Being Jo

I blame Jo March.  I realize it is not fair to lay anything at the foot of a fictional character beyond what happens in the text, and maybe even that goes too far.  For that matter, blame is seldom useful, but in this context, I will risk it.

Like many girls who grew up when I did (there seems, in my unscientific opinion, to have been some drop since), I wanted to be Jo.  Jo was the writer.  Jo was the strong one.  And no matter what trouble she got into, she always managed to get out with a funny story.

Jo was also the one who was told, over and over, that anger was bad.  Every time she gets angry, something truly bad happens.  Her anger is the thing that crosses the line of what her society will tolerate, that makes her whistling and running and untidiness unacceptable.  Throughout Little Women and in glimpses through the later books and in other Jo-like characters, the message comes through:  do not get angry.

Like Jo, and like Marmee, to whom she pours out her troubles, I can’t manage not to get angry.  What I do, like they did before me, is try to suppress it, paper it over, pretend it isn’t there.

It doesn’t always work.  Sometimes my anger explodes out of me.  And, in some ways, the story is right:  bad things happen.

It’s funny (not ha-ha funny, but, as my former father-in-law used to say “funny like a punch in the nuts…”) that I still have so much to learn at my age.  I expected to have more figured out by now.  Which is probably why I am blaming fictional characters for my troubles.

Thing is, if Jo had been allowed to be angry, had been allowed to learn to express her anger in appropriate ways, had spent her energy on changing the things that made her angry in the structures around her, maybe her anger would not have led to general apocalypse.  Maybe I could have learned a different lesson from her.