Little Women, big lessons

My winter with the March family taught me to love more patiently

A couple of weeks ago, I heard the familiar call from the other room: “PENNIE, NO!” This is a daily exclamation in our home, wherein resides my wife and I, our dignified nine-year-old Blue Heeler named Rhody, and — the most recent, and most chaotic addition — an 11-pound miniature dachshund puppy named Pennie.

Our princess, pictured above smothering her pet lobster (who causes no such ruckus), has a very forgivable face. But on this particular day, she had committed a difficult-to-forgive transgression. My wife found, both torn apart all over the floor and stuffed proudly between her tiny teeth, a small art print we had loved and bought from a street vendor in Paris a couple of years ago. Meaning, this was not something we could easily or cheaply replace.

Like the print that lay in shambles at my feet, my patience in that moment seemed beyond salvage. My darling dog’s big dumb eyes looked up at me with no trace of guilt, shame, or regret of any sort. Truly, I could in that moment have punted this dog off of a tall bridge, Anchorman-style, and felt no regret of my own.

Fortunately for Pennie, her Parisian art heist caught me in a rare moment of patience brought on by a brush with an old literary classic. You see, I was at that moment many chapters deep into Louisa May Alcott’s coming-of-age 1860s tale, Little Women, after having watched its 2019 movie adaptation for the first time just recently. Both are classics of their times, and both are timeless in the lessons they’ve taught generations of readers — including this one — about the power of patience and steadfastness, especially in the bleakest of winters.

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I could be wrong about this, but I’m quite sure that I’m not the target demographic for the 2019 movie adaptation of Little Women any more than a man in his mid-30s in 1868 was for Alcott’s original books. Apparently, the author had been implored by her publisher at the time to write a “book for girls” — meaning, young girls — and although both Alcott and her publisher found Alcott’s original draft “dull,” the publisher’s nieces got ahold of it, declared it “splendid,” and the rest was history.¹

So how did Little Women manage to catch me (not a young girl) after I had dodged it for so long? In this case, the cliche of “right place, right time” applies all too fittingly.

The story takes place in Concord, Massachusetts, the cradle of American democracy. If you’ve never been to Concord, you should know you’re missing out. I had the great fortune not just of growing up in the area², but of paying a visit with my parents to Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, where she lived while she wrote Little Women. The book’s main setting — the March residence — is largely based on Alcott’s Orchard House.

Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, winter 2022. Photo courtesy of the Orchard House Museum.

Even if you’re not from the area, you probably can recognize from this photo alone that what we’re talking about is quintessential New England. The colonial home with rough wood-picket fence, complete with forested backdrops and winding country roads that somehow lead to the site of the first battle of the American Revolution. Truly classic Americana going on here, for which I am the suckerest of suckers.

If you’re not familiar with the story, Little Women centers around the March family: four daughters (Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy), and their mother (affectionately referred to throughout as “Marmee”), whose husband is off fighting for the Union during the American Civil War. The story follows the trials, travails, and triumphs of these women (along with their charming and fortuitously wealthy guy pal down the road, Laurie), nearly all within the postcolonial setting of Concord.

But I wasn’t just drawn in by the location alone. Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film adaptation of Little Women leans not just into the New England scenery, but into another character who isn’t always present in the story, but who decidedly shapes the narrative: the season of winter. Alcott and her publisher may have thought her initial draft of Little Women was dull, but the story isn’t without struggle, nor without the growth and certitude that tend to flow forth from it. Winter is the season that Alcott chooses (and which Gerwig highlights) for many of the tale’s most pivotal, character-building trials.

One of the more memorable winter dramas comes after a heated argument between Jo and Amy, following Amy’s decision to burn up Jo’s manuscript in the fire in a fit of childish spite. The next day, Jo and Laurie go ice skating on the frozen river, and Amy, wanting to make amends, follows them despite Jo’s lingering grudge. Unaware that the ice is thinner further out, Amy skates after them. The ice gives way beneath her, and she nearly drowns in the freezing water before getting rescued by the other two.

Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth, from Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film adaptation, Little Women.

Winter is also largely responsible for the great tragedy of Little Women, the passing of sweet Beth. Acknowledged by all in her family as the purest, most innocently moral of them all (“full of the genuine virtues which ‘smell sweet, and blossom in the dust’”), Beth sojourns early in the story to bring sustenance to Hummels, a poor German immigrant family in their neighborhood who are continually on the verge of frostbite and starvation in the frigid Massachusetts winter. One of the family’s children, stricken with scarlet fever, dies in Beth’s arms. Beth herself soon catches the affliction, and dies as after a long struggle later in the book.

But these moments, terrifying and tragic though they are, have something to teach us as they taught the March sisters. From the bleak and the deepest possible cold come lasting, character-making lessons. As the ice breaks under Amy, so too does the icy grudge between the sisters when the stakes are highest. What’s most precious in this world nearly slips out of reach, putting the loss of a (sorry Jo, probably not that great) 15-year-old’s book manuscript into stark perspective in comparison. And what lasts, in the minds of the March girls and their readers after Beth’s tragic demise, is her shining example of dedicated selflessness and care for the lesser — two traits sometimes lacking in the world of Little Women (looking at you, Aunt March), and which feel chillingly absent from our current moment.

In Little Women, winter is more than just an inconvenient obstacle to overcome on the way to greener pastures, as we so often treat it in our daily lives. It’s a crucible of opportunity to grow, to fail, and to re-learn how to love better. Throughout Little Women, the stark, cold, yet undeniably beautiful landscapes and long, contemplative evenings compel all the characters to confront their vulnerabilities and stitch together (and break apart, then stitch together again even better) deep bonds with one another. Even more than that, the chill of the winter season, as home to the individual struggles each character faces, strikes a satisfying contrast with the warmth of familial love and domestic resilience that helps the characters (and all of us, for that matter) through cold, bleak periods.

These lessons from the Marches remind us that family isn’t perfect; but also that the chill of winter can compel the loving, sustained work of family life into being, as it does in this wintry poem from Robert Hayden:

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

George Henry Durrie, Winter in the Country, c. 1858, oil on canvas.

Over and over again, the cold passage through winter leads the members of the March family (and even clever Laurie) to newer, richer understandings of family and its inexpressible value as well as its imperfections, as the poem above lays bare.

Little Women doles out these lessons based in the Marches’ understanding of an upright moral code — and often an explicitly religious one — that can sound dissonant in today’s more secular world. Many chapters end with tidy (sometimes a bit too tidy) moral lessons about how to love God and each other in difficult times.

Surely, though, there are worse lessons to learn than these, especially through a cold-frosted window overlooking colonial Massachusetts. A simple scroll through the New York Times’ homepage instructs me to get over myself and appreciate sturdy moral conviction, in this time when morals in our public life are so quickly tossed overboard as dead weight.

At any rate, the path towards accepting and appreciating this morally sound, traditionally feminine-coded tale was, for me, the most familiar setting this old New Englander could imagine. The places, the uniquely northeastern winter I could see even without the film’s pitch-perfect scenery, opened a creaky wood-picket gate to a necessary story that a mid-30s Millennial dude like me might never have been able to pass through without them.

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“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” Here, little Amy offers her own spin on a favorite idiom of meditators everywhere: that waves are small and sometimes large (like Jo’s “chronic angers” that she has such difficulty breaking free from), but we have no choice but to ride them. We build our boat and straighten our backs when the bleak cold of winter comes. “Now that I’m upright, my thoughts settle like a snow globe,” reports

Katherine May

in her modern classic seasonal meditation, Wintering. “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo,” Marmee imparts, after counseling Jo off a cliff from her guilt after Amy falls through the cold winter ice. “But I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.” This state of learning is precisely where I ended up on my own cold January evening, faced with my tiny, close-to-the-ground, innocent (ha) dachshund’s ingestion of a treasured possession.

I don’t want to be false here: at other times, with fewer signposts for “how to be”, and without the fresh example of the March family, I have cursed sweet Pennie into oblivion under my breath, knowing thankfully that she — being a dog — can’t understand the invective being hurled her way.

At least this time, though, I stiffened my spine, steered my ship, and — thanks to a 150-year-old story — sighed, picked up the pieces, and forgave the horrible wench who ate the irreplaceable instead of the food that sat dormant in her dish.

1. Jameson, John (2007). Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

2. The northernmost tip of Rhode Island, less than an hour away from Concord.