Background Information/Vocabulary:
Here's what each girl grew in her garden. Sources for each photo are linked to the name of each item:
- Meg's garden: Roses, heliotrope, myrtle, orange tree
- Jo's garden: sunflowers (for the seeds!)
- Beth's garden: sweet peas, mignonette, larkspur, pinks, pansies, southernwood, chickweed, catnip
- Amy's garden: honeysuckles, morning glories, lilies, ferns, earwigs
- "winding sheet" (p. 117)--a shroud; fabric in which a corpse is buried
My Noticings:
- This book never tires of giving us symbolic depictions of the four sisters! In this chapter, we get their gardens, their Dickensian alter-egos, and their contributions to the paper. I hadn't noticed before how repetitive this can get (sort of like having the infamous first chapter of a Baby-Sitters Club novel recur every twenty pages or so) but I will never cease to find it charming.
- Pip (named, I guess, for Dickens's Pip?) strikes me as an uncharacteristically dark bit of this story! I understand the idea behind this chapter showing how out-of-sorts people can get when they haven't anything to occupy their time, but Beth starving one of her pets to death seems a bit much. (I suppose this is mitigated by the fact that we've never heard of Pip before--better this newly discovered bird than one of the beloved kittens!)
Final Thoughts:
In this section, we get a longer glimpse of the Marches' home life; the Pickwick Society that keeps the girls occupied during their free time and the chores that they normally do to keep the household running (but skip for a week, to tragic results.) As usual, we see a bit of each girl, most notably another of Jo's early attempts at writing (quite over-the-top and melodramatic) and Meg's shortcomings as a housekeeper (spoiling her clothes and the breakfast).
Question for readers:
If you had to use some of the symbols applied to the March sisters to describe yourself, what would you use? So far we've seen:
- The small item each girl wants to buy herself at Christmas
- The chore each girl takes on to get ready for Marmee's homecoming (and then how each girl helps get ready for dinner when Marmee arrives)
- The gift each girl gives Marmee
- The role(s) each girl plays in the theatrical performance
- Each girl's favorite part of playing Pilgrim's Progress
- The color of the books Marmee gives to each girl
- The gift each girl sends to Laurie when he's sick
- The plants growing in each girl's garden
- The Dickens character each girl pretends to be
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