Greta Gerwig's Little Women Shows Female Characters as People

In this op-ed, Teen Vogue's entertainment news editor P. Claire Dodson discusses Greta Gerwig's new film, Little Women, and how it portrays dynamic female characters with complex desires and belief systems. Some spoilers for the film ahead.

In the trailer for Little Women, Saoirse Ronan’s Jo March gives a hot-blooded monologue about her experiences as a young woman trying to build a writing career. It’s framed in the teaser as a grand feminist proclamation, actually taken from another of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novels, Rose in Bloom. “Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts,” Jo says in earnest. “And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as beauty, and I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it!”

But the speech has a twist, an afterword. The trailer doesn’t show the drop. It doesn’t show when Jo, close to tears, takes a breath and says brokenly, after all that bravado, “But I’m so lonely.”

And of course she is. She’s back home after a sell-out stint in New York, where instead of writing what she wanted, she penned gory, shock-value tales for the local newspaper, and for dollars less than her male peers. The editor tells her, “We usually give $35-$40, but for that we’ll give you $20.” She’s home because her sister Beth is dying of a heart weakened by childhood scarlet fever, which is Beth’s punishment for the good-hearted generosity expected of her as a woman and thus as a caretaker. Jo’s speech is about her sisters and their decisions, but it’s also about the opportunity lost when she (rightfully) rejects neighbor Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) and his marriage proposal because she wants to be independent and make her own way in the world. Suddenly, in the midst of familial grief and career disappointment, Jo is honest with herself. She gets to be more than a stand-in social statement. She gets to be a person.

Because Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is about afters, about what’s next, about what happens when you grow up and have to reckon with all the moments in between those big speeches, the pauses between the highs of idealism when, especially as a woman (and even more so if you’re a woman of color, characters who don’t really exist in Gerwig’s film), you’re pulled back down to the ground where limitations exist once again.

While watching the film, I kept marveling to myself how women, even if they are portrayed simplistically in books and in life, are never actually simple; they don't get the choice to live outside of systemic constraints, free of being judged and condescended to on the basis of their gender."

Gerwig’s adaptation twists the usual linear timeline of the novel and its many movie adaptations, but much of the plot remains the same. The scenes, however, float back and forth between the sisters' teen years and seven years later, when the sisters are grown and experiencing the ramifications of their desires.

Alcott’s 1868 novel and Gerwig's version tell the stories of Meg (Emma Watson), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Beth (Eliza Scanlen), and Amy March (Florence Pugh), preteens and teenagers on the cusp of adulthood during the American Civil War. Their mother, affectionately called Marmee (Laura Dern), builds an environment that’s warm and open, encouraging imaginative play, emotional intelligence, and some form of independence in the young women. Their father, meanwhile, is off working as a chaplain for Union soldiers, and Marmee and the girls are doing what they can to support the war effort.

It’s a movie that feels so extremely wholesome — fireside chats! ballroom dances! letters from father! — that it’s easy to forget how it’s quietly unpacking a lot of emotional baggage around what it was like to be a white woman in the mid-1800s. Jo explains in the film that her work is “about our little life” and “domestic struggle.” She’s not sure it really matters: “Writing doesn’t confer importance, it reflects it,” she believes. But Amy argues back the truth: Putting forth stories about people that don’t often get told makes them more important.

When I read the novel for the first time as a preteen, it was with a fervent belief in the purity of Jo March. Clearly, she was the one true heroine. Boring Meg and her self-righteousness? Do-gooder Beth who pays for her kindness with death? Spoiled Amy who has the gall to want things? Keep ‘em. It’s Jo, eternally Jo, who was the obvious choice of who you should want to be: Jo, the writer; Jo, the free-spirited sister who feels things and writes them down; Jo, who is okay being alone, but fortunately doesn’t have to be because she finally finds her equal in the professor (Louis Garrel).

Gerwig’s version, and perhaps time, soften that choice. It’s not whether you’re a Jo or a Meg or a Beth or an Amy — maybe it never was. Maybe I read it as a personality quiz when I was young because a story with multiple women characters who each has her own belief system, power struggle, and choice was so wildly rare.

It’s here that the decision to cast this film as almost unbelievably white feels most infuriating, because it was such an opportunity to show black and brown women characters with the incredible complexity that white women get in Gerwig’s adaptation. Adaptations of Little Women are so numerous that, at this point, we don’t need to keep telling this story of four white sisters and their white family, especially when, as Gerwig’s Little Women shows in a precious few scenes, black and brown people existed in Massachusetts during that time. Plus, part of the reason Little Women is so popular is because the themes of sisterhood, family, and persevering through struggle are universal.

Because each sister feels the drop after she asserts herself. Each sister has to reckon with what she wants and what it produces in a society that says she owns nothing. Each sister reckons with the idea that having to be only one thing is just another way of fencing in women.

When I read the novel for the first time as a preteen, it was with a fervent belief in the purity of Jo March. Clearly, she was the one true heroine. Boring Meg and her self-righteousness? Do-gooder Beth who pays for her kindness with death? Spoiled Amy who has the gall to want things? Keep ‘em.

We see Meg embrace her inner glamorous self at a debutante ball, only to be ridiculed by Laurie for daring to try to fit into the world of wealth he inhabits without even trying. “I know it’s silly. Let me have my fun tonight and I’ll be desperately good for the rest of my life,” she begs of him, sentencing herself to a future of denying herself nice things. In the future, we see her buy expensive silk and return it in a moral crisis, telling her husband she shouldn’t have spent his money. And still, she made the choice on her own, to marry despite Jo’s offer that they run away together so that Meg can be a stage actor.

We see Beth take matters into her own hands when her mother leaves home to help with the Union in Washington, D.C., and her sisters refuse to take up her mantle of generosity. Instead, she packs the food and medicine to take to the impoverished family down the road, contracting their contagious fever in the process. We see her fear of death, of other people, and how she strengthens herself against it.

Perhaps we mostly see Amy in a new light in Gerwig’s version. She can be a brat, sure, but she’s also clever and sharp, unashamed in her appreciation of her own beauty (“I have the most beautiful feet in the family!” she says, sobbing) and the beauty around her. She leans into her anger, burning Jo’s novel, proclaiming honestly that she did it because she wanted to hurt her.

And then Jo — of course, Jo — gains new ground in the opposite direction. In the wake of her independence, she admits vulnerability, permitting herself some small bit of room to feel jealous and sad, to admit that she wanted something (love) she had convinced herself she wasn’t allowed to want in her current form. It was consoling to see, as it always is when stories onscreen reflect reality so desperately.

Little Women is a soft, crackling recounting of what happens when you assert yourself and get what you asked for. When you grow up to realize you can want everything and never have it, and when you still have to exist as a person in the world even when it might be much nicer to exist in the stories in books.

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue