Age Gap Marriages In Little Women (Historical Origins) Part 2
Louisa May Alcott was a huge fan of German female poet Bettina von Arnim. Some people say that Bettina was a fraud. A big-time con woman, and others say that she was an early feminist.
When Louisa was a teenager, she read Bettina’s book called Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kindein German. It is a collection of letters that Bettina wrote to the poet Goethe. Louisa was a teenager when she read this book.
She had developed a crush on her next-door neighbour, philosopher Waldo Emerson, who was 29 years older than Louisa. Louisa writes in her journal, ”I turned myself into Bettina and made Emerson my Goethe. I would leave flowers to his doorstep and sing Mignon’s song in bad German underneath his window”.
Isn’t it interesting that Mignon’s song pops up again in Jo’s and Friedrich’s relationship? There is a quote from Louisa where she writes” I am a hero worshipper by nature”. Louisa’s father Bronson Alcott and Emerson were very good friends. but Bronson wasn’t always the most stable father figure. Emerson supported Louisa’s interest in literature and also let her borrow books from his great library. It is not that much big surprise that Louisa did develop a crush on him.
Bettina was a very unusual woman, a very clever woman and I think Louisa very much self-identified herself to her in some ways. Louisa was a huge fan of Sturm und Drang movement, which was a German movement in literature and arts that was started by Goethe and it emphasized the emotional experiences of the individual. This is what Bettina wrote to her brother about herself and it could apply to Louisa May Alcott as well.
”It is no use telling me to be calm. To me that conveys sitting with my hands in my lap, looking forward to the bread we are having for supper. My soul is a passionate dancer.
She dances to hidden music which only I can hear. Whatever police the world may prescribe to rule the soul, I refuse to obey them”. End quote.
Bettina, whose actual name was Elisabeth Brettano, was born in Frankfurt in 1785 into a family of Italian merchants. Bettina had a very strange connection with Goethe.
In her youth, her mother Maximilian had been Goethe’s first lover and muse. Bettina’s mother died when she was only eight years old and she was sent to a convent, but she considered Goethe as her family’s property. During this time Goethe had established a position in Germany as the national author and poet.
Different to Louisa, Bettina has been described to be incredibly beautiful. Bettina was small and delicate with black blossoming curls, porcelain skin, luminous brown eyes and magnetism beyond conventional beauty. This is a quote from Gundera’s Immortality.
”She was 22, about the same age as Goethe, when he fell for her mother Maximilian, back in his youthful Frankfurt days. This earlier infatuation with her mother may have led Bettina to imagine that she could be Goethe’s daughter. As Gundera writes, the feeling grew in her she had some sort of a secret right to the great poet, because in the metaphoric sense, and who should take metaphor seriously if not a poet, she considered herself as his daughter”.
“In any case, she developed what might be called hero worship for the great man. She was a small person and played on being a child-like figure like that of Mignon in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novel”.
Bettina comes out as a bit of a stalker. Bettina wrote him an impressive amount of 52 letters.
In Little Women, Friedrich asks Jo if she could address him as ”thou” because, in the German language, there are two ways to say ”you”. ”Du” and ”Sie”. Du is the informal way to address another person, and Sie is the formal way. In old English, do was translated to ”Thou”. Greta Gerwig has famously complained in every interview about how terrible it is that Friedrich forces Jo to call him ”Thou” without doing any sort of research on what the word means. I don’t know why Gerwig lies so much. In the book Friedrich very respectfully and quite adorably asks her if she would like like to address him with ”thou” instead of ”you”.
And Louisa writes ”Jo found thou a lovely syllable”.
Kundera continues. ”In these 52 letters, Bettina addressed him with the familiar ”thou” form.
These letters were the basis of the book she published after Goethe’s death, Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child. It was not until 1920 the authenticity of the correspondence was questioned, when the original letters were discovered and published.
