Mined from the notebooks, Christmas day, Friday, December 25, 2020. Posted Monday night, December 29.

Kirstin Dunst as Amy March in the 1994 film adaptation of “Little Women”.
All the March sisters in "Little Women" come in for some ribbing from their author. Each sister makes herself a tad ridiculous with their vanities and minor character flaws and faults: Meg is vain about her looks and takes advantage of her place as the eldest to order her sisters about; Jo is vain about her free-spiritedness and too quick to lose her temper; and even the good-natured, self-effacing, eager to please Beth, is vain about her musical talent and her shyness sometimes seems more like cowardice and sometimes like the wrong sort of pride. But Amy, the youngest, is the special target of Alcott’s satire. Naturally, as the youngest, she sees herself as being in competition with her big sisters for their mother’s approval, but she is too given to praising herself and always ready to one-up the others. She wants to be seen as being as virtuous and self-sacrificing as the household saint Beth, as artistically talented as the budding playwright and novelist Jo, as lady-like, grown-up, and pretty as Meg, the family beauty, and smarter and wiser in the ways of the world than all three. “Poor Petrea” is a comic character in “The Home”, a novel Alcott had read and taken to heart when she was around Amy’s age at this point in the book:
If anyone had asked Amy what the greatest trial of her life was, she would have answered at once, “My nose.” When she was a baby, Jo had accidentally dropped her into the coal hod, and Amy insisted that the fall had ruined her nose forever. It was not big nor red like poor “Petrea’s”, it was only rather flat, and all the pinching in the world could not give it an aristocratic point. No one minded it but herself, and it was doing its best to grow, but Amy felt deeply the want of a Grecian nose, and drew whole sheets of handsome ones to console herself.
And a few pages later...
"I think being disgraced in school is a great deal tryinger than anything bad boys can do," said Amy, shaking her head, as if her experience of life had been a deep one. "Susie Perkins came to school today with a lovely red carnelian ring. I wanted it dreadfully, and wished I was her with all my might. Well, she drew a picture of Mr. Davis, with a monstrous nose and a hump, and the words, 'Young ladies, my eye is upon you!' coming out of his mouth in a balloon thing. We were laughing over it when all of a sudden his eye was on us, and he ordered Susie to bring up her slate. She was parrylized with fright, but she went, and oh, what do you think he did? He took her by the ear—the ear! Just fancy how horrid!—and led her to the recitation platform, and made her stand there half an hour, holding the slate so everyone could see."
"Didn't the girls laugh at the picture?" asked Jo, who relished the scrape.
"Laugh? Not one! They sat still as mice, and Susie cried quarts, I know she did. I didn't envy her then, for I felt that millions of carnelian rings wouldn't have made me happy after that. I never, never should have got over such a agonizing mortification." And Amy went on with her work, in the proud consciousness of virtue and the successful utterance of two long words in a breath.
---from “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott.
Recent Comments