Little Women: The Book and the Movie

“Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. 

"It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. 

"I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all," added little Amy, with an injured sniff. 

"We've got Father and Mother, and each other," said Beth contentedly from her corner.” 

- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Alcott's novel is very formulaic, and the formula repeats over and over — when the four sisters are together, whatever the topic, each takes a turn speaking: 1, 2, 3, 4. Yet the overall effect somehow works, at least it did, when we were young, for those of us who grew up with the book. And while I don’t know what the experience would be for a sophisticated reader coming to the book for the first time as an older adult, I find I can re-read it now and be seduced all over again by the March family, even as I am aware of that repetitious, somewhat stilted formula. It’s because Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, for lifetime fans of Little Women, are real girls — always were and always will be. Where the magic comes from, I cannot say.

Why is it, though, that every girl who reads the book identifies herself as Jo? A recent NPR segment began by asking callers to say which girl they identified with and why, but the question had to be quickly discarded, as no one ever saw her girlhood self as conventional Meg, vain Amy, or shy, stay-at-home Beth. No, every girl-reader-become-woman claimed to have been, in her mind, as she read the book, tomboy-writer Jo, whether or not she’d been a tomboy (or even wished to be a boy) or hoped to be a writer when she grew up. Why?

I had occasion to reflect on this question some years ago, when one of my sisters and I had an exchange on the topic. I’d been amazed that she saw herself as Jo! Who, then, pray tell, did she imagine I would be? I was the oldest, but I was no Meg! Puzzling, I have come up at last with a two-pronged explanation: 

(1) Jo was the bookish sister. An aspiring writer, she was naturally a voracious reader. Girls who read Little Women were, obviously, readers themselves. In my family, three sisters (as were our parents) were all readers! Ipso facto, we were all Jo!

(2) Readers see an author’s fictional world through the author’s eyes, even when that author isn’t one of the characters. Little Women is written in the third person, but Jo is clearly the author’s alter ego. So it’s Jo’s head and heart we inhabit as we read the story. How could it be otherwise?

Moving from page to screen, there have been more than twelve adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s classic girls’ story, beginning with silent film versions in 1917 and 1918. I’ll have to watch Katherine Hepburn again as Jo (1933), but just thinking of Hepburn you can see why she would be a natural in the role. By contrast, whoever saw June Allyson as Jo (1949) ought to have had his (and I’m sure it was ‘his’) head examined. 

As for Winona Ryder (1994), sorry, I did not care for that version at all, though I realize it introduced a whole generation to the story. I became near-apoplectic at Jo and Professor Baer kissing in the balcony of a theatre! So wrong, so very wrong! Nineteenth-century PDA among the genteel, aspirational, theatre-going poor? Hardly! Besides that, the chapter in which the kiss takes place is called “Under the Umbrella”! Jo and the professor kiss under the umbrella after he tells her that all he has to offer are “these empty hands,” and she puts her hands in his and replies, “Not empty now.” I seem to recall I didn’t care for Susan Sarandon as Marmee, either, but as I’ve never wanted to see that film version a second time I cannot give a detailed critique. 

Because of my feelings about the 1994 film, I was nervous at first about seeing yet another adaptation. Now, after only my first viewing of Greta Gerwig’s version (which I’m sure I will see again many times in the future), I find myself agreeing with another audience member I overheard telling companions on the way out of the theatre, “I’ve seen three different movies made of ‘Little Women,’ but this is my favorite.” 

The dialogue at the top of this post opens the story of Alcott’s Little Women. In the new adaptation, the pre-Christmas complaint scene is moved and solutions the sisters find in making and/or purchasing modest gifts are omitted, but Gerwig does what she does so gracefully that I cannot object. The all-important introductory visit to the Hummels is there, intact. And that brings me to something the film adds that a book cannot: strong, big-screen visuals that put the viewer not only in the heart of the family but also in a geographical/historical context. I found myself devouring outdoor and street scenes and interiors of houses, as their world became as real to me as the sisters themselves. 

I did wonder, early on while watching, if someone unfamiliar with the story would find the time shifts confusing (there is nothing faintly like that in the strictly chronological presentation of the written book) and have difficulty catching all the dialogue when many voices were speaking together. My own movie-going companion, the Artist, never having read the book, was that very person: unfamiliar with the story, he did have difficulty catching everything that was said and making sense of all the time shifts. Well, I told him, I was completely lost the first time I saw (never having read) the film version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but I certainly wouldn’t change it. And I wouldn’t change Gerwig’s “Little Women,” either.

So many of the scenes from the book were there, just as L.M. Alcott wrote them, such as Amy falling through the ice when she follows Jo and Laurie after having burned Jo’s manuscript. Laurie’s proposal and Jo’s refusal: that scene, too, was straight from the book. I know the written story so well that I was aware of every addition or subtraction or substitution, but they were masterfully done, and I felt the story flowed along seamlessly. 

I’m still thinking about the ages of two characters, however: Laurie and Professor Bhaer (the latter generally referred to by his first name in the film). Both appeared much younger to me than I would have made them. I am coming around to accepting boyish Laurie, but Friedrich I can’t help wishing older and maybe not so handsome, more as he was in the book — though the actor’s very winsomeness makes it hard to complain about his looks!

The Artist asked me if the mother had been as much a background figure in the book as she was in the movie. I hadn’t thought about that before, but I think the answer is yes. She appears from time to time to offer sympathy and guidance, but it is the sisters themselves who form their own world, as young people always do, as each generation does.

In the car on the way home, I found myself telling the Artist about parts of the book that hadn’t made it to the screen. For instance, I loved the way they reminisced about the childhood game they played when small. “Backstory?” Yes. They played at being pilgrims, from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and as children would carry little bags of “burdens” that tumbled down the stairs when they reached the “Celestial City” at the top. Approaching womanhood, their burdens change: Meg hates being poor, Jo’s patience is tried by her work with demanding Aunt March, Beth struggles with near-crippling shyness, and Amy can’t help envying “girls with nice noses.” She so wants a classical nose!

They are so real to me, the March girls. Do you know them, too? What do you remember most? Or did you not care for them at all?

Book Asks: What Is the Life Span of Friendship?

Not all fall days are bright-colored

Recently I set aside a book I’d started reading, marking my place in Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History on page 93, to get busy reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, our challenging reading circle choice for November. A week later, over halfway through the Mann novel, I set it aside to devote an evening to an intriguing modern nonfiction book, The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women’s True-Life Tales of Friendships That Blew Up, Burned Out, or Faded Away. Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell were the editors of the volume, with introduction by Francine Prose. Twenty women’s true-life stories of lost friends! What woman could resist?

The little mini-bios at the back of the book don’t give the ages of the women who wrote their stories for the collection, but often there are clues in the essays themselves — popular songs or groups mentioned, national events, even descriptions of clothing — and sometimes the writer says of an event that it took place “thirty years ago” or something like that. In short, I deduced that while some of the women were clearly younger than I am, a few others are part of my cohort. (Older? No. And what does that tell you?) Some accounts describe friendships that went on for decades, others for only part of a year. Most stories are about girl friendships, but a couple tell of close friendships girls had -- or thought they had -- with boys. 

The theme that emerges is the complicated nature of friendship — the excitement of finding a friend and the anguish of losing one.

“Maybe,” someone remarked to me a few weeks back, “some friendships are by their very nature time-limited, not meant to last forever.” Every time I hear about a dog needing a “forever” home, I think, Nothing is forever. With a dog, of course, what we mean is for the rest of the dog’s life, and doesn't the shorthand of the whole 'BFF' thing suggest that our friends, too, might last our lifetime? 

Sadly, like dogs, many friends leave life before we do, and “No one replaces anyone,” as my friend Helene said to me years ago. (Certainly, no one has ever replaced her in my life.) Other friends move far away (or even not so terribly far) and fail to stay in touch. The “break-up” of a friendship, topic of so many of the essays in The Friend Who Got Away, can leave the kind of pain one might imagine only comes with divorce, along with questions, regrets, and confusion that, like divorce, can also last a lifetime when the friendship does not. 

No wonder, I’m thinking more and more these days, older people fortunate enough to have them turn increasingly to siblings, children, and grandchildren. They may or may not be close friends in the sense that they welcome our confidences. TMI, Grandma! On the other hand, they’re kind of stuck with us. For life. Thank heaven!

Save Your Kids the Trouble?

I stacked boxes on front porch

My mother was not a hoarder, by any stretch of the definition, but she did accumulate a lot of stuff in her home of 68 years. Three children grew up there. Also, my mother loved clothes and jewelry and knick-knacks and holiday decorations. She was a reader — books, newspapers, magazines. (No, she did not stockpile the old newspapers and magazines: those were recycled, as were many of the books that didn’t come from the library.) Photographs, clippings, old family-designed and -crafted holiday cards, and other souvenir mementos meant a lot to her, too. So when she died recently, my sisters and I had a lot of sorting to do, and we haven’t finished the job yet. Not everything that feels significant during grieving is personal, as I wrote in my last post, but a lot of it really, really is.

And there were some wonderful, heartwarming surprises awaiting us! One priceless treasure was a scrapbook our mother had put together in the middle 1940s, when she and our father were dating, then became engaged, and eventually married in Chicago and embarked on their new life together in Aberdeen, South Dakota. My sisters and I had never seen this scrapbook before. It was hidden away (why hidden? simply forgotten?) on the back of a top shelf. Along with saved slips of telephone messages and theatre programs and tickets, our mother had written notes on the pages to which the souvenirs were pasted. 

On the first page of the scrapbook is a theatre program from early 1946. My father (not yet my father) had come by train from South Dakota (where he led a survey crew for the Milwaukee Road) to Ohio to visit his father and stepmother in Columbus and stopped in Springfield on his way. In Springfield he and my mother (not yet my mother) attended a play. There is a note left at my mother’s office (she worked as a secretary after high school graduation; the college scholarship she was awarded would have paid half her tuition, but her parents could not afford the remainder) saying that “Mrs. Gilbert” had called. That would have been my father’s stepmother in Columbus. Subsequently my mother made a trip out to South Dakota to see my father, and they became engaged. We girls did know about the trip and the engagement. As my mother said, she knew she’d better come home with a ring after traveling so far to visit this man!

A letter dated August 23, 1946 (not pasted into the book), from the woman we always called Auntie Grace, our mother’s best friend and roommate before Grace and Gene were married in 1945, was signed “‘Becky,'” Gene & the girls,” her maiden name being (I think) Becker, and she and Gene were married in August of the previous year, so the twins must have come along right away. “Just a year ago today you arrived in Kazoo for my wedding. Seems like years have passed since then!” She writes in reply to Nora’s news that she and Lloyd are engaged to be married. “Believe it or not I wasn’t even surprised — just ever so happy for you. I guess I’ve sort of known all along that “this was it.” It just sounded “right” for some reason or other. I called Gene right away and when I said “Nora’s engaged!” he just said “Yes” — he’d expected it too.” Grace/'Becky' hopes Lloyd will be transferred from Aberdeen, South Dakota, to Chicago so the two couples will live closer to each other. That didn’t happen, but in 1950 my father changed jobs and went to work for a smaller railroad (from the Milwaukee Road to the Elgin, Joliet, & Eastern), and he and my mother and I moved to Joliet, 45 miles southwest of Chicago, where my two sisters were born. 

newspaper wedding story and wedding corsage

On the page with the newspaper story of their wedding, with my mother (not yet my mother) looking radiant and beautiful, she had written by hand on the now-brittle page, “My lovely double white orchid corsage — many envious glances were directed at this!!” (My mother was the queen of exclamation marks all her life!) Wedding luncheon at the Blackhawk Hotel in Chicago: Grace and Gene were there in Chicago for the wedding, along with my mother’s mother and Phil Mueller, best man. Who was Phil Mueller? HIs name is unfamiliar to me. 

“On Decoration Day [this would have been 1947] we moved into Ted & Anne Streibel's while they were out of town for the summer, Ted on the Sperry Car, & Anne & children visiting. August was a terrifically hot month — and Dr. King says I’m right about being pregnant! On one of the cooler evenings we took in our first rodeo — Edna joined us (Bob in Madison now).” She was pregnant with me — barely — and so in a sense my parents’ “first rodeo” was mine, too, as I attended in utero.

Birth announcements, holiday letters, theatre programs, newspaper clippings — she saved everything, but there is nothing more pasted into the scrapbook after the first childless Aberdeen days. Once the first baby came along and then the move to Joliet, Illinois, and, in time, two more babies, my mother’s paper mementos remained loose, in boxes and envelopes. For example, as a senior in high school, I received a National Merit letter of commendation, along with five others in my class. Two or three were awarded scholarships, but our superintendent is quoted in a newspaper article as saying he is proud of all of us. (One of the other letter recipients, a boy from my homeroom, I learn died two years ago. How is that possible?) Ephemera, all of it.

Her daughters only saw our mother’s scrapbook after she died, when one daughter discovered it high in a bedroom cupboard. Had she forgotten she had it? What if my mother had decided to clean out those cupboards and “get rid” of all that old stuff, “to save her kids the trouble”? I shudder to think of what we would have missed!

Not all objects remaining in the family home are equally precious, but each speaks to me of my mother: 

Child scribbles -- mine? -- in an old looseleaf cookbook

Battered box heavy with coins to be donated to church ladies' circle

Souvenir Leelanau shirt from July visit

Cast iron skillet perfect for cooking a single egg

A grade school class picture, she 2nd from L in 2nd row

With her brother, stepfather, mother, and sister

Not stylish, but warm -- and she loved it!

Also, going through these things together has been and continues to be an important grieving and bonding experience for my sisters and me. Our mother’s death was unexpected. I thought she would live to be 110. She was fine only the day before she went to sleep for the last time. In one way, you might say it’s “trouble” or “a lot of work” to go through her things, and so it is, but that’s not the whole story. These tasks are valuable to her children in their mourning process.

Sister Deborah

Sister Bettie

A Reading Relative Shares

Deborah and Sarah, I.

I’ve known her for her entire life and most of my own. My parents are the only people on earth who have known her longer, and not by much. When I was two months shy of three years old, Deborah came home from the hospital in our mother’s arms, and I was told to sit in the big living room chair (the daddy chair), a pillow from our parents’ bed laid across my lap. The new baby was placed on the pillow so I could “hold” her. Years later, when that same sister brought her firstborn home from the hospital and I looked down at that boy’s little face, I flashed back to the arrival of my sister into my life.

Deborah and Sarah, II.

My sister came up for a visit this past week. It’s April, and we had warm weather in march, so she thought she would be helping me prepare the garden bed and clearing the yard of winter-fallen branches and in my ongoing popple removal efforts. Instead of rake and pruners, she found herself wielding a snow shovel. Snow, snow, and more snow! Also taking her spoiled furry niece for lots of extra walks. Relieved of yard work, we got Sarah to the groomer on Monday and spent Tuesday wandering back roads, enjoying the scenery. 

Not exactly wading weather!

I’ve said more than once in this forum that we are a family of readers, so it should be no surprise that my sister and I, besides spending time in my bookstore, also visited the local library and sat around the house reading quite a bit, too. (We also cooked together.) So this morning, as I was taking a break from working on the next review for Books in Northport, it occurred to me that interviewing my sister for the blog might be a nice change of pace for all of us. 

Here it is! I'm the black font, and Deborah is the blue.

---

What is that book you just opened?

Dick Francis. Under Orders. Love Dick Francis! Horses! You know, he was a jockey.

What else have you been reading this week while visiting Leelanau County?

Let’s see. Remember, the Walter Mosley book that I’m almost done with at your house. Cookbooks! I’ve been reading cookbooks, and I have all kinds of plans now to go home and try new appetizers and side dishes and main courses and desserts. I also bought that Jim Harrison book. I’ve already read Even in Darkness [book by Barbara Stark-Nemon that was recently named Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal winner for European Fiction] but loaned it to a friend, and I wish she would give it back so I could read it again.

Didn’t you also read a mystery involving food?

Oh, exactly! The author’s last name is Fluke. She writes mystery stories and includes recipes in the books.

Have you ever made any of the recipes?

Oh, yes! I make her recipes. The book I just finished was Plum Pudding Murder. They’re very light, very easy reading.

I’ve never read Walter Mosley before, and I really like him.

Who’s the main character in the one you’re reading?

It’s actually a volume containing three different books. Gone Fishin’ is one of them....

[Later clarification: Deborah was reading two different books. Upstairs, her bedtime reading was Mosley's Gone Fishin' and downstairs, when we were reading together at the table, she was making her way delightfully through Three Short Novels by Wendell Berry. We cleared that up when we got home.]

Oh, I love that one! But Walter Mosley is very different from Joanne Fluke, right?

Oh, absolutely! Yes! I would say I have eclectic reading tastes, though I’m pretty much a fiction reader. I always think I’m not as intellectual as you and Bettie, and Matt [her older son, the one who looked so much like her when he was a baby] is more like you, I think.

But I can read some frothy stuff, too. Jane Austen knock-offs, for example.

Oh, of course. Yes. But I think when you read that kind of stuff, it’s because you have a bookstore, and you have to read it.

Not really. I enjoy light reading like anyone else.

-- Oh, and I’ve been re-reading parts of Prairie Evers and The Education of Ivy Blake [by Ellen Airgood]. I love those books! I just think they’re marvelous.

Do you know what Matt’s reading these days?

No, I don’t. I wish I did.

We’ll have to ask him....

I’ll send Bob [her partner] a text and find out what he’s reading these days. He’s in a book club, of course....

And what kind of books do they read? Serious stuff, right?

They do. ...Right now they’re reading Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

They must have good discussions.

They really do. Two of them are M.D.s, one is a Ph.D. Two are very serious Christians, the other two don’t go to church any more.

---

And then I lost her. She was back in her book but looked up with a laugh and a smile to say,

Oven Cleaner! That’s a good name for a racehorse!

Deborah and Sarah, III.

Note: We have a third sister and look forward to another visit -- in warmer weather -- to include Bettie and our mother. As you may recall, they are readers, too.