So, What About Beth?

To put it in objective terms, to lose a loved one is to lose a constant in one's life. Oftentimes, in the days following a death, people need to run circles in their mind to come up with a way of making sense of losing such a stable part of life as their relationship to a beloved family member. In literature, it is common to find authors using the death of a character to mark a climax, the end of a phase of the plot, or even a major turning point in the mindset of a character experiencing the death. Whether in real life or on the page, death has the power to spur a lot of change in people, settings, and life itself. 

It should come to no surprise that a book as rooted in Christian virtues as Little Women eventually spills the concept of death upon those who inhabit its pages. Of the four March sisters introduced to the reader in the novel, the generous, virtuous, and humble Beth March is the one author Louisa May Alcott chose to bear the defining death of the novel. Besides being representative of the realities of the 19^th century, in which it was not all that uncommon to bear the burden of losing a loved one, Beth’s death does serve a very real purpose in the novel. Since the central premise of the coming-of-age novel follows protagonist Jo March and her maturity, it is fairly predictable that she would have to face a loved one’s death at some point. Throughout the paragraphs preceding the passage in which Beth peacefully passes in her sleep, Alcott makes it extraordinarily clear to the reader that Jo is learning from the experience. She even goes so far as to add, “Jo renounced her old ambition, pledged herself to a new and better one, acknowledging the poverty of her other desires, and feeling the blessed solace of a belief in the immortality of love” (419). While touching, it is very clear that Alcott is trying to portray the understanding of the inevitability of death and the enduring of love (and, presumably, God) as one of the final steps toward full maturity.

Regardless of her predictability in killing off the nicest, most adorable March sister as a means to further the development of her protagonist, Alcott undeniably portrays a very real, complex feeling in a means that younger readers of the time could probably understand. The fact remains that death is inevitable, and at some point we all must come to terms with it. In a way, Alcott offered young 19^th century readers their first bout with a burden they assuredly came to know; either that, or she helped 19^th century readers come to terms with the heavy emotions they were already feeling.