Greta Gerwig’s Little Women Balances the Joy and Anger of Womanhood
Film Still ℅ Sony Pictures
Warning: Spoilers for 2019’s Little Women appear throughout the piece.
I grew up with Little Women. My mom bought me the early reader’s edition until I was old enough to appreciate Louisa May Alcott’s words as they were printed in 1868, and I lauded Winona Ryder’s performance in the 1994 film, identifying with the ill-tempered writer in the attic Jo March, being the avid young reader I was. This was the case for many girls growing up in America, as I discovered in a lively conversation in my English class while I was studying abroad in Edinburgh; the British students had barely heard of it, which astounded the other Americans in the room. Little Women marked the first page in my current studies as an English major enthralled with nineteenth-century women novelists (sorry, Alcott, I’ve already chosen the path of writing my senior honors thesis on Charlotte Brontë, to whom I couldn’t help but draw comparisons from the new film — forgive me for letting that seep into this article).
I was thrilled to discover that Greta Gerwig had written and directed an adaption of Little Women. The 2019 trailer felt like a dream — one of my favorite directors with some of my favorite actors in a feminist rendering of nine-year-old Kendall’s favorite book? I had to see it the day it came out, and once more the following week, surrounded by my own March women — my mom and two sisters, and of course my dad who cried himself.
Despite the permeating joy of sisterhood, there is an undercurrent of anger and passion in Gerwig’s film, unsurprising from the director of Lady Bird — a profoundly joyful film I always cry watching. Given that the film opens with an epigraph by Alcott, “I've had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales,” this balance is to be expected. Instead of telling the plot chronologically, in two volumes as Alcott published it, Gerwig splices the timeline and jumps around from past to present, illustrating the growth undergone by the March sisters from 1861 to 1868. The film starts in the present (‘68) with Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) at a publishing house with the hopes of selling a short story. After glimpsing the others’ separate adult lives — Meg (Emma Watson) is married to a penniless tutor with two children, Beth (Eliza Scanlen) sits at her piano at home, Amy (Florence Pugh) paints in France alongside Aunt March (Meryl Streep) in pursuit of a wealthy husband — we are taken back to their childhood.
Film Still ℅ Sony Pictures
In Little Women, love is tactile and pleasure is prosaic. Amy curls up in Meg’s lap, Jo puts her arm around Beth, the sisters eagerly crowd around the armchair that their mother, Marmee (Laura Dern) sits on to hear from their father (Bob Odenkirk), they link arms to walk through the snow. And through these daily moments of intimacy between the girls, joy permeates and fills the room like warmth from the fire. “I want people to want to crawl inside and live in there,” Gerwig said in an interview. What made me smile ear-to-ear, and what made others leave wanting sisters, is found in the quotidian details of girlhood and sisterhood. Joy is in the overlapping dialogue and joined hands, in their father’s return and in Meg’s wedding.
Joy is ultimately in the day-to-day lives of the girls and in their dreams that inform these moments; one Christmas morning, Amy proclaims that she has lots of wishes, and the others do too: Amy wants to be a painter, Meg a wealthy actress, Jo a famous writer, and Beth a pianist, though she’s content sharing that with just her family. Their artistic and intellectual endeavors are always present — particularly for the voice of the film Jo — and underscore the bliss in their ordinary lives, even when tragedy hits.
The circles of women are so often looked on by men in the film with a mix of admiration and envy: at his first encounter with the family, Laurie (Timothee Chalamet), who doesn’t have a mother nor any siblings, “stands apart, not wanting to be a disruption, but loving the March household, this slightly medieval utopia of artists and thinkers,” as Gerwig writes in her screenplay. The casual intimacy of the sisters is portrayed as wholesome but not naive, sweet but not saccharine. Men like Laurie stand outside and want inside, and seek perhaps to do so via marriage. This male gaze is not bad per se, only pernicious in the scene where Laurie chides Meg for dressing up or drunkenly derides Amy. In fact, no one is the villain — each character is instead intricately imperfect, and Gerwig fleshes out Alcott’s characters and brings each one to life; even the oft-intolerable Amy is good and clever and complex. Not even the publishing agent Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts), who at first rejects the manuscript, is wicked, but rather representative of the larger oppression of a patriarchal society, which disapproves of women writers and makes a married woman her husband’s property and so on. This scrutiny of moral judgement threads the girls’, particularly Jo’s, indignation and ambition beneath even the scenes of immense joy.
Film Still ℅ Sony Pictures
Jo is determined to write scandalous tales with poison and violence — “it sells” — but, after Professor Bhaer’s (Louis Garrel) criticism momentarily halts Jo’s writing, a sick Beth tells her to write about “us.” On the beach, Jo reads her a quote from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, whose protagonist Maggie isn’t unlike Jo: “What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?” It is a quote about growth and change but also the nostalgic energy of childhood and family and tender routine. Beth tells her to write her own words in response. Later, Beth’s death spurs Jo’s metatextual writing of Little Women, and she becomes a surrogate for Louisa May Alcott writing the wonderful trivialities of nineteenth-century women. “As a child, my hero was Jo March,” Gerwig said. “But as an adult, it’s Louisa May Alcott.” I agree (just as Brontë is more my hero than Jane Eyre). The scope of the novel is expanded with the film’s fiber of authorship woven into the plot.
Of Jane Eyre, Virgina Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, readers “constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain” — Brontë, a predecessor of Alcott, was “angry and restless” like Jo. Woolf declares this a fault of the novelist’s integrity, but this pain of lack and desire fuels Brontë’s as well as Alcott’s writing, and is reflected in Jo’s climactic line: “Women have minds and souls as well as hearts, ambition and talent as well as beauty.” (Side note: Brontë sold her copyright, as Woolf reprimands. Alcott, who wrote nearly 20 years after her, did not, like Jo. Alcott, and Jo, also published Little Women under her own name, unlike Bronte — Currer Bell — or George Eliot mentioned above.) Alcott wrote feverishly and ambidextrously, incited by her passion — “too noble to curb, too lofty to bend,” to quote Marmee and Alcott’s mother — as well as the familial and platonic love that surrounded her (as it does Jo and her sisters). She never married nor had children, but Jo March did, despite the author’s wishes for her to remain a “literary spinster.”
Gerwig alters the ending a smidge to make it something that Alcott might have written if her publisher had been okay with a heroine left unmarried at the end of the novel: she has it both ways, and shows the scene of Jo and Bhaer kissing under the umbrella, but only after suggesting that this is merely the character Jo while the author Jo remains unmarried. Instead of having marriage and kids, as the pinnacle reward of Victorian literary heroines, Jo gets the reunion of her family and ultimately the pleasure of watching her book being published. The true ending of the story is Jo’s fulfillment of agency and ambition, the publication of her novel that chronicles the intricacies and pleasures of sisterhood. “I think Little Women is always a secretly subversive story,” Amy Pascal, a producer on the film, said in an interview. And so it remains: a progressive tale of its time and a film that stays true to its beloved original.
About the Author
Kendall Geisel (she/her) is a 4th year from Milton, GA studying English Literature at the George Washington University. As being a woman is an important part of her identity, she is interested in female novelists of the Victorian to contemporary periods, particularly Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf. She’s at her best when she’s reading in the sun or at a concert.
