I’ve said before that I think a great first date question is “Would you consider yourself having had a Little Women childhood or a Jane Eyre childhood?” And, though I was half joking when I first said this, I completely stand by this take.
The childhood presented in Little Women is romantic and sentimental (affectionate and derogatory): filled-full with vivacity and sorority, community, labor without alienation, virtuous abundance amidst material poverty, generosity and compassion and Christian charity. The ordered chaos of a truly lived in and loving family. They have little money but much richness: deeply spiritual, creative, and life-affirming. Nothing is perfect — Sin and Death are present forces — but conflict is handled communally and interpersonally with endless grace and forgiveness and reconciliation. The Home is a Domestic Monastery of sorts headed by the Mother, Marmee, who is Christlike, almost Lady Wisdom-like, and maternal in the deepest sense, doing philosophy and theology in the kitchen and bedroom, and cultivating the innate but latent goodness, passion, and intelligence into something that is holy and befitting of 19th century “little women” and “Christian pilgrims.”
Conversely, childhood in Jane Eyee is a fucking prison. Jane has a pretty rough life in general (it is a fairy tale after all) but her childhood is the worst imo because she’s a child and thus a part of the most oppressed class. She’s a little melt orphan, alienated from literally everyone, tortured by hostile authorities who consistently prove themselves to be near universally cruel and hypocritical and fundamentally unable to be trusted. Childhood is no paradise here: it’s an inferno at worst and a purgatorio at best, and the way you survive childhood and transmutate it from one to the there is by yourself, mostly without assistance from adults or other children, respecting yourself, and cultivating stoic endurance, intellectual rebellion, and a strong, unbreakable moral compass. As she says herself at 10 years old, the key to avoiding hell in a world where Principalities, Powers, and Authorities wish nothing more than to send you there for eternity, is to keep in good health and not die.
Now, 10 year old Jane is being delightfully snarky and means this literally, but this is how she in the book grows into her own as an adult. This is what adulthood means to Jane Eyee: climbing out of hell and making the climb up purgatory by means of resisting evil and devoting oneself to God; mastering your desire and your intellect and your ethical vision, and submitting them to no one. There is and can be no nostalgia, no “ache for return”, no romanticizing her childhood home or her school because those are sights of slavery (Jane literally compares herself to a slave on the first page; girl has me rolling). Instead adulthood means becoming independent by working honest and hard, putting “your hands to work and your heart to God”, and shirking any and all comforts no matter where they come from, religious or economic or romantic, if it means compromising on your values. As she herself says to her employer, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
Adulthood also means being a freak for your boss but that’s neither here nor there.
For Little Women, if childhood is Eden, “Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. / Nothing gold can stay.” as one of my favorite poems goes. Adulthood is exile from the Garden. Adulthood is being separated from your family, no longer being the primary priority of the people around you, being confronted not just with the real possibility of Death but with its presence — and the absence it leaves. Adulthood is isolating and thus disorienting as you are taken out of old communities and thrust into new communities with new roles and expectations. The childish things — yes the childish flaws and imperfections, but also the creative desires, hopes, and ambitions of childhood (which to a 19th century evangelical moralist… how different are those in a woman, really?) — are put to rest.
“Rome took all the vanity out of me, for after seeing the wonders there, I felt too insignificant to live, and gave up all my foolish hopes in despair. […] talent isn’t genius and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won’t be a common-place dauber so I don’t intend to try anymore. [What I am going to do with myself instead is] polish up my other talents, and be an ornament to society, if I get the chance.”
Everything is measured against the warmth of the childhood home, making the adult world feel grossly desiccated. The first chapter of Book 2 ends with a foreboding warning that adulthood (symbolized viscerally by marriage) is coming for us all. “Mark my words, Jo, you’ll go next.” This is, after all, a sentimental novel, a coming of age novel: if you have any girls in your novel you must ensure they are married by the end. Or dead.
Actually, let me nuance this a little: it bears the threat, and the reality, of all of these things, but the book is far more optimistic than this. There’s sweetness in the bitterness. Like with Jane’s coming of age being either hell of purgatory depending on the strength of will of the protagonist, Little Women is the same way. Adulthood is leaving Eden, but whether leaving Eden is experienced as exile into the land of wild and waste or as a mission to fill the land with beauty and goodness and life and steward it, is dependent on the will and choice of the March sisters. The solution given by Little Women is to take Eden with you into the Wilderness. As Christ was with you in childhood, so he is with you in adulthood. As Marmee, who again is imo the invisible God made visible to the daughter who loved her more than anything, was with them in childhood, so she is with them in adulthood as well, though in a different way then before. The danger of the Unknown can only be tackled communally and with shared vulnerability and reliance.,They build an adulthood that is an extension of the glory of childhood: community, education, hard work, and an abundance of Christian virtue — all of which is handed down to the next generation of young children.
My childhood legally like *just* ended. But childhood as a sort of ontological and spiritual state (which is what it is in my memories distorted by nostalgia and my writings built off of it) honestly ended when I was about 10 when I moved away from my childhood home. While for Jane Eyre, “home” is the internal fortress of the stoics where the Logos resides, for me, home is a very specific house with a blue door and a BIG kitchen window with white curtains where the sun would stream in where I used to live in the countryside, with rolling hills and beautiful woods and a creek and Marci gras beads that decorated the house of trees me and my ex best friend (unsurprisingly racist) hung out in. My view of childhood is mythologized: it’s Arden, a mixture of the land of Eden and Arcadia, I was blissfully vibing as a holy androgyne, living the vita angelica, half savage and edenic and free among the wildflowers and forests on the hills, conversing easily and lovingly with God and angels and saints. Childhood is a time, a place, and a state of be-ing in relationship to the cosmos with “Innate Ecstasy” where the “Entirety / Of Earth — and Heaven — / Belong Solely to Us” to quote a Childhood Poem of mine. Adulthood is a time, place, and state of be-ing marked by alienation, cruelty, and decadence. Adulthood is “East of Arden”, Eden having sunk to grief, enslaved to the Principalities and Powers and Authorities. By adults we are corrupted and contaminated and taught to love lesser things over Greater things, until we forget how to love God. And the only proper response to that is to make pilgrimage back to Arden, to “return to the womb of God” and be reborn from above. But rather than a retreat to ignorance, it has to be an integration of Innocence and Experience: to be a childlike adult is to be as wise as a serpent but innocent as a dove, wise about what is Good and is uncorrupted by what is evil. It is to recover the visio Dei in all things, to be reintegrated into nature, to be liberated from capitalist toil and racialization and gender enforcement, and to not only desire God but to truly love him.
