Rereading Amy March in Little Women: Negotiating Conformity, Submission and Subversion

Abstract

In this thesis I study the tension between submission and subversion within the character Amy March in the book Little Women. Within academic research on Little Women the central question is whether the book is submissive or subversive in relation to patriarchal norms and ideals of femininity. Within the scholarly field, the protagonist of the book, Jo March, is often taken as the main object of analysis in order to answer this question. In this thesis I problematize this centralization of Jo and the consequent marginalization of the other sisters. This thesis addresses this gap from the literature by focusing on the sister Amy. Amy is often positioned as the more submissive sister in comparison to Jo, due to Jo’s resistance to social convention and femininity and Amy’s conformity to it. In this thesis I move beyond the understanding of Amy as a more submissive sister and propose a rereading of her conforming behavior. Central will be the question how Amy’s conformity in Little Women can be reread as a position of in-betweenness within the relation of submission and subversion. I base my rereading on a poststructuralist understanding of agency that defines agency as a particular way of inhabiting and re-signifying dominant norms in order to create oppositional spaces. With this conceptualization of agency I argue that the moments of conformity that are often characterized as submission should rather be understood as moments in which conformity becomes an agential practice aimed at freedom. In order to do this, I perform a close reading of four scenes in which Amy speaks about her conforming behavior. I analyze how she verbally frames her own behavior and decisions of conformity and how this positions her within the subversion/submission dichotomy. I show that a closer look at the language with which Amy frames her conforming behavior enables a rereading of Amy’s behavior as not submissive, but rather an agential practice that positions her in an in-between position within the relation of submission and subversion.