At Last, I Love Little Women & Why Maybe You Will Too

 

My best advice to anyone planning to see Little Women is to just let the movie wash over you. Don’t try to figure out the timelines and which scene is a flashback and which one a flash-forward. Or which is a memory and which one a dream — especially if you’ve never read the book, or read it so long ago you’ve forgotten most of it.

Yes, it’s all a little confusing, and, I might add annoying -especially if you’re an author who is working right now on re-structuring flashbacks and backstories in the latest round of suggested edits and revisions. (Hint: that’s me!)

But, in this movie the interweaving of past and present really works. Specifically, it keeps you awake more than a linear re-telling of the book would.

Wisely, Greta Gerwig, screenwriter and director of the movie, has chosen to tell the story of the four March sisters by splicing vignettes of the sisters as young girls (boring!) into the most interesting, most comprehensible narrative arc which belongs to Jo March as she evolves into a writer and author, and into the woman that Louisa May Alcott, her creator, always wanted Jo to be.

Best Scenes In Little Women

No prizes for guessing that Jo is my personal favorite because she’s a writer and the most interesting of the March sisters — unless you’re prepared to characterize sister Amy as the psycho in the family!

Well, she did burn Jo’s manuscript and also stole Jo’s boyfriend (although Jo really didn’t want him!) And, in the book, Alcott’s introduction of Amy  reads as follows: “Amy, the youngest, was a most important person, in her own opinion, at least.” Definitely. A psycho in the making!!!!

But Jo’s scenes are the best scenes in the movie: For example, we see her walking into the busy office of a New York publisher and waiting while he reads, edits and accepts her handwritten pages for publication; we see her getting back to work on a new book after Amy’s vandalism; we see her writing feverishly in an attic, getting ink stains on her fingers as her hand cramps up; we see her laying out her handwritten pages across the floor to better re-arrange her scenes in her novel.

Pickled Limes

Truth be told, I didn’t remember any such scenes from the book, possibly because the UK version stopped at the end of Volume I before Jo’s writing career really took off. In fact, I didn’t remember anything much about the book when I went to see the movie –except Amy’s chatter about pickled limes. That’s something I remembered for years afterwards, whenever the classic was mentioned.

That’s because the pickled limes remained a puzzle to me in a world without Google. I never understood what they were and why girls in Amy’s school passed them around like treats. I couldn’t figure out if they were literal pickled limes, or some sort of American candy which like Circus Peanuts are not really peanuts but sickly sweet marshmallow-type concoctions.

Jo March vs. Scarlett O’Hara

Sorry, but I have to admit I just didn’t enjoy the book when I read it as a child.  Sure, Little Women was the classic that every girl child was supposed to love. It followed the adventures and travails of four young sisters in a family trying to make ends meet while Father was off fighting in the Civil War (on the side of right, naturally!)

However, I read the book more than five decades ago, at around the same time that I read Gone With The Wind. Of course, nowadays GWTW is vilified for its glorification of the South’s slave holders during the same Civil War , but what did I know back then? Scarlett (“I’ll never go hungry again!”) was a far spunkier heroine than even Jo, the spunkiest of the March sisters.

For example, if one of Scarlett’s sisters had burned  a manuscript she’d sweated over for more than a year, Scarlett most likely would have chopped off her hand. As it is, this is how Louisa May Alcott wrote about Jo’s trauma:

“Amy’s bonfire had consumed the loving work of several years. It seemed a small loss to others, but to Jo it was a dreadful calamity and she felt that it could never be made up to her.”

Reluctant Author

Apparently, Alcott’s heart was never really into the writing of Little Women.  She was quite happy making her money writing lurid “blood and thunder” tales and potboilers, but her publisher wanted a novel about girls. Reluctantly, Alcott produced a work based on  her own family saga in which, like Jo, she was the second of four sisters.

She definitely resisted writing volume II, which was written (and subsequently added to Volume I of Little Women, turning it into one book) after her readers begged her to write about the March sisters as adults. Specifically, readers wanted to know if Jo would marry Laurie, the young handsome neighbor.

“Girls write to ask who the little women will marry,” Alcott once said in disgust. “as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life.”

Alcott (pictured) is known to have been virulently opposed to marrying off Jo to anyone and especially to Laurie.  But like  Mr. Dashwood, the publisher in Gerwig’s movie, Alcott’s publisher in real life insisted women in novels must either get married –or die.

I am sure Alcott got just the slightest bit of (devious) pleasure from marrying off Jo– in the book– not to Laurie, but to the older, grumpier, unattractive professor Baehr whom she first meets in a New York City boarding house.  In this new movie, Baehr is a dashing young Frenchman BUT, if it seems that Gerwig has compromised with the use of an aesthetically more pleasing character, she has also messed with our heads.

In the best way possible, I might add.

Jo: Literary Spinster Or Wife?

Spoiler Alert

The scene in the movie where Mr. Dashwood tells Jo that her female protagonist must be married or dead is interwoven with a scene of Jo running in the rain to the station to stop her dashing Frenchman from boarding a train for California. The scene concludes with an obligatory kiss under an umbrella.

Then, it’s CUT TO: Jo in the publisher’s office with Mr. Dashwood stating, “The title of that chapter will be Under The Umbrella.” So, we are left wondering if that’s a scene Jo March  inserted into her novel, or whether she actually married Baehr in this movie as she did in Alcott’s book?

I say, no. Jo does not marry in Gerwig’s movie. Or, if she does, it’s not important. There is no follow-up with Jo as a beautiful bride. Instead, the final scenes of the movie are a montage of Jo watching the physical publishing process of her book from the pouring of hot lead type to the pages being bound, to having the cover title brushed with goldleaf. And, then, she gets to hold her book (titled Little Women)  like she would hold a new-born baby.

It’s a throat-grabber of a scene that’s sure to leave any author or writer in the audience misty-eyed. It’s a scene that would undoubtedly have satisfied Alcott. It’s a scene that truly reconciles Alcott’s life, her feminist views and her fervent wish for Jo to remain a “literary spinster” with her bestselling classic –thus establishing it as one of the most brilliant adaptations of the book. Ever.

And, if Greta Gerwig does not win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Academy Awards judges really don’t know what they’re doing.