Louisa May Alcott and the Wise Woman

This is my second contribution to this month’s discussion of Little Women at the Year of Feminist Classics.

One issue which is seldom discussed when appraising feminist themes in literature is the role of women in old age. Too often older women are invisible, just as Doris Lessing observed in her novel The Summer before the Dark.

Nice picture, but not yet a “wise woman.”

Last year, when we discussed Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman at A Year of Feminist Classics, I was impressed by Gilman’s description of an all-female society where older women are both honored for the lives they have led and employed for their wisdom and self-control. Here the male visitors are greeted:

“If they were only younger,” he muttered between his teeth. “What on earth is a fellow to say to a regiment of old Colonels like this?”

In all our discussions and speculations we had always unconsciously assumed that the women, whatever else they might be, would be young. Most men do think that way, I fancy.

“Woman” in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.

Although Louisa May Alcott is writing about a real 19^th-century world – not a fantasy like Herland – she also recognizes the powerful role older women can take in understanding and counseling the young as they try to make their way in life. Marmee in Little Women is a clear example. Her opinions are usually conservative.

“Learn to know and value the praise which is worth having, and to excite the admiration of excellent people by being modest as well as pretty, Meg.”

Also,

“I’m not ambitious for a splendid fortune, a fashionable position, or a great name for my girls. If rank and money come with love and virtue, also, I would accept them gratefully, and enjoy your good fortune; but I know, by experience, how much genuine happiness can be had in a plain little house, where the daily bread is earned, and some privations give sweetness to the few pleasures.”

At the same time, Marmee unites with Mr. March in not accepting poverty passively. When the girls propose to find work,

“Believing they could not begin too early to cultivate energy, industry, and independence, their parents consented, and both fell to work with the hearty good-will which in spite of all obstacles is sure to succeed at last.”

What is most striking to a modern parent is not that the girls’ mother gives advice – all mothers do that – but that the girls take the advice so seriously.

Alcott’s next successful children’s book after Little Women was An Old Fashioned Girl. In it, Alcott continues to show the strong role an older woman can take in a sometimes dysfunctional household. Young Polly – pretty, gifted and poor – comes to stay in the Shaw household. The Shaw children are friendly but spoiled. Polly receives understanding and support not from their mother, but from their grandmother. When they meet, unsophisticated country Polly is praised by Grandmother Shaw because she is still a child:

“Well, dear, I’ll tell you. In my day, children of fourteen and fifteen did n’t dress in the height of the fashion; go to parties, as nearly like those of grown people as it’s possible to make them; lead idle, giddy, unhealthy lives, and get blas, at twenty. We were little folks till eighteen or so; worked and studied, dressed and played, like children; honored our parents; and our days were much longer in the land than now, it seems to, me.”

But children were not idle at all:

“Yes, and we all learned to make bread, and cook, and wore little chintz gowns, and were as gay and hearty as kittens. All lived to be grandmothers and fathers; and I’m the last, seventy, next birthday, my dear, and not worn out yet; though daughter Shaw is an invalid at forty.”

“That’s the way I was brought up, and that’s why Fan calls me old-fashioned, I suppose,” said Polly.

This function of advice giver and reinforcer of conservative family values is given to Uncle Alec in another successful children’s book, Eight Cousins. But still, the many aunts in the story sometimes get a word in and the elderly great aunts, Peace and Plenty, stand firmly for the good old days and good old values.

Even in her adult novel, Moods, Alcott finds a place for a wise woman. When Sylvia is grieving over the unfortunate marital choice, she has a “sudden memory”:

“If ever you need help that Geoffrey cannot give, remember cousin Faith.”

This was the hour Faith foresaw; Moor had gone to her in his trouble, why not follow, and let this woman, wise, discreet, and gentle, show her what should come next.

Faith diagnoses that Sylvia has two spirits contending in one body, and “…each rules by turns, and each helps or hinders as moods and circumstances lead.” Advice and comfort are then given and gratefully received.

Louisa May Alcott wrote two sequels to Little Women. In Little Men and Jo’s Boys Marmee does not completely disappear, but Jo is now clearly in charge of the family destiny. Whereas she was once the harum scarum tomboy who wanted independence of action, now she follows the fortunes of others and guides them on their various ways. Jo is now the wise woman.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland

Herland is what they call a utopian novel. Somewhere — it may be on another planet as in Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossesed, or hidden in the mountains like Shangri La — a society exists which is very different from ours. An outsider (one of us) arrives who experiences the culture, but never really understands it. Or perhaps the outsider comes to us, as in Huxley’s Brave New World or Howells’ A Traveler from Altruria. It never works. The outsider rejects the culture or the culture rejects the outsider. That’s why “utopia” is literally “no where”. You can’t go there; nevertheless, novelists keep trying to make the trip. I traveled to Herland with Charlotte Perkins Gilman as part of the Feminist Classics project.

This is a trip into a world where gender is not an issue because there are only women. They do everything because there is no other gender to take charge and tell them what they can and can’t do. Other posts will be exploring the implications of a single-gender society. I was struck by something else: Herland has one gender, but many ages. After an initial encounter with three young and attractive women, the three male travelers meet a contingent of a very different type:

They were not young. They were not old. They were not, in the girl sense, beautiful. They were not in the least ferocious. And yet, as I looked from face to face, calm, grave, wise, wholly unafraid, evidently assured and determined, I had the funniest feeling –a very early feeling–a feeling that I traced back and back in memory until I caught up with it at last. It was that sense of being hopelessly in the wrong that I had so often felt in early youth when my short legs’ utmost effort failed to overcome the fact that I was late to school.

These women of a certain age are managing Herland’s affairs, and the travelers are puzzled:

“Woman” in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.

Let’s hear it for grandmothers! A woman can easily be a grandmother at 45 or 50, ages at which men consider themselves at the height of political and economic power. By my calculations Gilman was 55 when she wrote Herland, so she had experience with assumptions about middle-aged women, and grandmothers too. These grandmothers are “very much on the stage, “  demonstrating that our assumptions about age are closely linked to our assumptions about gender differences.

The mentors chosen to teach the outsiders the language, as well as to document what knowledge they have, are clearly in middle life. The wise women in the temples who counsel the young are middle aged or elderly. It is apparently the young who need help; the older ones have worked it out. The very young, the children, are of course protected by all ages and are seen as the future, the form which immortality takes. The young man protests to the Herland woman he has come to love:

“Do you want to go out like a candle? Don’t you want to go on and on — growing and–and–being happy forever?”

“Why, no,” she said. “I don’t in the least. I want my child–and my child’s child–to go on–and they will. Why should I want to?”

Herland offers women of all ages a smooth path, from protected child, to contributing youth, to mother, to wise women, to the eternity of future generations. It is a beautiful vision, parallel to the one the male sex has always assigned to itself.