Big dreams for “Little Women”

Mon, 05 Apr 1999 22:04:00 +0000

Louisa May Alcott, author of "Little Women," was the only female face in the Authors card game. Her countenance is a cameo carved on my brain during childhood -- the soft shape of her profile, the crimped hair bundled at the back of her head, the lace tucker at her neck that suggested she was wearing one of those voluminous 19th century tent dresses women trundled around in.

Let's begin with the dress. Louisa May Alcott claimed she had a boy's spirit under her "bib and tucker." In "Little Women," Jo March, at odds with her feminine costume, burns out the backside of her dress by standing too close to the fire. At a party she has to hide the "bad breadth" of material in the dress by keeping her back to the wall.

When I was in grade school and profoundly involved in Alcott's novel, I wore plaid, long-sleeved dresses with gathered skirts. In the winter, to keep my legs warm, I wore blue jeans beneath this modified version of old-fashioned girls' garb. I was a country girl, in Kentucky, attending a rural school, where there was no library except one bookcase for the high school. My reading was limited to the popular series books -- Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton -- books my mother bought for me at the wallpaper store, which had a small book nook. I read them over and over, for there was nothing else to read. I knew the faces of the authors in the card game -- Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Twain and others -- but I did not know their works.

Salon.com > Bobbie Ann Mason

Big dreams for “Little Women”