28.12.09

Life and Death in Little Women

Just those first few notes of music and I am wholly caught up in a story that I am never wearied of. How many times in my life have I watched or read Little Women? I don't know, but the number isn't that important to me. It's the weight of all of those years of loving that story. Louisa May Alcott wrote these characters from life into immortality, taking from her own childhood to create what she knew. And so it is a true story, as real as anything found in the nonfiction section, though the characters and events may technically be fictional. It is a story of separation and reunification, of growing up and growing older, of living and dying, of love and confusion, of hope and despair. I find myself reflected in the words and dreams of the sisters, more so in some than in others but connecting with each.

The most wrenching scene in the entire movie takes place when Beth dies, and I think it captures the heart of the tension. Jo, having just had her literary hopes dashed by Professor Bhaer, returns to her room to find a telegram from Orchard House where Beth is at last succumbing to her prolonged weakness. She rushes home in time to spend a last few hours with her sister, reading Dickens to her and trying to spoon feed life back into her. But it is too late for that, and Beth lovingly submits to those exertions because they help Jo though they do little for her. She doesn't mind death. And I understand, I think.

You see, what Beth senses is the world in tumult, always turning, always changing. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien refers to the mortality of Men as the “gift of Eru,” though they do not recognize it as such when they enviously consider the immortality of the Elves. But there is pain in immortality, as there is pain in change. The closeness that I shared with Maria when we were children is not the closeness that we will have as adults. Perhaps we will not be the less so, but there is no more innocence, no more of that casual negligence that one can have toward a relationship that practically maintains itself because the two of us lived together and could hardly hope to avoid one another on a daily basis. It's true that we treasure something least until it's gone. Beth asks Jo bitterly why everyone wants to leave. She loves home and what the four sisters had there. They did not lead a charmed life, but they had one another and what more could they desire? But the other sisters did desire more. Meg gained her John, not a wealthy man but a fine one, and as good a husband as she could hope for. Jo chased after her literary dreams in New York City, itching to leave the confines of Orchard House for Europe or somewhere big enough to hold her boundless imagination. And Amy traveled with Aunt March to Europe, pursuing art and a good match. The only person left to love the papers and fragments of the life they lived together was Beth, dear Beth who did not want to leave.

And perhaps that is what kills her. Because she can't move on from there to something else, the old memories and nostalgia draining her strength as she struggles to somehow justify the joylessness of the present against those fondly remembered days. But her life is a brief and therefore potent example of the gift that death is to us. I will never say that death is good. It is wholly and without a doubt a result of the Fall. But I think that it was God's grace that led him to prevent Adam and Eve from eating of the tree of life in their fallen state. Pain was a reality for them, as was separation. The perfect unity of their souls could be no more, and to live forever in such a state would be Hell. In order to relieve the awful burden of that separation, God allowed them the ability to die, to be removed from the immediate cares and pains of this world until he might renew it in its entirety.

I don't fear death, though it may involve physical pain. I would fear far more the thought of living forever. And as John Donne says, “One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally / And death shall be no more ; death, thou shalt die.”

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