“A Power in the House”

As Charles Strickland and Sarah Elbert have shown, the ideals of Victorian domesticity deeply influenced the writing and reception of Little Women, but critics have paid little attention to the material culture of domesticity in the book. ¹ When we look closely at the architecture and furnishings of Little Women’s homes, we see how Louisa May Alcott imaginatively transformed a series of Alcott family households in Concord and Boston to create the March family home, a residence now fixed in the minds of readers with the physical layout of Orchard House, which the family acquired and renovated in 1858 when Louisa was twenty-six (Figure 5). The domestic architecture of Orchard House, and its counterpart in Little Women, reflects ideological currents of the time in the debates over how, in Marmee’s words, to make little women “‘fit for homes of your own.’” ² The Alcott family conformed to what Andrew Jackson Downing defined as the epitome of domestic architectural style, that of individual expression. An examination of the layouts, uses, and decor of the Alcott households and the imagined domestic spaces of Little Women reveals strategic choices to encourage self-expression, within the bounds of what is “eloquent of home love” (240). Thus the style of the house in Little Women spoke to readers as expressively as did the literary style of Alcott’s prose. The house can best be seen as stage sets on which the March girls learn how to perform the roles of little women using domestic furnishings as props richly invested with meanings. The household architecture confirms what many critics have noted about the book’s ambiguous representation of male authority and authorship, as Jo struggles to enter the parlor on her own terms as an author, rather than as a daughter or potential wife. ³ Finally, Alcott turns to the domestic architecture of Pilgrim’s Progress, and the hermeneutics of reading the rooms of its House of Interpreter, to create domestic spaces and scenes in which Jo negotiates the powers in the house of nineteenth-century domesticity and authorship. Figure 5 Postcard, “The Alcott House, Concord, Mass. A. Bronson Alcott, Mrs. Alcott, and one of the ‘Little Women.'” No date. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315050058/02cbbf93-9e33-43fe-a8fb-bf6f9fd93bd7/content/fig11_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>