A Greater Happiness

“‘Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!’” ¹ The final line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women belongs to Marmee, as she expresses the joy she feels on her sixtieth birthday with her children and grandchildren about her in a harvest of what, for want of a better term, we might call true womanhood. ² Through this maternal wish for love and well-being also speaks the voice of a culture that sought more and more to limit the ways in which women might achieve “happiness” even as women’s options expanded over the course of the nineteenth century. The novel tests some of those new options, but finally it comes down on the side of cultural restrictions. Jo March moves from a utopian “female world” inhabited almost solely by her mother and sisters to a different kind of utopia in which she will bring up her sons and her husband’s pupils to be “little men.” ³ Many feminist critics have read Little Women as subversive, but Jo’s domestication and marriage strike other readers as an unsatisfactory ending for a heroine who seems to promise an alternative to the Victorian domestic ideal. ⁴