An Alcott Advent: Love

Mary’s Magnificat is one of the most famous and most challenging scriptures, which is probably why Europeans tend to sing it in Latin, at least when there is an orchestra involved. It is Mary’s season, so often we see her in a manger, looking down, if her eyes are open at all, wrapped head to toe in powder blue. She would never say anything to ruffle feathers or make anyone uncomfortable. But if we listen to Mary, to the actual words attributed to Mary, she is the kind of woman who will look you directly in the eyes and tell you what’s what.

Mary is pregnant, and she shouldn’t be, so she goes to see her Auntie Elizabeth. You know the kind of aunt who won’t be disappointed in you when you are pregnant and you shouldn’t be. Maybe you have an aunt like this. Mary shows up and she sings a song, an ancient song of courage and reliance, the kind of song I imagine her Auntie Elizabeth teaching Mary and all the other kids in the family. Mary shows up pregnant and she shouldn’t be, which has never really been okay, and rather than apologizing or explaining, she says, “My soul magnifies the Lord,” or, “I help you see God.”

The world says she should feel ashamed. The norms say she is dirty and damaged. But she says no. The world says she should know her place, look down, and be quiet, but she knows who she is, and she sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” Now, if we could bypass 1,500 years of church mansplaining, Mary would be our feminist icon, and the church might actually be lifting up the lowly and de-throning the mighty, rather than micromanaging bodies or trying to post the Ten Commandments in public schools.

Even with the church muffling Mary’s voice, she is a guide and an example for us toward spiritual growth and maturity. And the real gift, when we listen to her voice rather than the stories of magical purity, is that she is imperfect. She leaves tween Jesus behind in Jerusalem for three days. She is annoyed when his ministry takes him away from family time. She has to “mom” him into ministry at a wedding in Cana. And she is there when the worst happens. She is powerful and wonderful and real, which I believe challenges us to grow in our faith and spirituality far more than a perfect, ethereal icon ever could.

The stories of our faith tradition, at least when they hold our deep attention, are filled with bold, brave, and imperfect people. And I think a key lesson from Mary’s Magnificat is that she knows who she is. She has a spiritual maturity that says, no matter what the world thinks she should or shouldn’t be, she will sing out, “My soul magnifies the Lord.”
Stories that help us grow up and into ourselves are often laden with the world’s norms, rules, and junk. The world around us has plenty of boxes and expectations, probably because it is easier to keep us in check if we haven’t really thought about who we actually are. And gender makes these limits, norms, and expectations even more strict, and that limits all of us, not just girls and women, even if that is often the easiest place to see it working most powerfully.

Mary knows who she is. So how do we follow in her footsteps? How do we grow up into ourselves and sing out, “My soul magnifies the Lord”? How do we practice, center, and take courage as perfectly imperfect people?

We are surrounded by stories with characters who help us see ourselves and be ourselves. And sometimes those stories come not from scripture, but from novels we’ve carried with us for years. The March sisters have taught me a great deal about courage, love, and becoming, but today I want to invite us to spend some time with Jo March.

Jo March, our bookish teen, is sometimes regarded as a feminist hero and sometimes as a feminist failure. Jo gets married, even after saying she never would, and later she starts a school for boys. And we, as modern readers, feel betrayed.

Perhaps when we look for perfection, we are still putting folks in boxes, just different boxes. Little Women shows four different girls growing up with different dreams, gifts, and hopes. And the gift is that none of theirpaths will be wrong. Meg will flat out say to Jo, “Just because my dreams are different from yours doesn’t mean they are less important.” The four sisters, and the aristocratic boy next door, are perfectly imperfect. In one moment they are deeply mature, and in the next they are so angry that they burn their sister’s manuscript or let her skate on thin ice.

They do get married, and if we are honest, even we modern readers are fascinated by relationships in stories. Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino sounded a lot like Louisa May Alcott when she named her annoyance at the public obsession over Rory Gilmore’s romantic life. Folks were Team Dean or Team Jess or Team Logan rather than Team Journalist or Team Author or Team Yale or Team Harvard. And it is not just Rory. It is Katniss Everdeen, and the girl with the vampire–werewolf love triangle, and all the kids in Harry Potter, and pretty much any story where someone is growing up. We have to know who they love.
This summer, I met a professor, Cathlin M. Davis, during conversations at Orchard House. She studied the kinds of letters young people, particularly tween girls, wrote to Louisa May Alcott alongside the kinds of letters tween girls write today to similar public figures. She found that the conversations, the questions, the struggles, and the dreams were remarkably the same. Everything is different. Women can own property, vote, and have a credit card without a man’s signature, not to mention smartphones and social media. But growing up is remarkably similar. There are growing pains that are not always physical, and middle school is hard, no matter how many pickled limes you may have.

Relationships have always been at the heart of our growing up. These include family relationships, sibling relationships, friendships, classmates, and even those first flickers of romantic relationships. Gender has always brought different pressures and has given both advantages and disadvantages.

In Alcott’s “blood and thunder” stories, which she sold under the name A. M. Barnard, her women were passionate and powerful, not always kind and never obedient to a man. There were lovers and struggles, anger and desire. This was the kind of writing that paid her family’s bills, and the kind of writing she never showed her literary hero, Emerson. In these works, written for an adult audience, you could find phrases like: “It was interesting to match him, and exciting to try my will against his in covert ways…over me he had no control.”
Or another epic example:
“I never obeyed a woman before, Jean. I think you are a witch.”
The protagonist responds, “I am a witch, and one day my disguise will drop away and you will see me as I am…love me at your peril.”
(If you want more of these tales, try reading Madeleine B. Stern’s collection in Feminist Alcott.)

Love me at your peril! If you are on the dating apps, I say put it on your profile. Love me at your peril—what a fantastic quote. I wish I had that line a long time ago.

Of course, a book for young people, particularly girls, in the 1860s might not work if you have Jo tell Laurie, “I am a witch, love me at your peril.” No parent would allow it, and no one would publish the book. But Jo turning down Laurie—the kind, fun, lovable, aristocratic boy next door—and the financial security he would have brought to the family, because she is true to her heart, is plenty edgy for 1868.

And the edge does not stop there. The March sisters are encouraged to study and learn, to write and paint, and to make up their own theatricals. They are allowed to be whole people, learning to live with all their emotions, even anger and jealousy. And most astounding of all, they are not ashamed to want fame and fortune. They use words like genius and ambition with the full encouragement of their family. For 1868, this is pushing boundaries in a big way, while somehow, given its sales, inviting the whole nation along.

This tension reflects not only Jo’s character, but also the life of Alcott’s mother, Abby or Abba May Alcott. Abba dreamed of a different future for herself and her daughters—one built on partnership in marriage, a sense of purpose, shared ambition and equal intellectual value. She was an advocate for women’s education and voting rights and she was passionate about a companionate marriage. The sense of marriage that is between two loving partners with mutual respect for their gifts and talents. 

We can hear Abba’s voice and journals echoed in Jo’s impassioned cry to Marmee in Gerwig’s film:

“Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for.”

Abba May wanted this life for herself, but her father arranged a sensible marriage for her, one with enough means to provide for a family. She chose her own path anyway. She could not go to Harvard like her brother Sam, but she could get his syllabus, read the books, and educate herself. She dreamed of being a teacher and making her own way.

This is how she met Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott. Both Sam and Abba were taken by Bronson’s charisma and ideas. Abba wanted to work with him, to build a school and reform education. He chose another woman for that work, and later confessed his love for Abba.

Bronson treated her as an intellectual equal, but he failed her and their family again and again financially. Abba’s father, her brother, and family friends like Emerson stepped in repeatedly to keep them from abject poverty. In fact, Bronson even changed his name from Alcox to Alcott to evade creditors before he re-invented himself as an educator.

They were trapped by the structure. There was no real way for a woman to keep a family financially afloat, even if she wanted to. Bronson’s idealism and utter impracticality drove the family into crushing debt and daily struggle. Abba and the girls did all they could, teaching, sewing, and taking in boarders. But women’s work did not pay then, and there is still a wage gap we need to close now. When her father died, he arranged for Abba’s inheritance to be placed in a trust so Bronson’s debts could not consume what might provide for Abba and her daughters.

A young Louisa heard her parents’ arguments, their separations, and the struggles caused by poverty and by her father’s impracticality. She called them “the pathetic family” in her letters and journals, and she loved them enough, in all their faults and failings, to work for their well-being.

And she succeeded because of certain gifts nurtured in the Alcott household. The girls were educated as much as girls could be and were encouraged to find their voices and refine their gifts. To be called “brilliant” or “a genius” was not rare, and certainly not shameful. Louisa knew other women who found professional success often did so in spite of their families’ discouragement or rejection.

Louisa was driven not only by her desire to write, but by her family’s needs. So when the money was too good to pass up, she wrote what she knew. Little Women shows the dreams of four girls and the boy next door. Every character daydreams of castles in the air. They name their boldest desires without being shamed for ambition or even pride in their gifts. Alcott’s “castles in the air” come directly from her teacher, Henry David Thoreau:

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

The gift of these characters is that everyone can see themselves. Everyone, even girls, can be inspired to ponder their own dreams, their own skills, and their own struggles, no matter the path they hope to take. Alcott makes transcendentalism something ordinary people can talk about.

The March sisters and Laurie talk honestly about marriage, partnership, love, and the refusal to love money. There is clear-eyed truth about the economics of marriage in the 1860s, rather than pretending it is all fairy tales and romance.

Maybe this is why Gretta Gerwig’s Amy gives Laurie an epic monologue based on elements of Chapter 44 

“Well… I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman. And as a woman, I have no way to make money, not enough to earn a living or support my family. Even if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the minute we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is.  It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.” 

In the end, every dreamer—not just Jo, but Laurie, Meg, and Amy—grows into a future that doesn’t exactly reflect the castles they built in the air. The story isn’t about fame and fortune, or even extraordinary wealth. The story told in Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys is the story of people who grow into themselves—whole and mature, loved and loving.

Alcott shows Jo marrying and opening a school for boys, which, like her father’s school, isn’t really just for boys after all. Meg marries for love, rather than wealth, as her Aunt March hoped. And if you read the second half of the book, you see that life isn’t always easy. No one is perfect. Amy burns Jo’s manuscript because she is angry at being left out. Jo wants Meg to run away and join the theater rather than marry John Brooks.

They all grow up, and they all have different paths and different dreams. All of them find the maturity of interdependence, a passion for community, and loving partnerships. Alcott invites us into what is timeless and universal about growing up: you must know yourself deeply, and maturity is about showing up with and for your community, fully present. It’s a story where growing up isn’t about conforming or checking all the boxes of society. Maturity isn’t about passing milestones; it’s about being fully who you are so you can show up in the world without losing yourself in people, partners, or projects. It’s about working through your ego and emotions so you can be there in hard moments and not be triggered.

So often we think growing up means getting a job and moving out of our parents’ house. Brené Brown speaks to the power of interdependence and quotes a social scientist: “To grow into adulthood as a social species is not to become autonomous and solitary, it’s to become the one on whom others can depend” (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone, p. 53).

In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown highlights interdependence. “Inter” means “between,” and it names the dependence between things—the quality or condition of being interdependent, or mutually reliant on each other. Mutuality and connection are strength (p. 83).

Growing up means real connection, rather than never needing anyone or anything. It means radical mutuality. And sometimes it means that the castles you built in the air as a young person become something even better in the end because you are not alone.

That’s the thing about growing up. To really grow up, you have to know who you are and work through the growing pains that come with self-reflection. This kind of maturity is the work of our faith—it’s not self-help because it’s not just about you. It means you and I do our self-work so we can show up in the world, fully present, ready to make this world “earth as it is in heaven.”

When Mary shows up to sing the Magnificat, she knows who she is. And it doesn’t matter that she is pregnant and she shouldn’t be. It doesn’t matter that she is a woman in an occupied country. It doesn’t matter that she is poor while some are rich. It doesn’t matter that she is a woman in a man’s world, and it certainly doesn’t matter that no one wants to hear from her. She sings a song about lifting the lowly and sending the rich away empty. She sings because she knows who she is, and the maturity of her faith means she will keep singing, keep working, keep mothering, and keep being a loud-mouth girl—because that’s how she helps us all see God.

May we have the courage to keep growing, keep learning, and keep singing. May it be so. Amen.