Post by Admin on Jan 8, 2020 20:01:23 GMT
One of the elements that makes Little Women such an enduring classic is the four women at the center of it, and the four wildly different personality types they represent: Meg, the responsible and forever compromising one; Jo, the fiery and ambitious one; Beth, the sensitive and shy one; Amy, the vain and social one. Every reader of Alcott’s book could identify with at least one of the characters, though they almost always aspired to be the tomboyish, indomitable Jo. Alcott by no means invented these personality types when she published her book in 1868, nor would she be the last to convey them by such clear delineations: just look at the ambitious one, the sensitive one, the sexy one, and the leader of Sex and the City, or the four mutant ninja turtles of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Look at how we label the members of boy bands! They’re all similar personality types (barring maybe the sexy one of TMNT) that stretch back to ancient Greek tradition and the concept of the four temperaments.
It’s easy to see where the women of Little Women fall among these personality types: Amy is sanguine, Jo is choleric, Beth is melancholic, and Meg is phlegmatic. Though we meet Amy as a young ridiculous girl who puts on the airs of a lady, she is clearly the most charismatic and sociable of the four, and the most avid social climber. But while Amy grows into her archetype (and defies its trappings), the other three are very firmly defined by their temperaments. Jo is the de facto leader of the group, the driven, ambitious, and independent sister who leads the girls on merry stage productions. Beth is the deep feeler and moral conscience of her sisters whose life revolves around her family. Meg is the eldest and by nature the peacekeeper, though her attempts are often met with cheery defiance.
These clear personality types make it easy to distinguish the four girls and — like many a story that revolves around these temperaments — end up becoming a seminal part in shaping readers’ own identities. Perhaps they identify with Meg and want to be more like Beth, or they see too much of themselves in Amy and become resentful of it. But the beauty of Little Women is that it doesn’t judge or mock any of these personality types. “Just because my dreams are different than yours, it doesn’t mean they’re unimportant,” Meg gently says to a bitter Jo, who can’t accept that her sister would choose the confines of marriage over a life on the stage. Alcott, who herself never bowed to the limited expectations for women at the time, would not constrain her characters to basic archetypes without highlighting the strengths, and flaws, in each of them. Her characters grow beyond their archetypes or upend our expectations of what that archetype entails. The vain, preening Amy turns out to be a pragmatic and emotionally intelligent woman; vice versa the independent Jo sees her hotheaded ways become an obstacle for her, while Meg’s compromising nature leads to her feeling forever entrapped.