Jack and Jill

[warning: contains spoilers]
On a first reading, Louisa May Alcott’s "Jack and Jill" may seem either sweet or disturbingly wholesome, depending on your level of cynicism. Best friends Jack and Jill hurt themselves sledding, and become better people over the course of their recoveries. Jill and two of her friends decide to be “missionaries,” and learn to improve the world around them, while bettering themselves. One of her friends is a mother to her baby brother. The whole book is one sappy story after another—the children put on a play and let Jill be Sleeping Beauty; Jack and Jill get to recuperate together in a beautifully painted room; Jack devises a communication device to Jill’s house, etc. One of the friends gets sick and dies in one of the chapters, and instead of being racked with grief, they all realize how special he was, and what true friendship means. Jill’s mom (who is poor) gets to move into Jack’s house and be their maid so that Jack’s mom can have more time to take walks and read, and everyone is excited about that. Jack’s mom takes him and Jill to the beach, and Jill’s mom stays back to keep house while they’re gone. Everyone goes on as if poor mothers deserve to be maids for rich mothers. Then they both get better! In the end, Jack and Jill get married, two of the group marry each other, and one of Jill’s friends is happy as a spinster, raising her little brother and living with cats for the rest of her life.

It’s wholesome and moralistic to a disturbing degree. I couldn’t help wondering what kind of adult could write such a book. Like really, what’s wrong with Alcott? Does she really think life is like that, or that it should be? How did other adults take her seriously? I looked her up on Wikipedia, and it turns out she was somewhat of a radical. She was friends with cool dudes like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her family lived in a utopian community for a while. She was an abolitionist and a feminist. She was in a group of radical female writers. All of this makes her seem pretty legit.

At the end of the Wikipedia article, it mentions an interview in which she was asked why she was still single. Her answer was, “…because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man." Holy crap she was a lesbian! That is so cool! Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this? No, seriously. So many children grow up thinking of gay people as freaks like Elton John and Brian Boitano. I think people would be a lot less homophobic if they were less ignorant about gay people. We live in a society where gay people are still considered perverted. That’s a hard argument to make when you have a wholesome children’s author carrying the rainbow flag. The fact that she was gay (and someone open about it, apparently) in the Civil War era gives her so much more street cred. Coupled with her radical roots, she must have been writing with some degree of social commentary, which would go over the heads of most children (and adults.) Only two or three of the reviews I read of Jack and Jill mentioned that the work was meaningful in any way; the rest were from readers who either enjoyed it or didn’t. It’s interesting to see how her main characters end up married, while she herself knew she never would. What kind of happy ending is that?