Sisterhood vs Marriage: Greta Gerwig's 'Little Women'

Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of “Little Women” was a marvel at Christmas last year for cinema goers and remains just as charming, relevant and uplifting one year on. With the Christmas period upon us yet again, it feels entirely appropriate to re-examine the film and to focus on Gerwig’s portrayal of family: something we are all experiencing the highs and lows of during this festive season.

The family in Gerwig’s “Little Women” centres around the matriarchy of Marmee and her four daughters Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, with an almost entirely absentee father throughout the film, and by the end expands to include each daughter’s respective spouse. The portrayal of family thus falls in line with traditional 19th c. American values: each little woman is married off during the course of the movie. Yet, the beauty of Gerwig’s adaptation is that she presents a dual-ending: one with the sisters and their spouses gathered in familial bliss and the other with Jo witnessing the printing of her book. The final scene with Jo implies that ultimately it is the sisterhood, written in her book, that is the most important. But, as always, the final decision is up to the audience.

Gerwig’s presentation of sisterhood, arguably the most important aspect of the family in Little Women, is one of deep contrasts. It is the rivalry between Amy and Jo that produces some of the most memorable and iconic moments from Alcott’s novel: Amy’s burning of Jo’s book and her subsequent near drowning and of course Amy’s marriage to Laurie that was seen as the ultimate tragedy and betrayal by book fans for decades. Ronan as Jo and Pugh as Amy were the ultimate pairing in showing the deep and passionate rivalry between the two sisters but at the same time their unconditional love and unbreakable bond between them. Gerwig gives Pugh’s Amy the respect and time she needs onscreen to present her as a strong character in her own right rather than just as a pest to the headstrong Jo. This brings about not only their reconciliation but also allows the audience to empathise more with a traditionally hated character. This choice from Gerwig and fantastic performance from Pugh makes the sting of seeing Amy burn Jo’s novel no less painful and blood boiling but it does allow a more nuanced view of their sisterly relationship. Their rivalry runs deep but so does their sisterly bond which ultimately triumphs as they grow up. Indeed, Pugh would know this having said in an interview about her younger sister “I just remember being so baffled that she would literally get anything that she would want,” “Little sisters or little brothers are always annoying, because they’ve always had a different type of parenting.” (The Atlantic- Shirley Li). Siblings can indeed be bitter rivals and naturally compete and compare themselves. Sisterhood can be tough, cruel and bitter - especially when rivalries are involved - but it is the love between the March sisters and their bond that ultimately triumphs.

The family unit is one that undergoes a transition in the film as it expands from the all-female unit of Marmee and her daughters to include their marital partners as the girls grow up. Meg and Amy embrace said transition with Meg’s love for the lowly tutor Mr Brooke and Amy’s practical desire to marry well. Ronan’s performance as a desperate Jo to keep her sisters together occurs in both her scene with Watson’s Meg before she marries Brooke and later her rejection of Laurie’s proposal. In both scenes she shows a desperation to keep her family together: she wants Meg to avoid marriage in order that they remain close and stay under the same roof. Ronan’s Jo cannot accept Laurie because she sees him as part of her family and thus not a romantic partner. As Gerwig explained “When [Laurie] asks [Jo] to marry him, what’s so wonderful and heartbreaking about it is it’s not just that he’s saying ‘I love you’ and she’s saying ‘I don’t love you,’” Gerwig explained. “It’s that he’s stepping out of childhood. He’s stepping out of androgyny and he’s saying, ‘I’m a man, and I’d like you to come be a woman, for me, as my wife.’ It’s like he’s claiming his adult role and he’s asking her to claim hers, and she doesn’t want to.”

Alcott, like Jo, protested the idea that a necessary part of growing up for young women involved marriage. She was advised by her publishers that her young heroine should be married off by the end of her tale in order to sell copies of her book to appeal to 19th c. values. Alcott as a protest choose the unpopular and unexpected pairings of Jo with the frumpy Professor Bhaer and Amy, the most hated sibling, with Laurie in order to imply the disappointing nature of marriage for her young female readers. Jo’s protestations seem to mirror Alcott’s own frustrations and as Lara Langer Cohen wrote at the LA Review of Books’ “Jo is angry, above all, because she gets the bitter tragedy of Little Women as no one else in the novel does. It tells a story about the bonds that knit together a family of women — of love nurtured with exquisite care — only to break up that family and transfer its bonds to an array of frankly disappointing men.” Gerwig however takes a less men-bashing approach in her adaptation by presenting the March sisters and their respective partners blossoming and flourishing together. As Ronan’s Jo declares “Women have minds and souls as well as hearts, ambition and talent as well as just beauty, and I’m sick of being told that love is all a woman is fit for,” but at the same time expresses her loneliness: something that Gerwig as a female director in a male-dominated industry herself may understand. This is why in Gerwig’s adaptation Jo’s eventual marriage to Professor Bhaer is far more logical than in the novel. Gerwig has them meet in New York, away from Jo’s home and family and thus when she has become a woman, and has him in a scene criticise her writing because he sees her as his intellectual equal. The casting of a handsome young French Louis Garrell also helped rather than an actor more similar to the novel’s older fat German professor. Gerwig’s decision to simply slap a pair of glasses on Garrell is a masterstroke. By doing so she perhaps is laughing at the trope where many male directors would cast a sexy version of a traditionally ugly female character and simply put a pair of glasses on them in order to make them “ugly”. Or perhaps it is a laugh at the “fantasy” ending of her heroine having to marry at the end of her tale: either way we are engaged.

The dual ending of Gerwig’s film and the nuanced performances of the actors is a winning combination in demonstrating the different aspects of family in “Little Women”. The only thing left to do to explore the portrayal of family further is to give it a watch again this Christmas. After all, Gerwig’s “Little Women” has the wonderful gift of surprising and charming the audience again and again.