"Eyes become clearer with tears
The heart grows warmer because of its troubles."
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Text | Paris Night Rose
Figure | Google
According to a foreign survey, Louisa Alcott's novel: "Little Women", is the favorite novel of women between the ages of 6 and 60.
This novel with an autobiographical nature is just a very simple portrayal of 4 young sisters, who have very different personalities, and their hobbies and pursuits are also very different.
From childhood, they have experienced changes in employment, society and marriage, and everyone has finally chosen their own way out and destination after being confused and entangled.
But it is such a simple book that has moved countless women.
Because the author does not dogmatically tell women how to live this life, but shows all women that your life and choices have multiple possibilities.
You can choose to get married, or not to marry; you can choose a career, or love; you can live rebelliously and freely, or you can choose to be a lady and a noblewoman.
None of this is the most important thing, what is important is that you understand: what type of woman you are, what you pursue, what you aspire to.
01
When a publisher, hoping that Louisa May Olcott, would write a story about girls, Louisa did not expect that her work would provoke such a wide discussion and have such a profound impact.
In her novel, she tells the story of four sisters in the 1860s who lived in high society but came from a poor family.
The eldest of them, 16 years old, is named Meg, who is beautiful and kind, gentle and full of motherhood.
The 15-year-old girl, Joe, is a very different existence from her sister, she is full of boyishness, wild and noisy, she is imaginative, emotional, energetic, likes to write, behaves in a manner that does not conform to ladylike norms, and often leads other sisters to perform their own scripts in the living room.
Beth, a 13-year-old girl, is the third oldest in the family, she is sensitive and delicate, full of love, likes to take care of abandoned dolls, dolls without arms, she is so kind that she seems a little delicate, and because she likes to talk about the piano, she is full of artists' sensitivity and neuroticism.
12-year-old Amy, conceited and selfish, beautiful and full of vanity, she is obviously beautiful, but she is very dissatisfied with her nose, committed to correcting her appearance, and making her words and deeds, full of ladylike temperament, can shine in social occasions.
And Laurie is the only heroine in the book, and many people take it for granted that such a perfect male protagonist is tailored for the heroine Joe.
After all, the wealthy Laurie lived next door to them, and when he came home from boarding school in Switzerland to accompany his lonely grandfather, he quietly observed the March family and was full of envy for their lively and happy life.
And Joe was the first to discover him and the first to make friends with him and bring him to his sisters.
However, in the end, Laurie confessed to Joe many times, but Joe repeatedly refused.
In the end, Laurie falls in love with Amy, a girl who is better suited to be his wife.
In the novel, Amy likes to draw, although she wants to become a painter, but obviously, she lacks the purity of an artist, a skill, it seems that only to make her ladylike temperament, to a greater extent.
So, in the final destination of the 4 girls, Amy married the handsome and golden Laurie, like any girl of that era, which was the most decent and enviable traditional way out.
However, the author did not criticize her choice, but believed that it was determined by Amy's own character, and for a girl with vanity and at the same time beautiful looks, this choice was in line with their own interests and in line with her heart, so Amy did not take the wrong path, but finally took a path that suited her best.
As for Joe March, she was bold and wild, rebellious and free, and though Labor pursued her hard, and though all readers longed for them to be together, the author, gave her a completely different choice.
Laurie may be fine, but what Joe needs is a man who understands her dreams, can give her writing advice, and can mentally guide and walk with her.
So, in the novel, even though Laurie is perfect, the free Joe chooses a professor who is many years older than himself.
Many fans are dissatisfied with this, but in fact, it is their own cognitive limitations.
Who says that a woman must marry someone, who says that a woman must marry a handsome, rich man?
Couldn't she marry a, knowledgeable, erudite, soul mate, even if she was destitute.
This is Joe's rebellion, and it is also Joe's inevitability.
Louisa, who sees better than most women, is Joe's way out, not the way out of ordinary girls, Joe's way out, is a female writer, should have the perfect way out.
02
In the novel, there are no conflicting events, except for the time when Beth died, everyone wept for it, most of the time, the novel is full of all kinds of small daily life.
Someone went skating, someone wrestled, some cats gave birth to kittens, and Joe March wanted everyone to walk away when he was creating.
Here, the characters are not charming, the events are not thrilling, just like the situation that occurs in all families.
Dad is not at home, Mom is kind and loving, and children have their own habits and lives.
But the simpler something is, the more complex it is.
Because there is no story that can move people more than the epic of a girl, the life choices of a group of girls.
How an ordinary little girl experiences twists and turns and finally finds her own life is the most concerned thing and the most confusing thing for all women.
There are many people in this world who are committed to teaching us how to succeed, but no one is teaching a girl how to grow into an adult and how to live up to her life.
Women, educated to live for their children, for their parents, for the right things, but not taught to live for themselves, to live for what they want to do.
Little Women, did it.
When publishers and fans force Louisa, Joe March, to marry Laurie, because they are so talented, because Laurie is the male protagonist, because Laurie satisfies all the fantasies of girls, is so gentle, kind, handsome, rich, and attracts the attention of all girls.
Louisa makes Joe, following her inner choices, or following her rebellious thoughts, fall in love with an old German professor with a grumpy temper.
He wasn't as young as Laurie, not as rich as Laurie, not even as handsome as Laurie.
But he had the virtue that he had a certain literary literacy that he could see at a glance that Joe March's novels had flaws there.
That was enough, his wisdom, his intellect, and his love for Joe was enough to beat everything.
To a certain extent, it is Joe's choice that allows her to break through the limitations of women, the limitations of the times.
Louisa wrote in a letter to a friend: "Joe should continue to be a literary old maid, but so many enthusiastic young ladies have written to me, clamoring for her to marry Laurie or someone, and out of willfulness I have made her an interesting combination.
But as Louisa tried to imply to us at the outset: Laurie was a fool, and though, handsome and rich, satisfied with all the fantasies of girls, he was not a serious man. He's not like Joe, who struggles to think about things and, in the dark, seeks meaning in life.
Barr, on the other hand, is completely different.
He was a distinguished professor in Germany, now a German tutor, and he was forty years old, poor, and wearing crumpled clothes.
He and Joe are good friends and have the same experience of having to break their dreams in order to make money.
At that time, Joe was writing superficial, tacky, sensational stories in the newspaper in order to make money, and after Barr saw it, he didn't laugh at her and didn't stand idly by.
He understood her, and he told her that she was wrong to write such garbage, that she was wasting her talents, and that even though he had made a lot of compromises for his own life, he tried to help Joe, not to let the girls he liked, do those compromises.
And Joe has a lot of respect for him, and she listens to him, burns those bad novels, and reimagines what she really wants to write.
In life, Mom is the source of wisdom for all, and Mom tells Meg and Joe that being loved by a good man is the best thing a woman can ever do.
But the good man that moms thought was a man like Laurie.
Joe needs good men, not men like that.
If Joe chooses Laurie, he will live in the human world, with no worries, but if Joe chooses Barr, these two partners who have no money, no beauty, and no luck will open the door of love, the understanding and integration of the soul.
Joe can choose not to get married, but if she gets married, she had better choose such a man so as not to lose her creative passion and talent.
03
Great women always influence great women, and great literature affects generations of women.
The year 1857 was the most desperate and helpless moment of Louisa's life.
Because in 1856, her favorite sister, infected with scarlet fever, fell ill and died, and the house they lived in was purchased with Emerson's financial support.
This family is destitute, and Louisa, unable to find a job, lives on relief. She could choose to marry, but she was not willing to compromise.
While reading Charlotte Brontë's biography, she was inspired by this strong female writer, whose ideals, their lives, all have many similarities, which made Louisa choose to stick to her ideals.
Later, she created Little Women.
Unexpectedly, this book has influenced and inspired more women to stick to their dreams and find their own lives.
Feminist Simone de Beauvoir, when she was a child, often played the game of "Little Women" with her sister, and Beauvoir always played Joe, and she later said: I told myself that I was like her, and that I would be better and find my place.
Later, her and Sartre's mutually supportive open marriage shocked the world.
Susan Sontag, claimed in the interview: "She would never have become a writer without Joe March's example.
Cynthia Ozik, on the other hand, wrote: "I read Little Women a thousand times, and it made me be myself."
It may be hard for you to imagine that it is such a simple novel that is completely more influential than we can imagine.
Nobel Laureate in Literature, Doris Lessing, Canada's most famous novelist, Margaret Atwood, and British women writer, A. Lessing. S. Byert, the writer of The Twilight Zone, Stephanie Meier, has said that the book has inspired and direction them.
This list of celebrities is long, with influences ranging from the upper class to the middle class to the lower classes.
But all those affected have a common identity, women.
They had their own dreams, but they didn't dare to insist on it, because in the society at that time, because no one around them did such a thing.
They weren't quite sure if the path they wanted to take was the right one, they didn't want to be an outlier, and they had no other references.
Whether it's Little Women, Joe March, or Louisa herself, in that traditional society, like a bellwether, they don't focus on the grass in front of them, but see a farther direction.
They longed for a world beyond the fence, and then they did so, giving the hesitant women a feeling: Maybe I can try too.
Therefore, they broke through the limitations and let women have more possibilities.
It also makes all women understand a truth, it turns out that from a little girl to a big heroine, women only need to follow their hearts.
04
Long before she wrote Little Women, Louisa vowed never to marry, a decision that undoubtedly stemmed from her observations of the union of her parents.
Louisa's father, Bronson Olcott, was an intellectual, or rather, a thoughtful man, a member of the New England Transcendentalist Club.
Other members of this club, including Emerson, Thoreau.
These people, both writers and philosophers, were pioneers of progressive education, believing in fresh air and realizing self-worth, outweighed the meaningless busyness of modern man.
Although to some extent, they are right, such as Thoreau, who lived in seclusion on the shores of Walden Lake for two years, through self-reliance, close to nature, to think about the problem of survival, and the meaning of life, and created the masterpiece "Walden", which became a classic of transcendentalism.
But Thoreau was not married, had no financial concerns, and as for Emerson, status and fame were there, and they could not worry about money, but Bronson Alcott was not the same, he was not wrong, but he had a family.
He is first of all a father, a husband, and secondly, he can pursue his ideals.
But Mr. Bronson, throughout his life, lived for his idealism.
His most famous project was in 1843, when he and a friend, in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, founded a utopian community, Fruit Fields.
He saw it as the Garden of Eden, a place to keep humanity away from sin.
Here, people do not eat animals, eat only vegetables, do not come into contact with alcohol and milk, do not live dependent on exploitative animals and labor, they are committed, living a natural, and primitive life to help them taste the purity of life.
If this project has attractive qualities in today's business society and the impetuous Internet era, then in that era, it was whimsical.
Projects that are too idealistic can only be attributed to ideals in the end.
No one wanted to join, and seven months after the team, it was announced that it was disbanded.
Even his most loyal friend, the friend who provided him with money and life support, Emerson, felt that Bronson was too idealistic.
In his forties, Bronson basically gave up the effort to make a living, he did not work, only thinking, which meant that his huge family, wife and four daughters, could only rely on themselves and try to survive.
They are very poor, and many times bread and boiled water are the main food.
They accepted handouts from relatives and friends, mainly Emerson's financial support, to survive.
When Louisa was in her twenties, she found that writing horror stories could earn a good income, so for a long time, she had been writing pulp fiction for financial gain.
This left her psychologically, with two shifts.
First of all, she despises her father, because he rarely takes care of his family, so the role of father in the novel, especially in "Little Women", is completely missing.
To a certain extent, Louisa erased her father, both because of revenge and because she felt in her heart that whether it was her father or her husband, it did not matter at all.
But at the same time, she idolized Emerson, a philosopher who was many years older than herself but helped and supported her family.
She once said in her diary that she had written many letters to Emerson, but in the end she did not send a single one.
Emerson, on the other hand, gave Louisa not only financially, but also spiritually.
Out of his concern for women, for his younger generations, he took great care of the little girl of this friend's family, but for Louisa, this image replaced the role of father.
So much so that in Little Women, Louisa is Joe March, the ultimate chosen partner, full of Emerson's shadow.
A serious man, a responsible man, a man who understands her, a man who gives guidance and help while allowing her to trust, rely on, and be many years older than herself.
So, people say, "Little Women" is actually the autobiographical novel of the author, Louisa Alcott.
05
In fact, "Little Women" and Luisa her own life do have a lot of overlap.
Although Louisa hated her father's idealism, her father's education also brought her a subtle influence.
For example, Louisa's father insisted that wealth is not the most important thing, what is important is spiritual abundance, and children should fully enjoy knowledge and wisdom, so when Louisa was a child, although material scarcity, her father let her read a lot of books.
In the novel "Little Women", Louisa also unconsciously conveys this idea.
The wealthy Laurie, in Joe March's view, was the fool she preferred, the seriously thinking Barr.
For example, Joe in the novel, in order to survive, had to write a story he didn't like, and in order to live, he had to make a certain degree of compromise.
In real life, in order to survive, Louisa had to earn an income by sewing clothes, washing clothes for others, caring for children, working as a governess, as well as domestic helpers, and even writing pulp fiction.
In Little Women, the father is absent, but the mother is strong, fraternal, and admirable.
In reality, Louisa's mother is also a respectable figure, and the reason why Louisa herself works so hard is that she hopes that her mother's life will be easier.
Louisa's mother was a feminist, and her father advocated abolition and civilian education, so although Louisa suffered a lot of material deprivation, spiritually, the education given by her parents was very avant-garde and correct, which laid a spiritual foundation for her to live a different life.
Although, Louisa was so concerned about the difficult childhood that she said after adulthood: Money is my mercenary means and end.
And once said: She wrote Little Woman because she believed it would sell well.
But Louisa was born into a family of strong principles that prioritized intellectual and spiritual pursuits over material pleasures.
So, in the big right and wrong, or the important link, you can see that Louisa's choice is very clear.
You can starve, but you can't go against your original intention.
Louisa's mother, a descendant of a prominent family, was one of the first paid female workers of all time.
Her mother understands the plight of women and is bitter about the injustices in the world.
Therefore, the mother is a feminist, who has long been running for women's rights and suffrage, and has even made great contributions to the Massachusetts Constitution's struggle for equal political rights for women.
Louisa, on the other hand, has undoubtedly inherited the mantle of her parents.
In the novel, on Christmas morning, the girls donate breakfast to poor families.
In real life, daughters, because of their mother's teachings, once gave breakfast to a hungry family, so that they were hungry.
Louisa's family of origin embraced extreme liberalism, self-sacrifice, and the principles of fraternity.
So, when Louisa grew up, unsurprisingly, she became an abolitionist and a feminist
She never married, but was willing to give her all to society.
In the 1870s, Louisa wrote for a women's rights journal and went door-to-door in Massachusetts to encourage women to vote.
In 1879, the state passed a law allowing women to vote in local elections on anything involving education and children, and Louisa registered as the first woman to register to vote in Concord.
Despite the resistance, she, along with 19 other women, voted at a town meeting in 1880. In 1920, decades after Louisa's death, the Nineteenth Amendment was finally ratified.
When the American Civil War broke out, Louisa worked as a nurse at a joint hospital, so much so that she contracted injuries halfway through, became terminally ill, and nearly died.
Throughout her life, she fought for the abolition of slavery and women's rights. It was something her father, her friend, had been hoping for years.
However, typhoid fever forced Louisa to return home, and because of the treatment for mercury chloride, she was poisoned by mercury and eventually died young.
In 1882, after Louisa's father suffered a stroke, Louisa finally chose to forgive.
That year, at the age of 55, she went to the hospital to visit her father.
She said to her father: Daddy, I am your Louisa, you are lying here, so happy, what are you thinking.
They talked for three days, and finally my father died.
Two days later, Louisa also passed away.
Unlike Joe March, Louisa never married, adopted only her niece, and lived an extremely simple life.
She once said in her diary that she ran until her death, and she said that she would always encourage female readers to challenge social norms about gender and fight all social inequalities through campaigning.
However, she eventually died young, but her work "Little Women" has been passed down forever, inspiring generations of women.
In the last stage of her life, Louisa forgave her father and understood that in a person's life, if there is a pursuit, it is doomed to lose.
Loss is not terrible, importantly, it is not worth it.
If you lose for the sake of the pursuit of the heart, the loss is not a loss, but a cost.
After Louisa's death in 1888, she was buried in a valley cemetery in Concord, near Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau, known as Writer Poe.
This writer, who has shortcomings in his life in the eyes of ordinary people, has finally achieved the ideal life.
Are there any flaws?
Inevitably.
However, if it is for the pursuit of the heart, then the lack of regret is an inevitability, a price.
Because there are gains and losses, it is not so difficult to accept.
06
Self-development, but it is said, one of the most common themes in literature, and one that many psychologists and philosophers agree with, is the importance of a purposeful life.
Finding a purpose and building your life around its pursuits can change lives and give meaning to them.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in his writings, said: Gradually, man became a miraculous animal, and it had to meet one more condition of existence than other animals: man must believe, and from time to time know why he exists.
A person who lives purposefully finds what Nietzsche called the "why" of their existence.
Therefore, a purposeful life is very important.
For women, figuring out why you live is figuring out how you should live.
As Richard Taylor expresses in Rebuilding Self-Esteem: Is what you're doing today exactly what you've been doing for years? If that's the case, then you're stuck, and no matter how many years you've been doing it, it doesn't mean you're going to do well. Your days go by day by day, and each day is like the other days, and no day adds anything to you except the accumulation of day by day.
The important thing is not to do it every day, but to do what you want to do every day.
It is because those deep desires give life passion, because those who want to do things in the depths of their hearts give meaning to life.
Many people cling to the illusory belief that a fulfilling life can be found by attaining some idealized end state.
For example, if we can earn a certain amount of money, achieve a certain social status, live in a certain beautiful mansion, and find a certain suitable spouse, our life will be full of value.
But our lives, good or bad, are not worth it, depending not on these external conditions, not on these universal standards, but on what we really want.
Living with purpose, having a certain goal, and working hard for it is the whole meaning of our lives.
Many people in our lives know from an early age what they want to do, what kind of people they are, and what kind of road they take, but some of them do not know what our mission as human beings is, nor do they know what our lifelong pursuit is.
We were in a fog and took a lot of detours.
Like Amy in Little Women, she is not like Joe March, who has a firm belief in her own firm life.
She has dreams and loves to draw, but in essence, she craves gaze, covets envy, craves worldly recognition and honor.
So, in the end, in the process of studying in Europe, after experiencing many useless efforts, she chose her own path.
For women, there is no distinction between any road, good or bad, what matters is whether it is suitable for you.
And Amy's journey tells us that you have to go out into the world, you have to try different things, as the ancient Greek poet Pinda wrote: You have to, through learning, to be yourself.
You can take detours, and importantly, you end up finding a way out worth dedicating your life to.
Richard Taylor, in his Rebuilding Self-Esteem, says: Your task is simply to find one or a few things that you're good at, and then, to succeed in those ways as your first priority in life.
Finding a goal is not complicated, but it is difficult to be honest with yourself and keep courage.
Luckily, there are countless great women, great works, that tell us that you are not alone in your efforts, your efforts, the efforts of all people.
You can understand a little late, but you can't always not understand; you can move slowly, but you can't be ignorant.
Because, only by knowing your goals, you can know what kind of life you want, can you work in one direction, and live a life that is worth the trip.
This is perhaps the most important truth that Little Women, which teaches all women: it doesn't matter if you get married or not, it doesn't matter what life you live, what you know what life you want to live, what kind of person you want to be, and what you work for.
Time can swallow everything
But it doesn't diminish in the slightest
Your great thoughts, your humor
Your kindness, and your courage
by Little Women
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