
Why 'Little Women' Endures - samclemens
https://newrepublic.com/article/150579/little-women-endures-louisa-may-alcott-anne-boyd-rioux
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zwieback
The Atlantic also had an article in the last issue - I didn't know that Alcott
wrote a bunch of "sensationalist stories about murder and opium addiction" and
felt that was her sweet spot.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/little-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/little-
women-louisa-may-alcott/565754/)

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sandworm101
It endures because it is a fairy tale. It is a tale from a more simple time,
but one with very modern characters as needed to soften the edges. In little
women, it is the men that are softened. They arent the sexist pigs that were
the norm of the time. The princess in the stone castle gets to marry the
prince on the horse because she loves him, not to cement a deal between
kingdoms: fairytale.

Tolkien's hobbit/tlotr is much the same.

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golemotron
Times are as simple as our lack of information about them. When there are few
sources of information about a time, we over value the ones that survive and
end up with a false picture. I think if we were teleported back we'd see the
same panorama of human nature that we see today.

~~~
sandworm101
This is literature, not history. The times were simple because the author made
them simple. Whether the author's fictional world comports with historical
truth is beside the point. The world of Little Women is objectively simpler
because we are limited to the information given to us by the author. We don't
see the complexity because it is denied us, something true of all historical
fiction. People and information move more slowly, which facilitates the
storytelling. Diseases are quickly diagnosed, and resolve themselves one way
or another quickly enough to not stall the story. That is the simpler
time/world that the author chose to use.

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billfruit
Sometimes I wonder why Little Woman has been/is being adapted for film so many
times, where as there hasn't been a proper adaptation of Huckleberry Finn.

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dpark
It's been a long time since I read Huckleberry Finn, but _could_ it be adapted
these days? A faithful adaptation would be heavily criticized for the racial
slurs and an unfaithful adaptation would probably lose much of the flavor.

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Uhhrrr
I reread some of the book after the last n-word-in-English-class controversy,
and Jim comes off as witty and sympathetic. I don't know if that is enough to
pacify the armchair mob. I also think it could probably survive the removal of
one slur. It's a great book.

~~~
burkaman
It's just about the language, and it's not just an armchair mob. Serious
people have serious issues with the book. I don't think it should be banned or
even removed from curriculums, but it should be taught carefully, with a lot
more instruction than just "this is a great book with some bad words that we
don't use anymore".

The characters are obviously racist, but the question is whether the author
and/or the book are racist, and if so that needs to be called out explicitly
and discussed in the classroom. Here's a good essay on it:
[https://www.vqronline.org/essay/jim-and-mark-twain-what-
do-d...](https://www.vqronline.org/essay/jim-and-mark-twain-what-do-dey-stan)

> In the middle of Huck Finn, Mark Twain let Jim step out from behind the
> racist stereotype that has proven a lot harder to destroy than slavery. The
> effect of the ending, though, is to put him back in blackface so the whites
> of his eyes will show more conspicuously when they roll. The ending of Huck
> Finn has been recognized as a problem for more than 50 years, although
> almost no one has emphasized how it changes Jim’s status within the novel.
> Charles Neider, in a new edition that Doubleday published for the
> centennial, grandly chose to cut 8300 words from this Tom Sawyer section. It
> does go on and on, becoming the longest episode in the novel—but that is the
> first thing that must be noted about it. The second is how hard Twain works
> in it to make his reader laugh, piling up witches, rats, mashed teeth,
> pouring melting butter over the whole. When he went back on the lecture
> circuit in the winter of 1884—85, he used the Evasion chapters as the basis
> for his new program, and in his letters home he brags about their
> effectiveness as a comic tour de force, a continuous series of snappers.
> That, especially in view of our modern unhappiness with the ending, should
> be the third thing to note: Twain used the 1884—85 tour to promote his
> forthcoming novel, and this was the part of it he chose to represent the
> whole.

> [...]

> We obviously cannot say what might have happened, either in the book or to
> the book’s reception, if Twain had not decided to turn Huck into Tom, and
> Jim into a comic stereotype. We must, however, reckon the price Twain paid
> for that decision. Huck can’t free Jim. Jim can’t free Huck. Between them,
> Huck and Jim could not free Mark Twain from the pact his need for popularity
> forced him to make with his public’s self-protective prejudices. Twain’s own
> sense of remorse is only a partial compensation for his betrayal of Jim. By
> Jim’s definition, which is surely entitled to be definitive, the ending of
> Huck Finn is “trash.” It is trash, though, that we cannot afford to throw
> away until we have finished learning what it has to teach us about our
> culture’s appetites.

