Alcott, <i>Little Women</i>, and the Popular Sublime

Abstract

In my reading of Alcott’s Little Women tetralogy (1868-1886) I argue that the aesthetics it proclaim —mainly in the representation of the development of Jo’s literary endeavours—can be conceived in terms of what I here define as a ”popular sublime.” In short, it consists of a depiction of everyday existence that transcends into political dimensions and in the case of Jo runs from a sharply cut and exaggerated melodramatic style over sensationalist thrills before it finally lands in sentimentalism with a political aim. I thus claim the popular sublime to be a conceptual move away from the eighteenth-century elitism in which the sublime experience caused magnificent existential angst in male solitude instead of the empathic tears and communal smiles as effected in for instance Alcott’s and Beecher Stowe’s sentimental realism of the nineteenth century. In the end, the popular sublime is all about recognizing the nobleness of others and the sublimity in all mankind which is the democratic message it can be said to convey.