The Little Women by Alcott stands as an Archetype of feminine Writing

Little Women is the story of a family. The father is absent for half of the book, though he has helped physique the character of his daughters and remains a presence to which they refer. The course the fabrication is structured, the girls live in a world in which they lie with a number od disappointments but are correct for each with some form of spiritual growth. This is in guardianship with the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a friend of Alcott's father:

Jo is compensated for each disappointment by spiritual growth. Jo's development is a sweetly sen epochntal version of the transit every one(a) is expected to make. . . Seemingly stubborn Jo learns to be the specimen woman: patient, forgiving, soothing, undemanding, unselfish, and uncapricious (Saxton 4).

The take, Marmee, is the ideal mother and has no life at all outside of her family. Jo tries to emulate her mother and be the same sort of person, and this becomes the ideal of the matriarch and so the family woman each of the daughters would like to be. Marmee is unselfish and has learned to deign her satisfactions from the satisfactions of others, notably her children. Jo's attempt to be like her mother is the ensample of the attempt by every young woman to reach that goal:

le Women provides a vision of the struggle to achieve ideal womanliness, with its rewards of moral satisfaction, terminus of interior discord, and the discovery of a species of Zen peace in self-sacrifice. It detail's a girls conflict with her family on the road to transcendent consolidation (Saxton 5).

However, while Jo may aspire to be as much(prenominal) like her mother as possible, she is ultimately the nonconformist whose aspirations range beyond home and family and who considers career choices as most of the women of her time did not, satisfied as they were made to be by the expression of a husband and home. Jo thus represents the sort of dilemma go about by women ever since the nineteenth century and more oft today, the choice between home and career, a choice that a good deal creates a conflict which emerges in some form.

For Jo, one way it emerges is in her attempt to be a little woman and thus be like her mother, an attempt doomed to affliction:

The journey is actually that of all four girls, though Jo is the aboriginal figure. Indeed, Jo is the only character so fully drawn that her journey can be seen in its entirety. Meg is the older babe with a passion for finery, and though she is shown battling against this desire, she is otherwise passionless and evening boring. She is rewarded with a husband who matches her for those same qualities. Beth is the third sister and is an ideal little woman, patient, undemanding, docile, timid, and unassuming. Self-sacrifice is the lesson she teaches, and she dies of a wasting disease to institute it. Amy is the youngest and is a self-centered girl. If she becomes a woman with better qualities, it is more often than not a matter of luck instead of diligence. Only Jo is shown to maneuver hard at becoming a better person, and it is the sign that most defines her.

Saxton, Martha. Louisa May. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

This conflict between aspirations on the one hand and the ideal of home and family on the other is appare
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