Dangerous Happiness:
Louisa May Alcott and the Mother of All Girls' Books
By Weisgall, Deborah
Magazine article from The American Prospect, Vol. 23, No. 6, July-August 2012
Magazine article from The American Prospect, Vol. 23, No. 6, July-August 2012
Article details
Christmas won't be Christmas
without any presents, grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. This is how Louisa May
Alcott begins Little Women. She wrote it in 1868, when she was 35, after months
of urging by Thomas Niles, a Boston publisher who wanted a story for girls. She
had not had much luck with a serious novel, she needed money, and it was part
of a deal that her father, Bronson Alcott, had proposed. If Louisa said yes,
Niles would agree to publish Bronson's philosophical treatise, Tablets. A
dutiful daughter, she couldn't say no.
I know the novel by heart. I
read it for the first time when I was nine years old; my father bought me a
British edition of the first part--the original Little Women. (Good Wives, the
second part, appeared just over six months later. In America, the two parts
were immediately combined, but in England, they are still published
separately.) We were living on a hill above Florence, Italy, but Concord,
Massachusetts, where the story is set and where the Alcotts lived, became for
me the most exotic town in the world.
The book begins on Christmas
Eve during the Civil War. Four sisters sit in the parlor waiting for their
adored mother to come home. I skipped over the illustrations because the girls
were so vivid on the page that I knew exactly what they looked like. Jo sprawls
on the floor like a boy, voicing a secular notion of Christmas: The day is an
occasion for gifts, not worship. She is tantalizing and subversive; she flares
with anger at the family's poverty. Jo's pretty older sister, Meg, only sighs
at her shabby dress. Amy, the youngest, is peeved that she can't have every
pretty thing she wants. Sweet Beth is the peacemaker: "We've got mother
and father and each other."
"The characters were
drawn from life," Louisa May Alcott later wrote to an acquaintance, and
the book ebbs and flows between actual event and authorial desire. The novel
records the anguish of Louisa's struggle to control her impatience and rash
temper--a struggle she shared with her mother. In life, the family--Bronson and
his wife, Abigail May, and their four daughters, Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and
May--built a precarious fortress of love, duty, and pride around themselves.
With her art, Louisa secured that stockade. She locked inside it her idealized
family--and especially her father, whom she rendered saintly and benign for all
the world to see.
Reading Little Women, I
inhabited their fortress with them; the house in Concord was real to me and at
the same time as magical and impossible as a fairy-tale castle. The March girls
were the sisters and Marmee was the mother generations of readers wished we
had, and we wished we had a next-door neighbor like Laurie, the handsome,
musical, rich boy who becomes Jo's soul mate and partner in innocent crime. In
Little Women, Louisa turned her family into an enduring symbol of tender domesticity.
But it is a household of
women; Father is not there. Too old to fight, idealistic Mr. March has
volunteered to serve in the Union Army as a chaplain. If he earns money, we
don't hear about it, and we don't know what work Mrs. March does to make ends
meet. Jo, a paid companion to her Aunt March, and Meg, a governess, bring home
little, and how they can afford a housekeeper is never explained. The Marches
end up celebrating Christmas morning with bread and milk because Mrs. March
gives their holiday breakfast to an immigrant family even poorer than they are.
Louisa knew her Charles Dickens. She improved upon A Christmas Carol, giving
her scene an egalitarian, American moral. No condescending presents of roast
goose here. This charity comes at a price to the giver.
Student Response Questions for
Dangerous Happiness
1. What was the reason that Louisa May Alcott wrote
Little Women?
2. How does the author of this article feel about the
book Little Women? How do you know?
3. Even though the author states that she skips over the
illustrations when she read Little Women, what does she do to bring the characters
to life?
4. If a book is written so that a reader can visualize
the characters in great detail, what does this suggest about the book?
5. What are the similarities between the author Louisa May
Alcott, and the main character Jo?
6. How does Deb Weisgall describe the Alcott family? What
characteristics do they have?
7. Deb Weisgall writes, “She improved upon “A
Christmas Carol”, giving her scene an egalitarian, American moral.” What does this statement mean? What is the
author’s purpose?
8. What does the author of this article, Deborah
Weisgall, admire about the characters in Little Women? What does she say that
others also admire?
9. What themes/messages does Deborah Weisgall suggest
using the comparison of Little Women to A Christmas Carol? What does the last
line mean?
Close Reading Exemplar
Lesson for “Dangerous Happiness”
Dangerous Happiness:
Louisa May Alcott and the Mother of All Girls' Books
By Weisgall, Deborah
Magazine article from The American Prospect, Vol. 23, No. 6, July-August 2012
Magazine article from The American Prospect, Vol. 23, No. 6, July-August 2012
Article details
Lexile: 1010L
639 words
from a UD Lib Search
Close Reading Exemplar
Lesson for “Dangerous Happiness”
Goals for
the Lesson: By reading this book
commentary closely, discerning the point of view of the author, and discussing
author’s purpose, the students will have an opportunity to think about why an
author writes, and what impact a novel can have on readers throughout
time. The students will
· Understand the relationship between writers
experiences and their fictional writing
· Make connections to self linking
fictional writing to the author’s real life experiences
· Make connections between the writer,
the reader and the reflective commentary
· Understand how good literature
establishes universal themes
· Articulate the chain of Ideas: life’s
lessons conveyed from author’s life, to novel, to published novel, to reader,
to critic, to mind of reader in memory for many years.
Content Standards
Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of
what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text. CC8RI1
Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the
course of the text, including its relationship to supporting ideas; provide an
objective summary of the text. CC8RI2
Analyze how a text makes connections among and distinctions between
individuals, ideas, or events (e.g., through comparisons, analogies, or
categories). CC8RI3
Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text,
including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze the impact
of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including analogies or allusions
to other texts. CC8RI4
Analyze in detail the structure of a specific paragraph in a text,
including the role of particular sentences in developing and refining a key
concept. CC8RI5
Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how
the author acknowledges and responds to conflicting evidence or viewpoints.
CC8RI6
Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text,
assessing whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence is relevant and
sufficient; recognize when irrelevant evidence is introduced. CC8RI8
By the end of the year, read and comprehend literary nonfiction at the
high end of the grades 6-8 text complexity band independently and proficiently.
CC8RI10
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