Louisa May Alcott Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Louisa May Alcott - Essay Example Perhaps feminists can constructively criticize a book they grew up reading. Simone de Beauvoir and Gertrude Stein both read the book as young girls and found much to admire in the character of Jo (Baker, 2006; Friedell, 2005). If the reader ignores the ending where Jo burns her manuscripts, there is much that a feminist could admire about the strength and focus of her character. There is much, also, to admire in the real-life Louisa Alcott, who became a masculine stereotype as breadwinner for her real life family. According to Friedell (2005), Alcott worked 14 hour days at her writing, spent her earnings on her parents and younger sister, and cared for various nieces and nephews when her other sisters died. By the age of 40, Alcott declared proudly that her family was out of debt and finally free, but she still continued to produce writing to support the family. When she contracted mercury poisoning serving as a nurse during the Civil War, Alcott became addicted to morphine and still continued to work. She didn’t even enjoy writing Little Women. While she was usually willing to change stories and novels to please her editors, refused to marry Jo off to Laurie, but gave in to the general idea of marriage, saying in her journals she did not want Jo to end up like herself, worked to the bone with no time to enjoy anything, and alone. It is interesting that the character of Laurie was probably patterned after a real-life romance between Alcott and Ladislas Wisniewski (Sands-O’Connor, 2001). Most of the characters in this novel were patterned after someone Alcott knew, and her journals and letters are vague as to whether there was a real romance between Ladislas and Louisa, or whether she simply fictionalized that, too. The feminists speculate whether Alcott was bisexual or lesbian, and a romance with Wisniewski never blossomed in public. The book Little Woman and the character of Jo certainly start out as