Major Themes
Each chapter describes an adventure in Rose's life as she learns to help herself and others make good choices. Rose must define for herself her role as the only woman of her generation in her family and as an heiress in Boston's elite society.
Without a mother for most of her life, Rose looks to her many aunts, her friends, and the housemaid Phebe as feminine role models. At the same time, this 13-year-old girl, who has just lost her beloved father, previously the only male in her life, is suddenly confronted with a male guardian and seven male cousins.
As do all of Alcott's books for young people, the story takes a high moral tone. Various chapters illustrate the evils of cigar-smoking, "yellow-back" novels, high fashion, billiards, patent nostrums, and so on, while promoting exercise, a healthy diet, and wholesome experiences of many kinds for girls as well as boys. Alcott uses the novel to promote education theories and feminist ideas, many of which appear in her other books. For example, Uncle Alec, in choosing a wardrobe for Rose, rejects current women's fashions (such as corsets, high heels, veils, and bustles) in favour of less restrictive and healthier clothing. Although he discourages her from the professional study of medicine, Uncle Alec educates Rose in physiology, a subject her aunts consider inappropriate for girls, so that she can understand and take charge of her own health. Rose is prepared for a career as a wife and mother, yet is taught that she must take active and thoughtful control of her fortune so that she may use her money and social position to the best advantage of the larger community. Written in an age when few women had control of their own money, property, or indeed their destinies, Alcott's portrayal of Rose’s upbringing is a good deal more revolutionary than 21st century readers may realize.
The sequel to Eight Cousins is Rose in Bloom (1876) and continues the story into Rose's young adulthood, depicting courtship and marriage, poverty and charity, transcendental poetry and prose, illness and death among her family and friends.
Read more about this topic: Eight Cousins
Famous quotes containing the words major and/or themes:
“Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less.”
—John Major (b. 1943)
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)