So I read Little Women a few weeks after watching the movie and was drawn to how Gerwig changed the contents for the film. The book is thoroughly Protestant and has a pertinent Christian spiritual overtone, while the movie had a more secularly feminist approach. I’m not saying the film eradicated every trace of religion, but it shifted how Jo comported herself throughout the book. In the book, she’s reading a Bible, praying, and having more complex discussions with her mother about how to behave according to a Christian framework.
Another quick example that I’ve been dwelling on is the scene where Teddy is broaching the topic of marriage with Jo. In the book, she replies, “I don’t believe I shall ever marry; I’m happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in any hurry to give it up for any mortal man.”
Now, if memory serves, in the movie, that quote has the word ‘mortal’ removed, so Jo says she won’t give up her liberty for ‘any man.’ In Christianity, this word plays a pivotal role because Christ is a man, but not a mortal one. Thus, in the book, Jo leaves room for a Christian type of divine intervention that would cause her to change or want to marry.
I’m having a hard time articulating exactly what this stood out to me, but it’s something like this: we’re in an age where our culture is having discussions about censorship, banning books, and reformulating American history outside of our normative WASP/patriarchal context, with the goal of being more faithful to actual history or at least creating a more holistic picture by supplying an alternative perspective. In addition, it seems like contemporary criticism of Biblical texts prioritizes scholarship and historicity, with questions cast about Biblical authorship, development of the canon, scribes editing past texts, the ‘telephone game’ argument, etc. Plus, I see lots of posts on social media from people with a vast range of qualifications and acumen discussing forgotten/forbidden books of the Bible, the real interpretations of key texts that have been hidden for millennia until now that changes everything, etc.
Which brings me back to Gerwig. She adjusted the language and tone of the movie away from American Protestantism/Christianity toward contemporary sensibilities about feminism and gender relations. She took the original form of a piece of art and reconfigured it to express a more humanistic form of feminism. Given that we have so many misgivings about how the Biblical corpus was formed in a Judeo-Christian history with a patriarchal bent and a (seeming) streak of redaction that corrupts the whole enterprise, are we more comfortable with Gerwig performing a similar kind of facelift with Little Women? Like, if the Little Women book went out of print and were lost forever, and all we had to represent the story was the movie, would we lose anything of value? Is the current social agenda always the most valuable entity to serve, regardless of what it means for our conception of the art we inherit from our forbears? Whether you’re a Christian or not, isn’t it a net negative if every generation rearticulates/reinterprets past art with the aim of creating a morally purer version, believing the past is generally more primitive/obsolete/regressive?
This isn’t to say that reintepreting and reimagining art are categorically destructive. But perhaps wanting to create an authoritative iteration of a past work that departs significantly from the original content because of ‘where it got it wrong’ (in this context, the reasons would be that 19th-century Protestantism is sexist, dogmatic, and repressive, so we can do away with that stuff) is.
In other words, a strong desire to ***supplant*** a past or original iteration of a work of art to solve some of its ‘problematic’ moral or social messaging actually does more harm than good to the literary canon because it seems to trend toward erasing the original sources of inspiration altogether. That’s entirely different than humbly setting your version alongside the original. I’m not saying Gerwig deliberately or explicitly did the former, but due to our current cultural moment, it seems like that would be the result in the mind of the average viewer (“I’ve seen the movie and it was amazing, why would I need to read the book? Especially with the cringey religious parts?” Plus people would already rather watch movies than read). But maybe I have the wrong idea about the average viewer. Thanks for indulging me!
by jvtswift10
1 Comment
Honestly, I didn’t read your whole post, but I came with a kernel of information you may or may not have known as it was news to me. This latest adaptation of Little Women was initially a project of Sarah Polley, who wrote the script and was set to direct. When she sustained a life altering concussion, as she relates in her memoir last year Run Towards the Danger, she was physically unable to direct as most of her days she needed to be in a dark room lying down.
Gerwig was given the director’s role and she was to film Polley’s script as written. At some point Gerwig wrestled the writer’s credit away from Polley as well. It’s unclear if she started from scratch or adapted and reinterpreted what Polley wrote, regardless, she did enough to claim the writing credit as her own, and at the time of the film’s release I don’t recall ANY mention of it all starting with Polley.
There are probably more details in the eponymous essay in Polley’s book. It is important to note that Polley won the best adapted screenplay this year for a film she also directed and which she should have been nominated as director as well. Polley had a miraculous recovery due to her treatment at the University of Pittsburgh concussion center.
Having starred for years in Montgomery’s period dramas of young girlhood from a similar time period I think her script would have been very interesting with strong feminist and social justice themes.