I don’t know if you’ve looked around lately, but it feels like Conservatives are feeling very threatened by what genitalia other people may or may not be rocking. They are also increasingly concerned with gender and the gender identity other people are choosing to reject or embrace.
It may be ramping up lately, but it’s also nothing new. Conservatives have always been big on binary, on hierarchy, on knowing exactly where you fit in that hierarchy, and on understanding what your role is and how you should play it. So when people come along and break what often seems like one of the most fundamental binaries (gender) – they tend to get a li'l crazy.
Most Conservatives, it seems, long for the old days. When little girls looked up to fairy-tale princesses – like Ariel! –, were drawn to vocations that prepared them for motherhood – like the girls in the Babysitter’s Club! – and who settled down in happy marriages full of children, like everyone in Little Women.
The past they recall with nostalgia was a simpler time. Mostly because it wasn’t real. That’s right, dear reader. The authors of each of those works was (to some degree or another) queer as Christmas. Something that the Christian film company “Pure Flix” (yes, this is, unfortunately, a thing) would probably be fairly upset to learn, given that they commissioned their own version of Little Women in 2018.
Today, let’s explore Louisa May Alcott or “Lou” as she preferred to be known most of her life.
“People think I am wild and queer.”
I alluded to this one in an early edition and a lovely friend of mine requested more info. And I LOVE this from every angle. First let me say that it is always wise to be cautious when applying contemporary labels like “gay”, “queer”, or “transgender” etc. to people from bygone periods.
That being said, I am also a huge fan of giddily doing that anyway in my mind and ferreting it away into my own personal “canon of this person” file when the evidence is just too juicy to ignore.
Louisa May Alcott is one of those people. Both because, as I alluded to earlier, Little Women is one of my favourite books of all time and because when I found this out and re-read it, it made Jo’s story arc (and Greta Gerwig’s subsequent adaptation of it) SO much more interesting.
Little Women is beloved by people all across the political spectrum. Conservatives love it (despite the March family being dirty Yankees) because of its emphasis on morals and virtue etc etc. I went into this in an earlier edition, so I won’t elaborate too much. I only mention it to show how much more delightful it is that Louisa May Alcott is who she was. Please note, I’m going to use “she” here because that’s what Alcott used during her lifetime, not to ignore pronouns that, in this day and age, may have made more sense to her.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Alcott, John Matteson describes how in countless letters and journals from her life, Alcott affirmed her desire to be a boy and later, a man. She describes her alienation with all things feminine, her love of everything boyish and the fact that she was “half-persuaded that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body.”
“I have been in love in my life with ever so many pretty girls, and never once the least bit with any man.”
Lou never married and never had children. She also did not leave behind any correspondence beyond what she playfully indicated above to her biographers, that suggest she was attracted to women. She maintained friendships in her middle age with younger men, two of whom jointly inspired the character of Laurie in Little Women. In her correspondence to these friends, she signed off as “a gentleman at large”, and “a man of all work.”
Her relationship with these two younger men was affectionate and intimate. The first, with Alfie Whitman (of no relation to Walt) was playful and affectionate and the second, with Ladislas “Laddie” Wisniewski certainly more intimate. He was dying of consumption when the two met and they quickly became inseparable.
There’s some debate about whether the relationship between Lou and Laddie was ever romantic. It was certainly scandalous for the time. The two of them spent days and weeks together unchaperoned, which was very naughty for the period, particularly as it wasn’t followed by a marriage. Whether or not it was ever romantic, it was certainly intimate. Lou called Laddie, “the dearest of her boys”, and carried a dried rose from Vevey, where the two of them had met for the rest of her life.
“Jo should have remained a literary spinster.”
Lou never intended to write a book like Little Women. Much of her other work tended towards the sensational and exploratory, including a very interesting short story called “My Mysterious Mademoiselle”, which explores a strange vaguely flirty encounter on a train between a man and a mysterious young woman, whom the hero finds attractive and alluring – before discovering that the young woman is in fact a young man (and his nephew, which makes it, I grant you, a bit ick).
Little Women was essentially written to market. Lou wrote the book on behest of an editor who asked her to write a simple novel about girls, a prospect she admitted to finding tedious. She also wrote to a friend about how annoying she found most of the book’s fans, saying, “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone,” she vowed. Instead, admitting it was partially to irritate those fans, she married Jo off to Professor Bhaer, but confessed to a friend that she was unhappy with the outcome. “Jo should have remained a literary spinster,” she said.
The book itself has never been out of print in the more than 150 years since its publication. It’s remained much beloved in Christian circles, but during second wave feminism, it was also reinterpreted as a feminist text. It’s this feminist slant that Greta Gerwig, in her brilliant adaptation, leaned into so well.
In Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, Lou was at last granted her wish. Jo was given the ending that Lou wanted her to have all along and Little Women’s feminist resurgence was given new life.
It was an adaptation Lou would have been proud of, and the one she undoubtedly would have written if she’d been free to do so.
Sources:
“Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott was a transgender man – Peyton Thomas, LGBTQ Nation
Gender as Performance in Louisa May Alcott’s “My Mysterious Mademoiselle” (Extended) – Hayley Pendleton, Hayley Pendleton Lit
Little Women’s Real Feminist Problem – Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic
Other Bits and Bobs
Watching: They Cloned Tyrone on Netflix. This was a lot of fun with Jamie Foxx in particular having a blast and chewing up the scenery. It’s a twist on ‘70s Blaxploitation films with a lot to say about assimilation, the US’ historic treatment of black people as science projects to be solved and unconscious acceptance of the status quo. It’s also really fucking funny.
Reading: Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I loved the Little House on the Prairie books growing up and this is a copy of the unabridged novel that eventually became those books. It’s rough and obviously needed a lot of editing, but it’s a fascinating look at one woman’s life during America’s pioneer days.
Also loving: Patti Smith’s substack is wonderful and you should check it out.
Listening to: They Cloned Tyrone also had an amazing soundtrack and I have no doubt I’ll be listening to it for the next little while.
I hope you enjoyed this read! If you’d like to know more about queer writers who became ironically embraced by conservatives… it’s a long list and I’d be happy to write more!
Let me know in the comments and as always, like and share if you enjoy reading!
Until next time.