There is a conversation between Amy and Jo that comes about halfway through ‘Little Women’ in which the two discuss whether the latter’s work will become anything more than a means to make money.
Jo states, “Writing doesn’t confer importance. It reflects it.”
Yet Amy insists, “Writing things is what makes them important.”
It is hard to not see the relevance of this to Louisa May Alcott’s novels in the 19th century. When the first part of ‘Little Women’ was published in 1868, the United States were fresh off the back of the Civil War, and the illusions of the South as an antebellum paradise were breaking down. Replacing the Southern Belle archetype was the “New Woman” who was independent and self-reliant, and yet resistance to these feminist waves still dominated the discourse around the changes taking place.
‘Little Women’ famously challenged these norms, reflecting Alcott’s own experiences as a feminist, abolitionist, and unmarried writer right up until her death in 1888. In Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-nominated 2019 adaptation of the novel, the parallels are drawn even closer – Alcott’s famous words “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe” are given to Jo March, as she navigates her own way through a culture that imprints its own gendered expectations of women into the minds of girls from an early age. She rails against the limitations forced upon her as she strives to carve her own way in the world, gradually building an impressive literary career that never manages to fully escape the overbearing influence of the literary industry’s patriarchal shadow.
In the final moments of Gerwig’s ‘Little Women’, Jo’s attempts to get her autobiographical novel published are successful, but only on the condition that its protagonist is married by the end. The following sequence cuts between Jo’s professional success, and her chasing down her love interest in a euphoric moment of passion, apparently cementing their future as a happily married couple. Up until now, the film’s non-linearity has been kept from becoming too abstruse by visually distinguishing the present from the past with a cold, stark tone, and yet when it comes to Jo’s rainy kiss we find the screen bathed in a warm glow.
For the first time in the film, Gerwig is allowing some ambiguity into how we interpret the reality of its events. This could be Jo finally finding happiness in a romantic relationship, just as her novel counterpart did, or it could possibly be Jo’s written version of herself being changed to appease her editor’s expectations. This version of Jo is even closer to Alcott’s vision of herself, as a woman who found great joy in her own independence, and yet it doesn’t go so far as to entirely contradict the novel’s established account. The magic of the ending is that Gerwig allows the two to exist side-by-side – a version of Jo in which she happily never marries, and a version of Jo that happily marries and still never gives up her personal convictions.
Though Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh have both been appropriately recognised with a pair of acting nominations at the 2020 Oscars, the greatest snub of the entire year has been the lack of recognition for Gerwig’s phenomenal direction. After her 2017 coming-of-age film ‘Lady Bird’ landed five nominations without a single win, it seemed that this might have been her year to finally be recognised by the Academy as one of the decade’s greatest directors, even with only two feature films under her belt. The fact she has been able to take this classic story, which has been adapted countless times, and retell it in a way that both maintains the integrity of the original piece and allows room for her own inspired, contemporary take, all without a shred of directorial recognition from her industry peers seems mind-boggling.
There is comfort in the larger picture though, especially in how the story of four women growing up in the post-Civil War era has taken hold in our culture, to the point that it has been adapted into a film nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. Individual struggles against a dominant force feel unimportant in the moment, but just as Amy asserts, it is stories like ‘Little Women’ that let them live on in our collective consciousness.
