Louisa May Alcott presents this human nature as a woman's struggle between duty to family and personal growth. The young women in this novel are shown dealing with the conflict of choosing what is more important in their lives "self-cultivation, or domestic duties. Social constraints on women during the nineteenth-century play an important role in this novel. Alcott shows through the four sisters four different ways of dealing with the social expectations put upon them. Meg and Beth both conform to society's expectations of the roles women should play, while Amy and Jo attempt initially to unchain themselves from these constraints in order to develop their individuality. Here Alcott seems to be drawing a parallel between Meg and Beth, and Amy and Jo, but when the latter two sisters eventually settle down into a more customary life (marriage, etc.), I suppose Alcott is making the point that while the individualistic model of womanhood is more desirable, the customary one is more realistic. As the critic Rebecca Lukens points out, Alcott's idealistic writing reflects her father's efforts "to form the perfect social community- (291). In other words, she is teaching her young readers the lessons about growing up, and what it means to learn from experiences "her "knowledge of young people, and her sympathy of youth- show through "which is why Little Women remains such a staple in classic children's literature (Meigs, 213). .
Alcott stresses the virtue of acting humble and genuine throughout her novel. This virtue is just one I will focus on, in consideration of length restrictions, but it's important to note that Little Women deals with a broad spectrum of emotions and ideas. Alcott "saw life whole, saw illness and death, sorrow and trouble and poverty as parts of life to be met with normality and courage- (Meigs, 351). To deal with the darker sides of life, Alcott teaches her young readers to develop the spiritual self, similar to the Transcendentalist movement, to which her father was a part of (Showalter, viii).
