Given the opposition between works that demand to be read in narrowly prescribed ways and texts that amount to open invitations to rewriting, it is no surprise that numberless readers have followed Barthes in preferring texts to works. Alcott explores relations between work and play that screen adaptations of Little Women complicate still further by the different ways they play with the novel and sometimes with each other.
Work is a subject Alcott took seriously, as readers can see from her autobiographical novel Work. And Alcott takes play equally seriously, as we can see from the space Little Women devotes to different kinds of play. Unlike Work , Little Women consistently complicates the apparent opposition or contradiction between work and play, most obviously by multiplying the number of her heroines to four, by creating shifting analogies and interplay between them, and by emphasizing the importance of play in their journey to womanhood.
March spends the first half of the novel fighting a just war and becomes an absent head of the family, ceding parental authority to two females: his wife, Margaret, and his sister, Aunt March. The four March sisters combine the impulses to work and play in four different ways.
Jo, who thinks that even being a woman is something of a masquerade 9 , approaches nearly every activity, even listening to a sermon, as play Beth, who plays Mr. All these exercises are clearly inspired by Mr.
Beth sees work as a constant vocation to be cheerfully accepted until her untimely death prevents her from developing any further perspectives on work and play. Meg sees play first as a complementary alternative to work, then as an activity in which one is played by other players like her scheming female friends, and finally, in something of a return to her younger self, as a tonic balance to work.
