The Role Of Family And Sympathy In Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Cindy Weinstein claims in Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, with respect to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, that this piece of sentimental literature has a “profound awareness of the relative fragility of the biological family and a commitment to strengthening and redefining it according to the logic of love”(Weinstein 4). Through Weinstein’s claim, she states that biological, familial ties are not what define a family; it is, however, through the love that the family shares with one another which makes them a true family. In agreement with this claim, Alcott’s novel Little Women shows that despite the biological, familial ties that the March family shares with each other. It is their strong bonds of love with one another and commitment to each other that allow them to
This concept is shown in the overall text through the depiction of various relationships, such as that of Josephine March and Amy March, although sisters, find it difficult to get along, as Amy even goes as far as to burn Jo’s cherished manuscript. Jo March and Theodore Laurence who are able to form a close relationship through a familial type of love without actually being blood-related Meg March and John Brooke’s familial tie as husband and wife alone is not enough to keep their relationship strong, as John expects Meg to be the happy wife who has dinner prepared when he comes home with company. Before their marriage, Jo March and Fredrick Bhaer are able to form a strongly close bond without any familial ties as Bhaer gives constructed criticism to Jo’s writing.
In Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women, Alcott depicts the weakness of bonds based solely on