Showalter, E. 1991. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing.

Oxford,
Clarendon Press.

Little Women Alcott’s Civil War

Judith F etterley
When, toward the end of Little Women, Jo finds her true ‘“style at last,”’ her
father blesses her with the prospect of inner peace and an end to all
ambivalence: ‘“You have had the bitter, now comes the sweet. Do your best
and grow as happy as we are in your success.”’ And Alcott adds her
benediction: ‘So, taught by love and sorrow, Jo wrote her little stories and
sent them away to make friends for themselves and her, finding it a very
charitable world to such humble wanderers.’1 Finding her true style at last
was not, however, such a peaceful arrival in safe waters for Alcott herself.
She responded with alacrity to the opportunity afforded by the anonymous
‘No-Names Series’ to write something not in her style, declaring that she
was ‘tired of providing moral pap for the young’ and enjoying the fun of
hearing people say, ‘“I know you didn’t write it, for you can’t hide your
peculiar style.”’2 She prayed more than once for time enough to write a
‘good’ book and realized that without it she would do what was easiest and
succumb to the pressure of the ‘dears’ who ‘will cling to the “Little
Women” style.’3 And at the end of Jo’s Boys, the last of her books on the
March family, she longs to close with an ‘earthquake which should engulf
Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no
youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it.’
Alcott’s commitment to her true style was evidently somewhat less a
choice than a necessity, somewhat less generated from within than imposed
from without. Her initial resistance to the proposal from Thomas Niles, a
partner in Roberts Brothers Publishing Company, that she write a book for
girls had its origins perhaps in an instinct for self-preservation; certainly the
success of Little Women limited her artistic possibilities thereafter. Hard it
was to deny the lucrative rewards attendant upon laying such golden eggs;
hard to reconcile the authorial image inherent in Little Women with the
personality capable of the sensational ‘Behind a Mask’; harder still to
ignore the statement of what was acceptable from a woman writer implicit
in the adulation accorded Little Women. Indeed, Alcott ceased to write
sensation fiction after the publication of Little Women. However what these
stories, taken as a group, make clear is the amount of rage and intelligence
Alcott had to suppress in order to attain her true style and write Little
Women. Alcott’s sensation fiction provides an important gloss on the sexual
politics involved in Jo’s renunciation of the writing of such fiction and on
the sexual politics of Jo’s relation with Professor Bhaer, under whose
influence she gives it up.
Yet clearly both anger and political perception are present in Little
Women, and, not surprisingly, there is evidence within Little Women of
Alcott’s ambivalence toward her true style. Little Women takes place during
the Civil War and the first of Jo’s many burdens on her pilgrim’s progress
toward little womanhood is her resentment at not being at the scene of
action. Later, however, she reflects that ‘keeping her temper at home was a
much harder task than facing a rebel or two down South’ (12). The Civil
War is an obvious metaphor for internal conflict and its invocation as
background to Little Women suggests the presence in the story of such
conflict. There is tension in the book, attributable to the conflict between its
overt messages and its covert messages. Set in subliminal counterpoint to
the consciously intended messages is a series of alternate messages which
provide evidence of Alcott’s ambivalence. To a considerable extent, the
continuing interest and power of Little Women is the result of this internal
conflict. As Alcott got farther and farther away from the moment of
discovery, as the true style became more and more the only style, this
tension was lost and the result was the tedious sentimentality of Rose in
Bloom or the unrelieved flatness of Under the Lilacs. Little Women survives
by subversion.

The overt messages of Little Women are clearly presented in the first two
chapters, ‘Playing Pilgrims’ and ‘A Merry Christmas.’ The book opens on
Christmas eve with the four girls – Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth – around the
fire awaiting the return of ‘Marmee.’ Remembering the joys of Christmas
past when they were rich, they grumble at their present lot: ‘“Christmas
won’t be Christmas without any presents”’; ‘“It’s so dreadful to be poor!”’;
‘“I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and
other girls nothing at all”’ (5). Such discontent with what one has inevitably
leads to the determination to get something more. They recall their mother’s
suggestion that they not be self-indulgent when others are suffering, but
they rationalize their determination to please themselves by arguing that
these ‘others’ will not be helped by their sacrifice and by protesting that
they have worked hard and deserve some fun. In the logic of the true style,
such commitment to self can only lead to a querulous debate on the
question of who works hardest and who suffers most. Their peevishness and
grumbling is luckily averted by the realization that Marmee is about to
arrive and as Beth gets out the old slippers to warm by the fire, the girls
experience a change of heart and decide to devote their little money to
presents for their mother. Such behavior is in imitation of the ‘tall, motherly
lady, with a “can-I-help-you” look about her,’ for unselfish devotion to
others is the keynote to Marmee’s character (10).
Marmee is the model little woman. Her first words are an implicit reproof
to the girl’s self-centered, ‘poor me’ discontent. ‘“Well, dearies, how have
you got on today? . . . Has anyone called, Beth? How is your cold, Meg? Jo,
you look tired to death.”’ The little lesson by contrast is followed by a more
extended sermon in the reading of a letter from father, away at the war, who
urges his girls ‘“to conquer themselves so beautifully that when I come
back to them I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women”’
(12). The paternal exhortation to conquer the self is happily facilitated by
Marmee’s proposal that they play again their childhood game of ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress,’ only this time in earnest. Discussion of this plan for self-
improvement enables them to get through an evening of uninteresting
sewing without grumbling. At nine, they put away their work and sing, a
household custom begun by Marmee, whose voice was ‘the first sound in
the morning . . . and the last sound at night’ (14). It is not enough that little
women be content with their condition; they must be positively cheery at
the prospect.
The importance and value of renouncing the self and thinking of others is
further dramatized in the second chapter. Armed with their presents to
Marmee, evidence of their little effort to forget themselves, they arrive at
the breakfast table only to find that Marmee has been visiting the Hummels,
a poor family in the neighborhood, and wants her girls to give them their
breakfast as a Christmas present. After a moment’s hesitation before the
new level of sacrifice required, the girls enter into the project
wholeheartedly, deliver up their breakfast to the poor, and discover that
bread and milk and the sense of having helped others make the best
breakfast ever.
The rebels that the girls must fight are clearly identified in these first two
chapters; discontent, selfishness, quarrelsomeness, bad temper, thinking too
much of worldly things (money, appearance, food). The success of their
campaign depends on their acquiring one central weapon: self-control. They
must learn to control the self so as to ensure that the self does in fact
renounce the self. Conquer yourself, says Father, reminding them that their
civil war must be fought at home. In the midst of domestic difficulties, Meg
remembers ‘maternal counsels given long ago’: ‘“Watch yourself, be the
first to ask pardon if you both err, and guard against the little piques,
misunderstandings, and hasty words that often pave the way for bitter
sorrow and regret”’ (269). To turbulent, restless, quick-tempered Jo,
Marmee offers the consolation of her most precious secret: ‘“I am angry
nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I have learned not to show it; and I still
hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do
so”’ (78). Conquer oneself and live for others are indeed the watchwords of
this women’s world.

Equal to the concern in Little Women for defining the ideal womanly
character is the concern for defining woman’s proper sphere and proper
work. Early in Little Women there is a chapter entitled ‘Castles in the Air,’
in which each girl describes her life’s ambition. The final chapter of the
book, called ‘Harvesttime,’ makes reference to this earlier chapter,
comparing what each of them dreamed with what each is now doing, clearly
to the advantage of the latter. Meg’s dream is from the start domestic: ‘“I
should like a lovely house, full of all sorts of luxurious things – nice food,
pretty clothes, handsome furniture, pleasant people, and heaps of money. I
am to be mistress of it, and manage it as I like, with plenty of servants, so I
never need work a bit”’ (140). All that time and maturity need modify for
Meg is her overvaluation of wealth and her desire to have a lot of servants.
Meg must learn that love is better than luxury; she must learn to put a man
in the center of her picture; and she must learn that without domestic chores
to keep them busy, women will be idle, bored, and prone to folly. These are
but minor adjustments, however, for Meg’s dream, centered on home, is
eminently acceptable. Thus she can say at the end, ‘“My castle was the
most nearly realized of all”’ (472).
In contrast, the lives of Amy and Jo are very different from their castles
in the air. Neither Amy’s ambition nor Jo’s is domestic. Amy wants ‘“to be
an artist, and go to Rome, and do fine pictures, and be the best artist in the
whole world,”’ and Jo wants to ‘“write books, and get rich and famous”’
(141). In Rome, however, where Amy makes a real bid to realize her
ambition, she comes to see that there is a difference between talent and
genius, and that she has only the former. In the future, she decides, her
relationship to art will be primarily that of patroness, encouraging and
supporting the work of others. Through her experience with Laurie, she
learns the truth of her mother’s dictum that ‘“to be loved and chosen by a
good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman”’
(95), far better than being a famous artist. Although Amy never completely
gives up her art, she places it in the service of home and family. In the final
chapter she remarks that she has ‘“begun to model a figure of baby, and
Laurie says it is the best thing I’ve ever done. I think so myself, and mean
to do it in marble, so that, whatever happens, I may at least keep the image
of my little angel”’ (472). Amy’s motivation has shifted ground. No longer
working for frame or fortune, she is inspired by love for her child. Her
figure is not intended for public exhibition, for Amy works not to produce
great art or to define herself as an artist, but to create a private memorial to
her dying child. Her artistic impulses have been harnessed and subordinated
to her ‘maternal instinct’ and thereby sanctioned.
Jo’s history is similar to Amy’s. In the final chapter she comments on her
‘castle in the air’ by saying, ‘“the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely,
and cold to me now. I haven’t given up the hope that I may write a good
book yet, but I can wait, and I’m sure it will be all the better for such
experiences and illustrations as these,”’ and she points to her husband,
children, and the familial scene around her (472–3). Again, the connection
is made between motherhood and ‘good’ art; when Jo writes her good book,
if she ever does, it will be the product of her experiences as a wife and
mother. Until then, like Amy, she is content to deploy her talents in the
service of the domestic: ‘she told no stories except to her flock of
enthusiastic believers and admirers’ and ‘found the applause of her boys
more satisfying than any praise of the world’ (468).
Earlier treatments of Jo’s relation to writing have also served to identify
the proper relation of women to art. When Jo at last finds her true style, the
impetus to write has been provided by Marmee and the motivation is solace
and comfort for the loss of Beth. In contrast is the picture we get when Jo
determines to try for the $100 prize offered in the columns of a newspaper
for a sensation story: ‘She said nothing of her plan at home, but fell to work
next day, much to the disquiet of her mother, who always looked a little
anxious when “genius took to burning”’ (258). As Marmee’s anxiety is a
barometer for the quality of Jo’s writing, there is evidently an inverse
relationship between Jo’s interest in what she is doing and its accept ability.
The more energetic Jo is in pursuing her writing and getting it published,
the worse it is and the more anxious Marmee gets. But when Jo is finally
brought to the point of saying, ‘“I’ve no heart to write, and if I had, nobody
cares for my things,”’ then Marmee is all encouragement: ‘“We do. Write
something for us, and never mind the rest of the world”’ (419). So Jo does
what her mother wishes and writes a story which her father sends, ‘much
against her will,’ to a popular magazine and which becomes, ‘for a small
thing,’ a great success. Understandably, Jo is bewildred by this turn of
events and when her father explains it to her, she cries, ‘“If there is anything
good or true in what I write, it isn’t mine; I owe it all to you and Mother and
to Beth”’ (420). Good writing for women is not the product of ambition or
even enthusiasm, nor does it seek worldly recognition. Rather it is the
product of a mind seeking solace for private pain, that scarcely knows what
it is doing and that seeks only to please others and, more specifically, those
few others who constitute the immediate family. Jo has gone from burning
genius to a state where what she writes isn’t even hers.

At the end of the first volume of Little Women, Alcott refers to her book as
a ‘domestic drama.’ Much of the popularity of Little Women, then and now,
derives from its embodiment of a cultural fantasy of the happy family – the
domestic and feminine counterpart to the nostalgia in male American
literature captured by Hemingway in the succinct ‘long time ago good, now
no good.’ At the heart of the fantasy family is, of course, the fantasy Mom,
the kind of Mom we all at some time or other are made to wish we could
have had. The inherent contradictions in the patriarchal mythology of the
family are present in Little Women, however; it is, after all, a girls’ book
written from the perspective of the child. Being Marmee’s child is one
thing; being Marmee herself is another. Resistances to growing up abound
in Little Women and suggest attitudes in conflict with the overt messages on
the joys of little womanhood.
There is a remark of Jo’s which reveals an attitude toward ‘women’s
work’ in conflict with the doctrinal attempts to ennoble the domestic sphere
through the endless endearing diminutives of ‘the little mop and the old
brush.’ When Jo discovers Professor Bhaer darning, she is horrified: ‘think
of the poor man having to mend his own clothes. The German gentlemen
embroider, I know; but darning hose is another thing and not so pretty’
(325). But more important than the revelation that women’s work is ugly
and degrading when done by men is the implication that women’s work is
not real work. Before their marriage, John says to Meg, ‘“You have only to
wait, I am to do the work”’ (226). This opposition between working and
waiting defines the brutal truth about woman’s role. After marriage Meg is
‘on the Shelf,’ still waiting. Only when she gets rid of her servants and
makes work for herself can she settle down, give up the foolish expenditures
which are as much the result of boredom as vanity, and become a good
wife. ‘Making work’ is the implicit subject of the chapter, which deals with
Meg’s relation to her children. Much of what she does for them is
unnecessary; the rest could be done in half the time and could indeed be
done better by John: ‘Baby respected the man who conquered him, and
loved the father whose grave “No, no,” was more impressive than all
Mamma’s love pats’; thus, ‘the children throve under the paternal rule, for
accurate, steadfast John brought order and obedience into Babydom’ (378,
383).
The perception that women’s work is made work generates the encounter
between Meg and John over her dress and his coat. In protest against the
limitations imposed by John’s modest salary and desiring to impress a
wealthy friend, Meg orders a fifty-dollar silk dress. Meg has been warned
by her mother about John and here she discovers one of the sources of this
warning. John ‘was very kind, forgave her readily, and did not utter one
reproach’ (273). He simply cancels the order for his overcoat. In response
to Meg’s inquiry, he comments, ‘“I can’t afford it, my dear”’ (273).
Consumed with guilt, Meg swallows her pride and her desire, prevails upon
her friend to buy her dress, and uses the money to get John’s coat. ‘One can
imagine . . . what a blissful state of things ensued’ (273). This blissful state,
however, is based on the premise that John needs and deserves a coat
because he has to go out in the world and work. Meg, on the contrary,
neither needs nor deserves her dress because, with no real work to do in the
world, she has no basis for attention to the self.
Implicit in Little Women is an understanding of the genesis of the ideal
womanly character far different from that overtly stated through the
pilgrim’s progress metaphor of the first chapter. ‘“Women,”’ says Amy,
‘“should learn to be agreeable”’ (285). With no legitimate function in life,
women will not be tolerated unless they are agreeable; only through a life of
cheerful service to others can they justify their existence and assuage the
guilt that derives from being useless. Women must watch themselves
because they are economically dependent on men’s income and emotionally
dependent on their approval. Marmee’s ‘maternal counsels’ contain an
implicit perception of the politics of marriage: ‘“John is a good man, but he
has his faults, and you must learn to see and bear with them, remembering
your own. . . . He has a temper, not like ours – one flash and then all over –
but the white, still anger that is seldom stirred, but once kindled is hard to
quench. Be careful, very careful, not to wake his anger against yourself, for
peace and happiness depend on keeping his respect”’ (269). While Marmee
schools Jo in the art of constricting her anger to a tightening of the lips, she
admonishes Meg to accommodate herself to John’s anger. Indeed, John’s
anger is ‘“not like ours.”’ It is male and must be attended to; Meg’s Jo’s
Marmee’s anger is female and must be suppressed. Little women must not
be angry because they cannot afford it. Marmee’s description of John is
frightening for the veiled threat it conveys – men’s love is contingent; be
careful, very careful not to lose it, for then where will you be?
If the cover messages of Little Women suggest that the acquisition of the
little woman character is less a matter of virtue than of necessity, so do they
suggest that women’s acceptance of the domestic sphere as the best and
happiest place may be less a matter of wise choice than of harsh necessity.
‘“To be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing
which can happen to a woman,”’ says Marmee to her girls; but she might as
well have said it is the only thing that can happen. There are no other viable
options. When Jo first meets Laurie, she describes herself to him as a
‘“businessman – girl, I mean.”’ The accuracy of this implicit presumption
against her chance for economic independence is clearly supported by her
subsequent experience. To earn money for her sick father, Jo can only sell
her hair. Selling one’s hair is a form of selling one’s body and well buried
within this minor detail is the perception that women’s capital is their flesh
and that they had better get the best price for it, which is, of course
marriage. Later Jo discovers a source of income in her stories but the
economics of her relation to writing are revealing. At first, she gets nothing
for her work; she is satisfied simply to have it published. When she finally
does get paid, it is because Laurie acts on her behalf. Jo does not assume
that she should or will be paid for her work; when payment comes, she
treats it as a gift. Thus she is ripe for the exploitation she encounters in the
office of the Weekly Volcano: ‘Mr. Dashwood graciously permitted her to
fill his columns at the lowest prices, not thinking it necessary to tell her that
the real cause of his hospitality was the fact that one of his hacks, on being
offered higher wages, had basely left him in the lurch’ (335). Eventually,
even this minor source of income is denied because Jo comes to see that
writing sensational fiction is a sordid and unwomanly activity and that good
writing is not done for money. ‘“Men have to work and women to marry for
money,”’ says Amy; and while her emphasis here is mistakenly on money,
nothing in the book contradicts her assessment of what women must do to
live.
Little women marry, however, not only because they lack economic
options, but because they lack emotional options as well. Old maidhood
obliterates little womanhood and the fear of being an old maid is a
motivating force in becoming a little woman. Fear is one of several
unpleasant emotions simmering just below the sunny surface of Alcott’s
story and it plays a considerable role in determining the behavior of the
‘little women.’ Beth, for example, finds it necessary to invoke the fear of
death in order to convince Jo of the primacy of loving service over writing
‘splendid books.’ Fear is always cropping up in Jo’s relation to writing –
fear of being selfish, fear of losing her womanliness, fear of becoming
insensitive, fear of making money, fear of getting attention – requiring that
she periodically renounce, in rather violent and self-punitive rituals, her
literary ambitions. And fear plays an important role in the larger drama of
Jo’s conversion from disgruntled rebel to little woman. At the beginning of
the book, Jo hates love, dislikes men and women in the romantic context,
and has no desire to marry, unless it be to her sister. She finds Amy’s
flirting incomprehensible and Meg’s capitulation to John disgraceful; she
insists on viewing boys as equals and the only game she wishes to play with
them is cricket. With Meg married, Beth dead, and Amy engaged, Jo begins
to change her tune, for what has she to look forward to: ‘“An old maid,
that’s what I’m to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family
of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps”’
(424). Alcott emphasizes the unpleasantness of this prospect for Jo as much
as is possible, given her commitment to the doctrine that every situation in
life is full of beautiful opportunities. Jo is surrounded by evidence of Meg’s
‘happy home’ and inundated by glowing letters from Amy about how ‘it is
so beautiful to be loved as Laurie loves me’ (421). On the evening when
this happy couple arrives home Jo is stricken with her worst fit of
loneliness, for she sees that all the world is paired off but her: ‘a sudden
sense of loneliness came over her so strongly that she looked about her with
dim eyes, as if to find something to lean upon, for even Teddy [Laurie] had
deserted her’ (433). Just at this moment Professor Bhaer arrives; Jo realizes
that she is in love and capitulates to the description of herself as possessing
a ‘“tender, womanly half . . . like a chestnut burr, prickly outside, but silk-
soft within, and a sweet kernel”’ (418). Far from being the ‘“best and
sweetest thing which can happen to a women,”’ love is the court of last
resort into which Jo is finally driven when all else fails and she must grow
up.
The overt ideology of Little Women on the subject of marriage is
undermined from still another direction. The reward for being ‘love-
worthy,’ for acquiring the little womanly character of self-denial, self-
control, accommodations, and concern for others, is not simply avoiding the
fate of becoming an old maid; it is also getting the good man. As we have
seen in the case of John, however, the good man is somewhat mixed
blessing. Indeed, while there is a lot of lip service paid in Little Women to
the superior value of the ‘lords of creation,’ and to the importance of male
reward, the emotional realities of the book move in a rather different
direction. The figure of Mr. March is representative. At the beginning of
part 2, Alcott assures us that while ‘to outsiders, the five energetic women
seemed to rule the house,’ the truth is that ‘the quiet scholar, sitting among
his books, was still the head of the family, the household conscience,
anchor, and the comforter; for to him the busy, anxious women always
turned in troublous times, finding him, in the truest sense of those sacred
words, husband and father’ (229–30). Yet this reputed center of power
makes his first appearance ‘muffled up to his eyes,’ a broken man leaning
on his wife’s arm. While Beth’s slow death takes place on center stage and
occupies several chapters, the illness of Mr. March is consigned to the
distant background and is only vaguely referred to. Literally absent during
the first half of the book, during the second half he rarely emerges from his
library and we are afforded brief glimpses into it to assure us that he is still
there. If Marmee, on her departure to Washington, not knowing if her
husband is alive or dead, comforts her girls by saying, ‘“Hope and keep
busy; and whatever happens, remember that you never can be fatherless,”’
the true object of worship in Little Women is revealed in the description of
Meg and Jo’s vigil with Beth: ‘all day Jo and Meg hovered over her,
watching, waiting, hoping, and trusting in God and Mother’ (161, 181). It is
Marmee who does all the things putatively ascribed to her husband; it is
Marmee who always has the right word of comfort, love, and advice.
Indeed, Beth’s miraculous recovery is implicitly attributed to the fact that
Marmee is merely on her way home. God may be a father but his agents on
earth are women and the only worship we are privy to is that of Marmee
and Beth. Similarly, in the question of love, the significance of men is
essentially a matter of lip service. Despite Marmee’s dictum about being
loved by men, what we see and feel in reading Little Women is the love that
exists between women: Marmee and her daughters; Jo and Beth. Thus while
the events of Jo’s life are determined by the book’s overt message, her wish
to resist the imperative to be a little woman and to instead marry her sister
and remain forever with her mother is endorsed by the book’s covert
message.

The imaginative experience of Little Women is built on a paradox: the figure

who most resists the pressure to become a little woman is the most
attractive and the figure who most succumbs to it dies. Jo is the vital center
of Alcott’s book and she is so because she is least a little woman. Beth, on
the other hand, is the least vital and the least interesting. She is also the
character who most fully internalizes the overt values of Little Women; she
is the daughter who comes closest to realizing the ideal of imitating mother.
Like Marmee, Beth’s devotion to her duty and her kindness toward others
are never-failing and, like Marmee, she never expresses needs of her own.
Beth is content with the role of housekeeping homebody; her castle in the
air is ‘“to stay at home safe with Father and Mother, and help take care of
the family”’ (140). In her content, her lack of ambition beyond broom and
mop and feather duster, Beth is the perfect little woman. Yet she dies.
Implicitly, a connection is made between the degree to which she fulfills the
prescription for being a little woman and the fact that she dies. The
connection is reinforced by the plot since Beth gets the fatal scarlet fever
from fulfilling Marmee’s charge to the girls to take care of the Hummels
while she is gone. Beth registers the costs of being a little woman; of
suppressing so completely the expression of one’s needs; of controlling so
massively all selfishness, self-assertiveness, and anger. In Beth one sees the
exhaustion of vitality in the effort to live as a little woman.
One also sees in Beth that negative self-image which is the real burden of
the little woman. Such self-image is behind Beth’s description of herself as
‘“stupid little Beth’ trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there”’
(360); and it is implicit in her identification with those broken dolls, cast off
by her sisters, which she absorbs into her ‘infirmary’ and makes her special
care. Yet, if Beth identifies with these broken bits of out-cast ‘dollanity’ that
constitute her imaginary world, her posture toward them expresses the hope
that the world may treat her with the same kindness as she adopts toward
them; and we are brought again to the connection between a life of loving
service to others and the conviction of one’s own worthlessness. Behind the
paradox that Beth, the object of everyone’s adoration, so thoroughly
condemns herself that Beth, so apparently content, cannot accept her right
to live, rests the ultimate tension of Alcott’s story. Beth’s history carries out
the implication of being a little woman to its logical conclusion: to be a
little woman is to be dead.
Yet the drama of Little Women is the making of a little woman; and much
of the book must be read as a series of lessons designed to teach Jo the
value of a more submissive spirit and to reveal to her the wisdom of the
doctrines of renunciation and adaptation announced so clearly in the
opening pages. Jo is constantly shown the nasty consequences of not
following Marmee’s model of selflessness and self-control. While Marmee,
though angry nearly every day of her life, has learned to control her anger,
Jo at the opening of the story is ‘wild.’ When Amy burns her book, Jo
refuses to forgive and forget; she sticks to her anger despite warning signals
from Marmee. The results of her contumacy are nearly fatal: she fails to
warn her sister of thin ice; Amy falls in and is only rescued by the timely,
and manly exertions of Laurie. The moral is clear. Jo’s selfishness, followed
by her anger, followed by her vindictiveness result in her sister’s nearly
dying. In the world of ‘little women’ female anger is so unacceptable that
there are no degrees to it; all anger leads to ‘murder.’ The consequence for
Jo is horror at herself which in turn results in contrition, repression, and a
firm vow to follow in the footsteps of Marmee and never to let anger get
beyond a tightening of the lips.
Jo pays for her quick temper and lack of self-control in a more tangible
way later in the book. Amy has roped Jo into going with her to pay the
family’s social calls. Amy thrives on such activity; but Jo finds it intolerable
and can only get through the experience by playing elaborate games at each
place they stop. The final call is to their Aunt March. Both girls are tired,
peevish, and anxious to go home; but when Jo suggests they skip the visit,
Amy remonstrates that ‘“it’s a little thing to do, but it gives her pleasure”’
(285). So Amy devotes herself to being nice to Aunt March and to Aunt
Carroll, who is with her, and to making the visit pleasant, while Jo gives
vent to her peevishness and irritation in a series of decided remarks on the
subject of patronage. Since Aunt March and Aunt Carroll are in the process
of deciding which of the two girls should be offered the chance to
accompany Aunt Carroll to Europe, Jo’s testiness is costly indeed. Amy
goes to Europe and Jo is left home to reflect on the fact that she has
received a ‘timely lesson in the art of holding her tongue’ (287) and to draw
the inevitable conclusion that in this world it is best to be a little woman
like Amy.
An even more traumatic lesson is administered to Jo through her beloved
sister Beth. Beth contracts scarlet fever because of the irresponsibility of
Meg and Jo, but the burden falls primarily on Jo as she is the one
particularly charged with responsibility for Beth. When Beth asks Jo to take
over the job of seeing the Hummels, Jo is too busy, Jo is writing; and so
Beth, who has never had scarlet fever, is exposed to the disease and catches
it. Again there is the pattern of maximum possible consequences for a
minimal degree of self-absorption and selfishness. It is a pattern well
calculated to teach Jo a more submissive spirit. In fact, one can say that
Beth’s primary function in Little Women is to be a lesson to Jo; Beth’s life is
a constant reminder to Jo of her own inadequacies and failures and of what
she ought to be, and her death is bitter testimony to the consequences of
these failures. It is by no means accidental that Jo ‘falls in love’ shortly
after Beth’s death. She gets scared, she gets good, she gets Professor Bhaer.
Obviously, one of the major problem Alcott faced in writing Little
Women was making up someone for Jo to marry since, as we have seen,
marry she must. She cannot marry, as she cannot ‘love,’ Laurie, not, as
Marmee claims, because they are too alike in temperament, but because
they are too alike in status; they are too equal. If anything, Laurie is Jo’s
inferior, as her constant reference to him as ‘the dear boy’ implies.
Unfortunately, perhaps, for Jo and Laurie, little women can only love up,
not across or down; they must marry their fathers, not their brothers or sons.
Thus Laurie gets Amy, who is a fitting child for him, and Jo gets her Papa
Bhaer who, as the Germanic and ursine connotations of his name suggest, is
the heavy authority figure necessary to offset Jo’s own considerable talent
and vitality. His age, his foreignness, his status as a professor, his
possession of moral and philosophic wisdom all conspire to put him on a
different plane from Laurie and John Brooke and to make him an
appropriate suitor for Jo, whose relationship to him is clearly that of pupil
to teacher, child to parent, little woman to big man. In exchange for German
lessons, she will darn his socks; at their school he will do all the teaching
and she will do the house-work; he has saved her soul by a timely warning
against the effects of sensational literature and later we are told of Jo’s
future that she ‘made queer mistakes; but the wise professor steered her
safely into calmer waters’ (467). It is clear, however, that such an
excessively hierarchical relationship is necessary to indicate Jo’s ultimate
acceptance of the doctrines of Little Women. In marrying Professor Bhaer,
Jo’s rebellion is neutralized and she proves once and for all that she is a
good little woman who wishes for nothing more than the chance to realize
herself in the service of some superior male.4 The process of getting her out
of her boots and doublet and her misguided male-identification and into her
role as a future Marmee is completed by placing her securely in the arms of
Papa Bhaer.
We do not, of course, view this transformations with unqualified
rejoicing. It is difficult not to see it as capitulation and difficult not to
respond to it with regret. Our attitude, moreover, is not the result of feminist
values imposed on Alcott’s work but the result of ambivalence within the
work on the subject of what it means to be a little woman. Certainly, this
ambivalence is itself part of the message of Little Women. It accurately
reflects the position of the woman writer in nineteenth-century America,
confronted on all sides by forces pressuring her to compromise her vision.
How conscious Alcott was of the conflict between the overt and covert
messages of Little Women, how intentional on the one hand was her
subversion of the book’s ‘doctrine’ and on the other hand her compromise
with her culture’s norms, it is impossible to say. What one can say, however,
is that in failing to give Jo a fate other than that of the little woman, Alcott
‘altered her values in deference to the opinions of others’ and obliterated
her own identity as an economically independent single woman who much
preferred to ‘paddle her own canoe’ than to resign herself to the
dependency of marriage.5 Clearly, her true style is rather less than true.
When Professor Bhaer excoriates sensation fiction in an effort to set Jo on
the road to attaining her true style, he exclaims, ‘“They haf no right to put
poison in the sugar plum, and let the small ones eat it”’ (342). It is to
Alcott’s credit that at least covertly if not overtly she recognized that the
sugar plum was the poison.

Notes
1. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 420. All
subsequent references will be to this edition and will be included parenthetically within the text.
Little Women was originally published in 1869.
2. Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, ed. Ednah D. Cheney (Boston: Roberts
Brothers, 1890), pp. 296–7.
3. Ibid., p. 303.
4. It is hard for me to comprehend how Elizabeth Janeway can describe Jo as ‘the one young
woman in nineteenth-century fiction who maintains her individual independence, who gives up
no part of her autonomy as payment for being born a woman – and gets away with it. Jo is the
tomboy dream come true, the dream of growing up into full humanity with all its potentialities
instead of into limited femininity. . . .’ Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that her concept of ‘full
humanity with all its potentialities’ reaches no further than the vision of a Jo who ‘marries and
becomes, please note, not a sweet little wife but a matriarch: mistress of the professor’s school,
mother of healthy sons [while Amy and Laurie have only one sickly daughter] and a cheerful,
active manager of events and people’ (italics mine). It is doubtful that such a vision would be
asserted as ‘full’ if the character under consideration were male. Auerbach’s analysis seems
much more sensible and grounded in the facts of the novel. While giving more weight to the
realm of matriarchal power which Jo enters on marrying Professor Bhaer than I am willing to do,
she nevertheless recognizes that, even when ‘stretched to its limit,’ this power collides with and
falters before ‘the history it tries to subdue. For . . . history remains where we found it at the
beginning of Little Women: “far away, where the fighting was.”’ Indeed, Alcott’s recognition that
she must write not about the external world of male power embodied in the Civil War but about
the internal world of Jo’s struggle between resistance and capitulation to the doctrines of little
womanhood indicates her understanding of Jo’s exclusion from the real sources of power. See
Elizabeth Janeway, Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening (New York: William
Morrow, 1975), pp. 234–7; and Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1978), pp. 55–73.
5. Alcott, Life, Letters, and Journals, p. 122.

‘Wake up, and be a man’: Little Women, Laurie,

and the Ethic of Submission
Ken Parille
During the past twenty-five years, Little Women has been at the center of
the feminist project of reading texts by nineteenth-century American
women. A primary reason for the extensive interest in Alcott’s novel is its
discussion of the cultural spaces women occupied, or were excluded from,
during the mid- and late nineteenth century. Although critics have disagreed
about whether the novel ‘seeks a new vision of women’s subjectivity and
space’ or argues for a ‘repressive domesticity,’ it nevertheless offers us a
complicated and compelling picture of Alcott and her culture’s
understanding of girls and women (Murphy, 1990: 564). Yet an important
story within Little Women remains largely untreated in recent criticism, one
that will affect our understanding of the novel’s exploration of gender: that
of the male protagonist, Laurie. Although critics have done important work
by drawing our attention to Alcott’s exploration of patriarchal structures
and their effect on girls and women, they have not looked in any detail at
her concurrent examination of their effect on boys and men.
In many ways, Laurie’s story is similar to that of many mid- and late
nineteenth-century middle-class young men. Like the struggles of the
March girls, his struggle and ultimate submission to cultural expectations
for young men narrate a typical confrontation with the limitations of gender
roles. Throughout Little Women, Laurie is subjected to a version of what
critics often describe as the ‘ethic of submission,’ an ethic usually deemed
relevant only to girls’ and women’s lives because only they were expected
to submit to patriarchal authority: ‘American women,’ Jane Tompkins
argues, ‘simply could not . . . [rebel] against the conditions of their lives for
they lacked the material means of escape or opposition. They had to stay
put and submit’ (1985: 161). For Tompkins and many critics after her, this
ethic meant that girls and women were expected to conform to very narrow
roles (dutiful daughter, caring mother, obedient wife), in contrast to boys
and men, who were free from such limitations.
In Alcott scholarship, the view of submission as a gendered phenomenon
goes back to critics such as Nina Auerbach, Judith Fetterley, and Patricia
Spacks, who, in her landmark work The Female Imagination, takes Jo at her
word when she says ‘Boys always have a capital time,’ forgetting that the
narrator and even Jo herself realize that this is often not the case (1975:
100). Although critics have begun to question this gendered understanding
of submission as it applies to men’s and boys’ lives, in Alcott studies it still
remains a prevalent assumption; Jo’s story is seen as a paradigmatic
example of this ethic, while the ways in which Laurie’s story parallels hers
are neglected. Only Elizabeth Keyser and Anne Dalke have noted that Little
Women dramatizes Laurie’s struggle with patriarchal expectations. Keyser
observes that Laurie ‘exemplifies . . . the masculine plight,’ yet she does not
explore at any length what ‘the masculine plight’ is, how Laurie represents
this plight, and what cultural beliefs shape it (1993: 66–7). Dalke mentions
that Laurie’s narrative parallels the girls’, but she does not examine this
similarity or discuss its significance (1985: 573). Critics need to see that
Laurie’s experience, like those of the March girls, is at every point
conditioned by the kinds of patriarchal and materialist pressures that
affected girls’ lives. For boys the pressure to live up to the standards and
achievements of other males (especially the pressure to succeed in the
market) has, in some sense, always circumscribed their field of possibilities,
as it circumscribes Laurie’s.
Using studies of masculinity in America during the nineteenth century by
Michael Kimmel, Anthony Rotundo, Judy Hilkey, and Joe Dubbert, I will
examine Laurie’s capitulation to patriarchal and materialist pressures in the
form of his grandfather’s desire that he become a merchant and the way in
which Amy March functions as the grandfather’s agent. By repeatedly
questioning his masculinity, Amy shames Laurie into acting in accord with
his grandfather’s wishes. Once we understand Laurie’s story in this way –
as submission brought about by shame – we can then revise the
conventional critical position that the ‘feminine quality of self-denial’ is
‘the novel’s . . . message’ (Gaard, 1991: 5). In order to understand more
fully what Alcott and Little Women have to say about gender, we must
recover Alcott’s narrative of masculine self-denial.
Perhaps critics have not explored the parallels between Laurie’s and the
March girls’ narratives because in letters and journals, Alcott often
idealized boyhood and set it in opposition to her life as a girl and a woman,
a life filled with disappointments and restrictions. ‘Boys are always jolly’
she noted in 1860 (1989: 100) . . . Possibly in part because of such
idealizations, critics believe that Jo articulates a truth about boyhood when
she says that ‘boys always have a capital time.’ But in Little Women,
Laurie’s story shows us that Alcott’s ideas about the lives of boys are much
more complex; the text rarely makes any idealizing claims about boyhood.
Laurie is definitely not ‘always jolly,’ and, puzzled that he could be wealthy
and sad, Jo exclaims, ‘Theodore Laurence, you ought to be the happiest boy
in the world’ (51). Laurie’s unhappiness results from his place in a world of
men and the concurrent pressure of proving himself a man to the novel’s
characters. According to Michael Kimmel, this pressure is a defining
feature of American masculinity in the nineteenth century (ix), the era that
the historian Joe Dubbert calls ‘the masculine century’ (13).
Gilded Age success manuals for young men published around the time of
Little Women often depict a boy’s life as fraught with anxiety. They present
him as prone to worrying and suffering from ‘dissatisfaction with . . . [his]
destiny’ and ‘spells of melancholy’ (cited in Hilkey, 1997: 76). Similarly,
Alcott introduces us to Laurie as a lonely, frustrated young man. Unlike the
nurturing domestic circle of the March girls and their mother, Laurie’s
world is an isolated male enclave composed of his grandfather and his tutor,
John Brooke, both of whom are grooming him for a life he does not want;
during a game called ‘rigmarole,’ Brooke even relates a thinly veiled
allegory of Laurie’s submission and his role in it. As a knight, Brooke must
‘tame and train’ Laurie, ‘a fine, but unbroken colt’ who is a ‘pet of the
king’s,’ Laurie’s grandfather (125). Although Laurie eventually goes to
work for his grandfather, he desperately wants ‘to enjoy myself in my own
way’: ‘I’m to be a famous musician myself, and all creation is to rush to
hear me; and I’m never to be bothered about money or business, but just
enjoy myself, and live for what I like’ (31, 140). In spite of these fantasies,
Laurie knows that his future involves a different kind of ‘capital time’ than
the one Jo thinks boys always have, namely, one devoted to ‘money and
business’. As Dubbert observes, men ‘were expected to cash in on . . .
opportunities to maximize their gains and minimize their losses’ and not, as
Laurie says, ‘live for what [they] like’ (15). His grandfather fears that
Laurie wants to pursue a materially unproductive and therefore unmasculine
career: ‘His music isn’t bad, but I hope he will do as well in more important
things’ (55). What is important for his grandfather is that Laurie do well in
business, as he had done. . . . . :
I ought to be satisfied to please grandfather, and I do try, but it’s working against the grain, you
see, and comes hard. He wants me to be an India merchant, as he was, and I’d rather be shot; I hate
tea, and silk, and spices . . . Going to college ought to satisfy him, for if I give him four years he
ought to let me off from the business; but he’s set, and I’ve got to do just as he did, unless I break
away and please myself, as my father did.
141–2
But this dream of breaking away, Alcott says, is difficult for both sexes to
realize; pleasing oneself, to use one of her favorite phrases, is an ‘air castle’
that must be abandoned by little men and women alike. Here, as elsewhere,
Alcott dramatizes a central claim of many critics who study masculinity:
culture has its designs on male fulfilment (Dubbert, 1979: 1011; Kimmel,
1996: 1–10). So, like many young men, Laurie is not free to pursue the
career he wants, for it would be ‘working against the grain’ of cultural
expectations.
Dubbert’s and Hilkey’s discussions of advice literature for young men
shows that manliness was synonymous with success in the market. A boy
knew that he would never be viewed as a man unless he was fiscally
productive (Dubbert, 1979: 27–8; Hilkey, 1997: 142–6); as success manuals
repeatedly announced, ‘character was capital’ (Hilkey, 1997: 126). That a
career as an artist would be counterproductive has already been forecast in
the story of Laurie’s father, a musician who ‘please [d him]self’ and ran
away, only to end up dead (144). The narrator never tells us how and why
he dies, but the implication is that his death results from his career choice;
had he become an India merchant – as Laurie’s grandfather surely would
have wanted – a different outcome is easy to imagine. Though still only a
young man, Laurie has been initiated into the male world of negotiation. He
trades four years of his life in order to escape becoming an India merchant –
a bargain that does not pay off.
Although many men likely fantasized about ‘breaking away,’ the
pressure placed on them to succeed in business meant that most could not
and did not. In reaction to pressure and violence directed at him by his
grandfather, Laurie tells Jo he wants to run away to Washington. ‘What fun
you’d have!’ Jo replies. ‘I wish I could run off, too . . . If I was a boy, we’d
run away together, and have a capital time; but as I’m a miserable girl, I
must be proper, and stay at home. Don’t tempt me, Teddy, it’s a crazy plan’
(206). In spite of the romance of escape, she believes that Laurie’s interests
are best served by remaining, so she orchestrates a truce to keep him at
home. Critics tend to take Jo’s comment as reiterating a cultural truth: boys
can run away, but girls must submit. Ann Murphy, for instance, claims that
‘as a boy, Jo would be . . . able to . . . “run away [with Laurie] and have a
capital time,”’ even though the text tells us in no uncertain terms that Laurie
cannot (577). . . . .
In a crucial and often-cited scene in Little Women, Mr Bhaer convinces
Jo to give up her dream of being a ‘sensational’ writer. The scene begins
with Jo’s defense of sensation stories, but after listening to Bhaer’s attack
on such ‘trash,’ she feels ‘horribly ashamed’ (342). The shame Jo feels
from seeing herself through, as she calls it, his ‘moral spectacles’ (342)
causes her to throw all her ‘lurid’ stories into the stove. Though these
stories are profitable and give her the opportunity to experience
imaginatively a life she is denied, Jo must stop writing them because such a
profession is incompatible with the way in which the novel conceives of
‘womanhood’ (343). Thus Mr Bhaer acts as a kind of enforcer for the text’s
values, shaming Jo into sacrificing her desires. But rarely referred to are the
scenes in which Amy, acting like Mr Bhaer, shames Laurie into giving up
his dreams of life as an artist, and the moment in which Laurie, echoing Jo’s
destruction, destroys his own manuscripts. The striking resemblance
between these scenes suggests that Alcott wants to draw our attention to the
similar sacrifices that boys and girls must make in order to fit into narrowly
defined adult roles.
In order to make Laurie into a man, Amy constantly reminds him of his
distance from cultural ideals of masculinity. Elaine Showalter observes that
Jo’s German husband, Mr Bhaer, is ‘unconfined by American codes of
masculinity’ (1989: xxvii), but she misses the way in which Alcott shows us
how Laurie, as an American boy, is all too confined by such codes. Amy
sees it as her job to awaken the sleeping ‘young knight’ from his boyish
illusions and bring him into conformity with these norms. She even
concludes her sermon by promising, ‘I won’t lecture any more, for I know
you’ll wake up, and be a man’ (395). As Jo’s ‘lurid’ literary aspirations are
in conflict with the way the text imagines her as a woman, so too are
Laurie’s boyish artistic dreams incompatible with the way it imagines him
as a man.
An essential part of Amy’s shaming of Laurie involves renaming him; as
his friends had called him ‘Dora’ to emphasize his failure to measure up to
their standards of masculinity, Amy calls him ‘Lazy Laurence’ to feminize
him by emphasizing how unindustrious, and therefore unmanly, he seems to
her. Laurie’s new name comes from Maria Edgeworth’s didactic story ‘Lazy
Lawrence,’ published in a popular collection called The Parent’s Assistant.
The tale features two boys, Jem, a model of masculine ambition, and
Lawrence, a model of idleness. Like Laurie, Lawrence dreams, dismisses
ambition, and enjoys ‘amusements,’ but eventually he converts to the ways
of industry. As Anthony Rotundo observes, one of the key ‘deficiencies of
character that [was] thought to cause failure . . . was laziness. Again and
again we have heard men exhort one another to “industry,” “persistence,”
“hard work.” . . . Each of these popular phrases stood not only as an
exhortation to positive behavior, but as a warning against negative
behavior’ (179). Amy’s appeal to Laurie to be industrious, then, represents
a typical exhortation to be successful, but also a warning to him that if he
continues on his present course he will be perceived as a failure. Like a
success manual come to life, Amy attempts, as H.A. Lewis attempted with
his Hidden Treasures, to ‘awaken dormant energies in ONE PERSON who
other-wise might have failed’ (Cited in Hilkey, 1997: 75).
Though the name ‘Lazy Laurence’ implicitly feminizes him, Amy tries to
make her assault on Laurie’s masculinity explicit: ‘instead of being the man
you might and ought to be, you are only –’ (392). . . . . But before she can
finish, Laurie interrupts her. He likely believes that she would conclude
with ‘a girl’ or ‘a woman,’ and in fact she soon says, ‘Aren’t you ashamed
of a hand like that? It’s as soft and white as a woman’s, and looks as if it
never did anything but wear Jouvin’s best gloves’ (393). . . .
Amy uses her art to further convince Laurie that he has yet to act
‘manfully’. She shows Laurie ‘a rough sketch of [him] taming a horse; hat
and coat were off, and every line of the active figure, resolute face, and
commanding attitude, was full of energy and meaning. . . [In] the rider’s
breezy hair and erect attitude, there was a suggestion of suddenly arrested
motion, of strength, courage’ (396). The image contains numerous codes of
the ‘real man’ as Amy and the novel conceive of him: active, resolute, in
command, and sexually powerful. . . . Even the kind of sketch Amy draws
encodes manliness; it is ‘rough,’ in contrast to Laurie’s ‘soft’ feminine
hands. She tells him that this picture represents him ‘as you were’ and then
compares it to a picture that could have been an illustration of Edgeworth’s
‘Lazy Lawrence.’ But it is clear that Laurie never was such a man. Amy
makes this claim in order to shame him by calling his virility into question.
As she had used Edgeworth’s story as a model for Laurie’s life, here she
uses her drawing to teach him ‘a little lesson.’
When Amy says to Laurie, ‘instead of being the man you might and
ought to be, you are only –,’ he concludes for her with ‘Saint Laurence on a
gridiron’ (392). The narrator tells us that this insertion ‘blandly finish[es]
the sentence,’ but Laurie’s invocation of one of the most famous Christian
martyrs should not be so easily dismissed. That Laurie should see himself
as Saint Laurence, a martyr who was burned to death, implies that he
recognized the renunciation of his ‘boyish passions’ as a metaphorical
death. The process of converting lazy Laurie into a man, the process that
Amy begins, he concludes with a literal act of destruction – he destroys his
manuscripts: ‘He grew more and more discontent with his desultory life,
began to long for some real and earnest work . . . then suddenly he tore up
his music-sheets one by one’ (406).
Laurie’s destruction of his manuscripts and the fiery death of his patron
saint both implicitly refer to Jo’s similar act of martyrdom: the
extinguishing of her writerly self by burning her sensational tales. . . . . But
Laurie knows that simply destroying the manuscripts is not enough. The
best way to prove to Amy and his grandfather that he is not a ‘humbug’ is
to do what men do: get a job. As critics have shown, male identity in the
nineteenth century was intimately connected to work, and Laurie knows
that if he fails to work he will be seen as unmasculine, as weak and
feminine. He sends Amy a note addressed to ‘Mentor’ from ‘Telemachus’
in order to acknowledge the success of her ‘little lesson’: ‘“Lazy Laurence”
has gone to his grandpa, like the best of boys’ (397). Although Laurie
literally goes to see his grandfather, the metaphorical ‘going’ is most
important. He has finally left his boyhood ‘air castles’ and submitted to his
grandfather. Like ‘the best of boys’ he embraces the values of the patriarchy
and abandons idle dreams in favor of ‘earnest work.’ The boy who earlier
said he never wanted to be ‘bothered about money or business’ now
exclaims, ‘I’m going into business with a devotion that shall delight
grandpa, and prove to him that I’m not spoilt. I need something of the sort
to keep me steady. I . . . mean to work like a man’ (439). This is perhaps the
novel’s most compact formulation of the cultural connection between
masculinity and material productivity: to be a man is to work. Acting as
Mentor, Amy is (to adapt the title of Edgeworth’s collection) the ‘culture’s
assistant’; that is, she enforces its codes of masculinity. . . .And given
Amy’s use of Edgeworth’s text in enforcing these codes, a use Laurie
acknowledges when he says ‘“Lazy Laurence” has gone to his grandpa’ – it
is difficult to understand Beverly Clark’s claims that Laurie can rebel
‘against prescribed texts’ (81). . . .
Amy thinks she is preparing Laurie to be a man so that he will be a
suitable partner for Jo, but the novel has already told us that this pairing is
not a possibility (395). Instead, she prepares him to fill the narrowly
prescribed categories of middle-class husband, father, and businessman, the
roles he ends up playing in her life. . . . . Many critics have suggested that
Jo’s marriage to Mr Bhaer is a kind of punishment. Rather than marry the
erotic young Laurie, she ends up with the asexual older man. Yet Laurie’s
marriage to Amy – the most traditional of all the March girls – instead of Jo
could similarly be seen as a punishment. But, of course, Amy’s
conventionality is the point. His marriage to her signifies that he has proved
his manhood to the novel’s characters. He accepts convention by embracing
domesticity and business. . . . .
The parallel between Laurie’s and Jo’s submission makes it clear that he
is as crucial to Little Women’s exploration of gender as the March girls. As
a novel about Laurie’s and the March girls’ submission, then, Little Women
remains relevant to us as a story of how both boys and girls confront
cultural limitations.

References
[All references to Little Women in the text are to the Oxford University Press edition (1998).]
Alcott, L.M. 1987. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy.
Boston, Little, Brown.
——— 1989. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy. Boston Little,
Brown.
——— 1998. Little Women. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Auerbach, N. 1978. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press.
Clark, B.L. 1989. ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Little Woman,’ Children’s Literature 17, 81–97.
Dalke, A. 1985. ‘“The House-Band”: The Education of Men in Little Women,’ College English 47:
571–8.
Dubbert, J.L. 1979. A Man’s Place: Masculinity in Transition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall.
Fetterley, J. 1979. ‘Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War,’ Feminist Studies 5: 369–83.
——— 1978. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington,
Indiana University Press.
Gaard, G. 1991. ‘“Self-denial was all the fashion”: Repressing Anger in Little Women,’ Papers on
Language and Literature 27: 3–19.
Hilkey, J. 1997. Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America.
Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.
Keyser, E. 1993. Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott. Knoxville, University of
Tennessee Press.
Kimmel, M.S. 1996. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York, Free Press.
Murphy, A. 1990. ‘The Borders of Ethical, Erotic, and Artistic Possibilities in Little Women,’ Signs
15: 562–85.
Rotundo, E.A. 1993. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the
Modern Era. New York, Basic Books.
Showalter, E. 1989. Introduction to Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. New York, Penguin, pp.
vii–xxviii.
Spacks, P. 1975. The Female Imagination. New York, Knopf.
Tompkins, J. 1985. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860. New
York, Oxford University Press.

Louisa May Alcott and the Rise of Gender-

Specific Series Books
Sarah A. Wadsworth
Few gentlemen, who have occasion to visit news-offices, can have failed to notice the periodical
literature for boys, which has been growing up during the last few years. The increase in the
number of these papers and magazines, and the appearance, from time to time, of new ones, which,
to judge by the pictures, are always worse than the old, seem to indicate that they find a wide
market.

William G. Summer, 1878

Girls, like boys, in recent years have been remarkably favoured in the matter of their reading. They
cannot complain, with any justice, that they are ignored in the piles of juvenile literature laid
annually upon the booksellers’ shelves. Boys boast of a literature of their ‘very own’, as they
would call it. So do girls. . . . [T]hat so-called ‘girls books’ continue to be published in shoals
annually is sufficient proof that there is a market for them.

Edward G. Salmon, 1886

Writing in 1878 and 1866 respectively, William G. Sumner and Edward G.

Salmon point to a newly emergent trend in British and American juvenile
literature: the development of distinct categories of literature written
expressly for boys or expressly for girls. To the twentieth-century reader,
raised on Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden or Danny Dunn,
the Baby-Sitters’ Club or Encyclopedia Brown, such a division may seem a
natural and obvious one. As Salmon’s observation suggests, however, the
shift from a more or less homogenous body of literature for ‘boys and girls’
to a body of juvenile fiction bifurcated by gender was considered an
innovation in the latter half of the nineteenth century.1 In the United States,
the transformation began gradually in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s with
popular authors such as Jacob Abbott, William T. Adams (‘Oliver Optic’),
and Rebecca Sophia Clarke (‘Sophie May’), gaining momentum in the
1860s, 1870s, and 1880s with the contributions of Louisa May Alcott,
Horitio Alger, and Mark Twain, and accelerating rapidly toward the close of
the nineteenth century as a result of publishers’ unflagging efforts in the
fields of gender-specific periodicals, dime novels, and, especially, series
books.
While many critics have noted that ‘adolescent or preadolescent boys and
girls historically were not encouraged to share reading material’ (Vallone
122), few distinguish between books written for either gender but
appropriated primarily by one or the other (for example, Robinson Crusoe)
and books written with a single-sex target audience in mind. An exception
is Gillian Avery, who observes, ‘[f]rom the mid-century onwards, as
juvenile publishing became an industry, what had been unisex developed
into two sharply differentiated categories. Writing for boys, and writing for
girls, became professions in themselves’ (190). As Avery suggests, the
segmentation of the juvenile fiction market closely parallels the
development of children’s literature as a specialized branch of publishing.2
In this essay, I illustrate the relationship between the segmentation of the
juvenile fiction market by gender and the commercialization of children’s
publishing through an examination of the careers of William T. Adams and
Louisa May Alcott. Perhaps more than any other writers in nineteenth-
century America, these two authors exemplify how ‘[w]riting for boys, and
writing for girls, became professions in themselves.’ As early practitioners
of gendered juvenile series, Alcott and Adams together illustrate the
separation of boys’ and girls’ reading in the United States in the mid- to late
nineteenth century. A side-by-side study of these two authors and their
juvenile series shows that Alcott was both responding to and writing against
Oliver Optic’s books. At the same time, Alcott’s books for girls reveal that
she simulta neously resisted and revised traditional models of femininity
while mediating her readers’ desire for conventional female plots. As a
result, Alcott brought about an important development in the history of
juvenile literature: in shaping a new kind of fiction aimed specifically at
adolescent girls, she ushered in realistic female characters and plots that
were as distinct from previous models of femininity and womanhood in
fiction, as from the characters and plots of the boys’ books against which
they were inevitably defined. Ultimately, however, the impact of Adams
and Alcott extended beyond the books they wrote to the audience who read
them. For, in recognizing the changing roles of boys and girls in American
society and their still-tentative presence in the maturing literary
marketplace, they (and their publishers) effectively brought these segments
of the juvenile fiction market into existence. Just as Adams helped to define
not only boys’ series but also the audience for boys’ books, so Alcott, as the
most important contemporary American author to write books specifically
for girls, was instrumental in defining, shaping, reinforcing, and revising
the qualities, interests, and aspirations of the girls who comprised that
market.3
In the second volume of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott describes Jo
March’s efforts to produce a type of story that would be both saleable and
respectable. After her friend (and future husband) Professor Bhaer
persuades her that sensational stories are morally corrupting to young
readers, Jo abandons this lucrative genre and attempts a tale in the bland,
unobjectionable style of Mary Sherwood, Maria Edgeworth, and Hannah
More. The result, Alcott writes, ‘might have been more properly called an
essay or a sermon, so intensely moral was it.’ After failing to find a
purchaser for ‘this didactic gem’ (343), Jo turns her hand to juvenile fiction:
Then she tried a child’s story, which she could easily have disposed of if she had not been
mercenary enough to demand filthy lucre for it. The only person who offered enough to make it
worth while to try juvenile literature was a worthy gentleman who felt it his mission to convert all
the world to his particular belief. But much as she liked to write for children, Jo could not consent
to depict all her naughty boys as being eaten by bears or tossed by mad bulls, because they did not
go to a particular Sabbath-school, nor all the good infants, who did go, as rewarded by every kind
of bliss, from gilded ginger-bread to escorts of angels, when they departed this life with psalms or
sermons on their lisping tongues. So nothing came of these trials; and Jo corked up her inkstand. . .
.
343

Unlike her semi-autobiographical protagonist, Alcott refused to cork up her

own inkstand but instead went on to write numerous stories for children,
beginning with fairy tales in the mid-1850s and continuing largely in the
fantasy mode promoted by Hawthorne up until about 1868. Finally, in the
spring of that year, she hit upon a combination of style and subject matter
that succeeded in earning her the stacks of ‘filthy lucre’ she dreamed of, in
addition to literary fame and respectability as the author of Little Women.
Louisa May Alcott did not want to write girls’ books, however. In fact,
she was rather strongly opposed to the suggestion, offered by Thomas Niles
of Roberts Brothers, that she write a novel for girls. In retrospect, her
distaste for the project (which she recorded in a journal entry of September
1867) is amusing:
Niles, partner of Robert, asked me to write a girls book. Said I’d try. Fuller asked me to be the
Editor of ‘Merry’s Museum.’ Said I’d try. Began at once on both new jobs, but didn’t like either.
Journals 158

As it happened, the task of editing Merry’s Museum proved to be quite a

drain on Alcott’s time and energy, and her progress on the ‘girls book’ was
no doubt hindered as much by the demands of reading manuscripts and
writing her monthly story and editorial as by her obvious resistance to the
project Niles proposed.
While Alcott continued to favor fairy tales, writing for Merry’s Museum
an eight-part serial entitled Will’s Wonder Book as well as several other
fantasy stories, Niles renewed his interest in her ‘girls book.’ In May 1868,
his prompting elicited another tepid response from Alcott:
Father saw Mr. Niles about a fairy book. Mr. N. wants a girls’ story, and I begin ‘Little Women.’
Marmee, Anna, and May all approve my plan. So I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of
thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may
prove interesting, though I doubt it.
Journals 165–6

The following month, she again voiced her lack of enthusiasm, noting in
her journal that she had
Sent twelve chapters of ‘L. W.’ to Mr. N. He thought it dull; so do I. But work away and mean to
try the experiment; for lively, simple books are very much needed for girls, and perhaps I can
supply the need.
Journals 166

Thomas Niles’s persistence in the face of Alcott’s continuing reluctance

is perhaps surprising until we consider both the unprecedented success then
being enjoyed by authors of ‘realistic’ juvenile fiction and the talent of this
up-and-coming editor for assessing the literary market of the day. Alcott’s
biography reveals that a powerful incentive to Niles (and, by extension, to
Alcott) was provided by the example of ‘Oliver Optic’ in the arena of boys’
books. Niles’s obituary in Publishers Weekly (9 June 1894) reported that
‘[t]he success of Oliver Optic’s books suggested to Mr. Niles the thought of
similar books for girls, and having been much pleased by “Hospital
Sketches,” by Louisa M. Alcott, published in 1867 by Ticknor & Fields, he
sent for Miss Alcott and engaged her for this work’ (‘T. Niles’ 859–60).
More recently, Gene Gleasion related that Niles asked Alcott to ‘“do
something like Oliver Optic,” but for girls’ (648). Madeleine Stern
reconstructs the scenario in her biography of Alcott as follows:
From his office at number 143 Washington Street he [Niles] had seen vast quantities of books by
‘Oliver Optic’ leaving the rooms of Lee and Shephard at number 149. There must be a similar
market for a full-length novel that would be as popular among girls as ‘Oliver Optic’s’ narratives
were among boys.
168

Who was this paragon of juvenile authorship who reportedly inspired

both Thomas Niles and Louisa May Alcott to experiment with realistic
fiction aimed specifically at adolescent girls? With approximately 126
books to his credit, ‘Oliver Optic’ was the enormously prolific Reverend
William Taylor Adams (1822–97), whose most popular books sold at a rate
of more than 100,000 a year (Gay 16). The indefatigable Adams also wrote
approximately 1,000 short stories, used at least eight different pseudonyms,
and was editor, at various times, of Student and Schoolmate, Our Little
Ones, and Oliver Optic’s Magazine (Our Boys and Girls) (Gleason 647–8).
By the time of his death, an estimated two milliom copies of his books had
been sold, making the former principal and Sunday-school teacher one of
the best-paid writers of his time as well as (according to at least one source)
the most widely read (Jones xvi). Given that Niles evidently hoped that
Alcott might provide a female counterpart to Adams’s fabulously popular
boys’ books, a glimpse into the career of the illustrious ‘Oliver Optic’
provides some insight into the role of the Little Women Series in the
nineteenth-century literary marketplace.
Just as Niles prompted Alcott with the suggestion that she write a book
for girls, so Adams’s publisher provided the initial impetus for the young
minister to write a book for boys. Although originally published by Brown,
Bazin and Co., The Boat Club: or The Bunkers of Rippleton. A Tale for
Boys (dated 1854), a story about two rival groups of boys and their boating
adventures on a New England lake, was picked up by Phillips, Sampson in
1855 and later republished by William Lee, who spurred Adams on to
produce sequel after sequel. Lee, as a partner in the newly established firm
of Lee & Shephard, capitalized on the popularity of the six-volume Oliver
Optic’s Library for young People (which he helped to create) and managed
to keep Adams in his stable of authors for the next forty years.
Lee & Shepard had more authors writing for boys than for girls; . . . but
their series for boys achieved a kind of a commercial success that none of
their girls’ series managed to approach. Fueled by their success in the boys’
market and hoping to correct the imbalance, Lee & Shephard decided to
enlist their most popular boys’ author in a bold attempt to jumpstart their
lagging trade in girls’ books. ‘Adams was summoned to the publishers’
office and asked to prepare a new series for girls – which might also be read
by boys!’ (Kilgour, Lee & Shephard 35). Adams agreed to give it a try. The
promised volume for girls was Rich and Humble; or, The Mission of Bertha
Grant (1864), the first volume of the Woodville Stories, in which Adams
confirms:
the author presents the following story to his young lady friends, though he confidently expects it
will prove as acceptable to the embryo ‘lords of creation’ as to those for whom it was more
especially written.
5

What is perhaps most interesting about Rich and Humble is the explicit
claim it makes to targeting a female audience. Despite its claims to
addressing a female readership, Rich and Humble carries the subtitle ‘A
Story for Young People,’ and the series is designated ‘A Library for Boys
and Girls.’ Moreover, in his preface to the volume, Adams addresses male
and female readers in turn, directing the attention of the two groups of
readers to different aspects of the text:
The girls will find that Bertha Grant is not only a very good girl, but that her life is animated by
a lofty purpose, which all may have, though they fail to achieve the visible triumphs that
rewarded the exertions of the heroine of ‘Rich and Humble.’
The boys will find that Richard Grant was not always a good boy because his life was not
animated by a lofty purpose; but the author hopes, in another volume, to present him in a higher
moral aspect, and more worthy the imitation of those who, like him, have wandered from the
true path.
5

Rich and Humble was not an immediate success; still, the long-term sales of
this domestic novel eventually outpaced many of Adams’s boys’ books
(Kilgour 39–40), providing persuasive corroboration that a ready market for
girls’ series books awaited those prepared to meet its demands. In spite of
these early beginnings, however, realistic fiction written specifically for the
amusement of young girls was still uncommon a full decade after the
appearance of Oliver Optic’s books for boys. While Lee & Shepard
exhibited customary foresight in staking out a corner of the girls’ market,
most publishers did not yet consider it necessary or sufficiently profitable to
publish books for this particular subset of readers.
One reason for the recognition of boys as a separate audience well before
girls was that the boys’ market was seen as including girls, while the girls’
market apparently excluded boys. In fact, it was a common perception that
boys required a separate body of literature. Girls, however, could enjoy
both domestic tales and adventure stories directed at a male audience. The
popular British children’s author Charlotte M. Yonge (who had been
producing novels for teenage girls in England since the mid-1850s and
whom Alcott read as a yound woman [Crisler 35]) explained her decision to
include a category of ‘boys’ books’ without a complementary listing of
‘girls’ books’ in her compendium of What Books to Give and What to Lend
(1887):
The mild tales that girls will read simply to pass away the time are ineffective with [boys]. . . . the
works therein [this catalogue] are not merely suited to lads, for though girls will often greatly
prefer a book about the other sex, boys almost universally disdain books about girls.
29–30

Alcott was well aware of this literary fact, for in Little Women she has Jo
read boys’ books, and even delicate Beth finds occasion to feel ‘glad that
she had read one of the boys’ books in which Jo delighted’ (152) Given
these attitudes toward boys’ and girls’ reading, it is not difficult to see why
entertaining novels conceived specifically for boys emerged earlier than
comparable books for girls.
The belated discovery of girls as a separate audience was also influenced
by a persistent misapprehension of what girls wanted to (or should) read.
Long after the fading of the notion that boys must be spoon-fed didactic and
moral tales of the type Alcott satirizes in Little Women, stories for girls
continued to consist largely of sugar-coated lessons in morality and
femininity. Many seemed to agree with Charlotte Yonge’s assessment that
‘[i]f the boy is not to betake himself to “Jack Sheppard” literature, he must
be beguiled by wholesome adventure,’ while ‘If the girl is not to study the
“penny dreadful,” her notions must be refined by the tale of high romance
or pure pathos’ (6).
The discrepancy between boys’ and girls’ literary fare reflects the
divergent roles of boys and girls in nineteenth-century society. As Anne
Scott MacLeod points out, ‘Realistic children’s literature nearly always
bends toward socializing the young, imparting values, and distinguishing
desirable behavior from the deplorable’ (American Childhood 54). Boys’
and girls’ novels of the nineteenth century accomplished these tasks
through plot as well as characterization: ‘Where the boys’ books
increasingly revolved around a young man’s encounter with the outside
world – in the army, in the West, in the city – and around active, extroverted
adventure, girls’ novels focused on character and relationships, as, of
course, girls’ lives did as they approached womanhood’ (MacLeod,
American Childhood 14) Salmon’s 1886 article ‘What Girls Read’
explicitly prescribed the manner in which juvenile literature should prepare
British children for their future roles as grown men and women:
Boy’s literature of a sound kind ought to build up men. Girls’ literature ought to help to build up
women. If in choosing the books that boys shall read it is necessary to remember that we are
choosing mental food for the future chiefs of a great race, it is equally important not to forget in
choosing books for girls that we are choosing mental food for the future wives and mothers of that
race.
526

Alcott’s entry into the largely untried arena of realistic fiction for girls
marked an important advance in the social function of girls’ reading.
Responding positively to the gradual widening of the female sphere and
increasing opportunities for women, Little Women, and its sequels
acknowledge girls as more than future wives and mothers, advocate
education and career opportunities for women, and celebrate the
individuality of spirited, intelligent, independent young women. In Little
Women, which was hailed as ‘[a] capital story for girls’ (‘New Publications’
857), two of the three sisters who reach adulthood pursue careers other than
(or in addition to) that of homemaker: Jo as a writer and Amy as an artist.
Although Alcott attributed the success of Little Women to its realistic
portrayal of girls’ lives, Jo, the central character, has typically been
regarded as an exceptional, rather than a typical, example of nineteenth-
century girl-hood. Certainly, Alcott’s portrayal of Jo flouts the
characteristics ascribed by convention to nineteenth-century heroines.
Alcott writes, ‘Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a fly-away look
to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly
shooting up into a woman, and didn’t like it’ (Little Women 6). As MacLeod
has recently argued, however, tomboyism, followed by its forced
abandonment in the mid- to late teens, was far more widespread among
American girls of the nineteenth century than convention has led us to
expect. Drawing on diaries, letters, and memoirs, as well as fictional
accounts, MacLeod suggests that girls of the later nineteenth century often
enjoyed the same kinds of rough-and-tumble activities as their brothers, up
until such time (typically between thirteen and fifteen) as society demanded
that they beome young ladies. MacLeod’s research helps account for the
popularity of Little Women, and especially of the beloved Jo. Not only did
Jo’s character exhibit many of the traits of MacLead’s tomboys –
independence, courage, an adventurous spirit, and a love of the outdoors –
but the problem with which Jo contends throughout Little Women was
evidently a pervasive and enduring one for American girls: the problem of
how to bridge the gap between the relative liberty of girlhood and the
potentially stifling constraints of womanhood.
The practice of spinning off sequels and series was a marketing
innovation that flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries –
an indication that authors and publishers were becoming quite adept at
catering to the demands of the marketplace – and, as indicated earlier,
William T. Adams and his publisher, Lee & Shepard, were masters of the
technique.
If Thomas Niles had indeed persuaded Alcott to follow the example of
Oliver Optic and write books directed specifically at a single-sex juvenile
audience, it is likely that he also had Adams’s success with series in mind
when he urged the author of Little Women to follow up with subsequent
volumes of the ‘March Family Chronicles.’ Alcott complained in a letter of
February 1869, ‘I [d]ont like sequels, & dont think No 2 will be as popular
as No 1, but publishers are very perverse & wont let authors have thier [sic]
way so my little women must grow up & be married off in a very stupid
style’ [Letters 121–2]). But Niles, who ‘[l]ike most publishers . . . felt that
books sold better in series, since a few outstanding titles would carry a mass
of trivia’ (Kilgour, Roberts Brothers 65), had already decided, within a
month of the publication of Little Women, that the story should have a
sequel. Moreover, he encouraged Alcott to keep the ending of Little Women
open to allow for such a possibility (Shealy 63), and when Little Women or
Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy Part Second was still in press, he was already
urging Alcott to follow it up with a ‘new story by Miss Alcott’ (Shealy 71).
Alcott readily acknowledged her indebtedness to Niles in establishing her
as a famous writer of books for girls, even referring to Little Women as a
book that was ‘very hastily written to order’ (Letters 118). Her debt to
Oliver Optic and the Lee & Shepard mode of mass production and
marketing remained largely unacknowledged, however, by both Alcott and
her publisher.
As the parallel and intertwining careers of Louisa May Alcott and Oliver
Optic show, however, both authors succeeded in the rapidly expanding
literary marketplace by staking out segments of the juvenile fiction market
defined principally by gender and age. Both authors effectively responded
to the literary tastes and interests of these audiences, and both paid heed to
the aspirations of their readers, as well as to the expectations society placed
upon them. The books of both authors were created and shaped by the
markets they addressed, and, in turn, shaped, defined, and fostered a sense
of community among these respective groups of readers.

Notes
1. John Newbery experimented with gender-based marketing gimmicks by packaging A Little
Pretty Pocket Book (1744) with a ball for boys and a pincushion for girls, but this strategy was
designed to make a single book equally attractive to both male and female children. Samuel F.
Pickering, Jr. traces the first ‘significant differentiation made between books for little girls and
for little boys’ to Mary Ann Kilner’s The Adventures of a Pin Cushion (1783?) and Memories of
a Peg-Top (1783) (qtd. in Segal, ‘“As the Twig Is Bent”’ 168).
2. Jacob Abbott’s Rollo and Lucy books (dating from 1835 and 1841, respectively) are the first
American juvenile series of note to be clearly differentiated by gender. The series I discuss in
this article targeted a slightly older age group than Abbott’s series. For a bibliographical
overview of series books for girls, see Girls Series Books: A Checklist of Titles Published, 1840–
1991 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992). For discussions of gender differentiation in the
British market, see Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Literature
In Britain, 1880–1910 and J. S. Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction.
3. It is significant that Sheryl A. Englund refers to Little Women as a ‘genre-defining “girl’s book”’
(201) and Cary Ryan pronounces it ‘a book that redefines what it means to be born a girl’
(Alcott, Girlhood Diary 36). I argue that her books for girls are both ‘genre-defining’ and
audience-defining and that the two functions are, in fact, interdependent.

References
Adams, William Taylor. Rich and Humble; or, The Mission of Bertha Grant. Boston: Lee & Shepard,
1864.
Alcott, Louisa May. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.
———. Little Women or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. 1868. Oxford: OUP, 1998.
———. Louisa May Alcott: Her Girlhood Diary. Ed. Cary Ryan. Mahwah, NJ: Bridge Water Books,
1993.
———. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, and Madeleine
B. Stern. Athens, GA: Univ of Georgia P; 1995.
9
Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (1995)

Introduction
Heather Montgomery
Northern Lights is the first novel of Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials.
First published in 1995 in the UK and in 1996 in North America, where it
was retitled The Golden Compass, it was followed by The Subtle Knife in
1997 and in 2000 by The Amber Spyglass. Northern Lights has sold more
than 12 million copies worldwide, and won numerous awards. In 2007 it
was voted by the public as the best children’s book of the last 70 years in
the ‘Carnegie of Carnegies’ (although Pullman himself felt that the
accolade should have gone to Tom’s Midnight Garden). It tells the story of
12-year-old Lyra Belacqua and her epic journey north to find her missing
friend Roger, and her imprisoned father, Lord Asriel. Enjoyed by adults and
children alike, it is sometimes classified as a crossover novel, although its
mixture of fantasy and realism, science and theology, and its use of
intertexts defies easy categorisation. There has been a highly acclaimed
stage adaptation of His Dark Materials, which premiered at the National
Theatre in 2003, and a less successful film version which appeared in 2006.

Origins and composition

Pullman wrote his first book, entitled The Haunted Storm, in 1972. By the
time Northern Lights came out he was a well-established writer for both
adults and children, most famous for his Sally Lockhart quartet which
begins with The Ruby in the Smoke (1985). Pullman draws his inspiration
from a number of sources, most notably William Blake and John Milton,
from whose poem Paradise Lost he takes the title of his trilogy. Pullman
has described how Northern Lights and his other writings come into being,
and the way that these other authors influence and inspire him: ‘Books and
stories don’t just emerge from nothing in a sort of mental Big Bang. They
grow more like plants, from a seed that’s nourished by a rich and fertile
soil. All my books have come out of the background of my own reading and
from the things I’ve seen, or heard, or done, or thought about’ (Pullman,
n.d., a).

Reception/critical terrain
A large body of critical literature has developed around Pullman’s work and
Northern Lights has been examined in terms of its theology, its
intertextuality, and whether or not it can best be seen as fantasy or
psychological realism. It is distinctive in that Pullman has himself engaged
in lively dialogue with the critics.
Pullman himself has claimed that he does not write fantasy and deals
only with ‘real’ human characters. He has said: ‘If I write fantasy, it’s only
because by using the mechanisms of fantasy I can say something a little
more vividly about, for example, the business of growing up’ (Rustin and
Rustin, 2003: 93). Taking his books as a reflection of psychological reality,
Margaret and Michael Rustin have read Northern Lights as an examination
of domestic family relationships and the psychic interplay between parents
and children. They have analysed it in terms of what it says about
fundamental questions of belonging, parent–child relationships, personality
formation and Freudian understandings of sexuality. They point out how
deeply damaged and dysfunctional Lyra’s family is and analyse the book as
her search for better and more loving adult role models, be they Iorek the
bear, Lee Scoresby, Serafina Pekkala or the dons at Jordan College, Oxford:
The ambivalence of parental adults towards growing children is a primary theme of Northern
Lights. Lyra’s parents demonstrate an interest in her which is deeply damaged by its narcissist
elements: she exists in their minds very little as a person in her own right, but more as a creature
serving their needs of one sort or another. The college, by contrast, has provided love and care
determined in a rough and ready way by Lyra’s needs, a setting in which she can grow up to be
herself.
Rustin and Rustin, 2003: 94–5

Pullman has come in for criticism from those who view his depictions of
adult/child roles and relationships negatively. Kristine Moruzi, for instance,
has claimed that ‘Pullman fails to offer any genuinely new ideas of the
world with respect to adult–child relationships and the roles that children
play in society’ (2005: 55–6). She sees Pullman’s vision as essentially
conservative, supporting a status quo in which children must bow to adult
authority and where their role is to obey and follow destiny rather than
change it: ‘Pullman’s insistence on the subordination of children becomes
… problematic because he fails to understand the reality of life for his child
audience and resists a genuine re-conceptualization of contemporary
society’ (2005: 67). Others have been critical of the ways in which His
Dark Materials trilogy deals with theological questions of creation and
eschatology, faith and the role of God in human’s lives, objecting to the
portrayal of God in The Amber Spyglass as senile, exhausted and dying.
Pullman’s treatment of organised religion has been particularly
controversial and he has accordingly been called ‘the most dangerous
author in Britain’ (Hitchens, 2003), while the Catholic Church has
condemned Pullman’s writings as anti-Christian and accused him of
promoting a vision of the world which leaves no room for hope. In this
respect, he has been accused of being overtly didactic, although he denies
this charge, claiming: ‘I’m not in the message business; I’m in the “Once
upon a time” business’ (Pullman, n.d., b).
His denial of an explicit ideological and moral agenda is disingenuous,
however. Not only, as Peter Hunt argues, is it ‘impossible for a children’s
book (especially one being read by a child) not to be educational or
influential in some way; it cannot help but reflect an ideology and, by
extension, didacticism’ (1994: 3), but Pullman himself has elsewhere been
happy to state his position explicitly:
The trouble is that all too often in human history, churches and priesthoods have set themselves up
to rule people’s lives in the name of some invisible god (and they’re all invisible, because they
don’t exist) – and done terrible damage. In the name of their god, they have burned, hanged,
tortured, maimed, robbed, violated, and enslaved millions of their fellow-creatures, and done so
with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to Heaven for
it. That is the religion I hate, and I’m happy to be known as its enemy.
Pullman, n.d., a.

Pullman has deliberately set himself up against writers such as C.S. Lewis,
whose Christian allegories, The Chronicles of Narnia, he despises. He has
described Lewis’s books as ‘rather hateful propaganda for prigs and
bullies’, going on to describe them as ‘profoundly racist’: ‘they are
misogynistic, he hates women and girls, he thinks they are no good at all,
they are weak, they are useless, they are stupid. In fact he hates life
basically, because at the end of them the greatest reward these children have
is to be taken away… and killed in a railway accident’ (Pullman, 2002). For
all his anti-Christian vehemence, however, there are others who see him as
less atheistic than he might wish to appear:
Indifference is certainly a far greater enemy to Christianity than atheism. The atheist still cares
about God, even if he wants him dead. There is a kind of piety in atheism. It is this piety that keeps
soaking through into the fabric of Philip Pullman’s fiction. Even in his rejection of religion, in his
hatred of the church and his contempt for God, Pullman is still asking theological questions and
finding comfort in theological answers.
Rayment-Pickard, 2004: 88

The essays
The three essays selected here from an increasingly crowded field deal with
different aspects of Pullman’s work and are representative in their concerns
of the themes that have received most critical attention. Anne-Marie Bird
takes one of Pullman’s key concepts, Dust, and traces its antecedents in
both Milton and Blake before looking at how Pullman rejects absolute
dichotomies between good and evil, spirit and body. Naomi Wood discusses
the links between Pullman and C.S. Lewis. Finally, Clare Squires looks at
one of the central aspects of Pullman’s work, his use of intertextuality and
the influences of other authors.
Intertextuality is a central concern in all of these essays and the ways in
which Pullman uses other works to give his books a particular authenticity
and to situate them in a particular tradition are important. By drawing
heavily on Milton and Blake, Pullman situates himself as part of a long
tradition of religious dissent, which is thrown into sharper relief by
comparison with the conservatism and religious orthodoxy of C.S. Lewis.
In this regard all three essays deal with the same issues of sources and
Pullman’s role in the wider canon. They move away from any simplistic
understanding of the ‘meanings’ or ‘messages’ of Northern Lights,
concentrating instead on the book as a literary creation.

References
Hitchens, P. 2003. ‘Is This the Most Dangerous Author in Britain?’ The Mail on Sunday, 25 June.
Hunt, P. 1994. An Introduction to Children’s Literature. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Moruzi, K. 2005. ‘Missed Opportunities: The Subordination of Children in Philip Pullman’s His
Dark Materials’, Children’s Literature in Education, 36, 55–68.
Pullman, P. n.d. a. About the Worlds. http://www.philip-pullman.com/about_the_worlds.asp, accessed
27 November 2008.
Pullman, P. n.d. b. About the Books. http://www.philip-pullman.com/about_the_worlds.asp, accessed
27 November 2008.
Pullman, P. 2002. ‘Interview with Philip Pullman,’ recorded at The Readers’ and Writers’ Roadshow,
Hay-on-Wye, broadcast on Radio 4, 11 July.
Rayment-Pickard, H. 2004. The Devil’s Account: Philip Pullman and Christianity. London, Darton,
Longman & Todd.
Rustin, M. and Rustin, M. 2003. ‘Where is Home? An Essay on Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights
(Volume 1 of His Dark Materials)’, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 29, 93–105.

Further reading
Hunt, P. and Lenz, M. 2001. Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. London, Continuum.
Lenz, M. and Scott, C. 2005. His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s
Trilogy. Detroit, Wayne State University Press.
Squires, C. 2006. Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials.
London, Continuum.
Tucker, N. 2007. Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman. London, Wizard.

Dust as Metaphor in Philip Pullman

Anne-Marie Bird
Few myths have had such an immensely powerful and prevailing influence
on the Western imagination, or have generated quite so many retellings, as
the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall. One reason for its endurance lies in
the fact that it provides a series of answers to the most basic and profound
questions such as how the universe was made, how humanity began, and
why suffering and death entered the world. Another reason for its pervasive
influence is that like other myths (and especially cosmogonic myths), it is
built on a system of classification – the notion that creation is a matter of
naming, a matter of making distinctions, and of articulating opposites – in
an attempt to organise or make sense of the universe. Indeed, the Genesis
narrative opens with the concept of separation: God ‘divided the light from
the darkness,’ the heaven from the earth and the day from the night. This
idea of division continues in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis as humanity’s
transgression of God’s law leads to further, more ideologically loaded
binary opposites, namely, innocence-experience, good-evil and spirit-
matter.
Finding elements of their inspiration in the biblical story of the Fall and
John Milton’s elaboration of this narrative in Paradise Lost, Philip
Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy (Northern Lights – or, in North
America, The Golden Compass – The Subtle Knife, and The Amber
Spyglass)1 makes use of this myth on several levels. On a simplistic level,
the books can be read as straightforward adventure stories in that they
involve difficult journeys in which the protagonists must confront numerous
challenges in the search for some object, place, or person. On a deeper
level, the texts are an exploration of the fundamental themes of the Fall:
initiation and the passage from innocence to experience, the nature of good
and evil, the consequences of knowledge, and the notion of free will or
individual responsibility. From this perspective, the books are
representative of the adolescent ‘rites of passage’ narrative in which the
most important journey is not an external event but an inner one concerning
the child’s journey toward adulthood.
However, if we investigate Pullman’s treatment of these themes, it
becomes apparent that, like the God of Genesis, human beings are also
concerned with the idea of division or separation. Drawing on motifs found
within Gnostic mythology and the poetry of William Blake – particularly
Blake’s concept of ‘Contraries’ – Pullman attempts to synthesise the
opposing principles that lie at the core of the myth while leaving the
innocence-experience dichotomy firmly in place. The effect of this is to
transpose what is, in traditional Christian readings, a paradigm of
disobedience and divine punishment into a scheme of self-development.
The key to this ontological scheme is ‘Dust,’ a conventional metaphor for
human physicality inspired by God’s judgment on humanity: ‘for dust thou
art, and unto dust shalt thou return’ (Genesis, 3:19). Underpinning the
concept of Dust is Milton’s metaphor for the mass of unformed primal
matter left over from the construction of the universe; in other words, the
‘dark materials’ of Paradise Lost (II, 1.916). In Pullman’s narrative,
however, Dust contains much more than the beginning and end of
humanity’s physical existence or the origins of the universe.

Organising Milton’s dark materials: dust as a means of

classification
The very term, Dust, is highly ambiguous. Its indistinctness lies in its
intrinsic amorphousness. Consequently, it is an extremely adaptable
concept, offering an almost infinite number of possibilities or meanings. To
the God of Genesis, Dust contains mankind’s origins and is literally the
substance that marks his demise. Pullman, however, uses the word in order
to connect the plethora of seemingly incompatible elements that make up
the universe. The desire to connect everything with everything else
manifests itself on every level of the texts. For example, the setting for the
narrative – its ‘uncountable billions of parallel worlds’ (NL, p. 374), none
hierarchically superior, but ‘interpenetrating with this one’ (NL, p. 187) –
epitomises the attempt to link together, and therefore equalises everything
in its most simplistic form.
Striving to unite all things is more complex, however, when it is
attempted through one metaphor in which all concepts, physical and
metaphysical, apparently exist in parallel. In the first book, Dust is
described as ‘a new kind of elementary particle’ (NL, p. 368), yet it
functions as a metaphor for ‘original sin’ (NL, p. 369) and is experienced by
Lyra as ‘dark intentions, like the forms of thoughts not yet born’ (p. 389). In
the second text, Dust operates in both a literal and a metaphorical sense.
Described by the particle physicists in a twentieth century research
laboratory as ‘dark matter’ (SK, p. 90), Dust appears to correspond to the
scientific phenomenon known as cosmic dust: the small particles of matter
that are distributed throughout space and which, according to current
theories of cosmology, make up at least ninety percent of the mass of the
universe. In short, Dust is the actual physical ‘stuff’ that holds the universe
together.
There is an obvious correspondence here between Dust as ‘dark matter’
and the ‘dark materials’ of Milton’s Paradise Lost (which Pullman quotes
in the epigraph to Northern Lights):
… Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this wild abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage …
II, ll. 910–19

In Milton’s text, the idea that God can ‘create more worlds’ by ordering or
rearranging the primal matter left over from the creation is clearly not
meant to be interpreted in a literal or scientifically accurate sense. What it
does suggest is that the dark materials are brimming with almost limitless
potential that merely awaits the Maker’s transmutation. Moreover, in
Milton’s work the metaphor of dark materials is extended with the
suggestion that the material that comprises the bulk of the universe’s mass
is made up of sentient particles in a state of rebellion. This is where
Milton’s metaphor ends. In the second book of Pullman’s trilogy, the
rebellious atoms of Paradise Lost are organised and arranged further,
evolving into a system of classification that involves the entire spectrum
ranging from pure matter to pure spirit – ‘Dust,’ ‘dark matter,’ ‘Shadows,’
‘shadow-particles,’ ‘particles of consciousness’ (pp. 90–2) and ‘rebel
angels’ (p. 260) – ultimately becoming the ‘inheritance’ of all human
beings in the final book (p. 497).
The slippage between one concept and another, from one end of the
spectrum to the other, and between the metaphorical and the literal,
transforms Dust from the familiar closed configuration bequeathed to
humanity by God into an open structure. Indeed, by developing Milton’s
‘dark materials’ into an extremely composite metaphor, Pullman is
suggesting that every elementary particle of Dust contains the entire
universe (which is, in turn, akin to the Blakean metaphor, ‘To see a World
in a Grain of Sand’). Thus, having established what Dust includes – the
numerous terms involved – we must turn our attention to how it functions in
the trilogy.

Mind–body duality: toward an integration

Religious dualism – the doctrine that the world comprises two basic,
diametrically opposed principles – is generally associated with Gnosticism.
For example, Gnostic myth and metaphor centre around the dualities of
light and dark, spirit and matter, and good and evil: the fundamental belief
being that the spirit is ‘good’ and matter is ‘evil.’ However, the distinction
between good and evil, or spirit and matter, is not only a distinguishing
Gnostic characteristic, but is just as notably a feature of traditional
Christianity in which the irreconcilable nature of the opposites arises from
their moral emphasis. There is no such simple theological dichotomy in
Pullman’s texts. Rather, his work strives to convince the reader of the
interconnectedness of these particular conceptual opposites.
The integration of the spiritual and the material is demonstrated most
effectively by Pullman’s innovative depiction of the human soul. However,
before specifically exploring this, it will be useful to attempt to define the
soul. According to conventional Cartesian philosophy, the soul is the
immaterial ‘I’ that confers individuality and is often considered to be
synonymous with the mind. In mainstream Christian theology, the soul is
further defined as that part of the human that partakes of divinity. Pullman’s
interpretation of the human soul includes all but one of these definitions and
brings us to what is perhaps the most striking characteristic of the world of
Northern Lights.
In this world, every human has a ‘dæmon’ which is both visible and
audible – a kind of ‘familiar’ in animal form, usually of the opposite sex to
its human counterpart (the physical realisation of the Jungian idea that we
have an anima, or animus which is part of our soul). However, the
significance of the external soul is that it explicitly foregrounds the notion
of dualism – the belief that the human being consists of two opposing and
independent ‘substances’ – while maintaining that the body and soul are
completely interrelated. Thus, the texts emphasise that human and dæmon
are one being, linked by an invisible, telepathic bond, as is illustrated when
Lyra tells her dæmon, Pantalaimon: ‘I didn’t have anything in mind and
well you know it’ (NL, p. 9). Their complete integration is reiterated in
Lyra’s statement: ‘Your dæmon en’t separate from you. It’s you’ (SK, p.
26), thereby echoing the Socratic and Platonic belief that the soul is
synonymous with the ‘essential’ person, or the ‘true’ self.
The trilogy’s insistence on diversity in unity suggests that denying
difference in order to unite opposing principles is not part of Pullman’s
agenda. In fact, it could be argued that denying difference is not only
impossible, but that difference has an important function in the texts. This
brings us back to Dust and the narrative’s basis in the Fall myth. It also
brings us to another important aspect of the external soul. In book 1, we are
told that the dæmon possesses a metamorphic ability to alter its form to
reflect and, at times, to avoid betraying the emotions of its human
counterpart – an ability that lasts until puberty, when ‘dæmons lost the
power to change and assumed one shape, keeping it permanently’ (NL, p.
49). The difference between the adult’s dæmon and the child’s is caused by
Dust, which, ‘during the years of puberty they [the children] begin to attract
… more strongly’ (NL, p. 368). Dust, therefore, is believed to accumulate in
ever-increasing quantities during adolescence, its function being to act as
some kind of catalyst that initiates the child’s journey toward adulthood. It
is when Dust has finally ‘settled’ on the individual that the dæmon acquires
a definitive form that most accurately reflects the essential nature of the
person. The narrative links this phenomenon directly to the Fall of ‘man’
with the idea that the ‘fixed’ dæmon is ‘physical proof that something
happened when innocence changed into experience’ (NL, p. 370).
The transition from innocence to experience can be interpreted in two
ways. The negative view is represented in the trilogy by the powerful and
punitive Church. As far as the Church is concerned, Dust must be ‘the
physical evidence for original sin’ (NL, p. 369) – the disastrous moment
when the gulf between innocence and experience was traversed with the
result that Adam and Eve’s ‘eyes were opened’ and they became aware of
their nakedness; a condition that, in terms of traditional Christian
interpretations, became connected with guilt, shame, and sin. To the Church
then, Dust symbolises the awakening of sexual awareness, humanity’s
rejection of the heavenly for the earthly, and thus, a descent from spirit to
matter.
In order to disturb the value-laden Christian hierarchy of spirit and
matter, Pullman is concerned to demonstrate the interdependency of soul
and body. To this end, the texts present a more literal realisation of the
descent from spirit to matter, through the ‘severed’ child in the first book
and the severed adults in the second. As far as Mrs. Coulter (an agent of the
Church) and her organisation, the ‘Oblation Board,’ are concerned, it is
imperative to prolong the child’s state of innocence, and in their view, the
most effective method of preventing Dust from settling on the child is to
separate the body from the dæmon before the onset of puberty – a castration
of sorts, referred to as ‘intercision’ (NL, p. 213), and ‘cutting’ (NL, p. 372).
The result is a permanent end to any imminent sexual awakening. As Mrs.
Coulter tells Lyra:
‘All that happens is a little cut, and then everything’s peaceful. For ever! You see, your dæmon’s a
wonderful friend and companion when you’re young, but at the age we call puberty … dæmons
bring all sorts of troublesome thoughts and feelings, and that’s what lets Dust in.’
NL, pp. 282–3

This ‘little cut’ has the opposite effect to the castration complex described
by Freud. In his theory, the threat of castration enables the child to grow up.
The Church’s intention is to halt this process – to prevent the Dust or
‘troublesome thoughts’ ever entering by literally cutting away the soul, thus
rendering mind and body as ‘separate entities’ (NL, p. 273).
However, preventing the child’s development toward adulthood is merely
one effect of intercision. Another is related to the complex question of the
human personality: the notion that it is the soul that makes us human, or
‘truly alive.’ This idea seems to be derived from Aristotle’s statement that
the soul is ‘the first principle of living things,’ or as Lyra tells Will: ‘You
have got a dæmon … Inside you … You wouldn’t be human else. You’d be
… half-dead’ (SK, p. 26). Thus, the psychic damage incurred following
intercision could be described as the destruction of the human being’s
identity as a human, while the person remains alive only on some purely
physical level. This is evident during Lyra’s encounter with the severed
child, as when confronted by metaphysical absence, Lyra suffers what
Freud would describe as an uncanny experience, doubting ‘whether an
apparently animate being is really alive’:
Her first impulse was to turn and run, or to be sick. A human being with no dæmon was like
someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out.
NL, p. 214

Dust as a dynamic, unsettling principle

The idea that the separation of body and soul constitutes a ‘psychic death,’
a descent from ‘human being’ to ‘non-being,’ is expanded by the suggestion
that the severed individual not only lacks a soul but is deprived of Dust:
‘the energy that links body and dæmon’ (NL, p. 373). Dust, therefore, does
not only initiate the child’s development toward adulthood, but remains as
an underlying energy vital to human existence in general, without which, ‘it
would all vanish. Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow
away, leaving nothing but a brute automatism’ (AS, p. 476). [T]he nurses at
Bolvangar experimental station have also undergone intercision. Following
the ‘operation’ the dæmons are returned to the nurses. However, the mere
possession of a soul is not as important as the psychic bond – the Dust –
that forms some energic point of contact between human and dæmon; when
this link is no longer present, the status of the dæmon is reduced to that of
‘a little trotting pet … [which] seemed to be sleepwalking’ (NL, pp. 282),
while the nurses themselves are totally indifferent too, having ‘a brisk,
blank, sensible air’ (NL, p. 238).
Given that intercision is final, the individuals who have undergone this
operation can never possess full subjectivity; thus they cannot become
‘dangerously independent’ (AS, p. 63), but instead are slaves to the
oppressive Church. Therefore, like Blake, who railed against orthodox
religion (‘… the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys’), the State, and
authority in general (‘… God & his Priest & King / Who make up a heaven
of our misery’), Pullman’s narrative denounces the Church and its Oblation
Board, or ‘Gobblers’ (NL, p. 90) – a combination of Church and State –
which denies the child the opportunity to develop toward sexual maturity.
The adult automata, irrevocably alienated from their humanity, represent a
further condemnation of the totalitarian Church whose major concern is not
worship but a concerted effort to eradicate those elements that might
threaten its absolute power, namely, individuality, liberty, and human
consciousness. To take the Blakean analogy further, the concept of Dust as
some kind of powerful energy that connects and activates both mind and
body – an energy which the Church views as ‘something bad, something
wrong, something evil and wicked’ (NL, p. 282) – is comparable to Blake’s
notion of ‘Energy’ as ‘the only life’ and therefore, ‘Eternal Delight.’ This is
neatly summed up in Georges Bataille’s interpretation of Blake’s work:
‘The Eternal Delight is at the same time the Eternal Awakening. It is
perhaps the Hell which Heaven could never truly reject.’
Bataille’s suggestion of the coexistence of Hell and Heaven in Blake’s
work corresponds to Pullman’s multifarious conception of Dust. On the one
hand, in order to undermine the rigid theological hierarchy of spirit and
matter (or good and evil), Pullman emphasises that human and dæmon
share a common boundary, which he calls Dust. The word boundary is
significant here, since collapsing hierarchies do not break down
distinctions. The complex paradox of simultaneous unity and difference,
evident in the depiction of the mind-body binary, and in Dust itself, is
significant in that it emphasises that what makes two concepts polar
opposites is what actually unites them and creates a powerful psychic force.
The most useful way of describing this would be as a necessary interplay of
opposites – what Blake refers to as ‘Contraries’ – the coexistence of good
and evil that traditional Christianity refuses to acknowledge (perhaps due to
an underlying fear that opposites will be confused if their interdependency
is made explicit). As far as the Church – ‘a body of men with a feverish
obsession with sexuality’ (AS, p. 343) – is concerned, the human body and
the world it inhabits is ‘material and sinful’ (NL, p. 31), whereas the human
soul is spiritual (a fragment of the divine) and as such must be protected
from Dust. The division of body and soul, therefore, would appear to be
highly desirable in that spirit and matter would be separated, the individual
would revert to a prelapsarian or innocent condition, and would remain so
eternally. However, separation results in an individual lacking in
‘Contraries,’ which in Pullman’s terminology is Dust. Consequently, the
conflict or struggle between opposites that is imperative for human
development would be absent, as [for Blake]
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and
Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good
& Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.

Conclusion
Thus, the development of Milton’s dark materials into an all-inclusive
metaphor in which physical particles and abstract metaphysical concepts are
one and the same, enables Pullman to avoid making the absolute
distinctions that characterise both Gnostic and Christian thought. This, in
turn, constitutes an attempt to mend the dichotomies of religious division,
which, rather than acknowledging the mutuality between opposing ends of
being, create the sense of the exclusive and distinctly separate states of
spirit and matter. By envisaging everything as connected with everything
else, Pullman effectively upsets and transforms the antithesis between
conventionally divided entities, rendering them as two halves of a more
complex and integrated whole.
In this sense, Pullman appears to share Blake’s acceptance and
appreciation of the human being as a dynamic, inclusive being comprising
body and soul, good and evil, the notion being that opposites are inadequate
unless synthesised. The horrific depiction of mind-less matter in the
narrative’s literal enactment of mind-body dualism and the obvious
disadvantages of being composed of spirit only, indicates that Pullman also
shares Blake’s conviction that the separation of the contraries limits
‘Energy’: that is, imagination, consciousness and, related to this, the
capacity to enjoy physical, or earthly pleasures.
Therefore, in Pullman’s universe, Dust is not a punishment or an
hereditary moral disease – the idea that we have to be ashamed simply
because we are alive – but is re-presented as the positive inheritance of all
human beings. Dust, according to the trilogy, symbolises the necessary
convergence of contraries; an event that is synonymous with the first
independent action taken by Adam and Eve, which is subsequently
extended into the first essential step toward maturity for the generations that
follow them.

Note
1. Northern Lights will be referred to as NL, The Subtle Knife as SK, and The Amber Spyglass as
AS.

References
Bataille, Georges, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton. London: Calder & Boyars, 1973.
Blake, William, William Blake: Selected Poetry, ed. W.H. Stevenson. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1988.
Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. Christopher Ricks. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
Pullman, Philip, Northern Lights. London: Scholastic Ltd, 1995 (as The Golden Compass. New York:
Knopf, 1996).
Pullman, Philip, The Subtle Knife. London: Scholastic Ltd, 1997; New York: Knopf, 1997.
Pullman, Philip, The Amber Spyglass. London: David Fickling Books, Scholastic Ltd, 2000; New
York: Knopf, 2000.

Obedience, Disobedience, and Storytelling in C.S.

Lewis and Philip Pullman
Naomi Wood
Literature for children, partly because of its traditionally didactic role, often
focuses on obedience as a central issue. Obedience is a fraught term; it may
be understood as a natural and instinctive response to a superior or as
coercive violation of individual choice through persuasion and/or physical
force. It is esteemed by kings, generals, priests, parents, and other authority
figures but may be contested by those most vulnerable to authority’s
dictates: subjects, rank-and-file, laity, and children. The most important
instance of disobedience in Judeo-Christian scripture is Eve’s decision to
eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge in order to be like God; her
disobedience initiates humanity’s fall. Themes and symbols surrounding
Eve’s disobedience and its metaphoric reflection of humanity’s moral status
have been appropriated by two important children’s fantasy series with
doubled and paradoxical effects.
In C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia [The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe and its successors] and Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark
Materials [Pullman, 1995, 1997, 2000], the authors re-create the story of
humanity’s Fall from grace through disobedience as found in Genesis and
Milton’s Paradise Lost. The conservative Lewis advocates obedience, and
the progressive Pullman questions it. But both pose obedience as a problem
for children as each defines, explicitly and implicitly, legitimate authority
and morality in his fiction. Each author’s narrative choice uses his view of
cosmic order to persuade readers that obedience should be understood as
central to coming of age. At stake is the proper role of human agency in the
world. Who, ultimately, writes the narrative that gives our lives meaning?
Can children become narrators of their own lives – or are they fated simply
to occupy narratives already written for them? Obedience and disobedience
are inextricably connected with narratives of origin, of development, and of
maturation. Both Lewis and Pullman model and problematize the process of
independent storytelling in order to arrive at truth: must we retell the same
stories or can we invent new ways of getting at old – or inventing new –
truths? Lewis’ and Pullman’s treatments of obedience and disobedience
explore each writer’s sense of the nature of authority, storytelling, and the
creative process.

Pullman vs. Lewis

Pullman has gained notoriety for his public attacks on Lewis’ Chronicles of
Narnia and on Lewis’ God. In ‘The Dark Side of Narnia,’ Pullman writes
that the series is too tainted with ‘misogyny … racism, [and] sado-
masochistic relish for violence’ (Pullman, 1988, p. 6) to have any
redemptive qualities at all for today’s child. Pullman declares that Lewis’
narratives ‘cheat’ readers by employing dei ex machina to solve narrational
problems while indiscriminately and inconsistently mixing plural mythic
traditions to produce a pastiche of a world rather than a ‘secondary
creation’ as Tolkien defined it (Tolkien, 1996, p. 273). Although Pullman
demonstrably chafes at Lewis’ influence in the field of children’s fantasy,
they have a great deal in common: both authors earned degrees in English
Literature from Oxford University; both write ‘high’ fantasies that draw on
the Classical, Norse, and English myths and romances of the Western
tradition; both are entranced by the past and its difference from the present;
both use their fiction to comment on and criticize our world; and both write
of naïve protagonists who find themselves responsible for the destiny of a
world. Both Lewis and Pullman are intimate with the literature of the Fall:
Lewis published a monograph on Paradise Lost in 1942 (C.S. Lewis,
Preface to Paradise Lost), and Pullman relates that he reread Paradise Lost
and William Blake before undertaking his own re-vision of the story for
today’s young adults (Alix Sharkey, 1999, p. 13).1 Both authors posit a
prohibiting authority, a moral choice, protagonists in whose hands the fate
of a world is placed. Both link issues of obedience and storytelling to the
moral and social consequences of coming of age. Finally, Pullman’s
vehement opposition to Lewis, coupled with his seemingly deliberate
rewriting of crucial moments and characters in Lewis’ fiction, suggests a
deep connection between the two: both series begin with children hiding in
a wardrobe and being jettisoned from there into world-shaping adventures;
both feature beautiful, deadly women wearing furs who tempt and betray
children through sweets; both feature youthful heroines – Lucy and Lyra –
who have special relationships with powerful, dangerous beasts – Aslan,
Iorek.
However, crucial differences exist between the two authors in their
appropriation of the characters, events, and themes of Paradise Lost. Lewis,
a Christian whose doctrine is informed by his saturation in the writings of
Medieval Europe and the theology of St. Augustine, posits a divinely
established order with a built-in hierarchy ‘that consist[s], in descending
order, of God, men, women, and animals’ (Bottigheimer, 1996, p. 198).2
Pullman, in the republican tradition of Blake and of Milton’s political
writing, depicts corrupt ecclesiastical and political authorities to whom
allegiance would be evil. Generally speaking, Lewis is Augustinian on
obedience and the Fall, while Pullman is closer to gnostic theology.3 In his
monograph on Paradise Lost, Lewis asserts that obedience to authority is
decorous and appropriate, even beautiful; we consent to submit, recognizing
authority’s right to control knowledge and power. Eve’s sin was her desire
to become godlike in knowledge and thus to rival God. On the other side,
Pullman appears to agree with those gnostics who, ‘instead of blaming the
human desire for knowledge as the root of all sin, … did the opposite and
sought redemption through gnosis. And whereas the orthodox often blamed
Eve for the fall and pointed to women’s submission as appropriate
punishment, gnostics often depicted Eve – or the feminine spiritual power
she represented – as the source of spiritual awakening’ (Pagels, 1988, p.
68). Pullman advocates repeatedly the disobedient pursuit of knowledge as
the key to maturity, and his heroine Lyra is called ‘Eve again’ to reinforce
her role as disobedient liberator of humanity through knowledge and the
creation of new true stories.

Authority, authorship, and narration

The ultimate authority in both Lewis’ and Pullman’s works is God; each
draws on Christian scripture, theology, and history for the portrait. Lewis
upholds what he terms ‘merely Christian’ doctrine while creating a world in
which Christianity as such does not exist. Pullman creates a Christianity
without Christ, exhibiting deep skepticism about divine power as it is
deployed through institutional religion. Lewis’ God is a benevolent
liberator, while Pullman’s is a tyrannical usurper. This difference is crucial
to understanding the role and significance of obedience in each series, in the
ways each author pictures and characterizes his version of God, and in the
way each narrates his tale. As ‘creator-god’ of their respective tales, Lewis
and Pullman employ narrators that capture structurally the qualities of their
ultimate authority figures – narrators that mirror and implicitly comment on
their respective visions of authority.
In the Chronicles of Narnia,4 Lewis depicts the second person of the
Christian trinity, Christ, rather than attempting to embody the ineffable first
person, who never appears in his narrative except as a name, ‘the Emperor
Beyond the Sea.’ Appropriately for a country of talking beasts, Lewis
chooses the King of the Beasts to represent Christ, alluding also to the
biblical Lion of Judah. Although the Lion Aslan’s purposes are often
mysterious and his visits to Narnia so far apart that some Narnians begin to
doubt his existence, he is a personal, incarnate deity who punishes and
rewards unambiguously (wine, dance, and picnics for the faithful, thrashing
and humiliation for miscreants). In the words of evangelical cliché, a
‘personal relationship’ with Aslan is possible. But this relationship is not
always necessarily comfortable: ‘“Course he isn’t safe,”’ Mr Beaver tells
the nervous Pevensies who are anticipating their meeting. ‘“But he’s good.
He’s the King, I tell you”’ (LWW, p. 76). At the same time, some
characters, most notably Lucy, develop relationships with Aslan that permit
caresses, kisses, and even romps.
Responses to the Lion reveal facets of his character, but even more they
reveal the personality of the responder: those who hate or dismiss the Lion
are damned, those who lean toward him, even if they fear, are saved. In The
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, treacherous Edmund’s instinctive
response to the Lion is self-indicting, just as his siblings’ response indicates
their receptivity to the Truth:
At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in his inside. Edmund felt a
sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some
delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling
you have when you wake up in the morning and realise that it is the beginning of the holidays or
the beginning of summer.
LWW, pp. 64–5

Aslan merits all these reactions as they result from the implied relationship
each child has with the Good, Truth and hence with God; thus, the three
‘good’ children each experience Aslan’s name as a metaphor of the thing
they most delight in, the good in them turning to the good in God and thus
experiencing him as the thing most good in themselves. Those who respond
negatively to Aslan turn their backs not only on the divine Other but also on
the good in themselves. To Lewis, God’s authority is a consequence of his
essence. In the natural hierarchy of value, some creatures are superior and
others inferior; God, as maker of everything, must be the most superior of
all. We obey God because that is the way we appropriately respond to his
superiority, which Lewis also defines as ‘goodness.’ Disobedience of God’s
commands demonstrates our ‘perversity,’ a word Lewis frequently employs
to describe any behaviors that do not match his sense of the norm: the
everyday traditional English life – allied with ‘fried eggs and soap and
sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy’ (Lewis, [1945] 1996, p. 299).
In Lewis’ novels, the good tends to align with heterosexuality, with sexual
division of labor and society; with the great chain of being. Perversity, often
shading into evil, is good pursued through faulty humanism: progressive,
socialist, and feminist efforts to institute programmatic social change. In the
Narnia series, to obey Aslan is simply to align oneself with good. Those
who disobey not only get punished, but idiotically frustrate themselves.
Lewis’ narrator, the friendly uncle-cum-deus ex machina, presents the
problem of identifying legitimate authority as relatively simple and the
rewards relatively clear. Knowledge of ‘true’ authority is inherent in the
Narnia books: because characters are made knowing the right and only their
perverted will prevents them from acting on it, there is no need, most of the
time, for outright instruction or directions. People like Edmund in The Lion,
the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Digory in The Magician’s Nephew, who
might plead that they were enchanted and did what was wrong under those
influences, are not absolved: they knew and must repent (see MN, p. 135).
This degree of control does offer a degree of security: under the narrator’s
guiding hand, only so much can go wrong in Narnia. Although the child
protagonists may temporarily suffer discomfort, hunger, and fear, no doubt
arises that the Narrator and his image, Aslan, are in control.
Pullman’s figure of God is different, much more distant than Lewis’,
without a corporeal intermediary such as Aslan. Introduced as an actual
being late in the second book of the series, The Subtle Knife, ‘the Authority’
is the oldest of the angels, but no creator; he lied to those who came after
him.
In the first book of the series, The Golden Compass, we only know the
Authority through the Church. Unlike Lewis, who does not describe any
kind of institutional relation in Narnia, Pullman exploits the known
offenses of institutional religion, Christianity in particular, to buttress his
thesis about the poisonous effects of religion on humanity and the rest of
nature. Lewis, aware of the same dismal history, perhaps, exchanges for the
institutionalized church a vision of individual relationships with the divine.5
In Pullman’s world, the Church is monolithic, powerful, and combines
the most authoritarian, formidable, and evil aspects of Protestant Calvinism
and Roman Catholicism.6 Pullman’s fictive Church, described in orthodox
manner as the Body of God, is similar enough to the Christian Church to
make some of Pullman’s characterizations pointed: his Church, like many in
our world, silences heretics through Inquisition, castrates young boys to
retain their lovely voices at the cost of their sexuality (‘so useful in Church
music’ [GC, p. 374]), and generally opposes desire for the things of the
material world while amassing great wealth and power. Pullman’s Church
sponsors all scientific research (called ‘experimental theology’) and uses
resulting technology in its rituals. It approves or disapproves of individual
discoveries referencing Church doctrine. Of chief concern in the series are
elementary particles called Dust, identified as Original Sin by Church
scholars. In an effort to fight Dust (which collects around human beings
beginning with puberty), the Church commissions the ‘General Oblation
Board’ to study Dust and solve the problem of its attraction to adolescents
and adults. Led by the evil Mrs. Coulter (a ‘coulter’ is an iron blade fixed at
the front of a plow to make a vertical cut into the soil, evoking the
guillotine devised by Mrs. Coulter’s employees to sever children and their
dæmons), the General Oblation Board kidnaps children to sever them from
their ‘dæmons’ – animal-shaped souls – in an experimental process
euphemistically called ‘intercision.’ Those who undergo this process either
die or become zombies without any wills of their own.
Clearly, Pullman and Lewis have different notions of deity: Pullman sees
God as a despoiler of the material universe; the cosmos itself acts
independently from the Authority; since other gods and powers exist and
since the Authority himself was formed out of Dust, as were other
conscious beings. Dust coalesced in the same way, ‘becoming aware of
itself’ and gravitating toward other conscious beings over tens of thousands
of years. Pullman’s God-authorized Church is an illegitimate arbiter of a
creation it does not seek to understand except to exploit and stands for
repression, exploitation, and the most negative aspects of authority. Lewis
on the contrary describes God as the maker and sustainer of creation, which
can only run properly if allowed to follow its ‘nature,’ a paradoxical notion
since we are both naturally good, with truth built as it were into our cells, as
we saw in the examples of responses to Aslan, but also naturally perverse,
expressing essentially fallen natures.
Pullman’s narrator does not tell us what to think about moral decision
making – at least not in the direct and regulated manner of Lewis’ narrator.
If Lewis’ narrator is avuncular, Pullman’s is more like a documentary with
very little voice-over: he shows us vignettes that enable us to see more than
individual characters see. In one interview, he compares himself to a
cinematic camera (Sharkey, 1999, p. 13). This technique creates dissonance
between characters’ and readers’ understanding of situations. This dissonant
space invites readers – one might say it forces readers – into judgments
about characters’ insufficient, incomplete grasp of a given event. For
example, this dissonance heightens the ironic contrasts between what Lyra
knows and assumes about life and what we know; privileged in our
knowledge, we lament Lyra’s lack of it. In ‘Lyra’s Jordan,’ the second
chapter of The Golden Compass, the first section is told from Lyra’s point
of view; the rest of the chapter reveals in shifting, episodic ways the
activities of a mysterious group, switching from past tense to the present
and back to past so that we have a sense both of immediacy and our own
inability to do anything to prevent what is happening/has happened. In the
present tense, we learn about ‘slow’ Tony Makarios and his life as a street
child, ‘his clumsy tenderness’ for his drunken mother, and how he lives on
handouts and minor pilfering. With promises of luxury sweets – ‘chocolat!’
– a beautiful lady in furs whose dæmon is a golden monkey lures him to a
cellar. Shifting ominously to the past tense again, we learn that she
promised the large group of children she had collected in the cellar that they
would be cared for as they journey to the North and their parents notified.
But no one is notified: ‘The lady stood on the jetty and waved till she could
see their faces no more. Then she turned back inside, with the golden
monkey nestled in her breast, and threw the little bundle of letters into the
furnace before leaving the way she had come’ (GC, p. 44). When this same
woman is introduced to Lyra at the end of the chapter as Mrs. Coulter, we
have knowledge Lyra does not, that Mrs. Coulter is most likely the cause of
the recent disappearance of Lyra’s best friend, Roger the kitchen boy. Lyra’s
subsequent enthrallment by Mrs. Coulter is more excruciating to witness
because of our special knowledge. Our narrator is no comforting uncle, for
it is uncomfortable, indeed, not to know who will prevail and suspect as
well that we might encounter another past-tense episode in which the future
has already been decided against the heroes.7
Lewis’ and Pullman’s narrative voices embody the divine authority they
imagine, though they require different responses from the reader. Lewis’
narrator invites the reader to become part of the club, while Pullman’s
narrator raises questions about what belonging to a club might involve.
Lewis’ narrator encourages conformity to the good (which is assumed to be
naturally apparent to anyone who is ‘normal’ in Lewis’ limited sense),
while Pullman’s narrator demonstrates the difficulty of determining the
good course of action when knowledge is always partial and impressions
may be manipulated or mistaken. Although both write in the high-fantasy
genre, Lewis’ allegiance to fairy-tale romance conventions demands the
‘happily ever after’ – even as his apocalyptic Christianity posits eternal
bliss Elsewhere, a Telos to which he holds creation is tending. In contrast,
Pullman insists that his work is ‘stark realism’ at least in psychological
terms (Achuka, 1999, p. 4); referencing evolutionary theory and physics,
Pullman grounds his fantasy in contemporary science. Rather than
occupying the all-knowing, all-powerful position of Lewis’ God/narrator,
Pullman’s narrator creates ironic discontinuity, highlighting harsh
contradictions between ideology and practice, culture and instinct, means
and ends. Pullman’s narrator is godlike in knowledge perhaps, but not
omnipotent; unresolvable conflict must remain unresolved and no deus ex
machina can make ‘happy ever after.’

The truth in storytelling

Both Pullman and Lewis tell stories about life and love and obedience, but
the truths they distill differ because of the writers’ different positions on the
divine and authority. In Lewis’ children’s books, no child becomes a
storyteller in her own right; children instead choose (or fail) to obey – to
become part of the overarching grand narrative that the Emperor Beyond
the Sea has written (Glover, 1989). Rather than emphasizing independent
agency or free will, in other words, the narrative encourages conformity to a
predetermined pattern (‘what the plot of that story is’). As Lewis concludes
his series,
for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever
after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all
their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were
beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever:
in which every chapter is better than the one before.
LB p. 184

Lewis’ commitment to ‘the end’, to the idea that time is linear and the grand
narrative of history is tending toward an apocalypse after which the real
story can begin, belies his narrator’s evident enjoyment of the materiality of
the world. Still, Lewis’ idealist repudiation of the chaotic and imperfect
nature of the material world leads him to posit a ‘true,’ more material world
elsewhere, a world that can only be entered through obedience to the master
narrative, not through independent creation of new stories.
Pullman argues that storymaking should not be an escape from this world
but a way to reinvent it. If chance through evolution over millions of years
has produced both Dust and consciousness, when matter begins to
understand itself, a strange synthesis occurs. One of the things that begins
to happen is storymaking, and through storymaking, new ways of creating
the world.
Both Lewis and Pullman insist on the ‘real’ implications of their fantasy
stories. Pullman exhorts his readers to take an activist role in creating the
world that they want:
‘We shouldn’t live as if [the Kingdom of Heaven] mattered more than this life in this world,
because where we are is always the most important place. We have to be all those difficult things
like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all
of us, in all our different worlds, and then we’ll build … The Republic of Heaven,’ said Lyra.
Sharkey, 1999, p. 518

The way we regain paradise is to embrace our real world, to live in it, to
recognize our symbiotic relationship with it, and to strive to learn and tell
true stories to those who come after. While this paean to human creativity
and resourcefulness is inspiring, it undercuts the basis of fantasy writing.
Shouldn’t we then read and write realism alone, based on the possibilities
inherent in ‘where we are’? What good does it do to escape to wonderful
imaginary places filled with satisfactions we can only yearn for, never
experience – dæmons, armoured bears, mulefa? And if we are to create a
democracy, what business have we naturalizing hierarchies, imagining
children of destiny? Doesn’t the romance form inevitably glamorize the
very ideology against which Lyra and her companions have been fighting?
These paradoxes depict the strength and autonomy of the form both
Lewis and Pullman have chosen for their tales. Even the author-creators
confess their dependence on their form; if they insist on the real and true
aspects of their stories, they also must submit to the ways their stories
intractably unsettle their stated goals. The powerful relationship between
tale, teller, and listener creates dynamic rather than static meaning. Stories
that inspire new stories, stories that provoke thought, stories that ask the big
questions … all these require the reader to pay attention, to think, and above
all to imagine and create. If the Genesis story with all its ambiguity might
be said to affirm one thing, it is that desire for true knowledge is a human
constant and the pursuit of that desire leads to new worlds and new
challenges, for good and ill. And we must tell stories to give those worlds
and challenges meaning, which is the only way to grow up.

Notes
1. As a teenager, Lewis contemplated writing an opera, Loki Unbound, with a promethean Loki as
his hero, struggling against the arrogant and tyrannical Odin; with his reconversion to
Christianity; however, Lewis returned to a more orthodox view of the authority of God as creator
(They Stand Together, 6 October 1914; 50–3). His struggle with the idea that God might be a
cosmic sadist, however, continued even into his last published work; in A Grief Observed he
discusses these ideas again.
2. See also Peter Brown: ‘Augustine’s exegesis validated the rule of men over women and the rule
of the father over his children as part of God’s original order’ (Brown, 1988, p. 400). For a
discussion of nineteenth-century adaptations of Paradise Lost for children, which involved
attempts to contain the subversive qualities of the poem, see Julie Pfeiffer’s essay in Children’s
Literature (1999).
3. For Lewis, see his own Preface to Paradise Lost and Elaine Pagels’s chapter on ‘Gnostic
Improvisations on Genesis’ in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (pp. 57–77).
4. I am citing all titles in text in abbreviated form: LWW [H11005] The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe; MN [H11005] The Magician’s Nephew; LB [H11005] The Last Battle; GC [H11005]
The Golden Compass; SK [H11005] The Subtle Knife; AS [H11005] The Amber Spyglass.
5. Lewis, inconsistently perhaps, differs from St. Augustine, who advocated the centrality of the
institutional church for the Christian.
6. Pope John Calvin moved the headquarters of the Church to Geneva, though the papacy has since
been superseded by a Magisterium (GC, p. 30). Pullman carefully makes all Christian
institutions culpable.
7. The Amber Spyglass does succumb to didacticism and exposition far more than the two previous
books do, perhaps because of the need to ‘wrap things up.’

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Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity:
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