Outgrowing Little Women (Preview)
Reviewed by J. E. Smyth

Toward the end of Woman’s Fiction (1978), her path-breaking study of American women’s novels published between 1820 and 1870, Nina Baym views the arrival of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in 1868 as a moment of decline. In the nineteenth century, writing was one of the few careers open to women, and they took to it with a vengeance, publishing bestsellers about complex heroines surviving frontier raids, slavery, reversals of fortune, and the day-to-day agonies of earning a living. We may have forgotten the names Catharine Sedgwick, Susan Warner, and Maria McIntosh—and we may no longer read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—but American women were so successful at crafting literary careers before the Civil War that the “great” Nathaniel Hawthorne would complain that the world was overrun by a legion of “scribbling women.” They did put a dent in his royalties; the public wanted to read Hope Leslie and The Wide, Wide World, not The Scarlet Letter. But of that great popular wave of women’s fiction, only Alcott’s Little Women survived the canonization/cull of worthy American literature. And, for Baym, the success of Alcott’s novel symbolized “the transformation of women’s fiction into girls’ fiction.”

Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. The four young March heroines are perfectly adorable in their different ways, their mother is a paragon, family life is New England quaintness personified, and three out of the four girls marry the right guy in the end. The Marches are somewhat impoverished due to the father’s mismanagement of the family finances (something experienced by and written about by many of Alcott’s literary forebears), and the Civil War has made things tougher, but, while the little women knit socks for the army, there is always enough to eat and a happy servant to cook it for them. There are no orphans, sieges, or scalpings; Marmee is always there to read Father’s letters from the front and tuck copies of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress under their pillows at night.

Little Women’s fans are legion; some, like producer Amy Beth Pascal, are ordained at birth, given the very names of the March sisters to inspire and shape their lives. Since 1868, invented tradition, passed from mother to daughter, has sustained the novel’s successive generations of devoted readers. We read the novel as girls, dreaming of a perfect New England childhood, perfecting our ideals of little womanhood, taking vicarious comfort in the warmth of a Yankee hearth, nurturing our little artistic talents while the snow flies…and, years later, we reread the story to our little girls, reinforcing the lessons learned in childhood, or, as Baym would argue, dwelling on a narrative again and again in an act of willful, narcissistic infantilism, deferring adulthood, not fully acknowledging Alcott’s career as a single woman, and ignoring the unpleasant afterlife of budding writer Jo March. Indeed, after the 1869 publication of Alcott’s second volume (entitled Good Wives in Britain), Alcott chronicled Jo’s work running a boys’ school with her husband and giving birth to more boys. Don’t bother reading Little Men (1871) or Jo’s Boys (1886) if you still believe in her most acclaimed novel’s so-called innate feminism, the tooth fairy, or happily-ever-after stories.

Were you under the impression that, after the events recounted in Little Women, Jo publishes her first book, becomes a professional writer, and lives on her own terms? You must be confusing Alcott’s Jo March with Greta Gerwig’s new film—or the off-screen life of filmdom’s ultimate Josephine March, Katharine Hepburn. That happens a lot to female fans who want to block out Jo’s marriage to a lumpy German professor and her ensuing life as a domestic drudge to a household of little men. Some have dreamed of a different outcome for Jo and her sisters, but for a hundred years film and television companies have relentlessly produced new adaptations of Little Women, propped up by the invented traditions of white, middle-class American girlhood, and the fantasy of shutting one’s eyes and starting over again with a clean slate and unbroken dreams.

The film industry has always been as obsessed with young girls as it is with remakes, and so it should be no surprise that we’ve had seven film versions of Little Women and even more television series and television movies since the first British feature appeared in the late summer of 1917. These days, Little Women might appear, to a certain extent, as nothing more than another franchise, recycled, rebranded, and rebooted as easily as Spider-Man (it’s not accidental that Pascal has rebooted her own productions of Little Women, in 1994 and 2019, and her Sony-owned webbed hero [2000, 2012, 2017] with different actors). Contemporary critics have tried to reconcile two concepts when arguing for the novel’s cultural relevance on screens. It is a “timeless classic” novel written by a woman about [little] women, and every generation “deserves” its own screen version. This is essentially the Bob Iger Philosophy of Remakes merged with Pascal’s feminism and a cultural belief that each increasingly feminist generation of filmmakers and viewers will find something new, modern, and strong in the story.

Perhaps the definition of madness really is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, but Hollywood’s obsession with remaking Little Women is not necessarily mad, simply because it expects and wants the same result from this presold classic: an old-fashioned, family-oriented box-office hit in which all four little girls grow up to be well-bred, married ladies (Meg, Jo, Amy)…or die beautifully (Beth). That said, Pascal and Gerwig have firmly curated the press for their #MeToo-era production, insisting on Gerwig’s mystical personal relationship with Alcott’s original text (“I was seized by the spirit of Louisa May Alcott”), emphasizing the film’s generous embrace of all kinds of female choices (remember the Dior slogan “We Should All Be Feminists”?), and refusing to demonize Amy as the petty blonde bimbo who gets the rich guy. FYI, that’s why Ronan’s Jo is blonde, too—ironically, just like Gerwig and screenwriter-turned-producer Robin Swicord. Swicord gave an interesting interview not long ago, in which she argued the new remake was a redemptive gesture for generations of blonde prom queens who always get the guy. This time, Gerwig, Pascal, and Swicord argue, the culture has changed around women in Hollywood, and this Little Women has been created to capture that new feminist audience. It probably is worth reminding this younger generation that feminism and independent women weren’t invented in the new millennium. Bearing their barrage of publicity in mind, however, I took my daughter along to the press screening and promised her a percentage of my Cineaste author’s fee if she took her own notes on the film. Needless to say, we were outnumbered by the male film critics in the room. Some cultures haven’t changed that much…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 2