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Little Women follows the lives and loves of four sisters growing up during the American Civil War, using emotional entanglement among family members as the clue to describe the happiness of the March’s family union. It is loosely based on Louisa May Alcott’s own experiences in her childhood. The novel describes their progress about how they become good and mature women with the additional strains of romance. The story is simple but real and touching. Published more than 100 years ago, it has been repeatedly put onto screen and translated into different languages, becoming literary classic and world’s treasure.
Little Women is the model of all the works that describe the experience of women’s growth in American family. It set aside the religious preaching, but directly describes real life, which makes the novel unique (李巧玲33). The novel fully embodies the independent spirit of women in the new era, and the heroines in the novel dissatisfied with the life of housewives’ style. They want to step into society, pursue economic independence and achieve their life purpose by bringing their talents into full play. It attracted generations of readers to pay attention to women’s growth, so as to arouse the female’s consciousness and develop female literature, leading females to independence and freedom.
1. The Relationship Between Males and Females
1.1 Examples of the Embodiment of the Patriarchal Society
In a long patriarchal society, women have almost no status, and their positions often depend on the relationships with their husbands. Moreover, women would be belittled as accessories of men.
There are many initiation novels in American history, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, Invisible Man, The Catcher in the Rye, Go Tell It on the Mountain, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings etc. Paying a lot of attention to the growth of males is in sharp contrast to the neglect of the growth of female, which is an inevitable result of a patriarchal society (黄然 50).
“In the colonial period, women were largely excluded from formal education.” (Xu Jie) In the United States, the traditional concept is that the man goes out to work while the woman looks after the house. That is to say, women should only concentrate on their family, but for men the world is their whole society. The students that were received by ordinary schools were all boys, while women were thought that training them to do housework was enough (陈友放 and 陈静 37). Some people also believed that marriage is female’s highest goal in life. Women could not go out of their homes to work for money, so women could only rely on their husbands for a living. Also, traditionally, it is believed that the mind of men is better than women, so they needed their husbands to guide them on emotionally.
Until the 1760s, the vast majority of middle-class families’ children would go into the public schools, learning basic knowledge of reading, writing and mathematics systematically. Nevertheless, only no more than 10 percent of students could enter junior high school to continue their education, most of which were boys, and most girl’s education only ended up after graduation from primary school.
Many views can support the fact that male enjoys an advantage than females in a patriarchal society. Karl Marx believes that women’s oppression was the result of social developing at a certain stage. Besides, in Weber’s opinion, under patriarchy women and children are the property of family, and women are attached to men because under normal circumstances, men have an advantage in physical strength and intelligence. Heidi Lo Hartmann believes that piding labor according to gender is a fundamental mechanism of a capitalist society. It maintains the superiority of men against women. In this sense, it can be said that capitalism takes the advantage of patriarchy. A combination of capitalism and patriarchy reduces women to subordinate status in four aspects: women are at a disadvantage in the labor market; women’s wages are low so they have to rely on men; married women should do housework; doing housework has legitimacy for women in the capitalist system, intensifying the disadvantage of women in the labor market (王金玲 58-80).