ABSTRACT
“‘I do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world!’” exults Jo March at the end of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–9). 1 Many readers have interpreted the novel as an argument, more or less convincing, for Jo’s assertion. And if their own families have been less than beautiful, they may have responded wistfully as did Jean Muir, the heroine of Alcott’s sensation story Behind a Mask (1866), on assuming her position as governess: “Something in the atmosphere of this happy home made me wish I was anything but what I am.” 2 Jo, however, utters her exclamation while “in an unusually uplifted frame of mind” (p. 595), and Jean goes on in her next breath to declare “Bah! how I hate sentiment!” (p. 99). Alcott’s conflicted, problematical relationship with her own family, which she idealized in Little Women but satirized in Transcendental Wild Oats (1873), as well as her choice to remain single, suggest that she viewed the Victorian family realistically, if not skeptically. Further, Jean’s uncharacteristic wish points to the danger of sentimentalizing home and family, especially for women: it serves to make them dissatisfied with what they are and severely limits what they can become.
