Little Women consists of two novels, Little Women and its sequel Good Wives. Little Women follows four sisters as they grow up, and Good Wives follows them as adults getting married off one by one. Every time I reread this novel, I feel like there is something deeply nuanced about the way that Louisa May Alcott presents love both as a stifling force that traps women into a lifetime of domestic labor and as the unbreakable bond between the March sisters, and I don’t know how these two ideas exist in tandem. Is she making a statement on heterosexuality or marriage as a whole? Did Alcott write the text to be secretly feminist, or did her deeply rooted resentment just bubble up into the lives of these characters? It is easy to treat marriage as a death for each of the sisters, and say that it is the men who ruined their lives and made Meg, Amy, and then finally Jo lose their individuality, but I believe that it started long before that with the lessons that their mother imparts. They all individually undergo a process of “feminization”: Meg marries a poor man and gets over her vanity, Amy becomes Catholic, and, though this may seem counterintuitive, Jo cuts her hair. But in my opinion, the most interesting sister is Beth, whose feminization is more complicated due to the nature of her disability- and I want to explore how that shows up for her specifically.
I would like my thesis to be rooted in disability studies first and foremost, because I want to explore how Beth fits into the lineage of disabled characters before and after Little Women. I also want to explore how spirituality and the presence of nature fits into it, because throughout her life she is constantly sanctified by the other sisters and the adults around her as the “good” girl, and is described as a saint on numerous occasions.
Last semester, I had the pleasure of reading a secondary source about Jo’s tomboyishness, and how tomboys in the late 19th century were socially acceptable up until adulthood, when the roles of womanhood were once again uncompromising. I find this fascinating in context with Beth’s disability, but that connection is not necessarily an obvious one. I think I will need to read many different secondary sources in order to hone in on a specific enough thesis statement.