The Not so Little Things About Little Women

(Spoiler Alert: Do not read this, if you plan on watching the film or reading the book.)

Last year, I had the opportunity to watch a wonderfully woven adaptation of Little Women made by rising director Greta Gerwig. It starred a talented young ensemble of actors and actresses with Saiorse Ronan and Timothee Chalamet in the role of the protagonists. These two have developed a renowned chemistry as they both starred in Gerwig’s first film Lady Bird which was critically acclaimed and garnered five Oscar nominations. Ronan has been especially successful as at the young age of 25 she has already been the recipient of four Oscar nominations: The Atonement, Brooklyn, Lady Bird, and of course Little Women. After watching the film, I felt compelled to read the novel that had inspired it. I recently finished reading Little Women which was written by Louisa May Alcott in the mid-19th century. During the process, I hoped there would be glaring differences between the novel and the film that I could compare and contrast. But apart from a few minute details and Gerwig’s artistic touch in manipulating the chronological order of storytelling, the film and the book were quite similar. I was, however, able to make several observations from these experiences.

The first is a better understanding of Alcott’s intentions in writing this story. But first I have to relate this to a series of realizations I had while watching the film last year. Like most people, I attempt to predict the ending of a film after reaching somewhere near the halfway point. While watching Little Women, I predicted that Jo March would remain single and that this element of the story would be the best gift Alcott could give to women of the 19th century. Obviously, I was misguided. At first, I attributed this error to my own extremely individualistic mindset, but clearly, there was something else: I had gotten feminism wrong. Feminism does not dictate any individual woman’s actions. More importantly, it consists of the idea that women can do whatever they want and can choose to be independent if they desire. And this inability to fully understand feminism is the exact struggle that Alcott created for her main character Jo.

A recurring theme in the first half of both book and film is that Jo March will not marry and it is evidently because she does not believe girls need boys to be satisfied with life. Yet this notion can contradict an essential facet of human nature: our inclination to be social beings. When the March household begins to shrink, Jo finally comes to terms with her reality. While she is moderately flourishing in her career as a teacher and writer, she cannot help but feel lonely. And this is where we see Greta Gerwig’s brilliance. She dramatizes a scene between Jo and her mother where they discuss the misery that Jo’s loneliness has caused her. The pain is evident in Jo’s voice when she expresses her inner conflict.

“I just feel like women, they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it. But, I’m so lonely.”

This monologue by Jo makes this one of the most memorable scenes from the film. It gets to the heart of not only Jo’s character but also to what most women in the 19th century must have felt about marriage. Women were cornered by societal standards that made marriage and domestic care their primary responsibilities. To have self-respect, they would have to choose to fight against these societal norms and deprive themselves of marriage; a decision which could not be easy by any means. An interesting element of this story is that it is largely based upon Louisa May Alcott’s family with the author representing herself through Jo. However, unlike Jo, Alcott chose to never get married. There is definitely an intriguing debate to be had as to why Alcott created this storyline for her most beloved character, Jo.

There are a couple of other minor conclusions I had. The first one is a comparison I made between Little Women and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. More specifically, I simply felt that Jane Austen was a far superior writer. I have a very small sample size, but there was a stark difference between just these two novels. Pride and Prejudice was very engaging because of Austen’s employment of subtle humor. There were several characters such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh whose representation of a specific socioeconomic class was so absurd that a reader could always get a good laugh out of her words and actions. I saw a similar theme played out in a recent film adaptation of Austen’s novel Emma where a character like Emma’s father provided consistent comedy. Jane Austen possesses a unique ability to create situations that will accentuate the idiosyncrasies of certain characters in a very subtle manner.

The writing of Little Women lacked this element. Perhaps that would be fine if the story had a riveting plotline, but that was not the case with Little Women. I felt that the book progressed very slowly and thus I was not able to engage in Little Women the way I did with Pride and Prejudice. One thing to take into account, however, is that many of Austen’s best characters come from her satirization of a certain social class. This was far less a focal point in Little Women and that may have contributed to my criticism.

But the fact that I read the book after watching the film is perhaps another factor that altered my perception of the novel. From this process, I believe it is an inferior experience to watch a film and then read the original story versus reading a book and then watching its film adaptation. However, this assertion can only be validated with more trials of doing both.