#fairychamber

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A lone wolf poised against a swirling backdrop of deep blues and shadowy blacks, evoking the chill of a northern wilderness. Its breath, a visible mist, curls into the cold air—silent, haunting, and alive. The painting captures a moment of stillness and raw power, embodying the quiet resilience of the wild.

"Miss February"

by Niina Niskanen

Maybe she noticed how a certain gleam come across his eyes as he sings the line. Maybe his lips turn upward into a smile when the lyric comes up, no matter how many times he sings it. Or maybe it was because of the warmth in his voice as he spoke of his home that Jo recognized as she speaks of her home.

But she notices. She notices all the little things of Friedrich, but had yet to have a reason why. But when she leaves New York and is alone after Beth’s death, she thinks of those little things and smiles to herself. 

“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...)

I have been given this question some thought (and that’s why I didn’t answer at first), and yet I cannot say much. Minna and Friedrich were evidently very close, they probably had no other siblings; she evidently died after her husband. It is kind of odd that she wanted her children to be educated by Fritz in America, given how much he loves everything German.

One thing I head canon about her is that she was younger than him, and than rather that being close in ideals and life projects, Fritz just had that unspeakable older-brother kind of protectiveness and tenderness for her.