The timeless classic Little Women by Louisa May Alcott shares a special place in American Literature. It’s heartfelt, empowering, and effortlessly illuminating with the war-raging American domestic life as its backdrop. Greta Gerwig’s movie adaptation in 2019 sparked fresh dialogue about this beautiful classic. Let’s find out how her adaptation was different as compared to Alcott’s novel in 1868.
Differences in the chronology
The book starts with the March girls sprawled across the sparsely furnished living room conversing about festivals, presents, and poverty. It opens with Jo’s iconic dialogue, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.” The movie, however, starts with Jo in New York and Amy in Paris. Greta’s non-linear technique with timelines is a bit jarring in the beginning. However, she differentiates timelines by using a clever color-coding technique. The girls’ past had a warmer tinge to it, while the fresher scenes were on the cooler side.
Jo’s role as an author
Alcott’s Jo was a struggling author, who eventually finds her way of writing after Bhaer’s harsh criticism of her ‘sensational’ stories to more morally grounded books, but she never explicitly wrote Little Women. The movie, however, shows Saoirse Ronan writing the book in her attic, which makes the plot more personal to Louisa May Alcott’s real-life story. The director delves deeper into the author’s semi-autobiographical work and makes it more of Louisa’s story than Jo’s story.
Florence Pugh’s Amy is a lot less unflattering in the movie
There is a common consensus in the reading community — nobody liked Amy in the books. She is pampered, selfish, and downright mean, especially when she burns Jo’s manuscripts. In the classic, her engagement with Laurie is shocking as Alcott rarely gives an insight into many of her seemingly selfish decisions. However, the movie took an unconventional approach. In an interview with SiriusXM, Florence revealed how Greta decided to bring Amy into a new light. Her famous speech with Laurie about Economic Prepositions was an invention of the 2019 adaption. Greta chooses to portray her as a practical character who understands the societal differences between men and women of her time. Her decision to marry rich isn’t a whim but a necessity for survival. In a way, she bears the greatest responsibility for her family — financial stability.
The movie’s ambiguous ending
Initially, Little Women was published in two volumes – the first book made it pretty clear that Jo was too unconventional for marriage, like Alcott herself. She was destined to be a ‘literary spinster’. Succumbing to the pressure by her fans and the literary culture of her time, Alcott finally ended up giving Jo her beau. He wasn’t conventionally attractive, unlike the movie’s casting of Louis Garrel. Alcott described him as a stout middle-aged German professor. It was her way to deflect her fanbase’s demands by creating an unsatisfactory romantic hero for Jo. The movie solves this tussle between Alcott’s true wishes for her protagonist vs the audience’s demands by giving two alternative endings for her movie. Jo’s fate is left in the hands of viewers and their interpretations.
In the end, the movie and the book are both excellent in directing the audience’s interest in the domestic lives of women, a concept that is still culturally secluded from modern art. What do you think of Greta Gerwig’s modern adaptation of the classic?