The Success of ‘Little Women’ in Film

The four March sisters introduced themselves to me when I was ten: every ounce of me wanted to be the fearless & feisty Jo, I adored Meg, found Amy annoyingly lucky and was inspired and pained by poor sweet Beth. These girls, becoming women, tied together by the impressive matriarch that is Marmee, were characters that have swirled colourfully in my head since I first read the printed pages they are kept in. Many question why this story has been so impactful for so many - it seems to me that Louisa May Alcott's celebration of the richness of these normal girls and women's lives is what keeps people anchored to the story of the March family, a story of girls and women doing the best they could, finding ways to be limitless in a time that told them to be limited. Alcott dispelled the narrative that women are only worthy of note and comment if they are absolutely exceptional and in writing this story, she declared that all dreams women aspire to achieve - be it love, career, charity or adventure - are important. In the words of Jo March, Alcott wanted ‘to write about us’, about everyday women.

Being such a special story, it is easy to fall in love with the March family quickly and deeply, and this is the reason many filmmakers have moved this story from page to screen. Since 1933, when the first ‘talkie’ production of Little Women was released, it has elegantly traversed from writers and directors to more writers and directors who, for the most part, have succeeded in rendering Alcott’s words into well-received films. At the Oscars alone Little Women has stood the test of time in its success. George Cukor’s aforementioned 1933 adaptation of the novel, which starred Katherine Hepburn as Jo March, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director and won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Subsequently, the 1949 version directed by Mervyn Le Roy was nominated for colour cinematography (it was 1949 after all) and won the Academy Award for Best Art Director and Best Set Decoration. More recently, the 1994 adaptation of Little Women, directed by Gillian Armstrong, won Winona Ryder an Oscar nomination for her ferocious, yet deeply tender and thus complicated portrayal of Jo March, and last year we were graced with Greta Gerwig’s second stint as solo-writer/director with her version of Alcott’s novel which snapped up nominations for Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively.

The sheer success of these films is surely testament to the longstanding strength of Alcott’s work, but credit should also be given to those who continue to make this century-and-a-half story palatable and exciting to the masses. Armstrong’s 1994 version was the first adaptation I ever saw, only encouraging my affection for Jo March and also gained my sympathy further for Amy, who my moralistic ten-year-old self saw as a mean Laurie-stealer, and indeed Armstrong’s version was hailed as the modern take on the novel. Armstrong leans into the fact this is a period piece, and not just in the way that it is obviously set in the time of Alcott’s writing, but also in the way we still empathise with the March girls and their problems, goals and dreams. Armstrong, through her actresses, shows that in some way, modern women still are these Little Women, falling through life and love, just doing their best.

Like her predecessor, Greta Gerwig has captivated the world with her updated take on the novel. For me, the pointed feminist stances that she includes in her scripts and subsequently her direction was what made me particularly connected to this adaptation. Jo March’s (Saoirse Ronan) tearful frustrations in her observation that “women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition, and they've got talent, as well as just beauty. I'm so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for” cuts deep. Her sister Amy (Florence Pugh) observes that due to the role and view of women in the society she inhabits, her choice of husband would not be a purely romantic but also an economic one, as women did not have the freedom to make an economic success of themselves (met by a grave comment from Laurie, played by Timothée Chalamet, that "the poets might disagree”). In emphasising these themes in her film, Gerwig magnifies the empathy for the Little Women and how despite all their constraints, they all achieved great things. I feel Gerwig’s predecessor Armstrong encapsulates this in a pure and simple tweet: “loved it. Very different! Brave new structure. Fantastic cast.”