Little Women Isn’t Just For Women
8 minute read
Little Women is a classic in American literature. First published in 1868, its many adaptations into film have been a staple across generations. The most recent iteration is a 2019 film written and directed by Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird). Despite immense praise, the film only won one Oscar for costume design. The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Forbes reported that the surprising lack of nominations was due to low male viewership. In other words, men were not watching the film because they believed it was for women. This is a shame, since the film is as much about men finding their place in the world as it is about women finding theirs.
At its core Little Women is a story about family, and as bell hooks argues in her work, we are first taught about gender and what it means to be a man or a woman from our family. Our political system privileges men, framing them as dominant and superior to women. Through this framework, men are perceived as the strong and valiant protectors of homes, as well as the violent enforcers of discipline. Women, meanwhile, are expected to be homemakers: they cook, clean, and raise children all the while behaving submissively to their husbands. Boys aren't supposed to cry or show weakness, because as adults they will be expected to serve as the patriarchs of their households. At the same time, girls are expected to be polite and gentle so they will be the most suitable mothers and future wives of these manly men.
Every single human being is incredibly multifaceted and unique, but these rigid identities reduce us to caricatures of who we really are and want to be. While men reap the rewards of this patriarchal system, they also suffer from the repression that perpetuates this system and keeps people from being able to behave as their fully realized selves. If society is going to progress past these outdated and harmful binaries, we need to envision a world where men and women can live and love together as equals freed from the gendered constraints imposed on them. Little Women invokes a more liberated vision of gender by showing us a family whose love is so strong that they can overcome these dogmatic roles. The emotional connection we feel with the film is due to the hope that it imbues in us that one day we may be able to overcome them as well.
Many women have written more eloquently than I could about Jo, Amy, Meg, Beth, and Marmee and what these characters mean for women. By contrast, the male characters in this narrative and their roles in creating a world of gender equality, have received less attention. In Gerwig’s rendition, Theodore Lawrence/Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) and Father March (Bob Odenkirk), are meaningful representations of boyhood and fatherhood.
We are first introduced to Laurie at a cotillion-like party where he is struggling to find his place. Jo finds him in a dark room completely removed from the game of courtship that everyone else is playing in the ballroom. As Jo swears and laments her fate of being a woman, Laurie only becomes more interested in her. He’s not put off by her unladylike conduct; he’s drawn to her. Laurie asks Jo to dance and comes up with a way to dance together so that no one can see them. As they bound up and down the porch, we see in every aspect of their exuberant dance, that in each other they have found a partner in rebellion against the gender roles that they were assigned to play at the party and in life. Laurie, perhaps inspired by Jo’s resentment of her gender, doesn't lead in the dance as many men are taught when dancing. Instead, as they parade around in jubilation, he twirls around like a ballerina. The dancing scene conveys he is attracted to Jo not because of any physical style that she presents, but the freedom of expression that their friendship provides.
After the dance, Laurie takes Jo and her sister home and when they arrive, they are warmly greeted by Jo’s mother, Marmee March (Laura Dern). Rather than perceive Laurie as a wealthy suitor for her daughter, a conventional narrative in these kinds of scenes, Marmee treats Laurie as a lonely boy in need of familial love. Marmee eagerly welcomes Laurie into her home and invites him to join in the plays her daughters put on, remarking, “You'll have to fight Jo for the male roles, or you could play a girl.” Marmee doesn't care that Laurie is a young man and an heir. She simply treats him as a young person who would benefit from joining her daughters in their ensemble. This joyous exchange ends with Marmee letting Laurie know that he’s been accepted into a less traditional home, waving goodbye and saying, “Just call me mother or Marmee, everyone does.” As Laurie leaves the warmth of the March household to return to his empty mansion, bereft of a mother or father, we get a glimpse of what Laurie must be feeling. When he turns around and gazes at the March residence there is a profound appreciation in his eyes. Greater than his desire for Jo is his wish to experience the festival of love a family can offer.
Later, we see how Laurie becomes an extended member of the March family when he joins the girls’ theater club. The club meetings are a chance for the sisters to roleplay as high society gentlemen who wear top hats and smoke pipes, aka the gendered 1%. When Laurie jumps out of his secret hiding spot to join the girls in their subversive fun, he hops and stomps around the room, viscerally breaking out of his constrained Latin-filled boys education and tapping into a more universal form of childhood. It’s in our nature to rebel against the gendered system we are born into. Boys would rebel more frequently if they were not disciplined so quickly for doing so and denied the chance to explore other ways of being. As Laurie spends more time in the March home, he discovers a space where he has the liberty to act as free as a child wishes. Later in the film, we see moments where Laurie displays an emotional vulnerability which is typically difficult for men who do not feel secure enough to express their emotions. Laurie is more capable of communicating his emotional self, because of the freedom he found in childhood as part of the March family who loved him unconditionally.
Where does this love within the March home originate from? Marmee is obviously a focal point but Father March is equally as important. Past film adaptations have discussed Father March’s progressive politics more explicitly. In this film, Gerwig decides to subtly indicate Father’s values through anecdotes told by his family and friends. Amy’s classmate remarks, “You Marches love a cause” in response to Amy’s support for the abolition of slavery. More significant than allusions to Father March’s politics is the commentary by Aunt March about what he hasn't accomplished in life. Aunt March openly resents Father for sacrificing wealth in favor of fighting for equality, and she acts as a stand-in for the sort of patriarch that she feels Father should be. In multiple scenes, Aunt March commands Amy and Jo to fulfill their duty of marrying into a well-to-do family. The irony of this order is that Aunt March never married. It is probable that she can accept patriarchy, because she has not had to deal with the pain that comes with living alongside a patriarch.
Whenever we see Aunt March and Father together, the contrast between their approaches is unmistakable. As we learn that Father March is away volunteering for the union army, Marmee reads a letter by Father in which he wishes his daughters will “fight their enemies bravely and conquer themselves so beautifully that when I come back to them, I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women.” The importance of this letter is twofold: First, the language Father uses demonstrates that he wants his daughters to take on the world as any boy would. In films and in life, fathers tend to grant their sons freedoms they deny their daughters. They shelter their daughters, seeking to protect their supposed innocence. Father March isn’t this kind of father. He’s not a controlling patriarch. He practices a progressive style of parenting that empowers his daughters. Second, in his letter, Father March emphasizes that good behavior will only be rewarded with love and pride. So much of the unnecessary pain in our domestic system derives from patriarchal punishment and the threat of violence. “Wait until dad comes home” are words that define our fearful childhoods. Father March knows that children do not need to fear their fathers in order to develop into mature adults. While Father March only appears in a few scenes in the film, his unconditional fatherly love radiates throughout the whole story.
In the last scenes of the film, we see Jo inheriting Aunt March’s large estate, which captures the feminist message of the film. That is, just as women need to take on patriarchy, so do men, and they can only do so effectively by working together. Jo channels this outlook when she declares her plan to transform the estate into a coeducational school that would make her aunt “turn in her grave.” If Aunt March represents a resigned acceptance of patriarchy, then Jo embodies a powerful challenge to it. A less ambitious plan would be for Jo to start a girls school to equalize gender imbalance. Instead, she creates a space where children can explore what it means to be complex humans together, a vital step towards equality.
The film ends with a stroll through Jo’s blissful school. As she proudly strides down the stairs, we see a wall covered in the work of her students. Jo walks past a room where Father and John Brooke are teaching a room full of girls and boys at a chalkboard. She then passes Friedrich showing students how to play the violin. We next see Laurie fencing with his students, and Meg giving acting classes. Finally, we see Amy returning to her art and teaching girls and boys how to paint. It may not appear revolutionary but the protagonists teaching art and sport to integrated groups of boys and girls sends a powerful message, because these activities that are so critical to the development of children are often prescribed to us along gendered lines. Superimposed onto this scene are images of the Little Women book as it is bound together. Weaving in the book-binding scenes suggests that the school is laying the foundation for a new kind of story, a story in which little boys and little girls can be writers, fencers, actors, painters or whatever they wish to be and, in so doing, succeed in surpassing the antiquated gender rules that constrain us to this day.
Great stuff Gabriel!