Strawberries and Salt: Culinary Hazards and Moral Education in Little Women

Abstract

Concerned primarily with the theme of moral education, Little Women (1868–69) depicts four sisters who must learn the virtues of self-sacrifice and hard work to meet the standards of the cult of domesticity and ideal womanhood. Food preparation and mealtimes, the management of which is central to the domestic operations of successful femininity, would appear to provide key instances of moral instruction; however, Louisa May Alcott’s own complicated relationship to the preparation and consumption of food and drink is revealed through an examination of the lessons related to them in Little Women. In scenes where eating is made central, the moral lessons provided deviate from those expected in a didactic novel targeted at young readers. Involvement in culinary activities instead leads to loss, humiliation, and embarrassment. These crises are motivated by a disjunction between her representation of the March family as normal, middle-class omnivores and her own traumatic childhood experience of enforced ascetism. She must reshape her memories of hunger to fit the narrative expectations of her more conventional middle-class readers. Ultimately, the lessons associated with food prove unrelated to domestic improvement or moral maturation: rather they show how the lessons to be learned are specific to Alcott family values, which were shaped by unique encounters with dietary restriction, poverty, and parental manipulation.