the girls live in a world in which they experience a number od disappointments but are compensated for each with some form of spiritual growth. This is in keeping with the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a friend of Alcott's father:
Jo is compensated for every disappointment by spiritual growth. Jo's development is a sweetly sentimental version of the journey everyone is expected to make. . . Seemingly intractable Jo learns to be the ideal woman: patient, forgiving, soothing, undemanding, unselfish, and uncapricious (Saxton 4).
The mother, Marmee, is the ideal mother and has no life at all outside of her family. Jo tries to emulate her mother and be the same sort of person, and this becomes the ideal of the matriarch and so the family woman each of the daughters would like to be. Marmee is unselfish and has learned to derive her satisfactions from the satisfactions of others, notably her children. Jo's attempt to be like her mother is the arch
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