Helping Along (1876)

AUTHOR: Alcott, Louisa May
PUBLICATION:  “Helping Along.” St. Nicholas Vol. III no. 5 (March 1876): 313-316.
https://archive.org/details/sim_saint-nicholas-a-magazine-for-boys-and-girls_1876-03_3_5/page/312/mode/2up

Reprinted in abridged form as “How One Sister Helped Her Brother.” The Christian Register  Vol. LV no. 24 (June 10, 1876): n. pag.
https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:492474776$98i

KEYWORDS: animals, morality, reform

The text depicts cruelty towards animals as particularly immoral; from this issue the story presents the natural power and duty of girls and women to encourage and foster moral education. This includes, among other things, counteracting male violence and cruelty. For Alcott, there is a clear difference in the natural disposition of the two genders that neatly fits the nineteenth-century "separate spheres" doctrine. To provide “kindly encouragement” and a “helping hand” is, Alcott writes, what “ 'we girls' are eminently fitted for by nature and by grace” (313). Girls are naturally “quick to see and feel many things that escape other eyes” and should “use this power” (314).

An essay on female morality, “Helping Along” includes several stories and anecdotes that emphasize Alcott's points. The most prominent of these concerns a boy, Johnny, who “tormented his sister's kitten” (314), is caught, and punished accordingly: He has to spend a day in “solitary confinement on bread and water” (314). Sue, his sister, takes pity on Johnny, even though he harmed her cat, and convinces her parents to pardon him. When Sue goes to release Johnny, at first he does not seem to regret what he did, but then he shows his sister “the motto, 'Do as you would be done by',” written on the wall (314). However, it turns out that the writing has been composed by pinning cockroaches to the wall. Johnny explains that the roaches were already dead and he had taken them from his stash of “bugs and things [he]'d caught in [his] trap” (314). Alcott makes clear that “[t]he utter absurdity of the golden rule being framed in starved cockroaches never struck Johnny” (315). His sister tenderly reproaches him, reminding him not to be cruel and not to “hurt a poor little cat.” She also emphatically forgives him without demanding an apology. Johnny is moved by Sue's tenderness and promises henceforth “to be as good to cats and things as you are to me” (315).

Alcott reminds her readers that the best way to proceed is “not by constant fault-finding, but by patiently trying to cure the faults in the kindest way,” in order “to discover and strengthen the virtues in one another” (315, 316). Not unlike William Alcott's essay on “Shooting Birds,” Louisa May Alcott's “Helping Along” casts cruelty towards animals as a particularly salient example of immorality and a welcome opportunity to showcase the good moral influence girls and women can and should exert, being naturally disposed to push “little reforms in manners and habits, as well as in thoughts and feeling” (315).

 

Last updated on July 4th, 2024

SNSF project 100015_204481

@VLS@veganism.social | VeganLiteraryStudies | @veganliterarystudies |