In Defence of Friedrich Bhaer

Jo March did not settle.

Twenty-four years ago, just after the new school session began, we were handed out abridged versions of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Our English teacher, a tall beauty from Kerala, always clad in a stunning south silk saree with a flick of chandan on her forehead and a sprig of jasmine in her hair, was adamant we had to finish the book as soon as possible. Why? It was only early July. Because we would be doing a play throughout the school year. So, we wrote a lengthy script from the abridged book, chose our roles, practised our lines, and performed scenes weekly for months followed by character analysis. Amid all this drama, I fell in love with the person playing Theodore "Laurie" Lawrence. Jo called him Teddy in the novels and so did I in real life. As it happens real life wasn't fiction and my affection was invisible to Laurie. The fresh taste of unrequited love would mark my memory of Little Women for years to come.

I bought all the volumes featuring the March sisters and their families and kids that year. What exactly happened when Jo turned Laurie down? I remember reading the chapter Heartache on a cold January afternoon under two blankets. The room heater was red hot and buzzing. So were my hot tears as I flipped the pages and understood what Jo had done.

Something in his resolute tone made Jo look up quickly to find him looking down at her with an expression that assured her the dreaded moment had come, and made her put out her hand with an imploring, “No, Teddy, please don‘t!”

My horror was visceral. An anguished but silent face-in-the-pillow cry. The same thing happened to me that very year although it wasn’t quite so dramatic. I retreated like a defeated stoic soldier from the battlefield holding my bunch of roses as my Teddy went gallivanting his way. I knew Jo’s reasons for saying “no” but at eleven years old, I was too young to wipe the Laurie effect from my mindset. Laurie, the handsome, rich, charming, next-door boy, whose bickering with Jo on everything were some of my favourite passages in the first book. Laurie, whose relationship and companionship with Jo would be the literary world’s affectionate coupling benchmark. How was anyone going to compete with what Laurie (the brat) had with Jo? Who challenged her wits, held her hand, and saw her for who she was.

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Many of us grew up emulating female literary figures like Josephine March. At least, I did for a couple of years when I was reading Alcott along with Woolf. A combination that seemed like a charged wire at the cusp of my teenage years. Like Jo I begged my best friend to start a magazine with me; we'd clear the tiny garage below our apartment, place an empty barrel as a table, write minutes, and discuss burning issues of "women's causes". Although I hadn't read much of Dickens, I was intrigued by the concept of a secret club based on "The Pickwick Papers," his first novel.

With a few interruptions, they had kept this up for a year, and met every Saturday evening in the big garret, on which occasions the ceremonies were as follows: Three chairs were arranged in a row before a table on which was a lamp, also four white badges, with a big “P. C.” in different colors on each, and the weekly newspaper called, The Pickwick Portfolio, to which all contributed something, while Jo, who reveled in pens and ink, was the editor. At seven o‘clock, the four members ascended to the clubroom, tied their badges round their heads, and took their seats with great solemnity. Meg, as the eldest, was Samuel Pickwick; Jo, being of a literary turn, Augustus Snodgrass; Beth, because she was round and rosy, Tracy Tupman; and Amy, who was always trying to do what she couldn’t, was Nathaniel Winkle. Pickwick, the president, read the paper, which was filled with original tales, poetry, local news, funny advertisements, and hints, in which they good-naturedly reminded each other of their faults and shortcomings.

I had a literary turn but my friend was more Amy or Meg than a fellow Jo. When Dad refused to empty the garage for some child’s play, I waited. Soon, our school’s magazine wanted pieces from every student and I found my Pickwick moment. A few years ago, my high school Hindi teacher shared some of the sketches I had submitted back then. I had forgotten how important it was for me to “write”, “sketch”, and “be published”.

Did Laurie understand this about Jo? The first time Laurie shows Jo the library at the Lawrence house she is ecstatic by the shelves of books, curiosities, and statues. The opulence was shocking. But their interaction in the library is a breadcrumb for the misunderstanding and pain that comes later.

“What richness!” sighed Jo, sinking into the depth of a velvet chair and gazing about her with an air of intense satisfaction. “Theodore Laurence, you ought to be the happiest boy in the world,” she added impressively.

“A fellow can’t live on books,” said Laurie, shaking his head as he perched on a table opposite.

Somewhere in my hormone-laced cosplay of Jo March, I had missed this crucial observation.

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Mr. Bhaer was an inevitable arrival in the narrative. And Alcott made sure he looked and felt diametrically opposite to Laurie.

Professor Bhaer was there, and while he arranged his books, I took a good look at him. A regular German—rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, good nose, the kindest eyes I ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one’s ears good, after our sharp or slipshod American gabble. His clothes were rusty, his hands were large, and he hadn’t a really handsome feature in his face, except his beautiful teeth; yet I liked him, for he had a fine head, his linen was very nice, and he looked like a gentleman, though two buttons were off his coat and there was a patch on one shoe.

Alcott was inspired by Goethe for Bhaer’s character. Years later, this initial physical description of Bhaer struck me as oddly laced with a misinterpretation of foreigners. Xenophobia might be too harsh a term. The “bushy beard” which adorned his not “really handsome” face. How did my teenage mind see this? That intellectual men are drab-looking, unkempt, and shoddy? And the beautiful German tongue was harsh? Here was a man without an inheritance which was the hallmark of the Lawrence family.

My broken heart was on the mend as I read the book. Bhaer’s microscopic attention to Jo’s needs felt organic. Unpretentious and devoid of expectations in the beginning. A universal union of minds. The intellectual and the emotional were a single pulsating being for both of them. That one could not grow without the other is why I perceive that Jo never settled for the less glamorous man.

Jo and Bhaer’s initial awkwardness is something that resonates with many of us who have navigated the world of modern dating. It capitulates on physical features as currency. After all, any dating app is initially based on how the person looks. Would we swipe for a Bhaer or go for the conventionally hip Laurie? I wonder what Laurie’s dating profile would look like. A globe trotter. Tailored chinos and a waistcoat. Sipping artisanal wine in some posh winery. Definitely.

Enough digression. That New Year Jo writes to Beth and we see a shift in her tone about her friend Bhaer.

Speaking of books reminds me that I’m getting rich in that line, for on New Year’s Day Mr. Bhaer gave me a fine Shakespeare. It is one he values much, and I’ve often admired it, set up in the place of honor with his German Bible, Plato, Homer, and Milton; so you may imagine how I felt when he brought it down, without its cover, and showed me my name in it, “from my friend Friedrich Bhaer.”

“You say often you wish a library: here I gif you one, for between these lids (he meant covers) is many books in one. Read him well, and he will help you much, for the study of character in this book will help you to read it in the world and paint it with your pen.”

I thanked him as well as I could, and talk now about “my library,” as if I had a hundred books. I never knew how much there was in Shakespeare before, but then I never had a Bhaer to explain it to me.

My heart rose from a pit of sullenness. Who cares about dandy boys? Broken hearts? Jo now distinguishes Bhaer as some sort of a phenomenon (uses his name as a noun) and not just simply a friend. “Never had a Bhaer” jolted me. Ah! My heroine was on the mend too.

The next paragraph in the letter simply captures one of Jo’s hidden attributes, one she didn’t want to tend to when she was younger. She knew Bhaer didn’t have much money so she bought him little things for him to find in his room. A standish for his table, a little vase for his flower (my eyes went wide reading this…Jo March buys a vase!), and a holder for his blower. This was Jo in a nascent world of domesticity. Bhaer brought out the simplest of all pleasures in Jo; taking care of a person you love, and a love that slowly converges into a romantic one as the book comes to its end. Is embracing our feminine side seen as a sign of weakness while we strive in intellectual pursuits?

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I found the glorification of marriage in the text a problem even back then. And feminist movements did too. Here was Alcott confusing us with Jo’s initial independence and then introducing Bhaer as some sort of salve. Why was everyone getting married in these books? What was the point? My teen heart was confused. But now I know the book is a product of the times Alcott lived in. And is it that bad? How has Bhaer become this non-ideal commiseration for Jo? How is companionship in whatever form anti-feminist? It isn’t. None of this is. Perhaps we fail to see what Alcott did with Bhaer. Rather than creating someone who completed Jo, as we like to believe Jo “needs” nobody (she really did not…bless her spirit), Alcott made both of them an alloy. A little steel never did anyone harm. I think the supposition that marrying Bhaer diminished Jo’s ideals, as ideals go by in literary contexts, is misunderstood.

Our play ended. We grew up that year. I read all the Alcott books. I found other authors and newer ideas. My unrequited love went to loving the Amys of the world. And I warmed up to the idea of a Bhaer for myself.