The scene plays out in stark contrast to the one in which Laurie proposes to Jo, Gerwig said. Jo rejects Laurie and the two fight like siblings, the former refusing to grow up. But when Amy admonishes Laurie for his lazy ways, for instance, he listens, both of them speaking to each other like adults.
Amy wants to. She simply accepts it as her due. If only she could find that email. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. After that, the movie is done hopping between timelines. Instead, what used to be the present story line becomes the past as the movie skips forward. So in one scene we see Bhaer, clearly looking for an excuse to see Jo again, arriving at the March home for a lovesick impromptu visit, the family howling for Jo to chase after him when he eventually says good-bye and departs.
Then back to the carriage that a giggling Amy and Meg are using to rush Jo to the station to stop the man she loves from leaving for good. The music swells, and what happens is the age-old stuff of cinema, the big finish — the racing through the rain, the frantic searching through the crowd, and the kind of glorious kiss that has, in the long history of movies, always been used to signal a happily ever after. Alcott herself never married.
She loves activity and can't bear to be left on the sidelines; it drives her crazy that she can't go and fight in the Civil War alongside her father, who has volunteered as a chaplain. Instead, Jo has to stay at home and try to reconcile herself to a nineteenth-century woman's place in the domestic sphere, which is extremely difficult for her.
You can hear the trouble in her name — she's called Josephine, a feminine name, but she goes by the more masculine-sounding Jo. She's clumsy, blunt, opinionated, and jolly. Her behavior is often most unladylike — she swears mildly , burns her dress while warming herself at the fire, spills things on her only gloves, and barely tolerates her cranky old Aunt March.
She's so boyish that Mr. March has referred to her as his "son JO" in the past, and her best friend Laurie sometimes calls her "my dear fellow. She composes plays for her sisters to perform and writes stories that she eventually gets published. She imitates Dickens and Shakespeare and Scott, and whenever she's not doing chores she curls up in her room, in a corner of the attic, or outside, completely absorbed in a good book.
Jo hopes to do something great when she grows up, although she's not sure what that might be — perhaps writing a great novel. Whatever it is, it's not going to involve getting married; Jo hates the idea of romance, because marriage might break up her family and separate her from the sisters she adores.
By the end of the novel, her dreams and dislikes are going to be turned topsy-turvy; her desire to make her way in the world and her distaste for staying at home will be altered forever.
She may not find romance in the places that readers expect, but she will find it. She'll also realize that romantic love has its place, even though it changes the relationships you already have.
As Jo discovers her feminine side, she also figures out how to balance her ambitious nature with the constraints placed on nineteenth-century women. The question is: how much do these constraints reflect the contemporary situation of twenty-first-century women readers?
Jo begins as a semi-autobiographical stand-in for the author, Louisa May Alcott. Like Jo, Alcott was one of four sisters, with a philosophically-minded father, strong religious principles, and a penchant for writing. Alcott, however, never married, although she adopted her deceased sister's child and thus experienced something like motherhood. The first half of Little Women Chapters is pretty much a fictional version of Louisa May Alcott's own life with her sisters, including the same kinds of domestic trials and triumphs that they experienced every day.
However, after readers clamored for Jo to marry her best friend, Laurie, Alcott realized that she couldn't get away with creating a beloved heroine and leaving her a spinster. Not in the nineteenth century, anyway. So Alcott invented a romance for Jo in the second half of the novel — just not the one that anyone expected! Another important similarity between Alcott and Jo is the kind of stories they write.
Louisa May Alcott herself wrote both realistic, moralized fiction, like Little Women and its sequels, and sensational thrillers. Of course, she published those under a pseudonym, but you can read some of her most exciting stuff in the anthology Alternative Alcott , which we highly recommend.
Like Alcott, Jo begins her publishing career by writing thrilling stories with Gothic inspiration and no morals whatsoever — the written version of horror films and historical thrillers. And also like Alcott, Jo is most successful as a writer when she produces sentimental works about everyday domestic life. We guess it's just one more piece of evidence in favor of that constant advice to young writers to "write what you know.
The four March sisters are extremely close, but their relationships with one another are varied and complex. Jo is closest to her sister Beth, who is two years younger than her. It was a deliberate choice on her part. Next Up In Culture. Delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email required.
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