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After some thorough unscientific research, I’ve come to the assumption/conclusion that death in the 1860s happened suddenly or even “very suddenly”, as opposed to the long dying process that Beth seemed to endure in Little Women. My “sample” came form list obituraries of small rural newspapers in Virginia which can be found here.
Also, in my research (googling), I found a website that further supports the hypothesis that sudden death was common in the 1860s. It seems that often when people died suddenly the families would hire a photographer to take a picture of the deceased often because there would be no photogrpahic record of the person otherwise. A link to this website is here. WARNING: there are dead babies, but they look very peaceful.
So obviously Beth’s slow death in the story was purposeful. I believe Alcott chose not to “kill off” Beth so abrubtly because she wanted it to be more impactful. It had to be long to represent how long women were trapped in the mold of Beth. With Beth’s death a more “old-fashioned heroine” was dying, which gave rise to the “new heroine” — Jo.
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Ah–I see my speculations were incorrect! Thanks for doing some interesting research to set at least part of the record straight.
Professor Emerson has some extremely interesting thoughts/musings on photographs like these. I wish she were in our class and could comment–strange to say, but true.
Comment by gcampbel 02.25.07 @ 7:49 am