A few years ago, I read Little Women for the first time in about a decade. It was December and I was in the Alps, which felt appropriate. Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel opens a few days before Christmas in snowy Massachusetts, with Jo March complaining that “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.” The March sisters are poor; their father recently lost most of his money and is now serving as a chaplain in the Civil War.
Little Women had been one of my favourite books as a child, and I expected my return to it to be pleasantly nostalgic. I was disappointed. Its moralising stuck in my throat. The highlight of the girls’ Christmas is a letter from their father, which their mother reads aloud. “Tell them I think of them by day, pray for them by night, and find my best comfort in their affection at all times.” So far, so good. Then, “I know they will… do their duty faithfully, fight their bosom enemies bravely, and conquer themselves so beautifully that when I come back to them I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women.” The idea of girls learning to “conquer themselves” in order to become “little women” might not trouble an eight-year-old, but it makes uncomfortable reading for an adult. Every chapter is a sermon instructing the March girls—and Little Women’s female readers—to tame their tempers and dampen their ambition. The book’s very title should have been a warning, not to mention that of its sequel, Good Wives.
I remembered this when I read Samantha Ellis’s recent bibliomemoir How To Be A Heroine (Chatto & Windus). The bibliomemoir is autobiography told through literature; in Ellis’s case, through the assessment of her literary heroines. Rereading favourite novels, Ellis realises how few of them have female characters who will enrich her adult life as a playwright, feminist and single woman. When she gets to Little Women she, like me, is shocked. So Ellis puts the book down and turns to Anne of Green Gables, with its emphasis on imagination rather than purification; to Pride and Prejudice, The Women’s Room and Cold Comfort Farm. Ellis’s ideal heroine is kind, empathetic and never loses hope. She also knows her own mind, kicks against convention and puts herself first where necessary.
Bibliomemoirs such as How To Be A Heroine—other recent examples include The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead and Horace & Me by Harry Eyres—rely on a distinction between narrated and narrating selves. The narrated self is naïve and conflicted, unsure of what she wants and how to get it. The narrating self—the narrator now looking back at her past—is mature and coherent. If she doesn’t yet have what she wants, she certainly knows what it is. She has been educated by life and literature.
The fictional counterpart of the bibliomemoir is the bildungsroman, the “novel of development” which traces its protagonist’s progress from childhood to maturity and self-awareness. By the end of both bibliomemoir and bildungsroman, the distinction between the narrating and narrated selves has been overcome, and the individual is ready to live beyond the book’s pages as a fully-formed member of society. This isn’t to say that the bibliomemoirist’s reading is complete. Ellis is unusually candid about this, acknowledging that “maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time.” Even so, there is a sense that she has identified and corrected the misreadings of her earlier unfinished self, and reached a form of enlightenment. She has shed the desires that conflict with her liberal feminism. No longer does she fetishise physical and mental suffering, as exemplified by Katy Carr (What Katy Did) and Esther Greenwood (The Bell Jar); no longer is she drawn to religious extremism (Franny Glass from Franny and Zooey).
These rejections appear to have come naturally to Ellis, even if not always painlessly; the process of growing up has been one in which her preferences and beliefs have aligned. Without this alignment, How To Be A Heroine could not exist. A bibliomemoir which leaves its author as confused and conflicted as she was at the start is as unthinkable as a Great Expectations in which Pip never discovers his benefactor’s identity or a Jane Eyre which ends before Jane can return to Mr Rochester.
But what if one’s preferences and beliefs do not align so neatly? What if you like something not in spite of its objectionable values, but because of them—and in spite of yourself? Sure, I stumbled through the first few pages of Little Women, but after that I began to enjoy Alcott preaching at me. The more saccharine and moralistic the book, the more it praised the virtues of self-denial and acceptance, the happier I was. The main character of Little Women is Jo March, but its moral centre is her younger sister Beth. Beth is very good, very passive and very shy: too shy to go to school or play the piano in company. I know that Jo—impulsive, boyish, full of writerly ambition—is a better role model for young girls, but I was a shy child and I'm not a particularly daring adult—I have limited interest in Jo’s pluckiness. Beth’s path is clear and extreme, and appealing for both those qualities: she always stays at home, she always gives in, and everyone loves her for it. There’s something seductive in the idea of sidestepping the endless negotiations with the world that constitute being alive. Still more seductive is the framing of this cowardice as a moral choice.
There is a divide between what I like and what I want to like. Even in the novels that celebrate female strength and ambition, I’m drawn to characters who lack such qualities. In Pride and Prejudice, I admire Elizabeth’s wit and refusal to compromise, but I’m more interested in Charlotte Lucas, whose compromise borders on sacrifice, and in Elizabeth’s excessively sweet and passive sister Jane. When I read Jane Eyre, I’m disappointed there isn’t more about Jane’s schoolfriend Helen Burns, whose extreme and ascetic piety makes her unfit for this world. Like Beth March, she dies in her teens. In short, I don’t think I’d do a very good job of identifying, as Ellis does, literary heroines to fortify and inspire me.
Fictional female role models don’t play much part in No Regrets, published at the end of last year by the Brooklyn magazine n+1. The book consists of three transcribed discussions between women affiliated with the magazine—writers, artists, activists and academics. It is a follow up to What We Should Have Known (2007), a volume of conversations intended to provide college students with a “directed guide… to the world of literature, philosophy and thought.” In both works, the participants talk about the books that have influenced them, the books they wish they’d read and those they could have done without. Dayna Tortorici writes in her introduction to No Regrets that it is a “book of women talking about the processes of becoming themselves,” which makes it sound very much like a bibliomemoir. But the number of participants (there are 13 in total) and the conversational format release the women’s individual narratives from the pressure of conclusion, making room for the ambivalence which the bibliomemoir denies. These are conversations about “becoming” without the expectation of having become.
As in How To Be A Heroine, there is an extensive bibliography at the end of No Regrets, but there’s very little overlap between the two. And while Ellis moves away from books whose depictions of women she finds problematic, many of the No Regrets participants have moved in the other direction. Sara Marcus says she spent her teens only reading books by women and later found herself wishing she hadn’t been so “resistant” to literature which didn’t share her values. Kristin Dombek describes how she used to reject any masculine or seemingly violent text, from Marx to Hemingway. Growing up has been a process of working towards a different way of reading: one that doesn’t rely on the assumption that “either it’s true or it’s evil. Either it’s true or it’s trying to hurt me.”
The difficult question is what that different way of reading should be. In the book’s second discussion, n+1 editor Carla Blumenkranz and writers Emily Gould and Emily Witt take on the subject of the “midcentury misogynists”: Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike. Their influence is such that no 21st-century writer can ignore them, however much they offend his or her feminist sensibilities. Blumenkranz opts for compartmentalisation. She favours Roth’s later novels on the grounds that they are “so craft driven” that she can focus on their aesthetic merits without troubling too much about their objectionable values. This kind of compartmentalising is common. Hip hop fans listen to songs with lyrics that express a level of misogyny they would be horrified to encounter outside the realm of art. Lovers of Victorian fiction tend not to let the racial politics of a former age entirely disrupt their reading pleasure.
Like the bibliomemoir, this approach is predicated on a belief in the coherent self. It ignores the possibility that a reader might not be able to chop a book up into parts she likes and parts she doesn’t—that she might, in fact, like and dislike a particular part at the same time, as I find both appealing and pernicious the moral world embodied by Beth March. While Blumenkranz reads late Roth, Emily Gould suggests a different way of approaching his work. She prefers his earlier, more openly misogynistic writing, which she celebrates for its “quality of being unrepentant.” This is inseparable from the books’ misogyny, but Gould finds it worth engaging with nonetheless: she values not the content of Roth’s misogyny, but its tone. A lack of repentance is as useful a quality for the feminist as for the committed misogynist.
The encouragement to be bold is a good thing; a certain lack of repentance, even aggression, is to be applauded. But how much do you want to learn from violence? From objectification? And while Gould’s approach offers a model for at once engaging and disagreeing with art which states its aims boldly, it’s no good at all when it comes to something like Little Women, which celebrates not boldness but modesty, sacrifice and submission.
Of course, you can turn your back on such books—the ones that express their sexist or otherwise disagreeable values insidiously rather than forthrightly. I could put Little Women to one side; I could refuse to read even Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice on the grounds that, while overall they promote values I admire, I have an unhealthy fondness for the parts of them that don’t. But though these books might not strengthen my feminist resolve, they serve another purpose. By provoking such a conflicted response, they make me pay attention to my own inconsistency. This kind of reading is not a straightforward argument between a book and a person, but an argument between different parts of a person—one that exposes the falseness behind the idea of the finished self which underpins the bibliomemoir.
In the postscript to What We Should Have Known, n+1 founding editor Keith Gessen writes that the most valuable parts of the book are not the debates the participants have about the state of literature, but the moments in which they talk about their youthful confusion, and how they “struggled to read and think their way out of” that confusion. “In the meantime,” Gessen tells his readers, you should “have the courage of your uncertainty.” In its accommodation of boldness and inconsistency, having the courage of your uncertainty seems to me a model for reading and being—one that needn’t be confined to a “meantime.” You can struggle with uncertainty without struggling out of it.
How to be a Heroine: Or, what I’ve learned from reading too muchBy Samantha Ellis (Chatto & Windus, £16.99)
No Regrets(n+1, £6)
