LOUISA MAY ALCOTT’S LITTLE WOMEN: HUMANISING DISEASE AND DECAY

Whenever a disease is widespread like an epidemic or pandemic its apocalypticnature fails to escape the creative imagination of literary writers. Beginning fromChaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe andMary Shelley’s The Last Man are some of the precursors of the literary fiction inEnglish which captures apocalyptic events and their impact on the society. Apandemic affects not only elders but also children, not only rich but also poor, notonly upper class but also the workers. A lot of literature focuses on the affliction ofthe first and their response to the pandemic. In addition to the epidemics like choleraand plague which recurred from time to time and afflicted a large section of thepopulation, there was the pandemic scarlet fever which rarely made the adultpopulation suffer as it primarily struck the children aged between five and fifteen. Thenumber of works which focus on scarlet fever are few and one of the prominent oneswhich this paper intends to look at is by an American novelist. Louisa May Alcott’sLittle Women (1868-69) captures influences that shape the lives of four sisters, Meg,Jo, Beth and Amy March from childhood into womanhood. One such influence,scarlet fever which is said to have spread across Europe and America during the 19thand early 20th century victimising and causing death of several infants and youngchildren affect the March family too. The paper attempts to capture the pandemicand tries to humanise disease and decay and its impact on the lives of the Marchsisters.