“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott (post 11): Jo’s personality radically changes at end of novel, probably because author’s personality switched.

Jo, at the end of the novel, is not the same as Jo at the beginning: she does not have the same personality.

At the beginning, she identifies herself as the boy or man of the house, who would never get married; moreover, she is a dedicated writer, whose writing process is epitomized by her “vortex” (see previous posts). At the end, she is no longer male-identified, is married, has children, and is not a writer.

This radical transformation of Jo’s personality has been called “The Horror of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,” and interpreted as the author’s pandering to her readers’ wish for a traditional ending (1). I agree that the character’s personality undergoes a radical transformation, but have a different reason for it.

Alcott could have gotten Jo married, but left her personality unchanged in private, or at least in the privacy of her own mind. And Jo’s marriage could have left her free to pursue her writing, just as Amy’s marriage left her free to pursue her art. So I don’t believe that Alcott had to change Jo’s personality for commercial reasons.

What, then, does explain the radical change in Jo’s personality? My theory is that the author had multiple personality, and one personality wrote the beginning of the novel, but a different personality wrote the end of the novel.

Such a thing may be more common than you think. In past posts, I have cited similarly remarkable inconsistencies and contradictions between the beginnings and endings of other novels—e.g., Nabokov’s Lolita and Oates’ You Must Remember This—and, in the context of other things known about the authors, had to come to the same conclusion.

1. Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant. “Dismembering the Text: The Horror of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,” pages 564-583, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy [1868-69]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2004.

Note added September 10, 2017: Why did the issue of Jo’s marriage prompt the author to switch narrative personalities? The reason is that alternate personalities are relatively specialized and narrow-minded. In this case, the alternate personality who approved of marriage, and could write an ending involving marriage, did not approve of a woman's being boyish or a writer, so when marriage was in, boyishness and writing were out, even in private.