If the radical potential of adaptation lies in its ability to harness the energy of an established text for new purpose, how much can it compromise, alter, or deny in pursuit of this goal? Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (re)presents the themes of the original – family, morality, marriage and creativity – in full period glory. What’s less clear, however, is whether she manages to update its vision of feminism for the 21st century. Little Women follows the exploits of the four March sisters – Meg (Emma Watson), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Beth (Eliza Scanlan) and Amy (Florence Pugh) – in Civil War-era America, growing up in poverty in New England, albeit one imbued with the trappings of aristocratic wealth. The story is both well-known and well-loved: a book that has sold 1.78 million copies since its publication in 1868, whose central characters have become cultural reference points in their own right and extolled by cultural figures including Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks and Ursula K. Le Guin. The book has already been serialised and popularised by successful TV and cinematic adaptations, including a George Cukor production in 1933, a Gillian Armstrong film in 1994 and a BBC series in 2017. Alcott, who never married, gave us sisters who strove to defy the norms of their era, and Armstrong’s film – made and marketed before the rise of contemporary consumerist feminism – faithfully reflected its source material. It was ready, many felt, for a 21st century feminist reboot and who better to helm it than Gerwig, director of Lady Bird (2018), the figurehead of wry, modern women who refuse to compromise? After a film focusing on a young woman’s fight against cultural expectations it might have been expected that Gerwig would apply the same treatment to Little Women. However, the resulting film is a balancing act. While positioning itself as a loving homage to its predecessors and revelling in its full traditionalism, it also attempts to bring the March sisters into the modern era, interlacing traditional symbolism with formal inventiveness and a concomitant self-aware politics. Gerwig has repackaged 19th century proto-feminism for the knowing 21st century viewer, but is energy and a critical eye enough to say something radically different?
The answer is both yes and no. Gerwig keeps her key characters recognisable to type; Jo is fiery, Meg dull, Beth sickly and Amy irritating. The film follows their different paths to womanhood and self-realisation, each sister an avatar of normative potential. Will they settle down and marry, devote themselves to charity and embrace the nuclear family? Or will they be slightly more daring, pursuing the arts? Will they, as Alcott did, take up writing? It is questionable whether Alcott’s Little Women was perceived as a radical proposition in the 19th century. Alcott herself later referred to it as “dull […] moral pap for children”. Gerwig’s script nevertheless tries to show that the March sisters can be more than metonyms for different strains of feminine vice and virtue. Apart from Beth, who remains stolid, loyal and doomed, we see each sister grow from a chattering child to a capable woman, exploring the transformative potential of sisterhood and fantasy. The opening scene of Little Women already signals Gerwig’s willingness to critically reflect on the relative conservatism of the original text. Jo’s negotiations with her publisher, Mr Dashwood, explicitly locate her outside the nuclear family unit where the Little Women narrative usually begins. She listens, ink-stained and scruffy, as he tells her, “If the main character’s a girl make sure she’s married by the end. Or dead. Either way.” (Gerwig’s scene expands on Armstrong’s depiction, which only shows Jo being rejected by her publisher and embellishes the exchange from the original book in which Dashwood argues that “morals don’t sell nowadays” but says nothing about marriage.) Signalling itself as a meta-commentary, a self-reflexive critique of the limited narrative arcs for women in period drama, the film turns Jo into Alcott, framing the film as a parable of feminist professional struggle. For a young Simone De Beauvoir, Jo was inspirational. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she wrote that she “identified myself passionately with Jo, the intellectual; brusque and bony […] In order to imitate her more completely, I composed two or three short stories”.i Jo’s independence is the film’s radical centre, its energy. It is Jo, even more than her sisters, who breaks through the stultifying aesthetic of the film’s world. Following her, Little Women spends less time in the March family house than the book or other adaptations. She’s at a party in a New York bar, then in a garret apartment. Jo sprints through the snow, down the streets, along the beach. She is cinematically construed as a modern woman, dancing wildly, theatrical in her boisterousness. There is more than a little Frances Ha about her. By focusing on Jo’s escapist writing and city living, the film departs from the suffocating domestic intensity of the book. Little Women is dominated by energy, rather than stasis, positivity in choice rather than negativity in compromise.
Gerwig is nevertheless keen to preserve the lavish period aesthetic, brightening and lightening where previous productions have emphasised the Marches’ relative lack of wealth. The March household glitters, bathed in a golden light that irradiates the sisters and their surroundings. The beauty of the filmic world is laid on thick, the frame crammed with period detail. The Marches are often arranged traditionally, lit to be golden, long hair tumbling artfully, angelic in their cotton nightdresses. Gerwig’s film has little appetite for gritty, ugly poverty and while much is (dialogically) made of the family’s struggle, the sparkle and beauty of their house resists engagement with this fact. When an interviewer told Gerwig “I want to live in the house”, Gerwig replied, “Me too!” These contradictions are frustrating. In the scenes on Christmas morning where the Marches, aglow with goodness, take their breakfast to their poorer neighbours, only to be rewarded with an even better breakfast by the similarly beneficent Laurence household, we are presented with an uncritical spectacle of Victorian dependency, grimly recycling the contemporary moral discourse where such charity represents a viable moral and political economy. Is Gerwig chained by the text in moments like these? Her film does more than uncritically reproduce the flaws of the original, visually fetishising this as performative philanthropy and turning the Marches’ charitable acts into indulgent rituals of moral spectacle. More twee clichés follow: the celebration of Aunt March as the archetypal old snob, humourised by her matronly old age and femininity and, as Sarah Blackwood argued in The New Yorker, the simplistic beatification of Marmee. Yet even in these scenes the girls’ rapid-fire, almost ceaseless dialogue tears through the traditional homespun aesthetic, a Gerwiggian tweak from the mumblecore tradition: here speed serves to highlight the girls’ modernity. At times they talk in (somewhat strained) lyrical New England traditionalisms but they are also acerbic and direct. Their wit is in tension with their staid aesthetic rendering, a tension that extends between the girls and their world. But is this enough to make the project radical, to enact a shift from proto-feminist to feminist? Speed and delivery cannot redeem Gerwig’s script from its uninspiring politics.
Reviewers have rushed to celebrate Gerwig’s Little Women for its contemporary feminist relevance, arguing that it shows that “dreams and ambitions can be greater and more soaring than Louisa May Alcott, trapped in the 19th century and kicking against it, could ever have hoped”. Really? As an adaptation, the film enacts few interpretive and material shifts for women. Meg stays dull, Amy irritating, and Beth dead. What does this lofty praise – so keen to find feminist value and demonstrate progress – say about the current culture of feminism? For all its modern chat and sass, Gerwig’s vision is nostalgic, its structural back-and-forth rose-tinted. In Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, Belén Vidal argues that period drama relishes in the “spectacle of pastness and its intricate signs”ii but also notes that in period film “pastness appears disconnected from the (historical) past by an aesthetic of surfaces”iii and this feels true of Little Women’s most spectacular scenes. In the vast New England landscapes or within the grand house of Mr. Laurence we are disconnected from History per-se and plunged into a free-floating aesthetic of association. Christmas scenes evoke Robert Frost, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods and Thomas Kinkade, a non-specific, idealised past. This sense of spectacular familiarity is common to adaptation and Gerwig plays on this through visual references to Armstrong’s Little Women, re-assembling the March sisters and their mother, Marmee (Laura Dern), in the same fireside poses. Through this referencing, Gerwig takes us out of History and into a hyper-constructed past, a mise-en-abyme that links her Little Women back to Armstrong, to Alcott and to the Little Women culture industry, bringing the viewer, through its self-reflexive system of citation, into a temporal loop between past and present. This is paralytic. With an ironising retrospective gaze, Little Women falls in line with what Owen Hatherley calls the “ironic-authoritarian-consumerist dreamworld”iv of the nostalgia industry which simplifies, limits and depoliticises the past for easy consumption in the modern marketplace. Little Women is marketed and will likely appeal to young people – young women. It’s sad, then, that this is a version without real consistent anger, that gives occasional voice to the rage of Jo and Marmee but which wraps up their fury in a linen shawl by the close of each scene, the bright scenery and music propelling them inexorably towards happiness. Sara Ahmed’s Killjoy Manifesto highlights the “political utility of happiness” that is used to “justify social norms and social goods”, suggesting we should celebrate the figure of the feminist killjoy who disturbs normative happiness to assert herself. Is Jo a killjoy? Was Alcott? In the original book their rage pushes against their world, but Gerwig’s character’s anger, although articulated verbally, barely builds beyond each scene, dissipating into the spectacle, given no object or oxygen to keep it alive.
In an interview with Film Comment, Gerwig describes how she took material from Alcott’s other work and added her own flourishes. A line from a different monologue that went “Women have minds, as well as just heart; ambition and talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying love is all a woman is fit for” is embellished with the additional clause: But I’m so lonely. In Gerwig’s Little Women, Jo says this to her mother in a monologue following Beth’s death. For Gerwig, this was a modern tweak that served to highlight the hardships of living ahead of your time, which she links to her own feelings of loneliness as a writer – “I was alone.” Yet far from instilling a sense of sisterly solidarity across time, her tinkering injects a sense of isolation and atomisation: anger becomes sadness, individuality becomes loneliness. The opening title of Gerwig’s film is also an edited quote from Alcott, “I’ve had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales”, taken from an entry in her diaries where she discusses novel writing with a fellow female author. The rest of the quote, cut by Gerwig, continues, “and we wondered why we each did so”v – a crucial clause that reframes individual feeling as a structural cultural issue, undermining the twee naivety of the first pronouncement. Gerwig’s editing of Alcott’s writing incises the radical doubt and nuance that characterised Alcott’s approach – it is a misrepresentation, a false justification for the jollity that follows. Lauded for taking the original “to new feminist heights”, Gerwig’s Little Women in fact fails to engage with the proto-feminist spirit of the original, let alone the radical potential for which a modern adaptation might allow. Instead, the film imbricates a knowing irony, a self-aware stylisation, into the fabric of the original text, but leaves the central tropes of the novel intact. The commitment to re-shaping, rather than re-writing the narrative and ideology of the original means that Gerwig’s Little Women remains a celebration of compromise, rather than radical fulfilment. When Jo’s publisher tells her that she cannot end her book with her heroine a spinster, Jo protests against the inevitability of literary marriage – “It’s an economic proposition! […] It’s mercenary!” – before accepting his suggestion, surrendering the argument for writerly control and ownership of creative destiny. Gerwig’s adaptation adds stylistically to the canon by introducing a knowing exploration of the limitations placed on women, caricaturing the economic and cultural constraints placed on female creativity. But in the end this self-aware capitulation is arguably more damaging than the historically bounded determinism of the original. Gerwig’s refusal to engage with feminist ideas beyond those that pertain to Alcott’s time risks celebrating a socially conservative present. With the cinematic perspective of looking backwards and smiling at History – however knowingly – comes bourgeois inevitability and unnecessary pessimism. Gerwig’s Little Women is afflicted by a kind of a teleological smugness. We can smile and say, yes, that was how they did it then, but we wouldn’t do it that way now, would we? But then again, we might.
Georgie Carr is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers. She tweets at @georgie_cat_.
[i] Simone De Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, World Pub. Co., 1959 [ii] Belén Vidal, Figuring The Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, Amsterdam University Press, p. 9 [iii] Belén Vidal, p. 18 [iv] Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia, Verso, pg. 128. [v] Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, Little Brown and Company, 1889, p. 131.
