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“In her personal letters, Alcott often made fun of the marriages in part two of Little Women. She wrote to her friend Elizabeth Powell in March 1869 that “‘Jo’ should have remained a literary spinster.” However, despite her preferred ending, Alcott declared: “[P]ublishers wont [sic] let authors finish up as they like but insist on having people married off in a wholesale manner which much afflicts me.” In the same letter, she even claims that she expects “vials of
to be poured out upon my head” when she does not marry Jo to Laurie (Selected Letters 124–25). Did Alcott specifically craft her letter to Powell, believing that her friend would appreciate the more independent, self-reliant version of Jo March? Powell, nine years Alcott’s junior, was both a Quaker and, as early as age sixteen, an activist in abolition. Like Alcott, Powell had also taught school in the early 1860s.
In April 1864, she came to Concord to teach gymnastics, which Alcott and her older sister Anna joined (Journals 129). A year later, Powell became the gymnastics instructor at Vassar College, founded in 1861 as the first institution of higher education for women in the United States. In 1869, the year part two of Little Women appeared, Powell, unmarried at the time (she would later marry in 1872 and eventually, in 1890, become dean of women at Swarthmore College)
was clearly the type of woman whom Alcott admired: a strong, independent activist and champion of woman’s rights and racial justice. Did Alcott think Powell would approve her insistence that Jo March not marry and that the author only acquiesced to her editor’s desires? No known letters among the Niles-Alcott correspondence suggest that the publisher had any say here. The marriage decision was all Alcott’s.”-Daniel Shealy, Wedding Marches
Interesting! However, I wouldn’t say that the lack of letters from the publisher on this subject meant that Alcott wouldn’t have preferred to let Jo remain a “literary spinster”. She may have made the decision herself without any explicit pressure from the publisher, simply because she knew what the inevitable reaction from the publisher would have been if she hadn’t married Jo to someone. She was, after all, trying to sell the book--and she knew what publishers wanted.
Once she had decided to marry Jo to someone, she obviously chose the man quite deliberately. His being an immigrant was a conscious choice, as was his age. And in those days, such an age difference wouldn’t raise eyebrows as much as it does now, even though it definitely put me off when I read the book. The fact that this adaptation cast a somewhat younger and quite attractive actor helps. (I must, however, remark briefly that the actor is French even though the character is a German immigrant...)
All of that said, my memories of the book are vague; it’s possible that rereading it now would make me a strong proponent of Jo/Friedrich. So I won’t speculate further about Alcott’s intentions.