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Will Greta Gerwig realize the radical potential of ‘Little Women’?

Wmc Fbomb Greta Gerwig Wikimedia 71219
Greta Gerwig, director of 'Little Women'

The world got its first sneak peak of Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of the 1868 coming-of-age novel Little Women when Vanity Fair released stills from, and profile of, the movie on June 19. The film, which will be released this Christmas, features an all-star cast that includes a Lady Bird reunion between Saoirse Ronan (Jo March) and Timothée Chalamet (Laurie). Gerwig told Vanity Fair that her adaptation of the film — the eighth — will not only highlight the feminist understones already present in the novel, but also examine the text with a modern eye, drawing on society’s increased sensitivity to gender fluidity.

One of the main ways Gerwig approached this theme was through Jo and Laurie’s friendship, which exists in a grey area between platonic and romantic. “They find each other before they’ve committed to a gender,” Gerwig told Vanity Fair, adding that the text may subtly support this in the androgyny of both Jo and Laurie’s names. Looking at these characters through the lens of destabilized gender also influenced Gerwig’s casting choices. “It wouldn’t be wrong to call Saoirse handsome and Timothée beautiful,” Gerwig explained. “Both have a slightly androgynous quality that makes them perfect for these characters.” The androgyny in Jo and Laurie’s relationship will also extend to their costumes in that Vanity Fair reports the characters exchange clothes throughout the film — a physical manifestation of the lack of boundaries between them. 

Beyond the specific interpretation of these two characters, Gerwig’s interrogation of the characters’ gender identities marks a connection to the life of the novel’s author, Louisa May Alcott. It’s no secret that the plot of Little Women closely mirrored Alcott’s life. Like Jo, Alcott was a tomboy and one of four sisters who grew up poor in Massachusetts. The grittier realities of poverty didn’t make it into the idealized plot of Little Women, and, some scholars argue, neither did Alcott’s more radical beliefs about gender and feminism. 

Many fans don’t know that Alcott didn’t choose to write Little Women. Instead, as The Washington Post reports, she was asked to write a book for girls because the publisher believed it would sell. And though Little Women made Alcott famous, she had issues with the subject of her novel, both while she was writing it and after its publication. According to Vox, Alcott once referred to the novel derogatorily in a journal entry, calling it “moral pap for the young.”  

Writer Sophie Gilbert offers a possible explanation for why Alcott felt such resistance to writing about a girl’s coming-of-age story. In her article “The Lie of Little Women,” Gilbert explains that when the novel received renewed attention from feminist critics in the 1970s, they started to see tensions between the values the novel espoused and Alcott’s personal beliefs. Paraphrasing these scholars, Gilbert writes that “the novel is about navigating adolescence to become a graceful little woman, but the story itself pushes back against that frame.” In other words, Alcott had difficulty writing Little Women because she couldn’t accept society’s definition of what a “little woman” should be. 

As Gerwig observes, Jo and Laurie’s relationship becomes a central point of conflict in this ideological tug of war. This is especially clear in the watershed moment in their relationship when Jo rejects Laurie’s marriage proposal, breaking his heart. To many fans, Jo’s rejection of Laurie’s proposal was inconceivable, but Alcott never married and did not want to marry her characters off either. Indiewire reports that in between releasing the first and second part of her novel, Alcott complained about her fans constantly wondering who the March sisters would marry, “as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life,” she wrote in one journal entry. “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.” Whether from outside pressure, her own change of heart, or a mix of both, Alcott did eventually relent, however, and married Jo off to an older man, Professor Bhaer.  

Other directors have arguably attempted to realize underlying feminist themes in their adaptations of the novels as well. The most famous is the 1994 version, starring Wynona Ryder as Jo. The movie earned praise for highlighting the feminist undertones in the novel by emphasizing the matriarchal nature of the March household and the creativity of the four March sisters.  

It seems Greta Gerwig, however, has an opportunity to take her adaptation a step forward and incorporate the tensions Alcott herself struggled with in her depiction of gender. Gerwig seems up to the challenge to rediscover Alcott in an ideological sense, pushing the text’s progressivism beyond the constricting social moores of the time, to see just how far it will go.



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