“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott (post 7): Jo’s father hopes she is now a “young lady,” no longer his “son Jo,” but Jo still thinks of herself as a guy.

Jo’s father has just returned from a year away in the Civil War. He is complimenting each of his four daughters, and when he comes to Jo, he says:

“…I don’t see the ‘son Jo’ whom I left a year ago, I see a young lady…” (Chapter XXII). But this would seem to be wishful thinking.

In the next and final chapter of Part I, Jo refers to herself as bearing something “like a man.” And when her older sister is about to get engaged to be married, she tells Jo that she, too, will be having relationships of the same sort. But Jo, almost seventeen, replies,

“Don’t mean to have any; it’s fun to watch other people philander, but I should feel like a fool doing it myself,” said Jo, looking alarmed at the thought.

On the last page of Part I, a friend of Jo, a boy her own age, trying to comfort Jo over the loss of her sister to marriage, says,

“Well, now, don’t be dismal, there’s a good fellow…We’ll have capital times after she is gone, for I shall be through college before long, and then we’ll go abroad, or some nice trip or other. Wouldn’t that console you?”

In this scrupulously moral family drama, he is not offering Jo anything sexual. He is considering her “a good fellow,” one of the guys, and she automatically accepts his offer from that point of view.

However, as noted in post 5, Jo has occasionally made sincere reference to herself as being a girl at heart.

In short, at nearly seventeen years of age, Jo sometimes sincerely self-identifies as a boy, but at other times sincerely self-identifies as a girl. And once again I wonder if she is a tomboy, transgender, or has multiple personality.