Pin it round your neck, and then it will be useful - Meg's shockingly revealing dress

Chapter 9 of Little Women, “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair,” that is where I want to spend my time today.  Bunyan describes Vanity Fair as the place where “all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.”

I can see why Pilgrim’s Progress has fallen out of favor as a children’s book.  Still that is just what Alcott’s chapter is about: Meg, the oldest sister, visits a marriage market, a fair where husbands are captured and wives are bought.  A party with the wealthy Moffats in Boston, I mean.

Meg’s sisters join her for the first few pages, as they pack her trunk and prepare her clothes.  The chapter is nothing but folds, silk, pins, ribbons.  Meg, sixteen, unworldly, and poor, only has one dress that is presentable at a fancy party; that is the crux of the action.  “My silk stockings and two pairs of [spick-and-]spandy gloves are my comfort,” she says, but that does not last.

That one functional dress is enough to escape Vanity Fair for one party, but a second does her in.  Her friends supply her with an appropriate dress, a blue silk “so tight she could hardly breathe” that is so revealing that only a frill and rose-bud bouquet “reconciled Meg to the display of her pretty white shoulders.”  She feels “’so queer and stiff, and half-dressed.’”  She wrestles with her dress’s train:

Meg smiled and relented, and whispered as they stood waiting to catch the time, "Take care my skirt doesn't trip you up.  It's the plague of my life and I was a goose to wear it."

"Pin it round your neck, and then it will be useful," said Laurie, looking down at the little blue boots, which he evidently approved of.

It was not until this point that I realized that Alcott was serious – that the shoulder-revealing dress was not unwise but immoral, not necessarily in its display of flesh but in its encouragement of the sin of vanity.  The dress is so dangerous that despite Laurie’s sarcasm, Meg finally throws herself into the party, dancing wildly and drinking champagne to the point of illness (“She was sick all the next day”).

A surprisingly jolly chapter, but all in the service of setting an example about how girls should and should not find husbands (not at balls, not in questionable dresses).

Speaking of jolliness, the rich Moffats, the mother and father – this is a curious little detail – are a “fat, jolly old gentleman” and a “fat, jolly old lady.”  The latter at one point “lumber[s] in, like an elephant, in silk and lace.”  Only one other character in the novel is fat, the wealthy Aunt March.  Or two characters, if you count her poodle, “a fat, cross beast” (Ch. 19).  Not every rich person in the book is fat, just most of them.

I keep forgetting to mention it, but Amanda at Simpler Pastimes is hosting a Classic Kiddie Lit Challenge this month, with a George MacDonald Princess and the Goblin readalong at the end of the month.  I have vaguely considered running a project.  Some fun!  Once I hit publish I will register Little Women over at her place.

The little books were full of help and comfort - Bunyan as structure in Little Women

Structure.  I thought the most interesting thing in Little Women – I mean in One – was the layer of structures Louisa May Alcott used to construct the book.  There are at least three.

1.  The year and seasons, roughly Christmas 1861 to Christmas 1862, with time passing at what feels like a natural rate.  “One July day she came in with her hands full…” I read at the beginning of Chapter 12, while Chapter 13 begins on “one warm September afternoon,” and “the October days began to grow chilly” at the head of Chapter 14.  Time moves differently in the sad, stressful November and December, so those months need more chapters.

2.  Episodes.  Many chapters belong to a single sister.  All four get their share.  All four have virtues to emulate and vices to expunge.  Sometimes we work as a group, sometimes we work on our own, so to speak.  The girls are always working, even while playing.

3.  Pilgrim’s Progress.  Alcott employs John Bunyan’s 1678 allegorical novel, and also its 1684 sequel, as a structural device throughout her own novel, both within the novel – meaning the characters read the book and refer to it – and outside of the novel, so to speak, in chapter titles and in the novel’s epigram, so that the first words of the book are actually Alcott’s adaptation of a poem from Pilgrim’s Progress: “Go then, my little Book” and encourage the “little tripping maids” to “choose to be \ Pilgrims better, by far, than thee or me.”  Alcott immediately blends her own novel with her model.

On that first Christmas, in Chapter 2, the girls all receive new copies of Pilgrim’s Progress, hidden under their pillows during the night, with each sister getting a different colored cover.  Which is great, right?  Those were the days.  These are the “little books” that the sisters are always reading for comfort and instruction.  The fictional characters are again modeling behavior for the actual reader engrossed in his own little book, as seen as Chapter 16 opens:

In the cold gray dawn the sisters lit their lamp and read their chapter with an earnestness never felt before.  For now the shadow of a real trouble had come, the little books were full of help and comfort, and as they dressed, they agreed to say goodbye cheerfully and hopefully, and send their mother on her anxious journey unsaddened by tears or complaints from them.

The Pilgrim’s Progress takes the place of the Bible for the March sisters.  I may well have missed a reference, but I believe the Bible is directly mentioned only once, in Chapter 33 – now we are in Two – where it is found in the possession of the 1848 revolutionary Professor Bhaer who keeps his edition of Shakespeare “with his German Bible, Plato, Homer, and Milton.”  In other words, the Bible is kept in the company of literature, not religious texts.  The fact that almost no one in the novel can even read this Bible is an additional irony.

Two unfortunately loses much of this overlaid structure.  The sequel becomes, as the passage about the books suggests, a kind of Bildungsroman for Jo, with the other sisters sidelined in one way or another, a functional but less complex way to organize the story.

Jane GS was inspired, when she read Little Women, to read The Pilgrim’s Progress as well, which more Alcott readers should do.  Bunyan’s book is sectarian and narrow, but also one of the great pieces of English prose, and I find that reading it in the context of Little Women softens its Calvinist harshness, which by itself is a debt I owe Alcott.

The Old Curiosity Shop - screeching and turning round and round again

Dickens tried something new in The Old Curiosity Shop. He borrowed an structure from another novel to prop up part of his own story. The journey of Nell and her grandfather is linked with that of Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress – Nell herself mentions this at the beginning of their pilgrimage:

“'Dear grandfather,' she said, 'only that this place is prettier and a great deal better than the real one, if that in the book is like it, I feel as if we were both Christian, and laid down on this grass all the cares and troubles we brought with us; never to take them up again.'” Ch. 15

I don’t think there is meant to be a one-to-one parallel between the episodes in The Old Curiosity Shop and those of The Pilgrim’s Progress – there are maybe only two or three of those.* Dickens is trying to create a story with a meaning greater than the sum of the episodes, so he borrows from what for many people was a classic, recognizable example. Does it work? I’m not convinced. As I wrote earlier this week, I value the novel more for its parts than its whole, and I have a general distaste for allegory that probably does not serve me well here. So let’s look at a part.

In a direct parallel with the Slough of Despond in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Nell and her grandfather have to cross (for “two days and nights”) a sort of industrial wasteland (outside of Birmingham, I guess), inhabited by despair and misery (or, to mimic Bunyan, Despair and Misery):

“On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. Then came more of the wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in their wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning round and round again; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.” Ch. 45

As night falls the description becomes more feverish. Bands of insurrectionists appear, carts filled with coffins wheel by, and Nell’s two attempts to ask for assistance are repelled by the even more degrading misery of the inhabitants of the place:

“'What would you have here?' said a gaunt man, opening it.

'Charity. A morsel of bread.'

'Do you see that?' returned the man hoarsely, pointing to a kind of bundle on the ground. 'That's a dead child. I and five hundred other men were thrown out of work, three months ago. That is my third dead child, and last. Do you think I have charity to bestow, or a morsel of bread to spare?'” Ch. 45

This is something new in Dickens, this industrial apocalypse. He’ll return to it in Hard Times, and elsewhere, although perhaps not in such a starkly symbolic fashion.

* There is also something going on with the recurring figure of Punch that I don’t fully understand. Punch-world seems to be an alternative to Pilgrim-world.