa Alcott that “love of cats” is a vice. Having Bronson Alcott as a father definitely was a mixed bag, the type of life that makes great source material for a novel.

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