![]() ![]() ![]() There is more than a little Frances Ha about her. She is cinematically construed as a modern woman, dancing wildly, theatrical in her boisterousness. Jo sprints through the snow, down the streets, along the beach. She’s at a party in a New York bar, then in a garret apartment. Following her, Little Women spends less time in the March family house than the book or other adaptations. It is Jo, even more than her sisters, who breaks through the stultifying aesthetic of the film’s world. i Jo’s independence is the film’s radical centre, its energy. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she wrote that she “identified myself passionately with Jo, the intellectual brusque and bony In order to imitate her more completely, I composed two or three short stories”. For a young Simone De Beauvoir, Jo was inspirational. Either way.” (Gerwig’s scene expands on Armstrong’s depiction, which only shows Jo being rejected by her publisher and embellishes the exchange from the original book in which Dashwood argues that “morals don’t sell nowadays” but says nothing about marriage.) Signalling itself as a meta-commentary, a self-reflexive critique of the limited narrative arcs for women in period drama, the film turns Jo into Alcott, framing the film as a parable of feminist professional struggle. She listens, ink-stained and scruffy, as he tells her, “If the main character’s a girl make sure she’s married by the end. Jo’s negotiations with her publisher, Mr Dashwood, explicitly locate her outside the nuclear family unit where the Little Women narrative usually begins. The opening scene of Little Women already signals Gerwig’s willingness to critically reflect on the relative conservatism of the original text. ![]() Apart from Beth, who remains stolid, loyal and doomed, we see each sister grow from a chattering child to a capable woman, exploring the transformative potential of sisterhood and fantasy. Gerwig’s script nevertheless tries to show that the March sisters can be more than metonyms for different strains of feminine vice and virtue. Alcott herself later referred to it as “dull moral pap for children”. Will they settle down and marry, devote themselves to charity and embrace the nuclear family? Or will they be slightly more daring, pursuing the arts? Will they, as Alcott did, take up writing? It is questionable whether Alcott’s Little Women was perceived as a radical proposition in the 19th century. The film follows their different paths to womanhood and self-realisation, each sister an avatar of normative potential. Gerwig keeps her key characters recognisable to type Jo is fiery, Meg dull, Beth sickly and Amy irritating. Gerwig has repackaged 19th century proto-feminism for the knowing 21st century viewer, but is energy and a critical eye enough to say something radically different? ![]() While positioning itself as a loving homage to its predecessors and revelling in its full traditionalism, it also attempts to bring the March sisters into the modern era, interlacing traditional symbolism with formal inventiveness and a concomitant self-aware politics. However, the resulting film is a balancing act. It was ready, many felt, for a 21st century feminist reboot and who better to helm it than Gerwig, director of Lady Bird (2018), the figurehead of wry, modern women who refuse to compromise? After a film focusing on a young woman’s fight against cultural expectations it might have been expected that Gerwig would apply the same treatment to Little Women. Alcott, who never married, gave us sisters who strove to defy the norms of their era, and Armstrong’s film – made and marketed before the rise of contemporary consumerist feminism – faithfully reflected its source material. The book has already been serialised and popularised by successful TV and cinematic adaptations, including a George Cukor production in 1933, a Gillian Armstrong film in 1994 and a BBC series in 2017. The story is both well-known and well-loved: a book that has sold 1.78 million copies since its publication in 1868, whose central characters have become cultural reference points in their own right and extolled by cultural figures including Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks and Ursula K. Little Women follows the exploits of the four March sisters – Meg (Emma Watson), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Beth (Eliza Scanlan) and Amy (Florence Pugh) – in Civil War-era America, growing up in poverty in New England, albeit one imbued with the trappings of aristocratic wealth. What’s less clear, however, is whether she manages to update its vision of feminism for the 21st century. If the radical potential of adaptation lies in its ability to harness the energy of an established text for new purpose, how much can it compromise, alter, or deny in pursuit of this goal? Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (re)presents the themes of the original – family, morality, marriage and creativity – in full period glory. ![]()
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