Analysis Of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

“Girl” is a short story in which the author, Jamaica Kincaid, unofficially presents the stereotypes of girls in the mid 1900s. Kincaid includes two major characters in the story “Girl”, they are the mother and the girl. Although the daughter only asks two questions in this story, she is the major character. The mother feels like her daughter is going in the wrong direction and not making the best decisions in her life. The whole story is basically the mother telling her daughter what affects her decisions will have in the future. The mother believes that because her daughter isn’t sitting, talking, cleaning, walking or singing correctly it will lead her to a path of destruction. “Girl” is a reflection of female sexuality, the power of family, and how family can help overcome future dangers.

" ‘I want something to do…' ‘Write a book,' Qouth the author of my being. ‘Don't know enough, sir. First live, then write.' ‘Try teaching again,' suggested my mother. ‘No thank you, ma'am, ten years of that is enough.' ‘Take a husband like my Darby, and fulfill your mission,' said sister Joan. ‘Can't afford expensive luxuries, Mrs. Coobiddy.' ‘Go nurse the soldiers,' said my young brother, Tom. ‘I will!' (Harper 14)." This is a dialog of Louisa May Alcott with her relatives. Miss Alcott, like many other African American women, helped serve in the Civil War. During the Civil War, Miss Alcott held a variety of jobs. Mainly working as a writer, she held positions as a nurse, teacher, and volunteered in

the North to work in a hospital caring for wounded men of the war. His

" ‘I want something to do…' ‘Write a book,' Qouth the author of my being. ‘Don't know enough, sir. First live, then write.' ‘Try teaching again,' suggested my mother. ‘No thank you, ma'am, ten years of that is enough.' ‘Take a husband like my Darby, and fulfill your mission,' said sister Joan. ‘Can't afford expensive luxuries, Mrs. Coobiddy.' ‘Go nurse the soldiers,' said my young brother, Tom. ‘I will!' (Harper 14)." This is a dialog of Louisa May Alcott with her relatives. Miss Alcott, like many other African American women, helped serve in the Civil War. During the Civil War, Miss Alcott held a variety of jobs. Mainly working as a writer, she held positions as a nurse, teacher, and volunteered in

One thing that people seem to forget is that people seem to become desensitized after a certain amount of time. Accomplishing the things that Alcott did during her time of the Civil war, allowed her to become a better person, more mature. Fortunately, Louisa desired to know life in all its uncertainties, being given an opportunity to experience life in “all its true variety”. As a nurse, she saw and bandaged thousands of wounded soldiers, little did she know that maybe she fell in love with one man in

At a young age she experienced her mother’s death but she didn’t let that take away from her focus on writing. Her most famous book was titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Abraham Lincoln believed to be the start of the Civil war. Later in life she had married and had a son. Although she found it very hard to raise a son and still keep up on her daily writing she somehow managed. She managed to raise her son with the help of a friend and keep up on her

Louisa May Alcott is an American Novelist best known as the author of the novel “Little Women”. Louisa was born in November 1982, grew up in Germantown- Washington D.C and was known to be an abolitionist, feminist and also a naturalist. Being a naturalist meant that she believed that nothing existed beyond the natural earth i.e. no such thing as spirituality or the supernatural. Her family suffered from financial difficulties and so Alcott had to work to support her family in an early age. She penned the story “My Contraband” (1869) which was formerly known as “The Brothers” (1863). Contraband was a black slave who escaped to or was brought within union lines (Alcott 759). In “My Contraband”, Louisa

It would have taken two paragraphs but I could use one to explain in more detail. The thing that makes me wonder the most is how she learned to read and write and why did her owners not stop her when they would out they she could read and write? I came to the conclusion that they found that her writing was exceptional and didn’t want to stop something that could be great, and be glad they didn’t stop her. She went on to do a bunch of amazing things like write to Washington about slavery and help a poet write a poem. She was the first African American to publish a poem when most slaves were forbidden to read and write. Overall she inspired a lot of slaves to learn how to read and write and was a part of

These men would look out for Louisa and her three sisters, keeping the girls from going hungry and cold in the harsh New England winters. The men’s kindness and direct influence on Louisa as she grew up would add to the influence reform movements had on Louisa May Alcott.

In the novel Little Women by: Louisa May Alcott, a common theme is expressed throughout. To the family in this story, each other is the only thing that matters, therefore, displaying the message family is the most important thing you can have in your life. The four sisters, Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy, belong to a very poor family in which the father is away at the military, leaving their mother alone to care for the children. The mother works very hard, but still can not manage to create a solid income for their family. The four sisters understand how hard their mother works

In this short story, Louisa’s internal independence plays a major role in who she is as a woman. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman describes Louisa as an introvert because she is someone who enjoys being alone. She spends fourteen years of her life being isolated at home, waiting for her fiancé to come back from his job in Australia. During those years, she learns how to be by herself through the hard times and the pleasant ones “Louisa’s feet had turned into a path, smooth maybe under a calm, serene sky, but so strait and unswerving that it could only meet a check at her grave, and so narrow that there was no room for any one at her side” (Freeman 66). This demonstrates how she is so use to not having anyone by her side. This is why she creates her own path through all the dark times she had to face on her own. In many ways this can foreshadow the ending of the short story. This shows how she always counted on herself and

Anna Alcott was the model for Meg March. Both these characters shared common life events. They both married a man called “John” and both gave birth to twins. They were both the eldest in the family. Louisa’s little sister, May, was the model for Amy. They were both graceful and poised at a young age and very materialistic. The youngest of the Alcott girls, Elizabeth was the model for Beth in the novel. Not only did they share the same namesake as the youngest March character Beth; they both shared a childhood death due to scarlet fever. They both died at a very young age. Evidently, Alcott was the model for Jo. They were both tempestuous and of wild nature. They were both females living in the Victorian Era who defied the norms of their times. At the age of fifteen, she wrote in her diary, “I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write anything to help the family and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t” (Laire 10). Women of that time did not normally focus on getting jobs; they left it to their male counterparts to bring home the income. Alcott and her sister both took on teaching jobs, though her dream was to become an actress. By the age of twenty, she knew her real talent was to write. To please the readers, she quickly understood the reading market and started experimenting with different writing styles. This gave her

Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania where she was taught by her father who was a transcendentalist philosopher. She studied informally with other authors such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. She has been publishing since 1851 poems, short stories, thrillers and juvenile tales. Her most popular novel was Little Women published in 1868. From what I read in a biography, she transformed her father’s story “Fruitland” to make it look like the woman was the hero. It says in the article that she: “makes her own creation out of his Fruitland's story, feminizes it, making the mother the hero and the father the fool”. I feel like Louisa wanted to mock her father’s story by telling her own that

Uncle Tom’s cabin is a book that takes you through the lives of slaves as seen through Harriet Beecher Stowe’s eyes. This book was written to raise awareness of the wrongs of slavery and how it should be ended because of how un-humane it truly is. It was a very controversial book during the time it was published, and was eventually banned for a period of time by the slave and plantation owners because of Stowe’s belief that everyone should be equal.

Throughout the 19th century, literature, especially the one written by women, romanticized domesticity. For example, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe politicized the home when she made it central to social action. In her novel, many of the pivotal or key scenes took place in the home and in most cases, women were seen as a central part when it came to making moral Christian-based choices. Another example is in An American Woman’s Home written in 1869 by Catherine Beecher. In this book, Beecher tries to raise the positions of women in the home to the same level as that of professional men since according to her, the work of women in the home is necessary and essential for the preservation of culture and morality. Many missionaries