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Queer looking men: 'Regulising little women"

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Queer looking men: 'Regulising little women"

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Greta Gerwig and the Politics of Women's Genres

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Greta Gerwig and the Politics of Women's Genres

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LITTLE WOMEN, GRETA GERWIG'S second feature film as writer and solo director, is about female authorship, as well as a lauded example of it. The film has earned Gerwig an Oscar nomination for writing, her second in that category. The omission of a parallel repeat nod in the directing category has been widely bemoaned (# StillSoWhiteAndMale), but "authorship" usefully blurs distinctions between writing and directing, literature and film. In adapting Louisa May Alcott's 1868-'69 best seller, Gerwig places herself in a long tradition of female creators in the commercial realm of American culture, where the successful appeal to female audiences authorizes expression and power not sanctioned elsewhere.

There is already a formidably feminist version of Little Women, written by Robin Swicord and directed by Gillian Armstrong (famous for her debut film, My Brilliant Career [1979], which is also about a 19th-century heroine whose writing career conflicts with expectations that women must marry). The 1994 Little Women respects the novel's chronology. A Nigella Lawson-worthy Christmas breakfast invites the viewer's longing to join the female family group, and shots through the frosted windowpanes visually link the whiteness of New England snow to the skin of its A-list ingenue cast. Gerwig chooses to put the emphasis more explicitly on authorship by messing with linear plot, opening and closing her film with Jo March (a Louisa May Alcott stand-in) played by Saoirse Ronan (a Greta Gerwig stand-in), visiting the office of Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts), her publisher.

In the opening scene, Jo is there to pitch a sensational story for "a friend," but her ink-stained fingers betray her own hand in writing it. In the concluding scene, she negotiates to retain copyright of the autobiographical novel she's produced while her three beloved sisters were busy getting married or dying young. Dashwood's daughters have persuaded him to release the novel, and he's predictably trying to lowball its author. To anyone who has been paying attention to Hollywood's self-marketing under the spotlight of Time's Up, this narrative frame clearly alludes to current efforts to increase the number of women directors and the pay grade of women creatives, as federal investigations, sexual harassment cases, watchdog groups, and data-driven studies have finally made the industry's century-plus exclusionary practices look shameful. (Things are improving in some areas according to Stacy L. Smith of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which crunches the annual numbers - 2020 promises not one but four superhero films helmed by women, admittedly a questionable criterion.)

Authorship is what film critics call it when the director's vision shines through the commodity form of cinema. Female authorship is what feminist film scholars look at, not because they believe in innate differences between woman- and man-made films, or ascribe to some mystical notion of individual genius, but because the work of female-identified creators so often addresses the private experience and structural determinants of life under patriarchy in importantly public ways. As Richard Dyer explains in his essay, "Believing in Fairies: The Author and the Homosexual," identity categories may politicize authorship in ways that deserve attention, even from critics skeptical of "pure" expression and suspicious of opportunistic branding. Gerwig's oeuvre, which combines the visibility of the actor/celebrity, the interiority of the writer, and the evidence of the director's well-informed choices, makes for a revealing case study.

Gerwig's Little Women, and its framing device, offers a relatively comforting vision of the Female Author as one who sticks to her own story rather than aspiring to Important Subjects or introducing Others. Jo (and Alcott before her) writes about her life with her mother, sisters, housekeeper, and aunt. (Voilà! Seven plum roles for white actresses.) Adapting her favorite novel, Gerwig expands the vision of female self-invention she realized in her first feature as writer and solo director, Lady Bird (in which Ronan also starred). In addition, this Female Author figure produces work that makes a generic appeal to women and girls. Jo's creator, Louisa May Alcott, was guided to produce her series of domestic novels for young readers by a 19th-century literary marketplace primed by what Nathaniel Hawthorne famously dubbed a "damned mob of scribbling women." Gerwig brought her talents to a canny remake of a feminist "chick flick" already in progress.

So even as we celebrate "agency" (which in Hollywood is a word with smarmy connotations), we must remember that women making movies is no noble gesture or political breakthrough in itself. It is consistent with the historical role of women as American cultural influencers, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Oprah Winfrey, whose political ambitions are intertwined with financial success. Gerwig has formidable female talent behind her. Former Sony chair Amy Pascal, doing very-well-thank-you with her own company Pascal Pictures, also worked on the 1994 version at Columbia, and that film's writer, Swicord, and producer, Denise Di Novi, have credits on the new film, too. All are happy to design a studio movie addressing women. They are aware of the sector's market value, while the rest of Hollywood seems serially surprised by the box-office success of films that appeal to little women ( Titanic, Frozen, Wonder Woman). But they are also aware that traditional women's genres, with their focus on domesticity and romance, are both diagnostic of women's restricted roles in society and outlets for their frustration with those restrictions. The female audience is a consumer demographic, with a cause.

Women's cinema, then, is both an authorial and a market category, just like women's (and girls') fiction was in the 19th century. In an address to a diverse female audience lies the proto-feminist capacity of women's genres, even their queer and anti-racist potential. In Alcott's time, the phenomenon of women writing was driven by the white and propertied ideology of male and female separate spheres. Men did politics; women did morality and manners, influencing through their words. As is well known, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin to forward the cause of abolition, and her vision of Christian maternalism outsold everything but the Bible in her time. Louisa May Alcott, her family's principal breadwinner, was less religious and more practical: she trained herself to write with her left hand when her right grew tired. Gerwig finds plenty of 19th-century progressive causes in Alcott's Little Women - from boycotting silk tainted with slave and child labor to women's education - and she casts extras as free blacks in scenes where it is plausible to signal the Marches' abolitionist sentiments.

But transposing the racial politics of Alcott's Civil War-era feminism to our current moment is tricky at best. The text's insularity risks maintaining white girlhood as guarantor of female moral authority. Gerwig's celebrity may get in the way here; with Ronan as her avatar, this is the blondest Little Women on record. Literary critic Ann Douglas famously holds Stowe's doomed golden girl Little Eva accountable for what she calls "the feminization of American culture," the triumph of "sentimentalism provided the inevitable rationalization of the economic order." Less judgmentally, Lauren Berlant looks to the racial politics of women's culture for the affective origins of our contradictory national "intimate public sphere." Female authorship coupled with feminist address tasks the utopian female collectivity with social transformation, and contemporary audiences surely understand what this would mean differently than did Alcott's.

The shifting figure-ground of female and feminist, of independence and collectivity, is apparent in the layers of the new film's closing scene. It isn't only percentage points Jo negotiates, it is the very question of narrative closure, a primary social task of the novel as literary form. Dashwood demands that the manuscript's Jo get married, imposing the marriage plot on a story whose fundamental attraction is its utopian female homosocial world. Gerwig sees the publisher's demand precisely as a plot against women's autonomy, and she honors Alcott's own wishes. Teaching the Little Women adaptations at Swarthmore College over the years, I was delighted to find these wishes outlined in Alcott's letter to her friend Elizabeth Powell (later Bond), housed at the Friends Historical Library there:

A sequel will be out early in April, & like all sequels will probably disappoint or disgust most readers, for publishers wont let authors finish up as they like but insist on having people married off in a wholesale manner which much afflicts me. "Jo" should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didnt dare to refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her. I expect vials of wrath to be poured out upon my head, but rather enjoy the prospect.

With the properly cinematic resources of space, time, and mise-en-scène, Gerwig approaches these contradictions as Alcott could not. Intercut with the meeting with Dashwood is a generically romantic resolution to the story - Jo's dull professor-ex-machina, Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel), is retrieved from the train station on the brink of departure by a whole troop of Marches and March hangers-on in a rom-com race to unite the hetero-couple. However, the images of this resolution do not actually depict a proposal or a wedding. Rather, after the professor is brought together with Jo for the kiss that signifies traditional closure, the scene continues. A sweeping overhead long take, in motion like much of the film, depicts Bhaer as one among many teachers, family members, and students who fill the halls and grounds of the (integrated and co-ed) school Jo sets up at Plumfield, the home she inherits from Aunt March. (Meryl Streep introduces all kinds of intertextual noise in this role, one note of which derives from her turn as Emmeline Pankhurst in 2015's Suffragette.)

While these images of closure are objectively part of the film we are watching, the viewer can't be entirely sure whether the writer Jo accepts the Professor or whether they are visualizations of what happens to character Jo in the novel when her creator capitulates to her publisher's demand. Thus Gerwig "out of perversity" gets away with not marrying off Jo. But she also does marry her off - there is no way to fix the status of the images. The ambiguity has led to conservative readings on either side: one reviewer objected to Gerwig's "postmodern feminism," which has rejected the novel's Jo's mature decision to forgo independence for a "genuinely egalitarian marriage"; another source "explains" the ending, but sees it as both literally and literarily uniting the heterosexual couple. But Gerwig's sly structure assures that even skeptical viewers are carried along in the final sequence's delicious rush of refusal.

Key to this double ending is the identification of Jo with Alcott and the incorporation of the narrative of writing and publishing the book within the film. As Gerwig explains in a podcast from the Directors Guild of America: "[T]he structure truly came out of wanting to introduce this layer of authorship everywhere." Gerwig gives us Jo and her published book as final clinch, the couple framed in the film's closing image. Alcott herself did very well as a "literary spinster" who confessed to having "fallen in love with so many pretty girls" - dare I say, sisters. In fact, today's young female viewers are quick to surmise that if Jo turns down Laurie (Timothée Chalamet, boy pin-up of the hour) it may just be because she's a lesbian.

But a genuinely queer Little Women would take more than an identity politics check-box or a character trait on the personality quiz: which sister are you? Ronan/Gerwig's is a feminist Jo, not a butch one ( only Katharine Hepburn has given us a taste of that), and some of the erotic glue of the novel is missing in the adaptation. The lesbian reading of Little Women is honored more in Jo's choices than in the film's portrayal of familial ties - she isn't jealous enough of Meg's marriage, protective enough of Beth, passionate enough in her rivalry with Amy, ardent enough with Marmee. The film's otherwise effective nonlinear telling contributes to the renunciation of queer girlhood, intercutting the women that the Marches become with the promise of their childhood. (Beth prefers to die rather than have Jo outgrow her love for her - I chose Beth in the abovementioned quiz.)

But does Gerwig's refusal of Jo's marriage, which signaled closure in the novel (and the conditions for its sequels), open the March family to a larger world? The question of endogamy versus exogamy is consequential to the novel's ideological inheritance, including its impact on nonwhite girls for the past century and a half. Endogamy, marrying inside a local community, is radical if it incorporates lesbian sisterhood, less so if it excludes on the basis of race. Plumfield school is an exemplar of 19th-century dreams of an inclusive society modeled on domesticity. The film's final utopian vision extends sisterworld to those who've been longingly looking though Orchard House's frosted windowpanes. Laurie, the rich kid next door, is the novel's and film's stand-in for all who want to become part of the March matrilineage; he'd likely marry any one of them who'd have him. Other white men are allowed in (Mr. Laurence has money, John Brooke and Professor Bhaer, education; Mr. March, squatter's rights). What about people of color? Stowe's literary imagination, however twisted, included blacks in the national family, both in the plantation South and in the story of the New England spinster, Miss Ophelia, who overcomes her racism to adopt the orphan black girl Topsy. Such a maternalistic model shadows the film's final scene of black and white kids painting and playing music side-by-side at Plumfield.

Critiques of the film's whiteness are not beside the point. The question of white accountability at Little Women's very origin is not fully addressed by proposals like the "racebent" casting of the half-Italian Laurie, however appealing the prospect might be to some fans. Originally published in the wake of Emancipation, written by an abolitionist, Little Women is about promise and disappointment at the intersection of whiteness and girlhood. Where Little Eva is a sign, the sisters are subjects.

Gerwig, whose authorial persona is informed by her signature film roles as an awkward, half-grown woman, attempts to wrest the iconic figure of white girlhood out of the mirror. Lady Bird arose from this legacy, this entitlement. Does showing someone who fights for her place, when she is already at the center of a culture's value system, crowd out other less charmed accounts of female self-realization? Or does it call out for them, as Kaitlyn Greenidge suggests in the opinion piece, "The Bearable Whiteness of Little Women"? Each revisiting of Alcott's text asks how its thrilling account of introspection, self-realization, and sisterly solidarity - played out against a backdrop of political injustice and economic precarity - speaks to other kinds of Americans.

For example, near the end of Negroland, her memoir of growing up among the African-American elite in midcentury Chicago, Margo Jefferson offers a retelling of Little Women. It is a book emblematic of the culture she consumed and had "the right to claim [...] without any race-linked restriction. 'Claim'? Consider. Study. Toy with. And when I choose, love." She doesn't reject the book's pedagogy, but she realizes in retrospect: "I should have wanted to be Amy. [...] At least Amy had appetite. Insistence." Gerwig's film accomplishes, for many reviewers, the redemption of little sister Amy, who saw the contradictions of femininity plainly and wasn't afraid to play the cards she'd been dealt. Julia Alvarez and her three sisters mapped their own kinship onto the novel. "Long before 'multicultural literature,'" she's written, "before we would find our faces or traditions or histories in American literature, we found our reflection here." Jo is any-woman who wants to write, which allows Gerwig her version. There are countless others.

After all, Gerwig's authorship is more than an expression of personal vision. As a critical construction, it evokes the influential history of American women's mass cultural production and reception, and it contends with the iconicity of white girlhood in that history. The broader concept of female authorship addresses privilege and positionality within the context of collective imagining. The panoramic hive of activity at Plumfield at the end of Little Women recalls for me the bustle of the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, which I've always taken as an idealized vision of the MGM dream factory. In my romantic vision, Jo gets her book and Gerwig gets not just a movie but a film studio. (Amy heads the art department, Meg's on costumes, Marmee's the AD, dead Beth hovers in the non-diegetic soundtrack.) Hollywood, made over in the image of feminist struggle and self-sufficiency that Alcott's novel inspired, would churn out films by, for, and about little women, wonder women, women of color, trans women, and many more. In this utopian space, "authors finish up as they like."

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Patricia White, professor and chair of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College, is the author of Women's Cinema, World Cinema (Duke University Press, 2015) and, with Timothy Corrigan, The Film Experience.

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Ambidextrous Authorship: Greta Gerwig and the Politics of Women's Genres | Los Angeles Review of Books

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Patricia White considers Greta Gerwig's adaptation of "Little Women."...

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Opinion | The Bearable Whiteness of ‘Little Women’ (Published 2020)

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There is a fine line between a story that is about the worldview of a specific person and one that declares that this worldview is the only one that matters.

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There's a scene in Greta Gerwig's extraordinary new adaptation of Little Women that's been shown almost in its entirety in various previews. Jo ( Saoirse Ronan), the heroine of Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel about four sisters living in genteel poverty in Civil War-era Massachusetts, has recently come home from New York City, where she'd tried to make it as a writer. Her sister Meg ( Emma Watson) is happily married, though to a man who can't afford to buy her pretty things; another sister, Amy (Florence Pugh), is learning to paint in Paris while attempting to secure herself a rich husband. Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is the only March girl who's managed to avoid getting swept up in marriage madness, by virtue of her weakened heart after a spell of scarlet fever. But according to Jo's publisher, girls in stories must all end up either married or dead. And once Beth succumbs to her illness for good, shortly after Jo returns home, Jo - still alive, still unmarried - is utterly and profoundly lost.

"Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts," Jo tells her mother, Marmee (Laura Dern). "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. I'm so sick of it!"

This was the bulk of Jo's tear-streaked speech, which we'd all heard first in the trailer for the movie. But in the film itself, her monologue comes to a surprising conclusion. Jo, who'd always vowed to become a spinster and drawn power from her stubborn sense of independence, is now questioning all the choices she's made. She believes that women are fit for much more than love, yes. "But," she says, "I'm so lonely."

Greta Gerwig told Film Comment's Devika Girish that most of Jo's speech comes from another Alcott novel, Rose in Bloom, but that Gerwig wrote the loneliness line herself. It's one of many changes the writer and director made when adapting her source material for the screen in 2019, and a particularly emblematic one: Jo is questioning whether she was right to refuse Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), the boy who's always loved her, the first time around. She even goes so far as to write Laurie a letter, before he and Amy return from Paris - where, unbeknownst to Jo, they've eloped - to let him know she's ready to receive him at last.

Sorry to the purists, but you guys: This girl is g-a-y.

I saw Little Women in my hometown theater with my aunt and my cousin; when Jo put that letter into the mailbox where she, her sisters, and Laurie would correspond between their houses as children, they were absolutely losing it. "What...is...happening!?" my cousin whisper-yelled. Like me, she and her mother are Little Women superfans (of both Alcott's book and Gillian Armstrong's 1994 adaptation, in particular), and they couldn't believe that Gerwig had dared portray Jo with a new dose of doubt.

I, however, was thrilled by the choice to have Jo second-guess the way she'd rejected Laurie. True believers in the ending of Alcott's novel, which sees Jo fall for the middle-aged German immigrant Professor Bhaer (played by Louis Garrel in the new movie), tend to argue that Laurie was never the right fit for Jo. He's too frivolous, too vain, while the professor, her true match, is committed to an intellectual life and takes her work seriously. But I never bought it.

For one thing, I don't think Alcott even really wanted us to - in a now-famous letter to a friend, she called Bhaer "a funny match" she came up with "out of perversity" in the face of readers' demands that Jo marry someone. And for another, I don't assume that what Jo really needed in a partner was someone who could validate her talent. She's got plenty of other people in her life for that: her publisher, her readers, her family. But someone who makes her laugh, who brings out her goofier side, who inspires and charms her? I could totally see Jo with Laurie. I've always believed that she did really love him, as a family member and a friend, but she wasn't in love with him - because she simply couldn't be. Sorry to the purists, but you guys: This girl is g-a-y.

Jo, in all her tomboyish glory, has set off queer readers' gaydars for 150 years now, and Gerwig's adaptation, without being too explicit about it, does gorgeous justice to that reading. This version of Little Women can't be boiled down to the false choice between one man and another or even reduced to the binary of romance versus professional and personal fulfillment.

Ronan choking out "but I'm so lonely" does so much of that work: Jo admits that, as much as she would relish the opportunity to live a life that isn't defined by marriage, she'd still like to find love. And if she can't find it with Laurie or with Professor Bhaer, might she someday with a woman?

Alcott, who never married, might very well have wished for the same. As Girish put it in Film Comment, "Alcott has said things that sound like she might have been what we think of today as queer." To account for her "spinsterhood," Alcott once explained, "I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body ... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."

Gerwig agreed: "I didn't want to assign anything that felt too modern to her but...there's lots of stuff." She mentioned the unmarried woman at Jo's boarding house who becomes her best friend there, and whom she wasn't ultimately able to include in the movie: "You think, 'Wait, is that secretly you, Louisa?'"

I recognized some of myself in Jo's sense of difference - her sense of queerness.

Ronan, speaking with Out magazine, also acknowledged the possibility that her character could be queer. "I think she was self-aware enough to know that there was something different about her and something that made her sort of different from even her other sisters," she said. "And I think if she had had the language or even a term that she could use, [she'd be able to say] 'Oh, maybe this is how I feel,' or 'This is what I am and that's okay.'"

As a kid reading Little Women for the first or fourth or eleventh time, I recognized some of myself in Jo's sense of difference - her sense of queerness - even though neither of us could describe what made us so. Perhaps Alcott, too, didn't have the words. But Gerwig, with her masterfully meta ending, creates room for the possibility.

Jo haggles with her publisher, at first attempting to submit her autobiographical novel without her heroine choosing to marry either of her suitors. The publisher is flabbergasted and reminds her: "Girls want to see women married, not consistent." Jo only acquiesces to write in a new romantic ending if she's able to retain her own copyright and earn a higher percentage of the book's profits. The movie thus offers us two alternate endings. First, there's Jo kissing the professor under his umbrella, the finale with which we're all familiar, followed by her waltzing through her grand new school for boys and girls, where she and Bhaer both teach; then there's Jo seemingly partner-free, but embracing her own published book in her arms.

Gerwig gets to have it both ways, and we, as viewers, get to choose what we believe is Jo's "real" fate. To me, what feels real is indisputable: Jo marries her novel's character off to please the masses, but in her actual life, being a single and accomplished writer is her true happy ending. After all, that would mirror Alcott's own journey. The romance of Little Women was never really about the relationships at all; Jo's fight to remain unabashedly herself in a man's world and to achieve her dream of a writer's life against all odds - that was the real love story.

In the original world of Little Women, it wasn't possible for Jo to emerge from her story without committing to a man. But what makes Gerwig's film so magical is that it delights in the possibilities of stories to continually change form, to over time reveal new truths. By layering different timelines and even different endings into the narrative, Gerwig reveals the ways in which all our lives are just a single decision away from being set upon a completely different path.

And when she puts that letter to Laurie in the mailbox, Jo, like so many queer girls - like so many girls who, for whatever reason, don't want to live by men's rules - has a moment of doubt in which she considers the possibility of living a more "normal" life, in the most tolerable way she sees available to her. The queerest thing about Gerwig's adaptation is that it refuses to assume Little Women's characters, like all of us, are essentially anything - not only whether we're queer or straight, but whether we're strictly predestined for any specific sort of life.

The queerest thing about Gerwig's adaptation is that it refuses to assume Little Women's characters, like all of us, are essentially anything.

In fact, I don't think Laurie was predestined for straight marriage, either. I've always read him as a queer figure: androgynous, impish, game to play dress-up with a bunch of sisters. He's an offbeat, lonely, orphaned boy awash in a big, empty house who's always longed above all for a family. In Jo, he sees adventure, daring, transgression. They're two little queer kids attempting to spin their fantasies into reality. But the crush of normativity eventually catches up with them: Jo, at least in the novel, is eventually pushed into straight marriage, while Laurie, in both the novel and the movie, attempts to fulfill at least half of his fantasy with Amy. Toward the end of the film, when Amy puts their baby into Laurie's arms and he does an awkward little jiggle, I laughed aloud; Chalamet looks like he's attempting to portray the family patriarch but failing miserably. For Laurie, it's a fitting ending.

There's a lovely scene toward the end of Gerwig's film that acknowledges fiction's power to give us the tools to define and shape our own experiences. Jo is walking with Meg and Amy outside Plumfield, the house that Aunt March (Meryl Streep) left to Jo in her will. Jo tells her sisters about her new project - the book that will become Little Women - though she's nervous that no one will really care about the "domestic joys and struggles" of a group of sisters.

"Writing doesn't confer importance," Jo says. "It reflects it."

Amy disagrees, in one of many touching moments for the newly rehabilitated character. "Writing things," she says, "is what makes them important."

Gerwig's film is ultimately about how fiction doesn't merely represent life as we know it; stories give shape to our lives, too, guiding us toward new modes of thinking or being that we may have otherwise thought impossible. I don't think there's necessarily a "true" Jo March who's been waiting all these years for people to realize she's gay, any more than I think that either of the men Jo considers spending her life with is her "true" match. But what I love about this version of Little Women is that it creates a world in which she could be. ●

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The New "Little Women" Makes Space For Jo's Queerness

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Greta Gerwig's adaptation leaves room for the idea that Jo might be different in a way Louisa May Alcott never put into words. Spoilers ahead.

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An attitude of disappointment , embarrassment or despair at being in a heterosexual relationship

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Interview with little women cast

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Little Women is a story that has resonated with women for generations, and Greta Gerwig's new big-screen adaptation is an extremely contemporary retelling of the lives of Jo March and her family -- no, it's not a modern adaptation, but rather a modern sensibility. In her latest, Gerwig has infused this Civil War-era tale with culturally relevant ideas about female agency, creative ownership, and identity.

"As we evolve, each generation catches up a little closer to where Louisa was," Laura Dern, who plays March family matriarch Marmee, tells Out. "It feels like that, that we keep rediscovering how true, how incredibly honest she was about who she was, what her feelings were, and the accepting family that she was growing up around...I just feel like it's revolutionary every time we get to discover these subject matters."

Heroine Jo March has long been coded as queer, something Saoirse Ronan believes is implied in Louisa May Alcott's text.

"This the first time in any adaption of the book that [her sexuality has] even in some way been addressed," she told Out during an interview in Alcott's hometown of Concord, Massachutses. There's a moment in the film when Jo tells her mother that she wants to be able to love freely. "That actually comes from Louisa's words," Ronan explains.

"And yeah, I think that what I did really love about her is that she didn't sort of put a lid on it. It was something that she was willing to acknowledge. And I think she was self aware enough to know that there was something different about her and something that made her sort of different from even her other sisters. And I think if she had had the language or even a term that she could use to go, 'Oh, maybe this is how I feel,' or 'This is what I am and that's okay. And there's a safe space for this.' And totally I could see her definitely experimenting with her sexuality, for sure."

Little Women is in theaters Christmas Day.

Timothee Chalamet on Being Hollywood's Straight Prince of Twinks

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Saoirse Ronan Says 'Little Women's Jo March Might Be Queer

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Out spoke with Ronan about how her character might identify if 'Little Women' took place today.

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"I intend to make my own way in the world: Queer Female Artistry and the Noble Nature of Gerwig's little women"

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"I intend to make my own way in the world: Queer Female Artistry and the Noble Nature of Gerwig's little women"

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"Gerwig's ending proclaims that there is absolutely no time to waste in becoming yourself, independent and free, as an artist and a woman' ( 10, pg62)

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"Propped up by the invented traditions of the white, middle class American girlhood and the fantasy of shutting one's eyes and starting over again with a clean slate and unbroken dreams" (pg8)

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Jo's feminist journey is irrelevant to her sexuality as her character does not resist the urge to be attracted to a man but rather to conform to society expectation of her to do so.

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"Jo famously bemoans that she is “so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for”. And she is right, in a sense. But also wrong, because love is all: not just romantic love but the love we feel for family, for strangers, for art, for creativity, for writing. And, thanks to Gerwig, Jo finally exists in a time when women can have all that."

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Sign in with your University E-Mail address

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2019

different ending

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1868

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"Gerwig's adaptation will be forging new territory as most Little Women adaptations, both cinematic and literary, more predominantly have focused on pt1. It should not come as a suprise Alcott ... would become newly relevant in 2018 to feminists seeking trailblazing independent-minded historical figures for inspiration. (pg430)

"It seems that almost every generation receives its own film adaptation of Little Women, and each reflects the time in which it was produced. (pg430)

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Girl Power: A Look at Recent Little Women Adaptations

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From BabyLit to Lusty Little Women: Age, Race, and Sexuality in Recent Little Women Spinoffs

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Little Women and The Feminist Imagination

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Little Women and The Feminist Imagination

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"Poverty, all too grim in bread lines and Hoovervilles, in the March home had the comfortable glow of nostalgia, which gave a heartening strength to the film's version of courage in the face of want" (referencing the 1933 version)