Happier Simpler Time?

Little Women a film by Greta Gerwig.  With Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep. ****

I’ll start by admitting that, unlike every woman I’ve spoken to about it, I didn’t read the book.  A boy reading such a book in my day—the late fifties and early sixties—would have been weird.  If I’d known, though, that it is essentially the story of a writer—at least that’s the way in comes across in the movie—I might have picked it up, because I became obsessed with writing at the age of eleven and determined to become a writer at fifteen.  I would have enjoyed a book about a kindred spirit.[1]

I’m a huge Greta Gerwig fan, and very much enjoyed this movie as I watched it, so let me mention my misgivings at the beginning.  I don’t believe nineteenth century Americans were as physically affectionate as these characters often are.  There is a scene early on where Amy (Florence Pugh) sees her male friend Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) in Europe, and she jumps out of the carriage and runs off and hugs him, and her maiden Aunt March (Meryl Streep), instead of having her flogged with birch rods, just mildly disapproves.  I found myself shaking my head, right at the beginning of the movie.  There is similarly a scene where Jo (Saoirse Ronan) and Laurie meet at a decorous dance party, and go out on the porch and frolic around in another kind of dancing altogether, something more like what we do today.  I didn’t believe that scene either.  And there were other scenes where people hugged and kissed in full view of others.  Maybe I’ve read too much Hawthorne.  I don’t think public displays of affection were big in nineteenth century America.

Then there’s the whole matter of this happy happy family.  There are minor petty jealousies, and of course one young woman succumbs to scarlet fever (suggesting those earlier simpler times weren’t all that great), but basically everybody loves each other and gets along wonderfully.  I haven’t run into many such families.  I’m not sure I believe they exist.  Maybe I’ve seen too much Eugene O’Neill, or read too many biographies of nineteenth century writers.  But those people had tough lives, and were pretty screwed up.  The fact that Freud wasn’t around to tell them how crazy they were doesn’t mean they weren’t crazy.

But I loved the story.  This family full of beautiful girls, with their beautiful mother, who all want to be artists of one kind or another, Jo a writer (and she succeeded), Meg (Emma Watson) an actress, Amy, a painter, and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) a musician; she’s already a pianist of considerable abilities.  And the fact that Greta Gerwig took what is, I assume, a plodding chronological nineteenth century narrative and jumbled up the time sequences, so that we’re often mildly confused but never totally at sea, and she makes a musty nineteenth century novel into, essentially, a modern work of art: that seems brilliant to me.  I applaud that.

And what a cast!  What acting!  When Meryl Streep plays a minor role, and Laura Dern is not quite major, you know you’re in a hell of a movie.

What my wife objected to was the gloriously happy ending (the words Hallmark Channel actually crossed her lips): the novel gets published, everybody gets married who wants to, and the little women open up a private academy where all the students are standing around practicing some art form (where did all these children come from, all of a sudden?) and everything seems great.  I hope that isn’t a spoiler, but if you’re a woman you’ve read the book, right?  And if you’re a man you’re not going to this movie anyway.  You’re staying home and watching football.

The most interesting thing is the whole issue of marriage.  According to the movie—I’m not sure what happens in the book—Jo is not planning to have her autobiographical character get married, but her publisher insists: you can’t have a story about a woman who doesn’t get married.  So—I think I’m following this correctly—not only just Jo alter the manuscript, she actually decides to get married, in real life.  And the IMdb website informs us that Jo’s speech about marriage, where she laments the fact that it’s the only option for women (unless they actually become famous artists), is one that wasn’t in the original script, or the novel, I assume, but was suggested by Meryl Streep and written by Gerwig at the last minute.  It’s a powerful speech.  But it was one more place I was asking myself: is this an anachronism?  Would this really have happened?

Alcott herself did not get married.  Little Women was not her only book; she actually wrote one called Little Men, a tactical error (boys aren’t readers, as any publisher will tell you).  Perhaps this film will make her famous again.

Maybe Little Women is what all those teenage girls are reading on their phones.

[1] I’m asking myself if there’s a corresponding book for boys, one that absolutely every boy read.  Tom Sawyer comes to mind, though I’m not sure everybody read it.  Lucky readers went on to Huckleberry Finn.  My father persuaded me to read the Penrod books by Booth Tarkington, and I loved them.  I loved books about an earlier time when things seemed simpler and better.  But every woman, it seems, tells me she read Little Women, and Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights.  Boys were off reading Chip Hilton and the Hardy Boys, if they were reading at all.