My mother and father (directly and indirectly) introduced me to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. My father moved to Bombay from Calcutta (via Mussoorie) in the 1970s, when he was just shy of becoming a teenager, and he grew up in the city with the confidence and quickness of an urban resident; she led a cloistered but privileged life in Meerut. My mother grew up in the 1960s on a hard, disciplinarian bedrock of Indian middle-class virtue in a sprawling bungalow with two lawns and a swimming pool. My father had risk-taking, working-class parents who finally made it to the big city of Bombay in their forties to set up a business. A keen follower of current affairs, my father has always combed through the newspaper with care, staying abreast with the latest developments in the city. Crossword Bookstore was one such development in the early 1990s, in India’s rapidly globalizing economy: a large, air-conditioned bookstore (poised to become a franchise) and reminiscent of the Fox bookstores in You’ve Got Mail. My father urged my mother to take me—about eight or so, but already with an addiction to books—to Mahalakshmi, where the bookstore was, in south Bombay. But my mother had already introduced me to cozier bookstores: my first memory of buying books is at a small book-stall, overshadowed by a large Adidas store on Linking Road, a long street lined with stores on either side, in Bandra, what used to be a sleepy suburban area of Bombay.
Being denied the permission to pursue medicine by her father, my mother chose the next academic discipline that was close to her heart: English literature. She had discovered the joy of reading early in life, and it was a joy that she inculcated in me. Not only did she pass down her affection for reading, but also her affection for specific books. Little Women was a book that she read and reread as a girl, and then again as a young woman. As the eldest child in a household that consisted of two families and four children, my mother bore the responsibility of being a “little woman” and a surrogate parent to all the other children in the house. And so, when her little girl was old enough, she bought me a copy (since her own had vanished into the cavernous Meerut home). In my edition, the novel concluded where it had begun: Christmas. That was where I left these four little women every time I shut the book. Imagine my surprise when I spotted, in the “Young Classics” section at Crossword in Mahalakshmi, that Little Women was followed by Good Wives (or Little Women II), Little Men, and Jo’s Boys! Years later, Penguin re-released renowned texts in hardback, clothbound editions. Little Women and Good Wives were published together in one such edition. By then, Crossword was an established franchise and had a store right next door to my parents’ house in Bandra. It was there where I purchased this nostalgia-evoking edition with dainty pink sewing scissors embossed on brown. It was this copy that I reread in May of 2022 when I needed the comfort of familiarity in a time of flux.
I had been evicted in March from my barely four-hundred-square-feet large studio apartment in Bandra. (Although the crotchety landlady and her gossipy, middleman nephew wouldn’t call it an eviction, the circumstances that they created left me no choice but to leave.) I was being punished by the housing society for my unconventional, and therefore unacceptable, life choices: being in a live-in relationship with a Muslim man. While I could return to my parents’ home, my partner was compelled to turn to his many friends in the city as we searched for a house that would accept us for who we were. After three months of uncertainty and unpalatable real estate encounters, we finally did find a place—but in Madh, Malad, far beyond my comfort zone of posh Bandra. I was elated by the spacious, green, peaceful environs, by a landlord and housing society that did not probe into our personal lives, by the prospect of beginning a new chapter with my partner, but I was terrified of having to build a home in a new part of the city, and of leaving behind what I had known for most of my life. In between houses and phases of life, I stood before my childhood bookcase and instinctively picked up the clothbound Little Women. Jo, Beth, Meg, and Amy constantly chose unexpected paths. Despite being separated from these four women by a century and a half, by continents and culture, I sought refuge in their company. Mid-nineteenth-century America offered its women writers, as Elaine Showalter observes, only “suffering and resignation.” Alcott’s women, however, did rebel in their own ways.
I neither like, respect, nor admire Tudor, though his grandfather’s uncle’s nephew’s niece was a third cousin to a lord. Tommy is poor, and bashful, and good, and very clever; I think well of him, and show that I do, for he is a gentleman in spite of the brown paper parcels.
So says “perverse Jo” when she is reprimanded by Amy for not attempting to disguise her dislike. When I read these lines as an adolescent, I secretly admired Jo’s brusque and bold nature and was contemptuous of Amy’s attempt at never ruffling any feathers:
Women should learn to be agreeable, particularly poor ones; for they have no other way repaying the kindnesses they receive. If you’d remember that, and practise it, you’d be better liked than I am, because there is more of you.
Rereading this exchange as a thirty-two-year-old, however, led me to appreciate Amy’s pragmatic method of navigating an intensely patriarchal society where you are diminished not only by your gender, but also by your social strata. I noticed for the first time Jo’s reluctant but unambiguous “you are right” and Amy’s honest and effortless admission about Jo’s kindness outweighing her own. Neither will implement the other’s suggestions, but both are able to see the merit of the other’s advice.
It was this very exchange that prompted me to reassess my literary hero Jo’s subversion of class-based discrimination and acknowledge her high-handed morality:
for us to frown at one set of young gentlemen, because we don’t approve of them, and smile upon another set, because we do, wouldn’t have a particle of effect, and we should only be considered odd and Puritanical … I don’t like reformers, and I hope you will never try to be one.
Jo’s refusal to relent her moral high ground struck a guilty chord within me. I, too, am prone to obstinate dislike, particularly when that dislike stems from intellectual superiority. “I don’t like favours; they oppress and make me feel like a slave; I’d rather do everything for myself and be perfectly independent,” Jo declares. Complete (or “fierce,” as my mother says) independence has been a preoccupation of mine—a by-product, perhaps, like Jo’s independence, of being instilled with a sense of perpetual gratitude, of an awareness of the invisible leash around your neck. For some, like Amy, feigning pleasantries is a small price to pay to eventually live life on your own terms; for others, like Jo (and me), it is an unbearable burden. What I learnt from Amy, this time around, was to consider it a right and not a favor; if an unequal society chooses to present fundamental freedom as a favor for women, then we must not only accept, but demand those favors as our undeniable right.
If Jo and Amy form two voices in the perennial argument in my mind pertaining to the paths available for women, Meg and Beth (the two sisters that I could relate to the least in the past) represent the average and accepted archetype for Indian women: the homemaker and the saint. “I declare, it really seems like being a fine young lady, to come home from my party in a carriage, and sit in my dressing-gown with a maid to wait on me,” says Meg. She is introduced to readers as covetous of upward social mobility. Meg suffers from a chronic case of low self-esteem, particularly in comparison to her preening peers. My impatience with Meg mirrors my internal impatience with many women I encounter, including those closest to me, like my mother, who have been trained by their family and society to trust others’ opinions and constantly mistrust their own. By the end of the first volume of Little Women, however, Meg demonstrates unexpected independence while making a life-altering decision—her choice of husband. John Brooke, a self-effacing tutor, wins the March family’s approval, except for Aunt March, who vows to disinherit Meg if she insists on marrying ‘“that Brooke.’” Meg defies her aunt’s and her own aspirations of marrying her way into wealth. With an ease and grace that is perhaps only possible in a fictional narrative, Meg navigates her domestic disappointments and disasters with negligible turbulence. This does not capture the resentment that simmers within women who have devoted their lives to their homes, husbands, and offspring and received little-to-no appreciation for the unacknowledged labor that is simply labelled as their duty. Meg’s equanimity when life takes its own course and deviates from her well-laid plans pales in comparison to Beth’s tremendous tranquility in the face of tragedy.
As a child, I saw Beth as an angel, an unattainable standard of virtue. The worldly preoccupations that drove her sisters—ambition, vanity, desire, passion—seemed to have left her untouched: “I am not like the rest of you; I never made any plans about what I’d do when I grew up,” she says. It was only when I learnt of the fate that awaited her character that my impression of Beth became less generic and more specific, particularly as I experienced grief myself at increasingly close quarters. An aunt, barely in her late forties, left us unexpectedly in March 2016: a self-inflicted death. I had last met her in February at a wedding in Delhi, when she had clasped both my hands and told me, “Life is too short.” In October 2017, my then-boyfriend was found lifeless in his room in Pune one morning; he was twenty-seven. After my aunt’s death, while I was living in London, completing my PhD, I turned towards Rumi, towards the Bhagavad Gita, towards Buddhism, towards a semblance of spirituality that I had shunned for much of my life. I sought some solace in these discrete spiritual approaches, all of which suggested that this material world is not all that we have. After my partner’s death, I returned to India a day too late to attend his funeral. I no longer sought solace. I felt like fresh clay that was being molded into a person that I could barely recognize. All my aspirations fell off, like excess baggage on an overloaded truck. Family, friends, and forgiveness organically substituted academia, a career, and financial security as my priorities. I finally understood Beth’s quiet contentment in the present and her disinterest in the future. She seemed to have an innate grasp over what several Eastern philosophical traditions advocate: beyond the present moment, all else is illusion. Alcott bestows Beth, only nineteen, with a profound ability to apprehend the transience of our lives: “It’s like the tide, Jo, when it turns,—it goes slowly, but it can’t be stopped.”
Forbearance and fortitude are not the domain of Beth alone in Little Women; its fountainhead is Mrs. March. As a young girl, I was bewildered by the archetypal and unflagging maternal love that Mrs. March embodies. She did not correspond to the maternal figure in my life. Where was Mrs. March’s exhaustion, the embittered rants, and the anger? My mother’s life has been devoted to that torturous shifting goalpost: the approval of others. From the stern confines of the parental home, she transitioned via an arranged marriage to an undemonstrative and demanding conjugal home. Her life has not been what she had imagined for herself. In fact, my mother has not been granted the agency to even imagine a life for herself. A loving husband with a strong sense of humor and a sage-like ability to detach himself from the daily disappointments of life could hardly fulfil that restless, aching desire for autonomy. Over the years, my mother’s desire for autonomy was replaced by an obsessive concern for others and others’ opinions, too. It was a concern that she felt was not reciprocated; others’ opinions, when they differed from her own, felt like disapproval. No wonder she was easily angered.
And she was not the only one. When I reread Little Women last summer, I noticed an exchange between Mrs. March and Jo that had escaped me all these years. When Jo confesses that she is struggling with her temper, Mrs. March says, “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and still hope to learn not to feel it.” As a grown woman, I could see what would have made Mrs. March “angry nearly every day”: her aging husband who volunteered to serve in the Civil War; being left to fend for her four young daughters and herself; the idealism inculcated in her by her husband that permits her no human frailty. Instead of delving into why she is angry, Alcott focuses on how Mrs. March deemed her anger a vice and learnt to suppress it with the help of her mother and then her husband. Jo recalls, “I used to see father sometimes put his finger on his lips, and look at you with a very kind, but sober face; and you always folded your lips tight, or went away.” This chilling image of a woman being silenced reminded me of a gesture of my father’s that never failed to upset my mother: a raised hand, with the palm facing her, as though he is trying to halt traffic—an indication that he wanted her to stop speaking.
Over the years, my feelings have changed. Where I used to fear my mother’s anger, then resented it—now, finally, I empathize with it. The irony lies in the fact that my empathy for my mother stems from my own anger at being silenced—by my father and by her. Their firstborn, their son grew up to become progressively violent and abusive in a manner that was far more sinister than the stereotypical bullying big brother. Overwhelmed by one demanding offspring, my parents seemed to have little left in the tank for the other. They were bombarded by the relentlessly excessive emotions of their son and were thereby unable to countenance the most inconspicuous trace of turbulence in their daughter. They are not without remorse today. My parents were, after all, the ones who introduced me to the world of reading, which then led me towards academia, an unpredictable pursuit that they have wholeheartedly supported. I have journeyed from silence to reading to speech. My life is now characterized by almost incessant articulation, whether through my research and writing or in the classroom, where I dabble with various pedagogical methods to engage increasingly distracted students, not unlike Jo and Bhaer in Jo’s Boys—but that is another story for another day and another essay.
Megha Agarwal has taught Literature at the School of Liberal Arts, NMIMS University, Mumbai and for the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) at Chatrabhuj Narsee School, Mumbai. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests include mythology, intertextuality, and film.