Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Little Women on Film: Socks or Buttons

2022; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jnc.2022.0018

2166-7438

Barbara Hochman,

American and British Literature Analysis

Little Women on Film:Socks or Buttons Barbara Hochman (bio) Keywords Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Greta Gerwig, reception, film adaptation, immigrants, nativism, gender norms, feminism I recently included Little Women in a graduate course on nineteenth-century children's literature and looked forward to rereading it, which I hadn't done for about thirty years. However, by chapter 4, when Jo asks Marmee to tell another story that is "real and not too preachy," I wondered how my students would swallow the novel's own didactic earnestness.1 This question impelled me to watch Greta Gerwig's recent film, which in turn made me curious about earlier versions. As we paired selected scenes from the book and the movies in class, cultural changes appeared with vivid, sometimes comic, immediacy rarely conveyed by academic studies. Broad shifts of emphasis and transformations of textual detail—from a sewing basket to a foreign accent—unexpectedly disclosed neglected aspects of Alcott's social criticism. The movies I managed to access were George Cukor's production of 1933 with the feisty Katharine Hepburn as Jo; a 1949 remake, starring the "bouncy" and playful June Allyson;2 Gillian Armstrong's 1994 adaptation with Winona Ryder in the central role; and Greta Gerwig's revision of 2019, where Saoirse Ronan plays the lead. As Jo's rebelliousness, her writing, and her temper gain prominence, this sequence of films predictably encapsulates changing assumptions about professional and emotional options for women during almost a century that included second-wave feminism and the rise of neoliberalism. But other reworkings of Alcott's text were less predictable and more intriguing. In one pronounced change, Professor Bhaer loses his rough edges. Over time, Alcott's awkward foreigner grows steadily younger, more articulate in English, conventionally handsome, and at last enigmatically [End Page 231] French. Concomitantly, Jo exemplifies gender-specific qualities prized in the cultural moment of each film. Since women of the 1930s and 1940s were generally expected to be wives and mothers, the first two movies in my series highlight these ideals, along with romance, marginalizing Jo's intellectual interests and her writing. But by the 1990s mainstream American culture was affirming feminist values such as women's work (at least in theory); thus the most recent adaptations, especially Gerwig's, stress Jo's independence, determination, and professional ambition. Affirming widely shared beliefs of their own milieu, all four versions water down the novel's critique of nineteenth-century gender norms, middle-class decorum, and nativism. None of the films takes the risk of disrupting attitudes presumed dear to its target audience. Little Women was published in 1868, early in the acrimonious Reconstruction period, when the stability of small-town life was further threatened by the rise of cities and westward expansion, developments that generated diverse opportunities (or temptations) and often splintered families. If tight domestic units where mothers and daughters bonded over marriage, childbirth, illness, and death were ever as idyllic as implied by Little Women, that world was rapidly changing. Meg, Jo, and Amy all live within spitting distance of their parents after they marry, but although such continuity was still common in the pre–Civil War period, it was less likely by 1868 (not to speak of 1933). All the films represent modes of behavior that, like fashion and decor, had changed substantially since the nineteenth century. The movies look back at a distant world, which they reconstruct with care—but mainly as a visual strategy. Between Cukor's black and white production and those that follow, technological changes enabled ever more precise and lavish representation of snowy villages and city streets, horse-drawn carriages, crowded interiors, curling irons, and leather-bound books. Nostalgic representations of homogeneous white communities and close-knit families were increasingly popular by the time Little Women appeared in twentieth-century cinema. The first of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books was published in 1932; Bing Crosby sang "White Christmas" ten years later.3 Like the novel itself, the two earliest movies in my lineup barely gesture toward serious social conflict, including the Civil War. (In the book the war serves mainly to remove the father from the action; he is only...