Embodying Conflict: The Visual Contexts Of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women

Sara R. Danger (Valparaiso University, Indiana, USA)

This paper examines the first illustrated edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-69) in relationship to the photography of the Civil War. The first illustrations, drawn by the author’s sister, May Alcott, accentuate the novel’s portrayal of the physical and psychological struggles involved in becoming “little women.” In May Alcott’s illustrations the March sisters appear more grotesque than sentimental, assuming disproportionate doll-like heads and misshapen bodies. The Alcotts’ debilitating visual/textual portrait of womanhood accrues additional significance, moreover, when viewed in conjunction with Civil War photography, which circulated widely at the moment of the novel’s publication. Civil War photographs of dead, wounded, and suffering soldiers created for Reconstruction-era readers a new way of viewing bodies in relationship to national identity and conflict.

Through the depiction of the March sisters suffering valiantly or masochistically (Meg and Jo) or as martyring themselves (Beth, Marmee, and Jo, in the end), Little Women and its illustrations present women’s struggles as resonant with the physical and national suffering displayed in Civil War photographs. Reading Little Women through these visual contexts, I will argue, contributes to the novel’s conflicted portrait of nineteenth-century womanhood. On the one hand, these visual parallels invest the belittlement of nineteenth-century women with heroic nationalism. On the other hand, they suggest that, like prostrate, wounded soldiers, the March sisters are scarred by the in-validation of their minds, bodies, and selves.