Identify the Pilgrim's Progress allusions structuring Little Women and explain what each borrowed image adds to the March sisters' story.
An allusion is a brief reference to another work that a writer expects the reader to already recognize -- and that recognition does real work, importing a whole world of meaning in just a few words. Classical myths get alluded to this way ("an Achilles' heel"), and so do religious and literary allegories: writers reach for a shared cultural memory instead of re-explaining an idea from scratch.
Alcott builds Little Women on top of one allusion more than any other: John Bunyan's seventeenth-century allegory The Pilgrim's Progress, in which a traveler named Christian journeys toward a distant "Celestial City," dropping a heavy "burden" along the way. Beyond the burdens named in Chapter 1, Alcott titles Meg's chapter at a fashionable, shallow party "Meg Goes to Vanity Fair" -- a direct nod to Bunyan's Vanity Fair, a town in his allegory built entirely on empty luxury and appearances. A reader who knows Bunyan's Vanity Fair immediately understands, before Meg says a word, that this party will tempt her with exactly the kind of hollow glamour the whole book keeps warning against.
Mastery looks like: They can identify at least two specific Pilgrim's Progress allusions in the novel and explain what meaning each one imports.
Common stumbles: Treating any resemblance as an allusion without checking whether the writer clearly intended the reference; missing that an allusion's meaning depends on the reader already knowing the source.