”This Was Something Altogether New“

Anne K. Phillips, in a close examination of the final chapters of Little Women, explores how Louisa May Alcott uses “purposeful word selection, contradiction, triangulation, and omission to provoke amusement while also subverting conventional expectations,” all the while “offer[ing] meaningful observations about the relationship of an individual to herself, her family, and her community.” Phillips also examines how several selected artists depict scenes in the final chapters of the novel, and she interprets what their illustrations suggest. Alcott’s final choices about her characters’ marriages show ambivalence about their eventual maturation and marriage while at the same time offering “the ways in which she was rethinking what it means to become a wife and mother and offering a new way of talking about those roles.” Phillips argues that Alcott both “satisf[ies] and thwart[s] reader expectations while also upholding ideals of individualism, liberty, interdependence, and community.”