graphic by brenda delgado
In December 2019, I saw the last movie I would see in theaters for two years. I honestly didn’t think much of it. I got “Little Women” tickets with some friends from high school and invited my little sister to come with me. I had just moved away to college (a whopping 30 minutes away) and wanted her to know she was still a part of my life even though I was a Big Girl. Bethy (the nickname bestowed upon her by my family when she was little that I refuse to change) was next to me the entire time we watched our fictional counterparts sit on a dreary beach and talk about death. “We can’t stop God’s will,” Beth tells Jo at a particularly emotional part of the movie. “God hasn’t met my will yet,” Jo responds. For some reason, Bethy burst out laughing next to me, and I turned to give her a horrified look. “It’s like us,” she shrugged, like I should’ve known that. I don’t think she remembers this interaction, how I tried to hide my tears in the darkness of the theater, or how it still makes me emotional five years later, with 3,000 miles between us.
I read “Little Women” during the deadly Texas snowstorm of 2021 in candlelight as rolling blackouts rendered our light bulbs useless. I marked favorite lines, things that made me giggle and cry as my family of six gritted our teeth in an impressive show of Southern resilience. I fell in love with the story and got into the habit of rewatching the Greta Gerwig movie and talking about my favorite scenes to literally anyone who would listen. Bethy endured a bulk of this, somehow. There were many nights we lay next to each other in bed scrolling through devastating TikToks in a silent competition to render the other speechless. The story of my sister and I bonding over these centuries-old sisters is not new or unexpected.
“Little Women” is one of the first American stories in which girls were able to see themselves portrayed as so much more than daughters, wives or mothers. The March sisters were each smart, stubborn, fierce and passionate and had their own lives and interests that made them all so much more human. We love them because we see pieces of ourselves and those we love in them.
So, it’s all the more compelling that Louisa May Alcott* made the March family feel like any other family while hiding so many revolutionary ideas between anecdotes about lobsters and handmade slippers. For example, Laurie is one of the first male characters who finds happiness and fulfillment by ingraining himself in the lives of the March girls instead of trying to make them conform to male ideas of friendship. In an interview about Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of Laurie, Gerwig points to the way in which the character subverts previous withstanding literary tropes, stating, “Girls are often imagining themselves into the space of boys because most literature is about boys. So, you have lots of practice imagining yourself as a pirate or as a king, and boys have less practice imagining themselves as women. But what’s so wonderful about Laurie is he comes over and he beams himself into being part of these girls. He’s the first literary character who imagines himself just as much a part of that as we always do with male characters.”
There’s also something intentional in the fact that Jo has a traditional boy’s nickname while Laurie has a traditional girl’s nickname. Alcott wants us to subvert these ideas of gender and relationships and does so subconsciously. In the book and the movie, Jo watches the play Twelfth Night in New York, a Shakespearean play about gender-bending, and seven years earlier talks about her “disappointment in being a girl.”
The movie also does so much justice to the other sisters. On her wedding day, Meg tells Jo, “Just because my dreams are different than yours doesn’t make them unimportant.” Meg is aware that she has every opportunity to explore life outside of the domestic, as Jo pushes her to do, but she loves John, and in return doesn’t feel as if she’s giving anything up. Her dreams of having children and a home are inspiring, not stifling. This could be because their home was headed by only women for a time during her childhood. We rely on Marmee and Hannah as the authority figures of the girls as they grow up, and we see how much life they’re able to live because of the family. So, of course, Meg wouldn’t feel as though she’s giving something up while Jo feels suffocated, wanting to go assist her father and the Union in the Civil War.
Beth, often merely viewed as a tragic figure, was given so much more nuance and importance in Gerwig’s onscreen adaptation. “I didn’t want Beth to be playing ‘plunky hymns’ on a piano. I wanted her to be playing Bach, and I wanted her to be playing Schumann. When she sits down at the piano at the Laurence house, I wanted everyone to feel like: ‘Oh my God. She was not marked for death. That’s just what happened.’ She was as great as any of them,” Gerwig said about Beth.
Older and wiser in her young adulthood, Beth encourages Jo to write something for her even though Jo is going through the imposter syndrome and subsequent writer’s block known to all creatives. “You are a writer even before anyone knew or paid you,” Beth says. Her abundant love and support throughout the story can be seen in the stark difference between the color tones in the film before and after her death. The Marches will never be the same without Beth. She was destined for so much, and that ambition lives on in Jo as she reaches through the past for her and writes their story. Without Beth, there would’ve been no “Little Women.” And that was always Alcott’s intention. We just lost her importance throughout the years because she was the sister who stayed home.
However, as Alcott reminds us, the home is not an unimportant or uninteresting place to be. “There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind,” Alcott said of Beth. Beth is so much more than tragedy. She’s intelligent, funny, strange and, in Amy’s words, “the best of us.” How could she have ever been seen as something less than one of her mother’s extraordinary daughters?
Then, Amy—my dear, sweet Amy—who is often labeled as “the one modern readers love to hate,” was given the space she needed to be understood. “What an interesting diagnosis of our culture that the character who says most clearly what she wants is the one we hated for so long,” Gerwig said about Amy’s character. In the first 30 minutes of the film, Amy says word for word, “I want to be the best painter in the world.”
So, why did we hate her for attempting to go on and do exactly that when Jo had similar dreams, and we applauded her for it? Birth order and the unforgiving attitude we place on young girls might be the culprit. Anyone who has grown up with younger siblings knows how frustrating they can be. Trust me when I say there were many times during my childhood when my siblings and I got into similar fights like the one Jo and Amy got into after Amy burned her manuscript with childish insults and fists being thrown within the same second.
As an adult, I realize we fought so much because we’re so similar and knew when and how to deliver the perfect blows. Amy burning Jo’s manuscript is an example of this meticulous blow. They both value their work so much, and they cannot and will not accept anything short of greatness. “Well, I can’t afford to starve on praise. … No one will forget Jo March,” Jo snaps at Professor Bhaer when he criticizes her work. “I’m a failure. Jo is in New York being a writer, and I’m a failure. … Talent isn’t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great or nothing,” Amy echoes when she tells Laurie she’s giving up art. Amy and Jo are both so headstrong, stubborn, ambitious and complex. They’re two sides of the same coin, and that’s why they fight so much. And it is because of all this—not in spite of it—that it’s not surprising for Laurie and Amy to fall in love. Florence Pugh perhaps said it best: “Laurie and Jo have constantly been described as similar people and other halves of one another. And so Saoirse (Ronan) and I were quite shocked to realize that Amy loved, essentially, Jo’s other half.”
Even Marmee—the ever-present, perfect mother to these girls and wife to her husband; a woman who gave up wealth to marry the man she loves—is allowed to have faults and weak moments in Gerwig’s adaptation. She talks to Jo about her anger, loneliness and life when she hits especially low points. She selflessly gives up scarves, food and time to help those less fortunate and encourages her daughters to do the same. She helps run a household while not knowing if her husband is dead or alive, and we see the toll that takes on her. “I’m angry nearly every day of my life,” she admits to Jo. “I’m not patient by nature.”
Marmee has always been seen as this perfect mother, and, for the first time, we see her break down and confide in her daughter about her struggles. But, she doesn’t make it seem like a negative thing—it’s just something that happens, something she hopes her daughters will be able to handle better than she does. Something every mother wishes for their children. “I hope you will do a great deal better than me. There are some natures too noble to curve and too lofty to bend,” Marmee says, quoting Alcott’s own mother, Abigail, when she talked about her free-spirited child.
I cannot understate how much this story means to me and what an excellent job I think Gerwig did in exploring these characters. In showing the different nuances each sister has, we are allowed to see ourselves in them. Yes, I may be a writer like Jo, but I’m also an oldest daughter who dreams of a family like Meg. I want the love I give others to be so grand that the room warms and invokes a childhood nostalgia. I want to take care of my family and make them and myself proud like Amy dreams of from the time Aunt March endows her with that responsibility. The time Gerwig gives us with these characters allows us to explore these ideas and personalities in a way that hasn’t been done as successfully as previous adaptations. Because of that success, I go back to the story over and over again.
Every February, I reread “Little Women” by candlelight, and every February, I cry as if I’m reading it for the first time. Every time I rewatch “Little Women,” I text Bethy and tell her, often reciting Laurie’s monologue on the hill over a voice memo. Every time, we exchange TikToks across the Atlantic. The story of my sister and I bonding over these centuries-old sisters is not new or unexpected, and that’s what makes it so special. Of course, we relate to this story. Of course, we’re so similar. Of course, I used to accuse her of copying me. Of course, I used to push her out of my room when my friends were over. Of course, I would do anything to live across the hall from her again. Of course, “it’s like us” because it was always meant to be us. Of course, I was always meant to be her Jo, and she was always meant to be my Bethy—when everyone else calls her Liz, and it drives her up a wall.
I don’t love and relate to Jo March because she marries Professor Bhaer or because she’s “the most interesting.” I love Jo March because she is the same neurotic, frenzied author that I am. I love her because we have the same temper, which is often our downfall. I love her because, through all her loneliness, adversity and anger, she makes something completely new and wonderful of her life. The story endures because the sisters endure.
“I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle,” Jo tells her sisters—or Alcott tells readers—in the chapter aptly named “Castles in the Air.” “Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead.” If giving girls a voice and a story to see themselves in more than 150 years after its initial publication isn’t heroic or wonderful, I still think Alcott and Jo would’ve found their castles in the air by now—in creating space and hope for readers like me—and everywhere else, even in their deaths.
*As the author of this article and a queer historian, I acknowledge the debate around Alcott’s gender identity. Due to the problematic nature of assigning labels to historical figures who are no longer alive to either confirm or dispute these claims, I do my best to refer to Alcott by their last name and gender-neutral pronouns.